![]() ![]() When Nath notices that his sister is underwater, he experiences “a flash of complete separateness as Lydia disappeared beneath the surface.” The lake symbolizes the possibility that even the closest of familial ties can suddenly be broken when people “disappear.” Lydia is not the only character to be submerged in the lake in the final scene of the book, Hannah pushes Nath into the lake after he punches Jack. Lydia’s death is foreshadowed earlier in the book when, during a trip to the lake with Nath, he pushes her in the water and she almost drowns. The fact that Lydia ends up being found drowned in the lake confirms the sense that she has not only died, but disappeared, swallowed up by the mysterious vastness of the water. Reality and disappearance, then, are shown to be related. The contrast between this normality and Lydia’s mysterious absence introduces a tension between appearances and reality: while everything might seem fine, this surface-level normality masks the loss and absence that often exist at the heart of ordinary life. When Marilyn looks in Lydia’s bedroom, she notices that her daughter’s bed is “unslept in,” although everything else looks normal. Following a convention of the thriller genre, the book opens with a disappearance: Lydia’s failure to come downstairs for breakfast, at which point her family discovers that she is missing from the house altogether. ![]()
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