The Friend in the Water
by Sylvia Worden
part 1
Demons were roaming the beach when Charlotte and her husband, Scott, arrived. One of them cracked its whip at the shorebirds. “Carnival,” Scott said, “carnival clowns. There’ll probably be a parade later today.” The couple disembarked onto the dock with the boatman’s help. There was luggage, scuba gear, all the baby gear, and their two children. The demons caught sight of the family and followed them at a distance. The baby picked up a stick and brandished it, facing the demons.
“It’s alright, Noah,” Charlotte said, taking his hand. “They’re just big boys wearing devil costumes. They’re dressed like that for a party.” The tiny boy turned and walked with his mother, still clutching the stick tightly.
That was the year Marella was five and Noah was seventeen months old, the year Scott had first heard about a remote place in Panama called Bocas del Toro. He booked a “villa” on the water. Scott liked vacations at places that were hard to reach and uncomfortable once you arrived.
This trip had begun the day before, with a flight from Miami to Costa Rica. Charlotte had insisted on spending the night at a hotel in San José before continuing what promised to be a grueling journey the next day.
The morning started with a terrifying bus ride, hurtling atop the mountains that formed the twisted spine of Costa Rica. There were two seats available for them together in the front of the van and only a single seat was open in the back, so Scott and Marella sat together in the front, while Charlotte traveled in the back with Noah on her lap.
Charlotte enjoyed the view once they burst through the coastal fog into the jewel tones of the mountain peak with a clear sky and green forest that vibrated with life and possibility. However, Noah began vomiting ten minutes later, when the bus switchbacked repeatedly down the mountain, then hurried through the banana plantations to the Atlantic Coast.
Noah had eaten a good breakfast, and Charlotte watched, fascinated, as it erupted in layers. First the papaya juice, then the egg, and finally bucketfuls of black beans and rice spewed forth from Noah’s apparently bottomless stomach. She quickly exhausted her supply of paper products and began trying to catch the vomit in disposable diapers.
Kind fellow passengers touched her arm every few minutes to offer tissues, often just in time for the next bout. She tried to refuse a striped bandana offered by a young American man with sleeve tattoos on both arms, but he pushed it at her insistently. “No, man. I want to help.”
“Pew! Mama, you stink!” Marella shouted as they disembarked. She and Scott had been insensible to the suffering of their family members behind them until they reached the end of the ride. The helpful passengers patted Noah and smiled at Charlotte as they walked by the family. The young American gave Noah a thumbs-up and said, “Good luck, little man,” as he left.
“The good news is that we only have another four hours on the road,” Scott said.
“Daaa-deee!” Marella said, looking up to the sky and sighing deeply.
I shouldn’t have had the second baby, Charlotte thought, pressing her lips together tightly and hitching Noah higher on her hip.
The trip took more than four hours because part of the road in Panama had been destroyed in a storm the previous month. They had to travel to Almirante first, where they hired a small boat to carry them the rest of the way, to the place with the demons.
The “villa” was a wooden shack on a platform that floated on the surface of the brilliantly clear water. It was moored to a dock. No air conditioning, but the breeze was steady and refreshing. The platform beneath their feet rocked when Noah bounced on it, which he did constantly, shrieking with laughter.
* * *
The evening of the second day, Marella announced that she had made a friend, Oscar. Scott and Charlotte had only seen her playing by herself on the platform where she could look deep into the clear water. “He likes to hear me sing,” Marella said.
“I didn’t see him,” Charlotte said. She’d been busy supervising Noah most of the day while Scott had been out diving. Maybe she’d missed a lot of the day’s events.
“It’s hard to see him,” Marella explained. “He’s mostly in the water.”
“Is he a boy from Panama?” Charlotte asked.
“He didn’t say,” Marella said.
“Well, does he speak English or Spanish?” Charlotte persisted.
“Spanish,” Marella reeplied. “He said, ‘Yo soy Óscar.’ That’s Spanish.”
“Well, maybe you can introduce him to us tomorrow,” Scott said. He rolled his eyes at Charlotte.
Marella spent the days dancing and singing in the shallows or lying on the platform, her palms flat on the surface of the water. She sang songs for Oscar, sometimes in an odd, invented language of her own.
“Can you introduce me to Oscar? Where is he?” Charlotte asked.
“Right here,” Marella said, gesturing at the deep. “Oscar, this is my mama.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Oscar.” Charlotte knelt on the platform and smiled at the surface of the water. Is there something in the water? A shadow, deep below? She thought she might have seen a quick movement, a dark figure swimming like an otter.
Marella usually hung her head over the platform’s edge, her head inclined toward the surface of the water. Sometimes she would tumble into the water, laughing. Scott pulled her out of the water once after she’d slid in headfirst.
“Oscar kissed me,” she said. Marella was a good swimmer for her age, so Scott and Charlotte didn’t worry that she’d drown in the calm water within reach of the floating platform. It was just odd.
Vacation ended, and the family left the island on a small boat, Marella leaning over the side, arms extended. “Say goodbye to your friend, Marella,” Scott said.
“I told him where we live. He’s going to come see me in Coral Gables, at our beach. He says he can go anywhere there’s water.”
Charlotte squinted and looked at the horizon, rolling a gritty pebble of unease back and forth in her heart.
* * *
Marella reported that she and Oscar had reunited at the beach near the family’s home in Florida. It was no trouble to take both children to the beach on the weekends, but that wasn’t enough for Marella. She pined for Oscar during the week, when Scott and Charlotte were too busy for time at the beach or the sailboat marina: “He wants me, too. He’s lonely without me.”
Charlotte noticed water seeping into their house from under the kitchen door one morning. She opened the door and found a tangle of seaweed and a small crab on the porch. That wasn’t so remarkable in south Florida, where the line between land and water is changeable and indistinct.
Scott persuaded Marella to join a swim team with the promise that she could spend more time at the shore when they were confident of her swimming ability. She wasn’t fast, but she had endurance. She swam slow laps for hours after team practice. “Maybe you can swim to the Bahamas one day,” Scott said.
“Okay,” Marella said. She spent her seventh summer dancing in the waves at the beach. Each visit to the shore began the same way. Marella would walk into the shallow water up to her hips, spread her arms, and slowly spin, chanting Oscar’s name. She said that he had a surname as well; it was Egad.
* * *
The night disturbances began the following year. At first, Marella slept through the snorting and gagging without waking. Charlotte took her to a sleep lab to be tested for sleep apnea, but she didn’t show the symptoms when she slept away from home.
King tides — the seasonal high tides of spring and fall — began flooding the neighborhood, sometimes flowing into the house overnight. Charlotte and Scott rolled up the rugs and became careful not to leave anything on the terrazzo floor at night that could be damaged by salt water.
The sleep disturbances increased. Marella awakened gasping and coughing several times a week. “I felt a heavy weight on my whole body,” she said.
Copyright © 2026 by Sylvia Worden
