There’s a pond near Laney’s house.
It’s a pretty pond, surrounded by lots of bright green grass and, if you walk close enough, soft, squishy sand along the edges. It’s a big pond, big enough to stretch over most of New Market Road. In the winter, it freezes over like an ice skating rink, but Mama never lets Laney skate on it; she says the ice doesn’t get hard enough to skate on. In the summer, there’s a fountain that shoots water a hundred feet into the sky.
There’s a few trees along the edges, but no other plants. Except for today.
When the car drives past the pond, Laney spots a few, tiny, colorful flowers next to a tree. They’re tied together with a ribbon, lying flat on the ground, as if someone had just tossed them there. There’s a red one, a blue one, and another red one, and she thinks she sees another blue one. The car turns onto the next road before she can make sure.
“What’re those for, Mama?”
Mama doesn’t look away from the road. “What?”
“The flowers.”
“What flowers?”
“The ones next to the tree. By the pond.”
She doesn’t say anything for a second. “Oh. I don’t know. Maybe someone planted them there.”
“But they weren’t in the ground. They were tied up by a ribbon.”
“Oh.” And then; “someone must have left them there.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, Laney.”
And that’s that.
——
At dinner, Laney picks at her peas while Mama and Daddy talk. She can hear their voices, but she’s not paying attention to what they’re saying. She just stares, stares at the new vase of frilly garden flowers in the center of the table, and at the peas and pasta on her plate, and all she can think about are these stupid peas, and how much she hates peas, and how they make her shudder whenever she chews them and swallows them, and how unfair it is—
“It’s a damn shame.”
”Mark.” Mama puts down her fork and looks at Daddy, her nose all scrunched up.
Daddy clears his throat. “Sorry. It’s a shame. Selfish, really.”
”What?”
Daddy looks at Laney and smiles. “Don’t worry about it, cupcake.”
”What?” Laney asks again. Now she’s not thinking about her peas, only about how much she wants to know what Mama and Daddy were talking about. If Daddy’s telling her not to worry about it, it must be important.
Daddy puts down his fork, still smiling at Laney. “Mama and I were talking about the accident.”
“What accident?”
”Mark,” Mama says again.
“It’s alright, Lynette.” Daddy looks back at Laney. “A lady had an accident next to New Market Pond. A car accident..”
“Did she die?”
Mama sucks in a breath. Daddy’s smile disappears. “Yeah, baby. She did.”
“Oh.” Laney chews her lip. She can feel something tight in her stomach, something like the feeling she gets when she’s watching a movie and she can tell one of the characters is about to die, or whenever Mama or Daddy makes her sit down in the kitchen to tell her they have to go to a funeral for another great uncle or great grandma.
“How did she die?”
Daddy breathes in sharply. “Well…she drove—,”
”Enough,” Mama says suddenly. “Laney, honey, go to your room.”
”But—,”
”Now.”
And Laney does, because she knows Mama’s using the voice she only uses when she and Daddy are about to start fighting.
And they do. Laney sits in the stairwell while she’s supposed to be getting ready for bed and listens to Mama and Daddy. Or tries to. She can only pick out a few words.
“She’s a child—”
”She’s not a baby anymore, Lynette. She’s smarter than you think.”
”I’m not ready to—”
And then their voices get quiet, and Laney can’t hear what they’re saying anymore.
——-
She cries that night.
Clutching Kitty, her stuffed cat, she tries to be quiet so that Mama and Daddy don’t hear her. But all she can think about is that lady at the pond, trapped in her car, the water slowly swallowing her up. She imagines what that must be like; seeing the surface of the water get farther and farther away from you as you sink deeper and deeper, no air coming into your lungs, no one coming to help you, until all you can see and feel is darkness.
——
“My daddy told me a lady died here.”
”Woah,” says Jimmy. He stands at the sandy edge of the pond with Laney, far away from Mrs. Atkinson and the rest of the second graders who are trying to find things in the pond to write about for their poetry project.
Laney can’t stop looking at the flowers by the tree. Their pretty colors are gone, replaced by a dull, dead brown slowly spreading over them.
Jimmy doesn’t seem to notice the little memorial. He continues looking at the lake, the wind blowing his sandy brown hair across his forehead, the sun highlighting his freckles and bright green eyes. He’s fidgeting with a dirty, long piece of yellow tape that he found on the ground earlier. Laney, swinging her pink plastic water bottle, watches him out of the corner of her eye.
Then he points at the lake. “Look at the baby geese, Laney.”
“It’s just ‘goose,’” Laney says, but follows his finger to see the little baby goose in the middle of the lake.
He–Laney guesses–is staring directly at them. She stares back. Jimmy walks away. She barely notices.
To her surprise, instead of swimming away, the gosling begins to swim to her. As he gets closer and closer, she notices the patches of brown fur overtaking most of his yellow fur, and his tiny, pitch black eyes, staring directly at her, almost curiously.
Laney sets her water bottle down and lifts up her hand to wave at him. “Hi.”
He doesn’t answer. At least, Laney doesn’t think he will at first. But then he opens his beak, and she swears she hears the smallest quack.
And she thinks, you seem so lonely. Why is no one here with you?
The gosling turns his head to the tree, where Laney spots Jimmy bending down to pick up a black toy truck that she only now notices has been lying next to the flowers.
A strange but sharp feeling jolts through her. “Don’t touch that!” she shrieks.
“Alaina! James! ”
Both kids look up to see Mrs Atkinson glaring at them a few feet away. “Get back here now!”
Laney swallows, her heart pounding, and follows Jimmy without looking back at the gosling.
—-
She cries that night, too. She thinks of the gosling’s eyes; so small, so black, but so full, and so deep. So bright, and so curious, like Jimmy’s.
She imagines him alone in that pond, how awful it must be, having to live like that, with no one to take care of you.
—-
“What do you mean you left it at the lake?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Laney almost whines. She tries not to sound so bratty, but the look on Daddy’s face, for some reason, makes her feel like she needs to show him why this isn’t her fault.
He sighs and rubs his forehead. “Alright. Let’s go.”
He grabs his keys from the kitchen counter and slings his dark black work bag over his shoulder. The same dark black as the gosling’s eyes.
Laney sees him again, alone in the pond, staring back at her.
She runs back upstairs.
“Laney!” She hears Daddy call her from downstairs. “What are you doing? We need to go!”
She ignores him and runs into her room. She finds Kitty sitting on her bed, right where she put her when she got up this morning. She grabs her and runs back downstairs to find Daddy already gone.
He must have gone to the car already. Laney walks out the door and heads straight to the flower bed at the front of the house.
She doesn’t think about Daddy sitting in the car, impatiently drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, dreading the lecture he’s going to get from his boss for coming into work late for the third time this week. She doesn’t think about Mama either, and how mad she’s going to be when she finds the empty patch at the front of her flowerbed.
For now, Laney focuses on picking the right amount of carnations (she thinks they’re carnations; that’s what Mama called them, right? Whatever). Two red ones, two blue ones, two yellow ones, two purple ones, and one more red one and one more blue one.
Daddy looks at her weirdly when she comes into the car. “What are you–?”
“It’s for the pond.”
He decides not to ask any further.
He turns onto New Market Road and pulls into the parking lot next to the pond. Miraculously, he spots the bright pink water bottle on the edge of the water.
“Hurry up, Laney.”
Laney hops out of the car, but walks right past the water bottle and heads for a random tree. He grumbles and grips the steering wheel, about to yell at her to come into the car, but stops. Laney kneels down in front of the tree. He loosens his grip from the steering wheel and watches what she’s doing.
At the tree, Laney kneels down and picks up the pile of wilted, dead flowers, and throws them away. She lays Kitty against the tree, and finds the old, dirty black car and places it next to her.
Around the toys, she lays the new flowers in a circle. Red, blue, yellow, purple, red, blue, yellow, purple, red, blue…
She stands up and looks at the new memorial. She frowns.
The flowers are crooked. The circle she tried to make doesn’t even look like a circle.
And then, slowly but surely, she realizes that these flowers, just like the old ones, will probably blow away, will definitely wilt and rot and die eventually.
She breathes in, and out, and in and out again, feeling the hot air sweep through her nostrils and into her tight chest.
What was the point?
But something stops her before she can start crying. She sees something out of the corner of her eye. She turns around.
The gosling watches her from the pond, staring at her curiously, just like before. And bobbing in the water right next to him is a goose. An older one, with a long black neck and brown patches on her feathers, just like the ones on the gosling.
Laney moves aside so they can see the tree. The goose looks at the tree, and then at Laney with her big, black eyes. She opens her beak. She lets out a soft quack.
Almost like she’s saying, thank you.