Re: [The Lake: Atticus & Cass]
He was not a vision. She knew this, not because she heard the sputter of the motor underwater before it cut out and not because the boat had a name or he spoke. All these things, Cass knew could be part of a vision, if it had been a long time. If it had been so long she had forgotten in her toes what it felt like to seize up like electric shock with something bigger and older and worse than she. They had put rubber between her teeth, in the Quiet Home. Visions didn't wait considerately for something lodged in the mouth to prevent her from biting off her own tongue. They wracked, they stole, they emptied until she was bones and skin and nothing else. She hadn't forgotten. She hadn't forgotten anything, even if they blunted her down with pills in paper cups.
She knew he wasn't a vision because there were still clouds in her head, a faint ache in her temples. She was still drugged and drugged, she couldn't hum like a tuning fork with whatever had lived or would live or was living by the water. He wasn't a vision, he was just a boy in a boat that she couldn't see clearly in the glare of sun on water. Cass shaded her eyes with her hand, turned into the direction of his voice. He sounded friendly, the boy in the boat. Perhaps, and perhaps. Cass smiled, sun-dazzled in his direction and her face was already pink-stung from early morning sun.
"It's terrific." She had a voice that didn't belong to town. Deep-voiced, and accented. A little French, a little wider Europe, her voice was a mutt that echoed all the places she'd lived. American schools in Cairo and in Portugal. "The kind of morning you steal before the day has finished making up its mind." She rolled in the water, until her feet were down and her head was up and she could see the shape of the boy as well as the boat, and she hummed with the song as she swam closer.
"Morrison. I missed music. Morrison is a mood. Like the morning."