Prologue

July 18, 2000

The dead have nothing to fear,” Lexie said.

The two of us treaded water, lips blue, teeth chattering.

My sister wore her new light-blue bikini, the color of the sky, and I had on one of her hand-me-downs, the fabric so worn that it was sheer in places.

“So when we play the Dead Game, we keep our eyes open, no matter what.” Her face was as serious as serious got. “Swear it? Swear you’ll keep them open?”

I nodded.

“Even if you see Rita?” she asked.

“Shut up, Lex.”

“She’s down there, you know. She’s waiting for us.”

“Shut up!” I swam away from her, closer to the edge of the pool.

She laughed, shook her head. “Don’t be such a chicken.” Then she seemed to feel bad, to take pity on me maybe; to remember I was only nine. She put out her hand, pointer finger extended. “Come on,” she called. I swam back to her, reached out, crossed her finger with my own. “The X girls,” she said.

“Now and forever,” I finished. Then we hooked our fingers together, squeezed, and let go.

“If she comes for one of us, she’ll have to take us both,” Lexie said.

“Lex!”

“On three,” she said. “One. Two. Keep your eyes open, Jax. I’ll know if you cheat.”

I took the deepest breath I could.

“Three!”

We put our faces under and floated, suspended in the dark water like twins in the womb.

* * *

Our grandmother’s pool was twenty by forty-five feet and surrounded by carved granite. Moss grew in the cracks between the damp, gray stones; the sides were stained green with algae. Because it was spring fed, there was no pump, only an outlet at the far end that drained into a stone-lined canal that made its way across the yard and down to the brook below, which led, eventually, to the river. Weeds grew along the edges, clinging to the stone, floating with Lexie and me. When they got too thick, Gram would scoop them out; for a time, she kept a trout, saying the fish helped keep the water clean and free of insects. My sister loved the pool. I hated it; the water was black—so dark that you couldn’t see your feet when you treaded water. It stank of rot and sulphur, tasted like burnt matches and rust, and was colder than the ice bath my mother plunged me in once when my fever got too high. It sucked the breath out of you; numbed your limbs, left your skin red and your lips blue. Each time we came out of the water, we really did look like the dead girls we were pretending to be.

Lexie and I spent every summer at Sparrow Crest with Gram, in the tiny village of Brandenburg, Vermont. It was a three-hour drive (yet felt worlds away) from our dull ranch house in the suburbs of Massachusetts, part of a huge grid of equally dull houses with postage-stamp yards and a garage if you were lucky. Sparrow Crest was a dark, damp, sprawling place, made of stone and huge hand-hewn beams, covered in decades of ivy. There was a half-round window in the front like an eye. Behind the house were two immense hills, thick with trees. Mom and Ted would stay with us for a long weekend here and there, but mostly it was the three of us. Gram looked forward to our visits all year. She was “lonely in her big old house all by herself.” That’s what Mom said.

So our summer lives centered around visiting our grandmother—and the pool. Gram had a lot of rules about swimming: We couldn’t go in the pool unless she was home. We were never to go in alone. We had to take breaks and warm up after half an hour at most. And we were never, ever to swim at night. “Too dangerous,” she pronounced. As if she’d needed to warn us—the knowledge of what had happened to our aunt Rita, our mother’s baby sister, who drowned when she was only seven years old, should have been enough.

I let myself picture it as I held my breath beside my sister playing the Dead Game: a little girl floating, hair fanned around her, tangled with weeds. A girl who would never grow up. I knew Rita was the reason we could never let Gram see us playing the Dead Game. The one time she’d caught us floating facedown together, she’d ordered us out of the water, shaking, terrified. Lexie explained it was a breath-holding game, but Gram announced a new pool rule: We must never, ever do such a morbid thing again, or she’d ban us from the water altogether.

We knew we shouldn’t play it, but it was Lexie’s favorite, and she always won. We only played the game when we knew Gram was in the living room watching her afternoon programs and wouldn’t catch us. But still, the idea that she might, made it seem extra dangerous. Gram didn’t get mad often, but when she did it was like one of those summer thunderstorms that shook the house to its very foundation, that had you hiding under the covers, praying for it to pass.

Gram had grown up at Sparrow Crest. She’d been married here, under a big canopy set up in the backyard. She had her babies here, three healthy girls born in the upstairs bedroom with a local midwife attending. She swam in the pool every day, even did cold plunges in the winter, chopping the ice until she had a hole wide enough to slip into. She’d strip off her parka and ski pants to reveal her polka-dot bathing suit, then lower herself feetfirst until only her head popped out like a seal. She claimed it kept her young, that it rejuvenated her. Gram seemed strong and brave to me, but Lexie once told me she had a sickness called agoraphobia.

“She doesn’t seem sick,” I’d argued. The only part I understood was “gore,” which meant blood and guts and things in R-rated movies I wasn’t allowed to see.

“It’s not a sickness you can see, dummy,” Lexie shot back. “Aunt Diane told me.”

Lexie was right: Gram almost never left the house, had never learned to drive, had all her groceries delivered. She was tough enough to chop a hole in the ice and swim in January, so it was hard to think of her being trapped by her own mind.

* * *

Facedown, we floated. Lexie timed us with a fancy diving watch she’d gotten for her birthday: My record for staying under the water was one minute, twelve seconds. Lexie had gone up to two minutes. She was like a fish, my sister. Sometimes, I was sure she had secret gills no one could see. But I was a creature of land, and my heart did funny things when I was in the water and not moving to stay warm. I lost all sense of time.

I had no idea how long we’d been under now, and it took every ounce of willpower not to swim furiously to the edge and pull myself out of the pool. I kept my eyes open, scanning the darkness, searching for a glimpse of Rita: a flash of her white nightgown, a pale hand reaching up from the depths.