The Still Water

What I have written is what happened. I have left nothing out, and I have added nothing, and I have told it in the order it happened, which is the only order I can bear. I know that you will read it and decide that I was unwell. The lawyer who forwarded this letter will decide the same thing. The agency will decide it. The town decided it before I left, and I have lived with that decision for four months, and I have not changed my mind about a single thing I saw.

But I have changed my mind about what I did.

Here is what I believe now, and you may believe it or not, as you choose. I believe that there was something at Stillwater that summer, and that it had been there a long time, and that it had been given the faces of two dead people because that was the only way it could get in. I believe that it had been with the children since their parents died, and that it did not care whether I saw it or not, because it had already won them. I believe that the night Eliot died, I was not fighting a ghost. I was fighting a child's need to be seen, and I lost, because I made him the only one who had to look.

Fern is with Ada's sister now, in New Jersey. I have written to her, and I have received no answer, and I do not expect one. I have thought about going to see her, and I have not gone, because I have understood something about her silence: she is not broken. She is keeping the secret the way Eliot kept it, the way the house kept it, the way the lake keeps everything. She is waiting, in her way, for someone to come to the window who will not make her look.

I will not come to the window.

I am writing this letter to you because you are the only person who was never in the house, and I thought, in my foolishness, that you might be the only person who could read it without hearing the water. I do not ask you to believe me. I do not ask you to forgive me. I ask you only to do one thing: do not let them put me in the story they are already telling. Whatever you decide I am — whatever you decide I saw — let it be my story, told in my words, and let the children be, in it, what they were to me: two children, standing very still, at the edge of the still water, looking out at something I could not see and would not let them love.

I have written my name below. I have no other.

Nora Hale

Stillwater, New York

October