Algal Bloom
That summer, Vienna ran up the driveway to our cabin and the first thing she said to me was, “The water is full of poison.”
When I went, “What?” she stepped back, and scraped her eyes over me instead of answering, a clear appraisal.
“You got a little taller,” she said.
She was much taller. The year since we’d seen each other last had stretched her out to a cornstalk leanness. Her blond hair was newly short, gathered up in a stubby paintbrush at the back of her skull. The difference between twelve and thirteen rested on her with a sunlit gravity and I remember that made me nervous. Vienna had the kind of sleek runner’s body that I would never have. “What about the water?”
“There’s an algal bloom in the lake.” She bent down to pull a bur off her sock. “And my grandpa said it spits out poison. So”—she flicked the bur into the dirt—“we can’t go swimming.”
“I missed you,” I said, and then worried that she would not also have missed me. “Have you seen it? The lake?”
She nodded as she straightened up, and I saw, already coiling in her, that restless interest in the forbidden. “Yeah. It’s really beautiful.”
I was a few months from thirteen, and Vienna was my best friend in a very localized way. Our families owned neighboring cabins on the mountain, both of us benefiting from the generosity of grandparents, both of us vanishing from our regular lives for a few weeks out of the year. We spent our summers in the Sierra combing up and down thickly wooded hillsides, poking at spiders that lived under the shutters, and burning little curls of our hair at campfires. I lived wild, or as wild as one could be with a warm living room to return to. I let my hair tangle in clots on my shoulders, avoided showers until my grandmother said, “Julie, you stink,” and pushed me in the direction of the bathroom, patting my butt like that of a well-loved dog. I swam in the lake in my dirty clothes and lay out on the granite to dry, sticky-hot, scratching up the lichen with my fingernails. My body was animal to me then. I still thought of it as something made to do what I wanted, belonging to me only.
The rest of the year, I had other people, other concerns, other versions of myself. At school, my best friend was a tyrannical girl with the glorious Viking name of Ingrid. I was occupied with science class and a business I wanted to start, building birdhouses. I had decided I should become interested in boys. When I returned to these things, my time in the Sierra would fall away, and Vienna with it. But she was always there the next summer, and so was the part of me that loved her.
* * *
Later that evening, my grandmother sat us down to talk about the lake. We’d been lounging on the porch steps, watching the sun go down over the treetops and twisting up cobwebs on the ends of sticks. Vienna was trying to teach me a song. One of those joke songs about sex or overblown violence that are eternally, inescapably popular among middle schoolers. I can’t remember what it was now, but I remember the bawdiness, and how proud of herself Vienna looked. She told me her aunt had yelled at her for singing that song back at her cabin, because her cousin Abigail was a tattler. She lowered her voice when my grandmother called us in for dinner, but kept humming, like she was still saying the filthy things behind her teeth.
At dinner, my grandmother folded her soft hands and told us not to go near the lake at all. She included both of us in the prohibition, wisely, because the same rules that applied to me had to be extended to Vienna, or else I would disobey and claim that it had not really been a violation, because Vienna was allowed. She wasn’t able to explain to our satisfaction, told us only that it was a warm year, that the algae was overgrown, and that was dangerous. What part of it was dangerous? we wanted to know. Wasn’t there always algae in the lake? It wasn’t like we drank that water. In retrospect, I’m not sure my grandmother understood it herself. “Doesn’t usually happen this high up,” my grandfather said, paused in the process of finishing his soup, and my grandmother wrung one of her red-dyed ringlets around her finger and repeated, “Are you listening to me, girls? Are you listening to me? That water could make you very sick.”
How could we be anything but fascinated? “I can do whatever I want,” Vienna told me the next afternoon.” Laughing, with both of us stretched on the hot flank of a granite slab. “For real, I go to bed whenever, I eat whatever. I went down to the lakeshore store this morning, and I stole a cigarette.” She showed me, flicking it between her thumb and middle finger.
“Are you going to smoke it?” I was fearfully impressed.
Vienna dragged her bottom lip between her teeth. “I could if I wanted to.”
Vienna’s grandparents were disinclined to involve themselves in her activities. Parents were far away in the summer, their voices heard on occasional phone calls. I missed my own but didn’t think of them much. My relative lawlessness in the Sierra was an anomaly for me, a vacation from my usually supervised life.
Maybe the same was true for Vienna. I don’t know, because I never thought to ask her.
That was the last summer I would come up without my parents, before entertaining a teenager in the wilderness became too much for my grandparents. Trips in later years were restricted to weekends, and I lost track of Vienna. When I saw her high school graduation pictures I was shocked. Her hair long and shining, the planes of her body softened, a new solemnity and attentiveness in her expression; it all felt like it had been sprung on me too abruptly. Like she should have stayed thirteen while I grew.
In the days after her warning, my grandmother made a good effort to keep us away from the lake, but too much of the responsibility was on her. The elevation was hard on my grandfather, and he spent most of his time sleeping—snoring softly on one of the couches, sometimes with a green tank of oxygen at his feet, the plastic mask sealed against his nose and mouth. I would stop to watch the rise and fall of his chest, his exhales fogging the mask. Then I would suck in a breath as fast as I could and hold it in my lungs, trying to feel a difference between this air and other air, how it was less breathable.
My grandmother, though, was still spry, and, meticulous as she was, surprisingly at home on the docks and the back porches. She shepherded us to campfires and cookouts, drove us to lakes safe to swim in, showed us how to make pie, and pointed us toward the easiest hiking trails.
When I think about that summer, I do feel for her. I find myself trying to bend this moment just enough to see it through my grandmother’s eyes. Tired from the long drive up to the cabin. Watching these girls fold themselves into the dining room chairs she had just dusted a winter’s worth of insect corpses from, knowing we were in danger, but not how much, exactly, or how to convince us of it. Knowing, anyway, that we wouldn’t listen.
* * *
On Saturday, we all went boating on one of the upper lakes. Vienna and me, our grandparents, Vienna’s aunt Chelsea and cousin Abigail. Vienna found me in the parking lot by the boat rental place that morning, scrunched her nose up, and told me, “Abby has nightmares. Abby thinks a rattlesnake is going to come through the window and eat her. I’m going to sleep in your bed tonight.”
“Good,” I said.
We rented a pontoon boat, and brought a cooler with sodas and beer and sandwiches the grandmothers made. The back of the boat was flat, a platform raised a little above the seats at the front, and Vienna claimed this part for us to sunbathe on. She took off her shirt, lay down in her swimsuit and shorts, the pale landscape of her back glittering like the light off the water. We weren’t old enough to really care about tanning, but we were old enough to pretend we did. The flooring of the boat prickled against my stomach.
“Did you put on sunscreen?” my grandmother asked, and I nodded, though I hadn’t. Vienna yawned and rolled over onto her back. Her swimsuit, like mine, was old, a magenta one-piece that faded to white in the middle and pulled too tightly at the top and bottom, threatening to slip down. In my periphery, I could see the pale tops of her breasts. I turned my cheek against the canvas so I couldn’t look at her.
“You’re gonna get skin cancer,” Abigail said.
Abigail was eleven, but so somber and so small that we both felt she was younger. When she was around, we excluded her with the devotion of older siblings, but without any of the affection.
“Okay?” Vienna drawled, and stuck out her tongue. Abigail started to respond, but stopped, coughing into her elbow, and everyone in the boat paused to watch her. Abigail had coughed like this last year too, a dry sound that scraped up from the center of her body. As far as I’d heard, no one knew what was causing it, or what would make it stop. She wasn’t sick otherwise.
“Oh, you poor thing,” my grandmother said. “Still?”
Abigail smiled, curling toward the attention. “It doesn’t hurt or anything.”
“We’re doing another allergy panel next month,” Chelsea said. She slid her hand over her daughter’s shoulder. “The doctor just doesn’t know.”
Sitting back on her palms, Abigail turned her face toward the sun.
Vienna reached into the cooler and pretended to drink an unopened can of beer, laughing when her aunt glared at her. The conversation drifted on.
“They’re saying it’s global warming, you know,” Chelsea said. Chelsea looked young for someone’s aunt. It was her hair, how long and healthy it was. She brushed it back now and bared her cheek to the sun, her pretty shoulders. “Why we’re getting the bloom all the way up here. It’s supposed to be too cold at this elevation.”
Vienna’s grandfather pushed air through his teeth. “It’s just a hot year, honey,” he said. “A hot year don’t have to mean anything.”
“But that’s what a hot year does mean,” Chelsea said. “A hot year means it’s hot.”
My grandmother laughed.
Chelsea rubbed the back of her head. “It’s gotten hotter in your lifetime,” she said to her father, Vienna’s grandfather. “The weather’s changed so much in your lifetime. You’ve seen it.”
“Colder last winter than it’s ever been,” Vienna’s grandmother said, and her grandfather added, “Thought a ball was going to drop off.”
“Richard!” My grandmother lifted her hands in despair. “The girls, for God’s sake, do not want to hear about your privates.”
“Let’s not talk politics.” This from my grandfather, who lay back toward the rear of the boat, his thin eyelids closed.
“All right,” Chelsea huffed. “All right, then, let’s not.”
She was sour and quiet while our grandparents talked about the sunshine, the pies the lakeside diner had started serving, who was selling their cabins, and who might be buying them. When she spoke again, she said, “I heard the Clarks’ dog died from drinking the lake water.”
Vienna levered herself up on her elbows. “Really?”
“The little white Jack Russell, Bennie. I was talking to Patti Clark at the gas station. She said their boys took him down to the water and let him go swimming, and the next morning he was dead.”
“Oh,” my grandmother sighed. “Poor thing.”
“She said,” Abigail added—she had straightened too, attracted back to the conversation, like we were, by the smell of death—“that he had blisters on his mouth and he was bleeding.”
“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration.” Chelsea’s smile was bland and shallow.
“Don’t be gross,” Vienna told Abigail. I could see she wanted to hear more about the dog as much as I did, but if we showed any interest Abigail would never be quiet again.
My grandfather dawdled the boat into a small cove and stopped us there, while I scrambled down on deck to help him hoist the anchor over the sides. The water was dark, a vanishing blue-green. Vienna and I wriggled out of our pants, and Abigail finally ditched her cover-up.
Vienna went first, bending and arching her back, examining the water as if creating a door in it, and then diving. Her body was smooth and quick as an arrow. I hurled myself after her.
We abandoned ourselves to this safer lake for a while. Splashing, throwing our bodies here and there. We competed to see who could bring up the most interesting things from the deep bottom, fistfuls of gravel, little stones and larger stones, bits of sticks and plant matter, like we were God looking for enough material to make the world.
There was a thrill to it every time Vienna went down, when her blond hair puddled against the surface like the hair of a corpse, and then all of her disappearing into the dark, and then the long moment when I steadied myself against the metal flank of the boat, against the possibility that she would not surface again. I would have to go under, have to catch her limp body around the waist, drag her heavily up toward the light. Or I would go after her and she would be gone.
When we tired ourselves out, we joined Abigail on the hunk of granite that jutted out from the shore, which could fit all three of us, like lions sunning ourselves. Vienna crawled up to the top, curled herself around the peak. Below us, Abigail picked bits of mud and gravel off her feet, out from between her toes, the flesh of her soles like dead fish. “Do you think there are leeches in the lake?” Vienna asked her, and she paused and looked up with a timidity mostly outweighed by excitement.
“The biggest leech I ever saw was in a tank and bigger than my thumb,” she informed us. “It looked like someone coughed up blood.”
I leaned back, tilting my shoulders Vienna’s way, laughed loud. “You’re so weird, Abby!”
Abigail nodded primly. She pointed at a tree on the shore that was yellowing where it was not supposed to, the pallor of dead pine boughs. “That’s because of a beetle. It’s killing all the trees around here. That’s why the fire alert is higher this year, because most of the trees are dead.”
Was it really like this? The pine beetles the same year as the algal bloom the same year as Abigail’s hacking cough and my grandfather barely able to breathe on the sofa? Everything around us starting to die, but only in a removed way, only in the background. There was a forest fire in August that took out half the mountain, missing our cabin by two miles. A drowning in the lake we were swimming in before we went home, a drunk tourist who tipped off his motorboat, the extra beats Vienna’s grandmother took before saying names that heralded the beginning of her Alzheimer’s. But I didn’t know that then.
“I’m going to put beetle eggs in your mouth while you sleep.” Vienna stretched out her legs. Her foot brushed against my side, her thigh right next to my cheek. I could smell the lake water on her, feel the damp heat of her skin almost in my mouth. The heat of a fire started in wet leaves. I felt suddenly panic-sick at the prospect of the dry trees, all that hollow, still-standing firewood.
“You’re not,” Abigail said, and I kicked her, lightly, because I could.
* * *
“Vienna’s sleeping over,” I told my grandmother as we all wandered back to our cars.
“Ask her grandparents.” But Vienna’s grandparents didn’t care where she went, and we all knew it, so she just waved over her shoulder as she climbed into the backseat next to me. Everyone’s attention was occupied by Abigail, who was having another coughing fit, bent at a right angle and hacking onto the ground. Still, Chelsea looked up, over the sound of her daughter coughing, and I watched her exchange a nod with my grandmother when Vienna got in our car.
My grandmother put on a CD of children singing hymns that came on car rides for my dubious benefit. My grandfather sat in the passenger seat with his earbuds in and his head lolling against the window, escaped into his audiobook, as the high voices ran through “Kumbaya” and a song called “Oh, You Can’t Get to Heaven.” I was embarrassed to have the hymns playing when Vienna was looking out the window and couldn’t catch my eye roll; she might assume that saccharine enthusiasm was my choice. As soon as she looked at me, while the children on the radio proclaimed that Jesus loved them, I stuck my tongue out.
We passed our lake on the way back to the cabin, and both Vienna and I turned, as if with one body. She pressed herself to the window and I leaned out of my seat, putting my chin on her shoulder and holding the rest of myself a little apart from her. The water was a vivid green, drifting in paint-like swirls, the trees leaking, oily, off the banks and into the current. It looked like a lake in a rain forest, or a portal to another world.
“Oh my God.” Vienna lowered her voice on the word God, because my grandmother was listening.
“Can we—”
“No,” my grandmother said. “It’s poison.”
My grandfather looked back over the shoulder of his seat. “I’ll take you girls for a walk there tomorrow, if you want. We just can’t go in.”
When we got back to the cabin, Vienna and I poured out of the backseat before we were even at a complete stop. We went inside to play Uno on the floor, our swimsuits dampening the carpet. My grandmother bustled between the den and the kitchen, putting jam-and-cream-cheese sandwiches in front of us, turning up Fox News on the television. They talked about global warming there too, or didn’t, and moved loudly around the blanks in the conversation. It was the hottest year on record. The year before had been the hottest year on record too.
“Uno,” Vienna said. I looked at the card she’d put down. It was from a different edition of the game, one with extra trick cards and props that had long since been lost.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. Vienna shrugged, so I drew two and kept going. When we finished Uno and our sandwiches, we switched to Guess Who, which we played impressionistically and with questions we thought were very funny. Did your person used to be a porn star? Does your person look like they ax-murdered their parents? Does your person own a vibrator? Vienna had just told me what that was, and we both blushed, saying the word and giggling helplessly. When Vienna laughed, her mouth became a new animal, this sleek rabbit-pulsed thing taking up residence on her face.
If I were to diagnose something special about that summer, other than the omnipresence of death, I would say it was the last year before language reached all the parts of me, before words started knocking softly on my head, trying to get in. When I think about it, when I think about Vienna, this is where my mind goes more often than not. To naming. The things that it has made less frightening, and the things it has obscured, and what was different, a little, when I had nothing to call it. Even accurate words you don’t live in, the way you don’t live in a photograph of your house.
When Vienna crawled into bed that night, her shirt riding up and her hot side pressed next to mine, she whispered, “What do you think would really happen if we swam in it?”
I considered this, that licking green slipping up our arms, accepting our waists into it. “Do you think we’d get sick?”
“If we didn’t drink it, we’d probably be fine. It’s probably just if little kids drink it.”
Later, I would learn that harmful algal blooms produce something called cyanobacteria, which can be absorbed through the skin, or inhaled, just as easily as it can pass through the mouth. At the time this made sense, though, that there was only the one way to let something into my body, that it couldn’t enter me unless I allowed it. I rolled over so that my face was in Vienna’s short hair. She still smelled like the lake, that light blue-green smell, like disappearing underwater.
* * *
I woke up first the next morning. The room we slept in was on the second floor, a triangular chamber like the top of a church with a small stained-glass window that opened over the living room. It felt like a room for keeping princesses in. I could hear the soft sounds of my grandmother downstairs. Vienna had rolled most of the quilt around herself, the pale ridges of her knuckles curled around the dark green like tree roots. .
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