Water
by Silvia Moreno-GarciaRebecca Lynn Ashley stared at the world from a bad quality Polaroid with her blonde hair piled up and a smile painted on that perfect face of hers. She could have won a local beauty pageant, Miss Red Lobster or something or other, - she was that kind of girl. Instead, Rebecca was a poster on a telephone pole, the word "missing" in bold.
Rebecca Lynn's family was poor, and my first thought on learning she had vanished was that perhaps she had left town dreaming of earning money and fame in some strange, fairytale way. It seemed something she could do; a modern Cinderella.
I did not know Rebecca Lynn, and at the same time I knew her. We had two classes together. We never talked, and when we crossed paths in the hallway she did not look at me, though I looked at her. She was the kind of girl everyone looks at. She had prom queen and beautiful written all over her, and she was proud of it.
Yeah, I knew her because there are a thousand Rebecca Lynns and they are all the same. A little vain, a bit dreamy. I could have written the biography of the Rebecca Lynn girl from beginning to end.
After high school she would marry Tom Green or Peter Startford, or any of the other boys that lived near her house. She would have four children as blond as her. She would make meatloaf once a week. Her husband would come back late at nights and they would fight. Sometimes she would stand before the mirror and realize that she was no longer beautiful, or young, and that the mask of a face that was left behind belonged to a stranger. She might take out an old yearbook then and go through her pictures, remembering how pretty she looked in that white, flowing dress the night of the prom.
In Rebecca Lynn's case, her mom was a waitress and her dad was unemployed. She had too many siblings and not enough cash. In the fairy tales the heroine does not need a credit card, just the right prince. Unfortunately for Rebecca Lynn there would be no prince, just good old Tommy or Pete, and a trip to Deadendsville.
But that was the future, and meanwhile she had the laughter, the admiration, the giggling friends and an ever-expanding court of admirers.
I envied Rebecca, I admit it. When you are the plain kid at the back of the room you have to hate the Rebecca Lynns of the world and wish them ill - as well as wish you were them, just for one day.
I often saw her leaning over glossy teen magazines, mesmerized by the models. I'm sure she did not care about the printed words. The photographs reflected her hungry dreams, an ink and paper mirror.
Do I think she ran away? Everyone wants to be a movie star these days. She could have taken a bus to Hollywood, a suitcase packed with dreams and a ticket in her pocket.
Yes, maybe she got tired of looking at the pictures. Maybe she got tired of the smell of alcohol on her dad's breath and the blank look in her mother's face; the constant screams echoing through the house, the unpaid bills pilling over the plastic table in the dinning room.
The cold, simple facts are that one March morning Rebecca Lynn Ashley did not go to school. She never, ever went again, and for a time there were posters on the walls, the supermarket, and the telephone poles.
She left her clothes, her CDs, and her stuffed toys at home. Maybe she decided it was time for a clean slate, that she had enough of Rebecca Lynn, and discarded anything of her former existence. We could picture Rebecca this way, standing on the side of a lonely rode, hitchhiking. She was no longer Rebecca: she was Giselle or Kristy or any other silly name a would-be model might pick, eliminating her former self.
She had been volatile and a little wild. "She talked about going away," a close friend was quoted on the news as saying. Funny how her close friends understood so little about her and could not say where she might have gone, if she had escaped with someone. Funny they did not even know that her full name was Rebecca Lynn, because everyone called her Lynn.
We talked about her, of course. Someone suggested that she had been murdered by some deranged man and buried in the beach. The story was slowly embellished. She had been, raped, then murdered. It was the work of a satanic cult. It was one guy alone. She had been strangled - no, shot in the head. She had been drowned, then cut in to little pieces.
There were other tales, not as grisly but still disturbing. A kid in match class claimed Rebecca Lynn changed her name and was something of a porn star in distant, sunny California. Others said she was a hooker.
I liked to make a happier fate for her, to create my own ending for the beauty queen. As I lay in bed at night I would imagine Rebecca posing for a photographer, smiling for the cover of a teen magazine.
I was so sure that I would find her face on the cover of a glamorous publication that when I flipped through these mediocre magazines and did not glimpse her blue eyes, an unbearable melancholy swept through me. I checked every fashion magazine, just in case she happened to be there, lost between the pages, caught between an add for Revlon and a syndicated column.
Of course, this was only my imagination.
We knew nothing of Rebecca Lynn, except that she had not come home one night.
A few weeks after her disappearance I dreamt of Rebecca. In my dream we were at a dance - perhaps in our own high school. It was a Halloween party, and standing in a corner was Rebecca. She wore a peculiar mask of what seemed to be blue scales and an iridescent blue-green dress. I waved hello. She smiled.
It was the next morning that I remembered. I had seen Rebecca one day before she disappeared. We lived in the same neighborhood, a few streets from each other. It was late in the afternoon and I was hurrying home, my backpack dangling from my right shoulder. A couple of lazy sea gulls flew away when I passed next to them and there she was, just standing against a fence, smoking a cigarette.
I slowed down. Rebecca Lynn wore a plain, blue t-shirt and a skirt. Her hair was braided, decorated with little blue plastic butterfly clips. She seemed to be waiting for someone. When I looked at her she looked back at me, straight into my eyes, and I felt a little uncomfortable. She did not say anything, did not seem pleased or displeased with my presence. I walked away but felt her gaze still upon my back. How I didn't remember before, I don't know. But the more I thought about it, the more real it seemed, and I would have not been surprised at all if I had received a telegram from the missing girl: "I am fine. I am happy. I had to go away."
Beautiful, uncertain Rebecca Lynn. We read about her in the newspapers until the story was thrown to the back pages, and then faded out altogether.
I watched in panic as the articles about her grew smaller and smaller, and with each passing day Rebecca Lynn seemed to move further away from us, towards the horizon.
Margaret White was the prom queen that year, a pretty, popular girl. Her date was Bryan Ross, who happened to be the cute boy of the class and played the guitar.
So we never did get any pictures of Rebecca at the prom, although that crown had been made specially for her.
There was only one curious incident, one final footnote on the Lynn story. It was another dream. The night after the dance I dreamt I saw Rebecca Lynn swimming slowly towards me. She had a dark green fish's tale, long and scaled. She was smiling. In my imagination Rebecca was a mermaid. That was the last time I dreamt about her.
So we forgot about her. Rebecca Lynn might have never existed. If it had not been for those yellow pictures with her name below them, beaten by the rain and time, we would have branded her an invention.
Only then there was an evening when I passed Rebecca Lynn Ashley's house with out even noticing it. There again was the wooden fence. The sound of the waves beating against the rocks made a great, loud roar.
You know that feeling, déjà vu it's called? Lovely how the French have a name for every strange and conceivable feeling. Anyway, it was like déjà vu. A tingling that made me pause.
I don't know why I did it, but suddenly I jumped over the fence and stood there, staring at the gray ocean and the equally gray sky.
"Rebecca!" I cried.
And though there was no answer, I knew then what had happened to Rebecca Lynn. I knew she had climbed down those large sturdy rocks, until she felt the sand under her feet, and kept on walking until the waves lapped at her legs, then her waist. Until the waves adopted her as their daughter. I knew.
If I wanted to, I could go down there and see Rebecca once more. She would stretch out her pale arms and smile, then take me with her. We would be friends.
Something moved in the water. It was something pale. A fish, maybe. I squinted. There was a hand, a white, white hand in the water.
My heart seemed to stop for one slow, painful second before I rushed back towards the road and I ran back home as fast as I could.
It started raining, and by the time I managed to pick out the right key and open the lock, I was soaked. I had a high fever for several days.
Soon summer ended. By then I was going away to university and had almost convinced myself I'd dreamed the whole thing.
If men could think a manatee was a woman, couldn't I have turned a log or a piece of garbage or something into a mythical creature? Sure thing.
Still. The idea of Rebecca Lynn combing her blonde hair deep below the water has haunted me for a long time. Call me superstitious, but when I visit my mother I do not go down to the beach, although it is only a few blocks away; nor I do not look for her in the magazines as I wait in line for the cashier to ring my groceries.
But sometimes I get this feeling that she surfaces and looks far across the water, searching for me.
One day we will swim together.
One day.
I'm just not ready yet.
©Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexican native transplanted to Canada, writes fantasy and magic realism. Her work has been published in Deep Magic and Shimmer, and she has an upcoming story in Fantasy.