Emily Across The Lake by Sherry Cassells

There’s an Ojibway song goes blue lake and rocky shore I will return once more and it plays to the beat behind my eye bones over and over.
We had a cottage on Catastrophe Lake, way up in Northern Ontario around Lake of the Woods, which sounds nice whispered. We had the whole lake to ourselves at first and my parents wanted it to stay that way forever but I was an only child and I waited for a friend, who eventually came in the form of Emily Across the Lake, which also sounds nice whispered.
First time I saw her she was on the opposite shore waving and it was shocking to spot her little spark of life. I got in the canoe and went to her like a magnet.
Emily’s side of the lake got the morning sun and every morning after that I paddled from my shadowy dawn through the mist where she was waiting. She’d slip into the bow, a few rocks colliding with the hull in that dull beat I’ve got behind my eye bones still. 
We’d scour the world, and in our wake, leave nothing.
There must have been inclement days, and weekends one of us didn’t show up, groggy falls and bleak winters, but these I cannot remember. Why would I?
We were cottage friends only, Emily and I, and we never talked about our other lives – our lesser selves  we called them – but once or twice on a Friday night she’d show up late and leap to the dock where I was splayed, still in her school uniform, the edges of her lesser self diminishing, the storied academy she attended in downtown Toronto going poof.
  Catastrophe Lake was charmed. Something about the order of things, the arrangement of stone, the tall birches spaced just so, the curves of rocky shoreline, the stands of pine – one or two out of line permanently and beautifully windblown. The water itself seemed more than the H2O of other lakes, the fish deeply coloured like swirls of night sky against stark white bellies.
  Emily needed, and I have to choose this word carefully – flux – the whispered underside of chaos and I think that’s why she became a painter, so that she could move and alter and change. With paint on canvas she augmented the already dazzling beauty of Catastrophe Lake, yes, but also she could destroy it and sometimes, while I wrote, she roughed in precarious elements – a loose boulder, sudden rapids, snakes and ladders – and other times she’d obliterate everything, an entire morning’s work with a storm of grey, and the temperature of my words altered in response.
In Emily’s quest for – I don’t know how else to put it – so in Emily’s quest for beautiful bedlam, we hiked and climbed and shambled through forest and field, and eventually stood blinking on the bright shores of other lakes, kids our age approaching us in zooming boats, but we recoiled from them knowing it was only our lesser selves who craved a stint with normalcy.
Emily’s grandfather sometimes came up to the cottage. He was an intelligent, dignified man, handsome like a movie star, and in spite of his age, his body remained that of an athlete, a swimmer, his old man pants grasping at his narrow waist, his flannel cottage shirts taut at the shoulders. His was the first tattoo I’d ever seen and I swam close to him in an attempt to decipher the smudge but it was swallowed in his flesh, too faded, and I didn’t ask what woman lived upon his heart in blue calligraphy.
  He’s the one who taught Emily how to bird whisper.
You’d think she’d start with the little ones – wrens or chickadees or orioles – but she started with ravens. When I paddled to her one morning she had a scribble on her forearm and I thought she’d been wire sketching but as I left the cold gloom of the lesser shores, the wire lifted from her arm and became something else, floating over the dark cedars, escaping my aim, until it stretched into the sky as a raven.
That’s Macbeth she said.
The summer we turned sixteen I was able to admit to myself two things: that I was in love with Emily, and that she was abnormal in a slightly dangerous way. I do not say this lightly, nor did I admit to myself easily, that her charm was laced with a sort of sparkling darkness which I both loved and hated, the source of my brief teenage angst which I scratched as poetry into little black books.
If I didn’t love her, I would have loved her more.
  That summer Emily did the most wondrous thing and no matter how long I live or what marvels my future may hold, I have known the best of it – love and joy and wonder in their purest form – and if there is a heaven, surely it will seem a lesser paradise.
There was a birch forest at the shallow end of our lake and in it we made a sort of home, a small circular place from where the view was spectacular, and it was where Emily put her spell on birds. When they fainted into her palm, she coloured them, painting their feathers with dye she brewed from petals and berries.
  I will never forget the first time when her hands opened and she whispered look and there on her palm stood a small bird. I wasn’t sure it was alive or carved from a miraculous gemstone unknown to me, but it was exquisite. She only gave me a few seconds before she leaned over and blew a small column of air on its back, revealing a tremendous Technicolor bloom. The bird then stretched its beautiful neck – I gasped – and it spiraled away.
  That bird flew in my head all winter.

After that, Emily and I no longer went to the cottage for entire summers but we sometimes collided there, our lesser selves temporarily discarded, forgotten, scorned.

I have Emily’s paintings all around me now as I write this, so many you wouldn’t believe. Most pieces she gave me, some I took from her garbage, and others I bought from galleries without her knowledge.
Things got hairy and they eventually put her on something, I don’t know what, but she had trouble making decisions after that. She could never pick a colour, and after a while she gave up painting and became interested in her lesser self, and we drifted apart. I continued to visit her, my love undiminished but haggard. We sometimes drove up to the lake together and stayed on our respective sides like always, but she was different, and I couldn’t write for beans.
Decades flew by.
She started painting again a few years ago, and I continued to eek out a living writing mostly lifestyle bullshit articles for peanuts, my little black books with their rippled pages stored in boxes.
She called me recently and said meet me at the cottage and there was something thrilling in her voice so I grabbed my keys right away and split. On the drive I wondered if I’d left my front door swinging open.
I didn’t want to, I tried to convince myself I’d make it, but I had to stop for gas and something in the back seat flashed – the Christmas present I’d not given Emily two years running – and when I got back in the car, I reached for it and put it on the seat beside me. It suddenly didn’t seem so absurd.
Everything was present when I arrived – the gathering birds, the sunset, a few early stars, the darkening forest, the canoe knocking – and Emily flat-out on the dock. She came to me and said what’s that about the gift.
For you I said.  
Of course she thought it was an album, but instead she unwrapped the colour picker I’d made her so long ago from my old Twister game, the primary coloured pie replaced with tiny slices of Catastrophe Lake colours – all colours – including the impossible ones she had invented for the birds. 
She kissed me for the first time then and suddenly I knew I’d been in a lesser love all along, and I don’t know how or why or any of that, but the words came back to me, all of them at once.