I go over and over the day that the blue girl drowned, and still I can’t think why I didn’t help. I turn it over in my mind, that first image of her out in the lake, already blue, the girl who turned blue and stayed blue, the girl who drowned and yet still lives. Why didn’t I jump in, why didn’t I swim out to her? Why did I leave it to Irene’s poor Audrey, fifteen like my Caroline and always so nervous, the kind of girl who should never have seen such blueness up close. I should have gotten up and swam, out to the buoys where you’re not supposed to go. I was never afraid of water. I knew I wouldn’t drown, if there’s one thing I’ve known all my life it’s that I’ll never drown. But I was not the one to go.

To watch someone drown is a terrible thing. To watch her revived is even worse. To watch a girl who was already blue and who stays blue even after she breathes, this is the worst thing I can imagine. In all my years at the lake as a child, I never saw someone drown, I never saw anyone fall into a deep pocket or even cough up swallowed water. At this lake in this town I learned to swim when the water still looked like glass. I taught my own children to swim when they were babies with their faces in the water first. Don’t be afraid, I’d say, it’s only water.
I used to be one of the summer people. But no more. I stayed. People say that there are only a few of us who stayed, and I am one. I used to love this town when I was one of the summer people, but now it’s just a town like any other town, except for the blue girl, who’s made everything different, even the things I cannot name.

My parents brought me to this lake when I was a child. They came from Russia and made money in textiles. They told me, Magda, marry well, marry safe, forget happiness, there is no happiness in marriage. Their marriage had been arranged, and they played pinochle and took their children to a beach to watch them swim in a quiet lake in a quaint summer town. They said that the kind of people who could take their children away to summer in a cottage were the kind of people we should know. I remember sitting on my mother’s lap while she rubbed lemon in my hair to bring out streaks and watching the lake that looked like glass. I remember my brothers throwing stones to make ripples and how I stepped into the largest ripple just before it broke apart. If I could stay inside the ripple, I used to think, if only I could stay. Anything would be possible.

And so I found that I could stay. I met a town boy with long hair and gangly limbs and got myself pregnant out at that lake. We danced in the ripples. My parents wept. They said, this boy will bring you no kind of happiness, Magdalena, and I said, to hell with happiness, you said so yourself. Mama wept more and said, who ever said such things to you? And I hugged her and said, you did, Mama, you did.

Year after year, the town grew more dull. Maybe we were waiting for the blue girl all along, without even knowing it. The lake filled with algae, and the summer people looked more tired. The children grew. My parents died. My brothers said they had never seen our parents so happy as they had been in old age, playing pinochle and telling Russian jokes. The town boy became a man who still keeps his hair long and no longer makes me laugh. One day when the children were fighting, Greg and Caroline, Greg the boy who kept me here and the sensible Caroline who reminds me why I wanted to stay, I drove out to the lake to throw stones. They skimmed the water the way my brothers had taught me when we were summer people and embarrassed by our parents’ English. When the ripples floated out toward me, I went into the lake in my jeans and sandals and stood until the ripple broke through my body. The next day, the blue girl came from nowhere, out beyond the lake in the trees. She moved slowly, but her skin flashed. At first I alone saw her, and I thought, I will stay. Now I will have to stay.

I tell the blue girl lies.

In my bed at night when I see traces of the town boy in my man-husband, I sing, Tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you no lies. He smiles and says, you used to sing to me all the time, do you remember? I smooth back the graying hair with my fingers, an old habit, and say, no, I don’t. What did I sing?

Of course I remember. But there is such a thing as telling too much, my mother used to say. It’s better to lie.

Greg stomps in the kitchen. When I named him Gregorio and nicknamed him Greg, Mama took him in her arms and said, this boy will always be a boy, Magda, this Gregorio, this Greg the Boy. He has always been impetuous, my son, and reluctant to take direction, even at three and a half. Try to teach him to ride a tricycle, this boy knew better. But this is new, this swearing. I don’t remember my brothers talking the way he does. Mama was right about him. Greg the Boy.

He throws his sneakers on the floor and says, this blue girl, everyone wants to know how does someone get so blue? How does someone get that blue and still be alive?

This is the son who kept me here, who caught inside me became this freckled, lanky boy. Such a boy, this boy is, defying me with talk of the blue girl. He wants a rise out of me, and I won’t give in.

I say nothing to him, and he says, I’m going to go find her out there, out by the lake, a bunch of the guys and me, we’re going to go find that blue girl and see why she’s so blue.

Mama taught me well.

I say, listen, boy, this is no way to talk in my house, and you will go nowhere near that girl, not if I have a thing to say about it.

I can play his game.

He laughs and says, Ma, you are such a gas.

He fishes around in his pockets, his head slung low like it’s too heavy to carry, like he hopes his head will snap off. I know the feeling. But I am trying to bake because we’re meeting tonight, and I need to make moon pies. I had never heard of moon pies before this, before Irene said we should visit the blue girl and bake moon pies to offer her for our failure to save her. She called this morning and said, we need to go, tonight, Magda, tonight is one of those nights, and I said, don’t worry, we’ll go, all you have to do is ask.

I think of the blue girl and look over at Greg with his sloping shoulders and grabbing hands, and I say, get out of my kitchen, boy, you are failing biology.

He says, how the hell do you know?

I say, I have my ways.

I pluck marshmallows from the bag and arrange them in the pot to melt. He’s failed biology three times, this boy who kept me here, this boy who cannot understand cells when it was the splitting of cells that made me stay in this sorry town.

Zygote, I say, and whack him with my spoon.

He says, what’s that? and I say, you should know, my boy, you of all people should know, and he lumbers out of the room with his hands at his sides, his arms like puppets with the hands broken.

The marshmallows bubble in the pot. White liquid simmers and draws circles around itself. This is the best part, the stirring as the bubbles rise up and then pop. I move my spoon around and around, stabbing at bubbles with the wooden handle. This is where I spoon in the lies. I imagine each circling bubble opening up and taking them in, one lie at a time.

Little white lies, tiny bubbles, my life in a pot.

Tiny bubbles, I start to sing.

Caroline shuffles into the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in barrettes, very unflattering with the zigzag part all the girls are wearing now. When she came down the stairs this morning, she leaned down to show me her scalp and the butterfly clasps that held the hair back from her forehead, which is much too large for her smallish face, and she asked me how I liked her hair. I said, very much.

Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I don’t know the rest of the words.
She leans against the sink with her arms crossed over her chest. The butterflies look trapped.

Mama, you look so happy when you make those little pies, she says.
I turn to her and toss a marshmallow to her from the bag. She’s getting thick about the waist, the Russian blood coming out in her with her heavy hands and squat legs. If only Mama had lived to see this.

I say, who said anything about making pies?

The marshmallow disappears inside her mouth. I throw another and another to make her laugh. Anything to keep her from my pies.

Greg’s failing biology again, she says.

The whiteness thickens. I stir and stir. The cakes are still in the oven, not quite ready for their sticky filling.

I know, I say. I have my ways, you kids should know, I have my ways.
Under the cabinet I find my oven mitts, a pair with faded sunflowers Mama bought me when I first got married. She said, to bake bread for that blond boy husband, but I’ve never baked bread for him, not a day in my life. Moon pies are all I can manage.

The cakes are perfectly round. I’ve never seen cakes so round. I let out a little whoop inside myself so Caroline doesn’t hear. She can’t have a mother whooping about the kitchen, it will give her ideas. The blue girl’s mouth appears inside my mind, open, with blue skin giving way to pink tongue. Like a cat’s except without ridges.

Are those for us? Caroline asks. I’m hungry.

I am ever the disappointing mother.

No, I say, and when she looks down at her sneakers and bends to tie the laces, I say, I’m making something special for you. These are for the bake sale, too sweet, anyway, no good, they’ll rot those beautiful teeth.

This much is true. If Caroline has one beautiful thing, it is her teeth. They shine. Even as a child, her baby teeth almost glowed. At the lake the summer people would stop me as I paddled her in the water and ask, how do you get your baby’s teeth so white?

I’d say, baking soda.

They’d look at their own babies’ teeth with the milky film across them and squint their eyes at me.

A remedy from the old country, I’d say.

I never touched her teeth. What she brushes with now, I don’t know, but never with baking soda, that much I’m sure of. What kind of a mother would put baking soda in her baby’s mouth?

Caroline smiles when I mention her teeth and slides one of the barrettes from her hair. Even with just the one strand hanging loose, she looks so much softer, less severe, less like my mother.

Mr. Fish made Greg get in front of the class today, I was so embarrassed, she says. And Audrey, I thought Audrey was going to cry when someone asked how someone could drown and still be alive.
The mitts feel tight around my hands. I set the tray on top of the oven to cool and think of Audrey sprinting toward the water, bone thin, pulling the blue girl out.

Caroline says, everyone wants to know. Everyone asks about the day she drowned.

Steam rises from my cakes. When I smell something in the air, I rush back to the stove and lift the pot off to keep the marshmallows from burning.

I ask, what did Mr. Fish say?

Caroline eats another marshmallow. The marshmallow is less white than her teeth, even the marshmallow can’t compete with teeth like hers.

He said it could be vascular, the way her skin is, that he’s heard about this blue girl, she says, but then he said he doesn’t believe she’s real.
Greg comes back in and hovers over the stove. He has always been a hoverer, this boy, always lurking.

One of the cakes falls to the floor. My son with his freckles the size of quarters, freckles no one in my family has ever had. He picks up the cake and takes a bite.

He chews on the cake and then says, this cake sucks, and spits it there, right into his hands.

I call Irene to ask her what time we should meet, and as I’m dialing I think her name is the name of a song, too, maybe a song I used to sing. What were the words? Irene, Irene, what was so special about Irene? Something, I think, made the Irene in that song special, but what it was, I can’t remember. Maybe the visits to the blue girl are taking my memory. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Irene, Irene, I sing into the phone when she picks up. What time, Irene?

She whispers. I can hardly hear her.

What? I say.

Same time, she says, as always, and hangs up.

Irene’s a nervous woman with a nervous daughter, even though I can’t blame Audrey for being nervous after saving the blue girl that day. She’s thinner than ever, and once I asked Irene, is she eating? and she said, of course she’s eating, I cook for her every night. It was the wrong question, I knew it as soon as it came out of mouth. I have that way about me, like Mama did. Mama once asked a woman at a fruit stand if she shaved her legs above the knee.

So smooth, she said to the woman, is why I ask.

Some people don’t like to have observations made about them, Mama, I told her, even if the observations are nice. And she said, what observation? I like things smooth.

The nights we go to the blue girl, I miss Mama. Papa not so much, since he was quiet and let Mama do most of the talking, but Mama, I miss her humor, I miss the way she phrased things, so embarrassing to me as a kid. I even miss her disappointment in me. I think about what she’d say about this blue girl who lives in our town out in the woods with an old woman. No family? she’d say. But you feed her. Feeding is good.

Not even in my imagination do I let her ask me what it is I feed her.
David’s on the couch watching television when it’s time to go. He’s belched up my stroganoff. Tastes even better coming up, he laughs. I sit on the couch beside him and think of the blond boy who swam after me in the lake and first slipped his fingers inside in a way that made my head fall forward against his chest like I might never be able to lift it again. David, I told myself, slayer of giants. A good name for a man you marry. Never mind the boy inside me who made me get married in the first place.

I tell him, I have to go. I have to meet the girls to give them the cakes for the bake sale.

Another bake sale? he asks.

You should know what kind of town this is, I say. You grew up here, not me. It’s not my fault there are so many bake sales.

He lays a hand on his thigh and looks over at me in a way he hasn’t looked in a long time.

I tell him to check to make sure they’ve done their homework, especially biology which that boy is failing again, and to please compliment Caroline on her hair. She’s very sensitive these days. We don’t want her thickening any more than she already has.

He shakes his head at me and leans into me close, says, what happened to that wild girl who shook out her hair in the water? Who would have ever guessed you’d become such a fine, domesticated woman?

My mother, I think, that’s who.

People change, I say, as I look around the room at my needlepoint, the ceramic mugs the kids made in grammar school, the pictures of our wedding, so young and stupid, and he says, I guess they do.

He asks me if I’ve left any of the pies for the kids in case they want a snack, and I tell him I’ve made them their own pies, special ones, that I would never deprive my children, what kind of mother does he take me for? Does he really think I’d keep things from my children?

He says, no, of course not, that’s not the kind of woman I am. He meant nothing by it, he says. He has never found me to be selfish.

Irene waits for me in her blue station wagon, the same station wagon she’s had for ten years, rusting now at the trunk and around the edges. She is married to Richard who never speaks, who plays basketball like a child. I think I can count on one hand the number of things Richard has said to me over the years. I try to count them in the car, but I lose count at three and give up. He is not right in the head, but still he could buy her a new car, she deserves that much. I don’t ever tell Irene those things. Talking about Richard makes her nervous, and she’s nervous enough as it is.

I get out of the van and wave. She mustn’t see me in the dark, she doesn’t even turn her head. I knock on the window, and her head snaps around, so fast I can almost feel the burn up her neck from a crick in the neck like that. She opens the lock and lets me in.

She says, the children are beginning to talk.

I light a cigarette that I save for our nights that we go to the blue girl and crack my window. When I offer the pack to Irene, she takes one, though she never has before. Her hands are shaking.

I say, it’s just talk, Irene, it’s just talk.

Irene puffs on the cigarette. She leans forward to squint her eyes at the road ahead that leads to the house like she can see everything.

Buck dreams about her, she says. The smoke curls around her fingers. He’s eight. He dreams about her every night.

I take a loud puff and blow it out the window. Mama loved to smoke when she was young, and I imagine her sitting beside me, sucking on her unfiltered cigarette and laughing, saying, afraid of her own children, this woman, such a shame, and then clucking her tongue.

Irene, I say, children talk. They dream. They do all sorts of things.
She nods but does not puff anymore.

Look at my boy Greg, failing biology, always stomping around, I say. They grow up and become strange.

She says, Audrey doesn’t sleep, and I say, I know. She has circles under her eyes, we all see.

And then I say, they ask her about the blue girl at school, Irene. All of them. Maybe it’s time you talked to Audrey.

She glares at me and flinches like I’ve poked her with a lit match and says, this is our secret. I thought we agreed.

Not about this, I say, but maybe about other things.

She doesn’t answer, and the time for talking is past.

We laugh. Every time we visit the blue girl, we laugh, the nervous laughter that comes up at funerals sometimes or when we reveal things to each other about sex, like the time Irene told me that Richard snorted like a dog when he came. Once I told the story of David falling asleep while I went down on him with ice cubes after too many shots of rum, but I’ve been sorry I told that story ever since, even though Irene is my friend and who else can I tell? We laugh even though these stories aren’t funny. They make us look bad, they embarrass us. They show how unattractive we’ve become, unable to seduce even our own husbands. But since we don’t tell what we put into our moon pies, even to each other, we have to tell each other something. And not just about kids or cooking or summer gossip. We have to tell something about ourselves.

I’m the first to go in, always, but since the last time when the blue girl choked, I want to go last. But we must have routine, that’s one thing we agree on. It’s a ritual, and we must abide by it. I hear my mother murmuring approval as I think this. The blue girl seemed peaceful in her bed that first time we visited her, lying there with her blue fingers interlocked and white blankets draped over her. Her breath came slow and deep and didn’t whistle, not then. She lay there on the bed and opened her mouth as soon as I unwrapped the moon pie. She swallowed it and smiled at me with rapture.

I said, you like that? and when she nodded, I broke off a piece and gave her another.

Each bite made me feel lighter. I felt bubbles in my head like after too much champagne.

I thought of every lie I’d ever told, and though they were too many to count, I felt hopeful. That first night, after I fed the blue girl my lies, I swam nude in the lake. The ripples washed over me, and I couldn’t see them breaking in the darkness, I couldn’t tell where the ripples ended and I began. It made me cry, swimming that way. I thought about David as the blond lanky boy I met that summer, how I’d lean my head against him as he sucked on my breast, tugging at it with teeth, like he wanted to swallow me whole. How I wanted him to. I’d press my chest forward to make the sucking deeper, give him more of me, but it was never deep enough, there was never enough to give.

These last few times, the blue girl looks restless. She sits up in bed and stares, not lying back like she used to, not opening her mouth until the moon pie is almost at her lips. When she choked, I began to cry, and I haven’t cried for so long that it hurt to stop. She swallowed one of the pies whole and opened her mouth to show me she could breathe. She tried to grab for my hand. I ran out to the tiny room where the old woman waits and out to my car, crying all the way.

Irene said, if we can just hold on, Magda, it will be all right once it’s over, and I said, I know, but sometimes it’s just so hard.

Tonight the old woman is waiting by the door. She’s small and hunched and keeps her hands hidden in pockets. Her hands move inside the pockets, I can see the outlines moving, and I imagine they’re filled with nuts. When we’re gone, I think, she cracks open the nuts with her teeth. She motions to us with her hand, but it’s too dark to see the hand, even the outline, to see what she’s hiding. I think that if Mama were here, she could talk to the old woman in a strange language and get her to open her hands. I have no such gifts like Mama. I can’t even sing half the time.

The old woman says, she is hungry, and gives me a look of such meanness that I almost crush the moon pies before I remember that they’re in my hands. She says, you take so long to come, the girl is starving, the girl needs to be fed.

Irene says she’s sorry, that we have children who need us, things to attend to, we don’t mean to be forgetful. The old woman doesn’t answer Irene. She pokes at my moon pies with her finger.

Go, she says, and I hurry through the small room with no chairs, almost tripping, and down the hallway to her door. I think of knocking, but she’s always in bed, this blue girl, so I turn the knob and go inside.

The first thing I think is that she looks bluer than before, but how this is possible, I don’t know. But how she became blue in the first place is a mystery to all of us, how she breathes, where she came from, what she wants. What we want from her. It feels so much like a dream that, standing there, I’m sure I’ll wake up in a minute and find Mama shaking me in my bed, telling me it’s time to go swimming in the lake, that I should get some sun on my face, I’m too pale. I think I’ll wake up and there will be no boy pulling at his groin or husband staring at me and no daughter with limp hair and thick middle. It will just be me and Mama and Papa playing pinochle. I’ll be one of the summer people again. My brothers will throw rocks in the lake. I’ll dance in the ripples.

She’s sitting up in the bed looking bluer than ever but not serene like she used to. There’s no peace in her face. Her brows knit together, her crazy hair jutting out worse than Caroline’s. I think of offering to comb it. I think the blue girl would like that, a mother’s touch. But I’m no good with hair.

I say, I brought you pies, your favorite, and when she smiles, I say, you’re very hungry.

It’s the first time I’ve seen her nod. Her head moves slowly, up and down, up and down again, like a baby when you first teach it to say yes or no, even though no is always the favorite.

I ask her if she’d like some of my pie, and she nods again, up and down, her whole neck bending then coming slowly up. It looks like a great effort for her, this nodding, but she smiles when she does it, so I think it mustn’t hurt. Her blue lips part as I hold out a piece for her. She closes her eyes, smiling while she chews, and I think of Mama saying, This blue girl, so easy to please. You were once that way.

She finishes the pies in several big bites, and I watch her for signs of choking, but they seem to go down smoothly, no gasps. When she swallows the last bite I hear the song in my head, Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I wish the blue girl knew the words.

I’m about to get up when she lets out a grunt. A low, guttural noise in her throat, so low it stops me, and I fall back in the chair.

I open up the linen napkin and say, that’s it, no more. She holds out her blue hand to mine. I don’t take the hand. I just look at it. Even the fingernails are blue.

I say, no more, that’s all I have.

She shakes her head at me again.

Then I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t go in the water after you, but you were saved by the girl. You were saved.

She shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. I get up from the chair to move toward the door. There’s no time for lingering.

I don’t look back. I move out the door as fast as I can. I don’t even wait for Irene. All I can think is that I have to get home before something happens, but what I don’t know.

I drive fast with my foot hard on the accelerator and my hands tight at the wheel. Mama sits in the passenger seat next to me holding cards in her hands. She says, so much pain that girl has. Why don’t you sing instead of telling such lies?

I blink, and Mama’s gone. In my head I tell her, No more lies, I promise I’ll sing, but I know even that is a lie. It’s the one thing I’m good at, doesn’t she know?

Greg is up when I get home. For a minute I want to take the freckled boy in my arms the way I did when he was small, when the freckles were still small. We used to play connect the dots on his arm. Now we’d need to draw a map.

He says, Ma, where are all the pies?

I stand there looking at this boy, this son of mine who fails biology. I think someday when I’m gone he’ll imagine me in his car with him and think about the smell of my pies. I wonder if that’s all he’ll have of me, this mother who made moon pies. That can’t be all. There must be more.

He rattles around in the refrigerator. It’s late, and I’m so tired.
He says, who took all the pies?

I stand there in the kitchen with the linen napkins in my pocket. I imagine I hear the blue girl’s voice. It is like a song.

I say, never mind the pies, it’s time for you to go to bed.

For once the boy listens to me. He ambles out in that way he has, head hanging low. No stomping this time. His feet seem to float.

Alone in the kitchen I whisper that I’m the one who took the pies. The pies are mine. There will be more.

Laurie Foos is the author of five novels: Before Elvis There Was Nothing, Bingo Under the Crucifix, Twinship, Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, and Ex Utero. She teaches at Lesley University and lives on Long Island with her husband and two children.