The Friend in the Water
by Sylvia Worden
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Marella became thin. She went for months without gaining weight. She was growing taller, so she looked thinner just as her friends were putting on sleek fat in preparation for puberty. She would sometimes gain a few pounds, and Charlotte would feel relieved, but then Marella would grow a few more inches and look thinner than ever.
Marella had friends among the girls in her classroom. They were at the age when girls had sleepovers at each other’s houses, staying up late to talk about boys and paint their nails. Marella brought her friends to the beach with her one evening at dusk. Charlotte watched them all spinning in the shallow water, chanting “Oscar Egad! Oscar Egad!” Then they laughed and played in the waves.
“I wonder when she’ll be ready to give up her imaginary friend,” Charlotte said. “She’s almost twelve years old.”
“Oscar seems harmless enough,” Scott said. “She has real friends, and she does well in school.” Scott had taken to teasing Marella about Oscar, asking her about her “boyfriend.” Marella’s lack of response to Scott’s comments only seemed to escalate his teasing, until it was a routine: father teasing, daughter ignoring him.
A rogue storm hit the southeast coast of Florida, blowing in from the ocean. Rain blew horizontally and hit the windows forcefully, sounding like hail. Trees blew sideways, leaning in toward the land, branches breaking and tumbling along the ground. The lightning storm began at midnight and stalled offshore for hours, the thunder deafening.
Noah ran into Scott and Charlotte’s bedroom to huddle in their bed, but Marella was quiet. Charlotte got up once to check on her and saw her lying in bed, then went back to her distressed son.
The storm lifted before dawn, leaving palm fronds and branches everywhere. Charlotte started breakfast, then wondered why she hadn’t seen Marella.
Her daughter’s bed was empty except for wet, tangled sheets. Water was everywhere; it had flooded in through the open window during the storm. Both the front and back doors of the house were still locked, and all the window screens were intact.
“We have to call the police,” Charlotte said.
“There’s got to be a simple explanation,” said Scott. “She could have gone out a window this morning. Gone down to the beach.”
Charlotte called 911 and reported her eleven-year old daughter missing while Scott ran to the beach. The police hadn’t yet arrived when Marella walked into the kitchen fully dressed, her hair wet and tangled.
“Where were you?” asked Charlotte. “I called the police.”
“I visited Oscar,” Marella said.
Two Coral Gables Police detectives, a male and female pair, arrived shortly afterwards. Charlotte studied their badges carefully, then spoke. “She’s had an imaginary friend since she was five,” Charlotte explained to the bored-looking detectives. “She said she went to visit him. I don’t know when she left, but she was gone when I woke up.” The cops gave each other a sideways look.
“Well, young lady, you’re getting pretty old to have an imaginary friend,” the male detective said. He was an older man, balding, belly straining the buttons on his uniform shirt. Marella stared at the floor.
The female detective was younger, probably in her thirties, and spoke English with a strong Spanish accent. She took a form out of a case she’d been carrying and began to write. “Would you like a referral to mental health counseling for your daughter?” she asked Charlotte.
Charlotte stared, then nodded slowly. “I’ll think about that, thank you.”
“I’m going to ask you to leave the room so that I can speak with Marella,” the woman said.
“My daughter is not an abused child,” Charlotte said in a louder voice, folding her arms and lifting her chin.
“That’s good, so it shouldn’t be upsetting to anyone for us to verify that,” the male detective replied.
“You, too,” his partner said, gesturing with her head that her male partner should leave the room.
The detective joined Charlotte and her partner in the living room about ten minutes later. “She’s not talking to me,” she said. “She doesn’t seem to be in any distress, and there is no visible injury.” She offered a plain business card to Charlotte. “Call me if you have questions, or if anything else comes up. We’re here to help.” She and her pudgy counterpart smiled as they stood and held their hands out to Charlotte.
Charlotte looked down at the card in her hand. Debbie Ortiz, Detective, Coral Gables Police Department. She put it into her wallet. Marella had already gone to her room.
Scott returned after the detectives had left. “The police were here, just after Marella returned. They were useless.”
“What could you expect? She was already home,” he replied.
“She said she visited Oscar.”
Scott looked up at the ceiling and sighed, as he did when he wanted his family to know how burdensome they were to him.
* * *
Charlotte was relieved when Scott accepted an offer to teach at a university in New Mexico for two years. “It’ll be an adventure, a change of scenery,” said Charlotte. She hadn’t realized until then that she, too, was yearning for an adventure. “This is the perfect time, before the kids get much bigger.”
She tried to persuade Scott to sell the house and make a fresh start in the new state, but he wouldn’t hear of leaving south Florida. She hoped that Oscar would be unable to accompany them to New Mexico.
Marella was distressed. “I won’t see Oscar for two years. He’ll be lonely and sad. Me, too.”
“We’re keeping this house for our return to Florida. Oscar will be here when we come home,” Scott said, “if you want to see him.”
The family found a house with a barn on several acres outside of Santa Fe. Charlotte had grown up with horses, and she bought a pony for Noah and quarter horses for Marella and herself.
Charlotte became the adventurous parent in New Mexico. Sometimes she took both children into the backcountry on horseback where they camped for days and cooked their dinners over a fire.
Noah joined 4-H and raised goats for the county fair. Marella and her girlfriends went to the rodeos that came through town. She sat with crowds of girls on the bleachers and talked to boys. As Marella gained weight and filled out, Charlotte thought perhaps she’d worried over nothing back in Coral Gables.
* * *
“Our two years went fast,” Scott said to the children. “Are you ready to pack up and head home to Florida?” He turned to Marella. “Do you think Oscar will be happy to see you?”
Charlotte felt her heart squeeze painfully inside her chest. Why ask that? Why say that name? She looked at Marella’s face, but it was placid and unreadable. Just an imaginary friend.
The first morning back in Florida, Charlotte stepped out of bed and almost slipped on the wet floor. She heard a door open in the kitchen, and it was Marella returning, windblown from running. “I’m fourteen. I can go to the beach,” Marella said when Charlotte asked.
“What do you want for breakfast?”
“Not hungry.” Marella went into her room and shut the door. A familiar sense of anxious dread settled into Charlotte’s chest as though it had never left.
It was summer, and both children spent their days at the beach. Charlotte was grateful to Marella for taking Noah with her. The kids’ hair bleached almost white in the sun. Marella returned to her old routine of swimming for hours at a time. She looked at her father blankly when he teased her about rekindling her romance with Oscar.
“Why do you have to keep bringing that up?” Charlotte asked. There was something that made her anxious every time she heard the name.
“What? Oscar?” Scott was maddening. “It’s funny. Just harmless teasing.”
Should I take the kids and go back to New Mexico? It was just a passing thought. She let it go.
The sleep disturbances began again in July, more violent than before. Marella would thrash her limbs as she gagged and gasped for breath. Sometimes she would have trouble returning to sleep after an episode, and Charlotte would hear the almost imperceptible slap of her bare feet on the terrazzo floor as she wandered through the house.
Charlotte began having disturbing dreams that she couldn’t remember upon awakening. She would wake with a start, heart pounding, covered in sweat. She found it reassuring to hear Marella pacing through the house, both of them awake, anxious, in the dark.
Unseasonably high tides occurred just in the Coral Gables area, and the local paper wrote a story about the odd phenomenon. Sometimes the family would awaken to find lumpy piles of seaweed on their lawn. Each tangle comprised an entire universe of tiny ocean creatures, miniature crabs and water insects of all kinds. Shorebirds clustered around the seaweed shortly after dawn, feasting on the small water animals.
The family had a small party for Marella’s fifteenth birthday. One best friend remained to spend the night after the rest of the girls had departed.
A noisy thunderstorm barreled across the state around midnight. Charlotte heard the two girls screaming and laughing as the storm passed through. It was just one storm among the many electrical storms that pounded Florida every summer.
In the morning, Marella was gone. Her friend wandered out to the kitchen, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
“Where’s Marella? Did she go out?” asked Charlotte.
“I don’t know,” said the teenager. “Her bed was empty when I woke up.”
Charlotte’s heart froze. “Call your mom to come pick you up,” she said to the girl. “Scott! Go to the beach and look for Marella. Now!”
The card was still in her wallet. Debbie Ortiz, Detective. She called the number, but it went to voicemail. Now what? Wait? Call the police department? Charlotte had particularly wanted to speak with Debbie Ortiz.
Marella’s friend was still sitting in the kitchen, waiting for her mother. Charlotte gave her a piece of toast and a glass of milk. “Um, can I have some coffee?” the friend asked. Charlotte smiled and poured her a cup.
Her phone rang and it was Detective Ortiz. “I’m nearby. I’ll be right over.” Ortiz was dressed in shorts and running shoes when she arrived on foot, strings of loose hair plastered to the sides of her face with sweat.
“It’s your day off,” Charlotte said. “I’m sorry.” She poured a cup of coffee for the detective and spilled her worries onto the table between the two women. “It’s just that there’s always been this friend — this imaginary friend — Oscar, ever since she was five years old, in Panama. When she disappeared the other time, two years ago, she said she was visiting Oscar. I know it sounds crazy,” she sighed.
“Oscar. Do you know a surname for Oscar?”
“Egad. Oscar Egad,” Charlotte answered.
“Egad?” Ortiz’s face was frozen, eyebrows lifted. “Could it be Edad?”
“Edad?” Charlotte tried out the sound. “Oscar Edad, Oscar Edad. Sure, that’s a possibility.” She nodded.
“Did she tell you how Oscar introduced himself to her?”
“Well, she said that he spoke Spanish and that he said, ’Yo soy Óscar.’” Charlotte was feeling shaky now, and she gripped her coffee mug tightly.
“You’re sure he put it that way? ’Yo soy Óscar’? ‘Yo soy Óscar Edad’? It wasn’t ’Me llamo Óscar’?” The detective’s gaze was soul-piercing. “I grew up in Luquillo, in Puerto Rico, till I came here for college. I think he was telling Marella what, not who he was.”
“So, what was he saying?”
Debbie Ortiz put her hand on Charlotte’s and gripped it firmly. “Yo soy oscuridad. I am darkness.”
Copyright © 2026 by Sylvia Worden
