The Glass Lake Reflected

The year the ice didn’t freeze on Glass Lake, I was boiling pasta for a late lunch while my stepdaughter, Cora, curled her hair in the hall bath. Her boyfriend, Dex, had turned the guest room into a temporary den, playing some war game on his headphones. My brother-in-law, Owen, had just arrived from the city, and I remember him padding down the hallway in his sock feet to ask Cora if she’d seen his reading glasses. As he passed through the kitchen, I asked if he’d take the compost out to the far bin. He said, ‘Sure, soon as I find those glasses.’

I finished the pasta and went to my studio at the north end of the house to sketch the winter trees. When I came out half an hour later, the light had shifted, and the house felt oddly still. I crossed toward the kitchen, and as I neared, I saw Owen at the mudroom bench, lacing up his boots. ‘Compost?’ I asked. He didn’t look up. ‘Getting my boots on,’ he said, his voice flat.

I turned down the back hall, and there was Cora, standing at the glass sliding door that faced the lake. The lake was a sheet of dull pewter under the overcast sky, but she was staring intently at the far shore, as if waiting for someone to emerge from the tree line. Her makeup was half done, one eye shadowed, the other bare. I asked, ‘Who are you watching for?’ She didn’t turn. ‘Waiting for Pat,’ she said, her voice dreamy, as if she’d said it a hundred times.

I had never heard her mention a Pat. My heart gave a small shudder, the way it does when a note is out of tune. I looked out at the lake, and for a moment I thought I saw a dark shape near the water, but it was just a reflection of the roof gable. ‘Pat who?’ I asked, but she was already walking away, back toward the bathroom, her bare feet silent on the cold tiles.

Dinner came and went. Dex emerged for food, headphones still on, oblivious. Owen never took the compost out; the bag sat by the back door, and when I asked him about it, he looked puzzled and said he didn’t remember me asking. I brushed it off, but the unease stayed with me, like a hairline crack in ice.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The house made its usual creaks, but there was a new sound: a slow, rhythmic scraping against the glass of the back door, as if a branch were dragging itself along. I went to check. The lake was black, and the frost was forming at the edges of the water, but the scraping came from inside. A fingernail, tapping against the pane. Cora stood on the other side, her face pressed close, her breath fogging the glass. She was smiling too wide. ‘Pat is here,’ she whispered. ‘He’s come to take us across.’

I stepped back, my hand finding the light switch, but the bulb flickered and died. In the darkness, I heard the back door slide open. The wind that swept in smelled of wet earth and decay, and it carried a voice that was not Cora’s, but older, deeper, and somehow multiple. ‘I’ve been waiting by the lake all these years,’ it said, ‘for the one who would answer the water’s call.’ Cora walked out onto the porch, her silhouette against the stars, and I saw her hand raise as if to wave at someone beyond the shore.

I called for Owen and Dex, but the house was silent, and when I stumbled into the hallway, the light from the moon showed Owen’s boots gone from the mudroom, and Dex’s door open, his chair empty. I ran to the kitchen, but the compost bag was gone, and the back door stood open, leading to the night. I stepped out onto the deck, and the lake had transformed: it was no longer water, but a sheet of perfect, seamless glass, mirroring a sky full of stars that did not belong to our season. In the center, three figures stood, their outlines crisp and black, like cut paper. One waved. One pointed. One was kneeling, as if praying.

I wanted to scream, but my voice was frozen. The lake’s reflection rippled, and I saw my own face looking up from the glass, but it was older, gaunt, with eyes that were not mine. Then the glass began to crack, hairline fractures spreading from the center, and a voice whispered from the cracks, ‘Pat has been waiting since the winter of ’98, when he walked onto the ice and never came back. You’ll keep him company now.’

The last thing I remember was the cold of the glass meeting my bare feet as I stepped forward, drawn not by my will but by a force gentle as a mother’s hand. The cracks closed above me, and I saw the stars up close, and then I was standing on the shore, looking up at a woman in the window of a house I had never seen, and I knew I was Pat now.