Annie thought coming to the lake house might make it better. This place had saved her after the divorce ten years ago and the loss of her son to cancer five years later. Sixty-five years of good memories. The lake magic didn’t seem to be working this time. Maybe because this time it was her fault.

God was punishing her. The courts hadn’t. Even the little girl’s parents had been kinder than they should have been. The guilt lay heavy, smothering her. Annie tried to force a deep breath into her tight chest.

The newly built dock smelled of sawdust. Jordy, a childhood friend, built this dock when she decided to come back to the lake. He’d called the old dock “rickety” and said he didn’t want an “old woman with a gimpy arm crashing into the water.” She knew it had more to do with his beneficent nature than safety.

Annie fumbled for one of the skipping stones in the basket next to her on the dock. The weight of the cast on her left arm altered her arc as she threw the stone sideways at the lake’s smooth surface. Instead of skipping across the water, it plopped and sank. How appropriate, she thought. The accident stole even her childhood skills. Annie hoped she could still swim once they removed the cast.

She could no longer drive either, but Annie couldn’t blame that on the cast. The fear snatched away that ability. She couldn’t even cry. The tears burned behind her dry eyes but never fell, dammed by shame.

Annie tried to concentrate on the scene in front of her, to replace the screeching of her tires with birdsong. To overlay the small bicyclist’s big eyes with the greenish-blue water. Switching her focus from little pink tassels covered in blood to the blue heron sailing past. She couldn’t.

Everyone said Annie was lucky to have suffered only a broken arm. They didn’t know the panic that stalked her as she slept, the nightmares, waking in a cold sweat, trying to push the brakes even harder, hard enough to stop before she hit that little girl. Sarah, nine years old, her leg broken in three places.

They didn’t know because she couldn’t tell them. She tried to go to a therapist right after it happened. A plump lady in a checkered cardigan and red scarf. Her friendly smile, intended to put Annie at ease, did nothing to loosen her words. Sarah might walk with a limp forever because of her. Annie never went back to the therapist. Words couldn’t turn back time.

A car crunched onto the gravel behind her. She stood up to see a grey Subaru Outback with a green canoe lashed to its top. The door opened to reveal the top of Jordy’s silver hair. He climbed out wearing red swim trunks and a blue t-shirt, and waved at her. Jordy lived on the lake year-round. He called down to her as he shed his shirt and threw it in the passenger seat of his car.

“You going for a swim?”

She held up her cast-encased arm and yelled back. “Very funny.”

His back muscles rippled under his dark skin as he unloaded the canoe. He’d aged better than she. Working muscles, she thought, not gym muscles. Jordy owned a construction company, but whenever she’d seen him on a work site, he’d been swinging a hammer or carrying wood. She wondered when he had the time to complete the administrative tasks. But judging from the art on the walls in his living room and the reclining massage chairs in his home theater, he did all right with accounts receivable.

She stayed where she was, and he carried the canoe down and set it in the water.

“You want to go for a paddle?”

When she hesitated, he added, “I’ll drive.”

Jordy grinned at her. She knew he was making fun of her refusal to get behind the wheel for the last six weeks.

She shook her head. “Jordy, I can’t.”

“Come on,” he said, coaxing a smile out of her.

He slid her arms into a life jacket and helped her settle into the boat. She sat in the front and he climbed into the rear of the boat. It felt peculiar to Annie to have someone chauffeuring her across the water. It gave her time to settle into herself as his paddle whooshed the water rhythmically, left side, right side. Her chest began to loosen.

He rowed in silence, other than the sound of the oars or the splash of the occasional jumping fish, until they passed the old, white house, more of a weathered grey now. The Matthews used to live there. Annie didn’t know who lived there now.

“You wanna talk about it?” He asked.

Annie knew she could shake her head and the journey would continue, no pressure. She fixed her eyes on the horizon and began to speak. She told him everything from the moment she pulled out of her driveway until she stood in the street, body aching, watching the ambulance take the little girl away.

“She may not ever walk normally again.”

Jordy continued to row as she talked, taking them down the creek that flowed off the lake to the blue heron nest they’d discovered a few years ago. Annie had looked it up then— most herons didn’t return to the same nest—but they recognized this one because his right wing was slightly crooked. They’d named him Old Blue.

Jordy steered the boat to the little cove that allowed them to see the nest without being seen. Old Blue stood on one leg, scanning the water for his dinner. They could see his mate sitting in the nest beyond him.

“He seems like he does all right,” Jordy pointed out. “Did I ever tell you that the Native Americans believe a Blue Heron represents an ability to progress and evolve?”

“Progress and evolve,” Annie repeated. Could she? Could Sarah?

The words had loosened the blockage. The dam broke and tears flowed down her face like magic, lake magic.

Nancy Wahler writes in Chattanooga, TN. Beyond writing, her other passion is psychotherapy with a trauma focus. She lives with her husband, two human children, a human-like dog, and four very cat cats. She has had short stories published online in Every Day Fiction and Knoxzine and in the anthologies Women. Period, Jackson and Central, and Three Bridges.