Sunrise

An Incident Over Horsebone Lake
August 2024

Now you see her. From above, she’s a dark speck against darker water. Head, shoulders, occasional hands. Below, her legs are churning flashes in the green. She’s fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she’s been teleported into this cold horror. For now, she’s still screaming. Grabbing at empty space as her clothes continue to swell with water. Her brain is convinced that her feet will eventually find ground. They won’t—she’s almost half a mile from land, and the lake, where she’s fallen, is over four hundred feet deep. In a minute or two, she’ll realize the broad strokes of all this and slow her thrashing.

Overhead, the smoke trail the Cessna left behind is already fading. A black drape blurring faintly gray as the wind pulls it apart. It takes Nina a few seconds to tie one thing to the other: her body down here in the water, the smoke’s plunging arc up there in the sky.

No plane. There’s no plane anymore.

No fireball, either, though. No explosion. That’s important.

The dulling cold is in her. She feels as if it’s been part of her for a long time, although she can’t have been underwater for more than a few seconds.

Something—thick, cold, and living—bumps her leg, and she sets off for shore. Slow progress. She has to think about every move: the reach, the pull. She never really learned how to swim. Lied on her nannying application about having formal training in all four strokes. Her arms ache and disobey. Sometimes they fail, and she dips under. Water up her nose, and in her mouth. The roar of it in her ears. There’s no stillness anywhere.

Her shoes are like irons, pulling at her from below. She reaches down and starts to unlace one: there’s her distant, slow-motion hand, plucking at the bright green gleam of the sneaker. But then the thought of losing something to the insistent darkness of the lake fills her with panic. It would be like cutting off a piece of herself. She gives up on the laces and swims on, the flooded shoe loose now and threatening to come off with every kick.

A tendril of memory finally comes through.

Ben. Where’s Ben?

She glances around. Behind her, there’s nothing but flat blue calm, all the way to the far shore. Two miles, maybe more, of this freezing lake, bigger than it had looked through the low clouds when Ben had aimed the plunging Cessna toward it. In the distance, she can make out some bluffs, barren and black, covered in leafless trees, dead, maybe, or burned in one of the many fires Jones told her are forever ravaging these mountains.

The shore she is swimming toward doesn’t seem much livelier. A gray beach littered with driftwood that looks like the shed antlers of something huge and prehistoric.

By the time her knees hit ground, she can’t even imagine trying to stand. She crawls the rest of the way, drops down into the muck, and lies there. The close-up world appears in extraordinary high definition: coarse flecks of gold and brick-red among the sand grains, a pip of something incredibly green that was once, perhaps, part of a bottle.

Everything around her has already fallen into silence. No plane engine. No water in her ears. No birds. Just her own breath scraping in and out, and the immense indifference of the world going back to what it had been before the sputtering Cessna cleaved into it.

Don’t just lie there.

She pushes herself up onto her elbows. Before her, the beach slopes steeply away from the lake and into a dense wall of pine trees. The ones nearest to her are tiny, but the soaring ranks behind them are tall enough to disappear into the fog. There’s no sky, no sign of anything beyond them. The fog has fastened everything to the ground.

To her left lies a massive pile of boulders past which the landscape is anybody’s guess. To her right, the beach goes on for a good while before curving sharply around the end of what looks like a peninsula, into more trees and out of sight.

Nina turns over slowly until she’s sitting up. Her legs look odd, misshapen. White with cold. The stark veins around her knees make it seem like she’s infected with some alien pathogen.

“It’s all right,” she tells her shoes, in the same voice she’s been instructed to use with the Devander girls, Bo and Belice. “Hey. We’re all right.”

Now comes the inevitable vomiting. She throws up lake water and the remnants of this morning’s burrito, procured in haste at the Snak Shak by the airstrip outside the so-called town of Hollis, South Dakota. Nina had felt too nervous to eat, but then Ben pointed out that the flight to Moraine would take almost two hours, and that she would start complaining if she got hungry. She had forced herself to finish the whole burrito while Ben’s old Park Service bunkmate, Jones, went back over the Cessna’s controls one more time.

“Oh, I know,” Ben had said, gliding his hand wistfully along the flank of the plane. “I remember.”

All the way to Hollis, Ben had talked about this clunker as if it were some magnificent old horse he had been forced to abandon and was hoping to find still alive when he finally made his way back to what he considered his real life. He called it “the Fire Drake.” He had flown it all over the Mountain West. In the year since Ben had last seen it, Jones had given it a new set of tires and a fresh paint job.

Ben must have jumped right after pushing her out of the plane. This probably happened somewhere past that curve of the beach, where the lake, she presumes, continues indefinitely. That’s where the fading smoke trail leads. And since no new smoke has appeared, she knows the plane didn’t crash and explode. Ben would’ve jumped and then swum to shore, as she did, just past those trees. He’ll be following the shoreline straight back here. She shouldn’t go searching for him. She shouldn’t move. She should stay exactly where she is until he finds her.

Her phone, miraculously, is still in her backpack. Save for the smashed top corner of the screen, it looks intact. There’s no signal, of course. This notification about her seven o’clock dinner reservation at the Black Horse bobbing at the top of her screen must have come in sometime while they were airborne. So, too, a couple of texts from her mother. Whatever you want Nina. And then: Send me text when you get on the road. And then finally, just twenty-three minutes ago: Juhu? All okej?

She thumbs All okej into the keys and hits Send. While the progress bar stutters across the top of her screen, she tries to figure out what to type once this first useless communication manages to get out. Her next effort really has to count. She could try: We had a snafu. But then her mother would write: What is snafu? Resulting in a meaningless back-and-forth, a gigantic waste of time and signal. She has to convey the facts clearly and simply without sending her mother into a tailspin. Something like: We left the van with Ben’s friend Jones and flew in Jones’s plane to Moraine. But we hit a bird and had to do an emergency landing. This is true, in essence. After the bird, and the initial moments of panic following the strike, an emergency water landing had been attempted—and hopefully had succeeded back there behind the trees after Ben had pushed her out of the plane.

Receiving this shock of information, her mother would try to call her and, when that failed, would still type: Where are you??? What is going on?? To preempt this, Nina should just go ahead and add: Not sure where we are. But I’m okej. I’m waiting for Ben. Pliz don’t panic. That last part is vital. Don’t panic. And it applies equally to everyone involved. Yes, something terrible has happened. The exact kind of something her mother would have warned her about had she known that they were planning to take off in some tiny single-engine, even one Ben had previously flown. But the most important fact is: nobody is hurt. Nina is all right. She’s managed to hold on to both her backpack and her shoes. Her cellphone not only works, but is charged, for once, to a miraculous 84 percent, thanks to Ben’s prescience back at the motel last night. No, she doesn’t feel up to standing just yet, but beyond the searing pain in her chest, she clearly hasn’t broken anything, and this, too, is a small miracle. Any second now, Ben will come around the curve at the far end of the beach. By then, she’ll have gathered enough strength to start hobbling toward him. Rangers are probably on their way here, too—along with whoever else saw the Cessna go down.

A watched message never sends. She places the phone screenside down on the damp shingle beside her. With her head on her knees, she waits.