This was crazy. She was crazy.
But she had to try. Just once. She had to try. For her own sanity.
With a determined sigh she shrugged off her jacket, rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, attempted to at least pull her wild hair back into something more manageable.
Then she jumped.
The first shock as she plunged into the murky depths was a soul shocking cold. Then the weavyness of the water around her pressed into her as instinctively she began to struggle against the suffocating weight.
Then she felt it. Just like Alice and Kathryn, Elliot and Jacob had warned her of.
She felt that brushing pull of the water greens tugging around her ankles.
She comes back up gasping as no doubt everyone in her family had after using this damnable pond.
The first thing she sees is the bundled jacket resting on the shore.
Colten's jacket. The one she'd taken to wearing once again needing to feel closer to her lost husband for just a little longer as her thoughts spiraled between anger, grief and confusion from everything she now knew about him.
It hadn't worked.
But then as she struggles to catch her breath, attempting to keep her head above water both metaphorically and literally with the heaviness of her chocking emotions and her waterlogged limbs, she hears it.
She hears that familiar melody strumming out among the trees ahead of her.
"Hope you know your everything I've wanted. In my whole life."
Del gasps as the words drift to her along with the sweet guitar notes.
"In your eyes there's a horizon. So, I can find my way back home."
Not the voice of the man she'd married but of the boy she'd first fallen in love with.
Raw and real. Not a phantom from a demo record or remembered times in her own mind.
As quietly but as quickly as she could with her waterlogged clothes weighing her down Del struggled towards the edge of the pond following that soft young voice calling to her among the trees.
"You're the reason this garden is growing. Keeps us calm in the night."
Still dripping buckets of icy pond water Del Landry shoves herself onto much more solid ground.
"You shine like the passage on the water. In the moonlight."
Del's chilly fingers scramble for the dryer feel of the tossed away jacket resting over the also brought along guitar case she hadn't noticed struggling against the pull of the pond.
Her teeth chattering from the crushing cold with little warmth from the taken jacket despite the warmth of the temperature around her Del stumbles into the trees. Her only guide, the strummed song moving along the uneven pathway as its composer seems to stumble too over the right guitar notes to play with the words.