Underlake

A richly glittering debut about the interlocked fates of two women, raised worlds apart, who must join forces on an extraordinary journey, diving leagues beneath the water's surface—and straight into the fathomless heart of fear, forgiveness, and love.

“Stunning . . .  Underlake reveals the greatest depths are within the human heart.” —Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker

“A breathtaking and unforgettable debut about what happens when the water rises and when the water runs out.” —Susanna Kwan, author of Awake in the Floating City

“Underlake is a novel of gorgeous, pressurized truth.” —Clare Beams, author of The Garden

Twelve years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become a marine biologist. Now she’s returned, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she’ll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger appears at her door.

This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she’s under the nearby lake—alive. To find the missing girl, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper beneath the water, confronting webs of fear, control, and delusion borne of a rampant nostalgia for a purer world. Along the way, they will also push their bodies to the mortal limit.

Hypnotic and arresting, Underlake brings a poet’s attention to language, evoking the ethereal work of Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff, and Emily St. John Mandel and the imaginative brio of Margaret Atwood. In taking her place as a major new voice in American fiction, McCoy shrewdly explores the American obsession with inheritance, property, and race, asking how we stake our claim on the timeline of history—and who we erase in the process.“In this stunning debut, Erin L. McCoy has found another world beneath our own, where attempts to create a purer society inculcate the worst tendencies of what its inhabitants have disavowed. At times surreal but—from the beginning to its sublime last line—also achingly true to the human need for hope and forgiveness, Underlake reveals the greatest depths are within the human heart.”
—Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker

“Eerie and mesmerizing, Underlake is a journey into the deepest recesses of American society and the human heart. Erin L. McCoy guides the reader through lightless tunnels and shimmering pools, charting an underwater world of communities living in extreme isolation. At each step, this book illuminates how faith, language, and truth can warp or sharpen under extraordinary pressure. This is a spellbinding exploration of the risks we take for love, reminiscent of the survival story in Women Talking and the labyrinthine mysteries of Piranesi. A breathtaking and unforgettable debut about what happens when the water rises and when the water runs out.”
—Susanna Kwan, author of Awake in the Floating City

“Underlake is a novel of gorgeous, pressurized truth. Erin L. McCoy has brought all the layers of love and grief and history to bear here, along with an astonishing virtuosity of language. There are images here I know I will never forget as long as I live.”
—Clare Beams, author of The GardenErin L. McCoy is the author of the poetry collection Wrecks, a finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Narrative, Conjunctions, Bennington Review, The American Poetry Review, and Best New Poets, among other publications. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Erin has lived in Seattle, Malaysia, Spain, and two St. Petersburgs.I

Otta

When the last sod was laid on the south slope of Paintsville Dam in the spring of 1979, the valley to its north filled up with water, and two hundred and forty people drowned.

All that remained of Paintsville was a five-­thousand-­acre lake, sterile and glassy in the shadow of the hills. The dam’s two slopes—­one of rubble, one of grass—­met in a spine of road. Beneath this were two million cubic yards of rock fill and earth, and beneath this, a concrete tunnel through which the lake water, with the sluice gates’ permission, passed. The tunnel carved through ribbons of red clay, beneath which a layer of limestone clasped Paleozoic coral in its teeth. Caves wound their way through the stone, and a long tongue of aquifer, slick with beetles and milky salamanders, shuddered with the groans and slips of the mantle, which bore it all.

Two hundred and forty people dead. It became the defining tragedy of Steels, a one-­stoplight town and former neighbor to Paintsville due northeast along a state road flanked by goldenrod. The city council mounted a bronze placard by the lakeshore, then left it to oxidize.

Once, Allie and I took a boat out on the lake and I fell overboard, and while I was suspended under the water—­in shock and not knowing how to swim—­I thought I saw a chimney winding up through the silt. A chimney under the lake, just like the stories we had heard. The town didn’t like to talk about its dead, but children still told ghost stories: about what if those people had done what they set out to do, which was to keep living on the same land where they were born—­submerged. I thought in that moment that I had found proof, delivered us all from mourning.

But I’ve learned not to trust myself when I know what I wish. Look how many years I spent trying to excise my past like a tumor, believing that through blood and labor and terror-­driven will I could escape what this place had made me. Or how, when it all collapsed, my mind dangled a series of fevered daydreams: Could it be that Ethan was only lost, that the ocean had spat him out whole and gasping onto some beach? Powder-­blue sand, cluster of foxtail palms tossing softly the shade around. Like those people under the lake, he might have passed into a realm invisible to this one—­could be there now.

Then the daydream would crumble, and I’d find the same hands in front of me, tan line from my dive watch and nails bitten down to the quick. It was only a wish, and I knew why I wished it: because, in the darkness and clean scrape of the seafloor, the glass cephalopods and blue luminescence haunting at the edge of sight, I was the one that lost him.

The night I came home to Steels, my mother in her pastel nightgown spun around to fetch the whistling kettle off the stove and suddenly got so dizzy that she clutched at the oven handle, wrenching open its charred maw. I had to half-­carry her to the couch.

Just an hour earlier, on the ride from the bus station, Allie had filled me in: the kidney disease was getting worse, and our mother, Eugenia, refused to be put on the transplant list.

“They’re pretty mild, but the symptoms are there—­some days worse than others,” she said. “I think she’s having some dementia too.”

Allie’s eyes fixed on the road, like she was shy of me. It had been years since we’d seen each other. Her jawbone had grown sharp, her nose aquiline, the last childlike features melted away.

She dropped me off in the driveway. “Can’t come in—­I’m running late for the dinner shift.” The restaurant where she waited tables was in the city, an hour’s drive away.

As I opened the car door, she grabbed my wrist. We locked eyes then, and she smiled. “Stay a while this time.”

She didn’t know I had nowhere else to go.

The dementia wasn’t news. On our last call, my mother had asked three times if I was wearing my good coat, although summer on an oil rig on the Gulf of Mexico isn’t exactly going to freeze your ass off. I didn’t think much of it. She’d always had those moments when her mind went loose and wandered. She came back to herself in her own time.

But look at the place now. Heaps of magazines and boxes of collectible tea sets and folded paisley table runners and cages for birds when we’d never had birds. These towered against the walls three and four and five stacks deep, with hair and shit from the cat clotted at their feet.

My mother’s dizzy spell left her exhausted—­eyelids lilting, jaw clenched. I walked her upstairs to bed, then called Allie.

“I’m working, what’s up?”

I told her what had happened.

“She had dialysis today. She gets lightheaded after,” Allie said. “Let her rest.”

I climbed back up the stairs, which were littered with feathers—­maybe our mother did have a bird?—­and piles of tabloids in chronological order, advancing as the stairs advanced. The collections had expanded threefold since I’d visited last.

When I walked into the bedroom Eugenia was sitting up, reading a magazine. Her eyes swept over my face, then returned to the wrinkled issue of Time.

“Otta Coates,” she said. “When did you get in?”

“We talked downstairs, Mom.”

She flipped the page. “Right, I remember.” It sounded like a lie. But then, with one swift tug at the hook, she returned to herself: “I don’t know why you took the bus. What are you here for, anyway?”

I checked in on Eugenia a few times over the course of the night. She’d fallen asleep with the magazine on her chest and started to sweat, her forehead glossy beneath wild gray wires of hair. She was tossing in the face of I don’t know what dream. I opened a window and the wind gnashed in carrying slices of rain, and still she sweated and kept sweating.

I rotated cool rags until she stilled. Then I crossed to the window and tried to mop up where droplets blotched the papers scattered across her dresser.

Beneath a stack of receipts, I found a leather-­bound album, and flipped through it. It was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, all from before the dam was built. On one article from 1978, I could see the headline and the first few paragraphs of the folded paper.


AMID RIFTS, COUNCIL STILL REFUSES TO LEAVE VALLEY

A group of some 400 people who have refused to evacuate Weber Valley has now splintered as a result of internal power disputes.

The group, which calls itself the People’s Council, has insisted on remaining in and around the town of Paintsville, even as construction wraps on a dam that will flood the area next year.

The council was founded by a contingent of factory workers who seized control of the shuttered Weber Paint Co. more than a year ago. This group has spearheaded efforts to reinforce the factory and a number of buildings along Paintsville’s Main Street in preparation for “underwater living.” Other isolated homes and industrial structures have also been outfitted, including Paintsville Church, which stands on a hill at the valley’s highest point.

On Monday, Rev. Arnold Jewell of Paintsville Church told The Herald that he has broken ties with factory leadership due to “philosophical differences.”

“We are not guided by ‘the people.’ We will follow His word and His word alone in these final days,” Rev. Jewell said.

Community leaders have expressed mounting con­cerns that this mass delusion may in fact lead to


I shut the album. I’d heard the stories a hundred times growing up—­though never from my mother.

I sat down beside her, watched the hinge of her jaw working at something she could never grind down.

The moon passed behind a cloud and I dozed, a crooked sleep that picked at my scabs and every hour tossed me awake. Haunted. Something, at last, my mother and I had in common.

When I opened the door to the sunporch the next morning, a frothing black mold filled my lungs, and I coughed my way back into the kitchen.

I saw the problem fast enough: a corner of the roof had dry-­rotted, and the ceiling drooped with damp. My mother had apparently covered the boxes she kept out there with a tarp but had made no attempt to fix the roof.

I was still sick in those first days home, damp in the lungs and hacking out something I’d caught down on the ocean floor. Breathing heliox at five hundred feet of depth had left the occasional tremors in my hands. When I was asleep I could still hear the dull shriek of metal through the comms as Ethan—­weighed down by his dive gear and a million tons of water—­wound the bolts into place, then tapped to test the solidity of the pipeline.

I took my mother’s car and drove into Steels to find a contractor for the roof.

It was the first time I’d seen the town in years, and as I approached the single stoplight at the top of Main Street, my stomach churned. A wind tossed the light on its wire. I inched down the rust-­dark corridor of storefronts, two redbrick stories beneath flaking cornices running down both sides of Main, huddled together against the brittle autumn. The plate-­glass windows gaped through famished frames.

Nothing had changed since I’d left twelve years ago: a bank, a contractor’s office, the diner where I waited tables in high school. It was as though the town had been sealed off completely from the outside world. Towering above it all was the eyeless edifice of Steels Evangelical Church, its oxidized steeple like a single raised finger of reproach.

I parked and went inside the contractor’s office. The drowsy re­ceptionist asked a few questions, then scribbled out an estimate that was far more than I could afford. My student loans were due, and it wasn’t yet clear whether my last paycheck would be forwarded to me here.

I walked to the bank to see if I could set up a wire transfer. The teller, gulping through his tie knot, told me about a handyman living down on the lakeshore who would do it cheap.

“Jeffrey Clark,” he said.

“Clark—the physics teacher?”

He nodded. He couldn’t help with the wire.

I drove over a muddy creek and out of town. This road traced the boundary of a three-­hundred-­acre tract that my mother claimed had all been Coates farmland “for as far back as history goes.” Eugenia liked to point out the landmarks: a clot of sugar maples where her grandmother, Ottilie—­daughter of a French immigrant, after whom I was named—­hung a tire swing; a span of field where her grandfather shot the buck whose head still hung in our house. Eugenia’s father had sold almost all this land to developers.

I turned down the road to the lake, and a vine-­gnarled forest swallowed the fields. The land around the lake was a state park, though it didn’t get much traffic. The year after the valley flooded, the state health department detected dangerous levels of lead in the lake water and forbade anyone from swimming, boating, or eating the fish. The promise of a touristic boom of anglers and an influx of cash for Steels was dashed overnight.

Jeffrey Clark lived on a floating marina that had been built just before the bad news broke, in a bait shop that had never opened. I pulled into the empty parking lot. It was late September, and a swell of cicadas still quaked the surrounding woods.

As I walked down the gangway, whiskered bullheads swarmed the pylons, their keyhole mouths picking at floats of algae. Poisonous, maybe, but not poisoned.

I knocked, heard a grunt from inside the shop, and went in.

A counter with an old cash register ran along the back wall. There, a man wearing magnifier eyeglasses hunched over a battery pack with wires fraying out. A single shock of orange hair on the crown of his head cut through the gray. I’d seen him, years ago, shuffling through the halls of the high school with a leather folio. I never took his class; he was known for falling asleep in his chair.

“Shop’s closed,” he said, pushing the magnifiers up his nose.

“Going on thirty years, right?”

My joke didn’t land. He scanned my face, the glasses dilating his pupils.

I searched the room for a change of subject and spotted a buoyancy compensator and crumpled wet suit in the corner.

“You scuba?” I asked, moving toward it by instinct until a twist in my gut stopped me short.

He shrugged.

“Turns out my asthma’s too bad,” he said. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

He pulled off the magnifiers. His eyes gaped, and he blew out a puff of air.

“Well, how about that,” he muttered.

I explained about my mother’s roof. He was watching me closely, tugging at his beard.

Finally, he waved away the rest of my story: all the details of the sunporch’s proportions, my hedging on the cost.

“I can start Monday, but only if I can bring a friend.”

“A friend.”

He nodded.

“She needs to learn how to dive,” he said, “and she needs to learn fast.”