Deep and Dark and Dangerous

At almost five years old, Emma is the younger cousin of Ali and Dulcie’s daughter. The blonde-haired girl is an only child who, by her own admission, has no friends. Her mother has many artist friends in their New York neighborhood, but there are few children. The financial pressures of single parenthood mean that Dulcie cannot afford to send Emma to preschool, so she spends little time with children her age. This isolation causes Emma to feel lonely and long for a friend. Emma is also obsessed with the book and series The Lonely Doll and identifies with Edith to the point that she believes if she wishes hard enough for a friend, one will come. When Sissy shows up days later, Emma naively believes her wish has been fulfilled. Her loneliness becomes an integral factor in her attachment to, and manipulation by, Sissy.

As a young child, Emma is only just beginning to form her own impressions of the world, yet at times she displays a level of insightfulness that is well beyond her years. Talking with a waitress at a restaurant, Emma is proud of feeding the seagulls without being afraid. The waitress jokes that Emma must not be afraid of anything, but Emma replies, “Sometimes nothing is the scariest thing of all” (152). Emma’s understanding of death provides one of the more unsettling moments of the story, as she explains that one’s bones “come out” after death. She also has a nightmare in which bones in the lake come out and chase her. The line “the bones came out, the bones came out, the bones came out” is as haunting for Ali as it likely is for readers (37). Still, Hahn does not flatten Emma into just a “creepy child” trope but rather uses moments like Emma’s ride on the Ferris wheel to show her experiencing childhood mirth just like other children. In the end, she realizes she is happiest with the friend she had all along—her best friend and cousin Ali.

Sissy is a blonde almost 10-year-old girl who appears at the lake one day during the summer and develops a fraught friendship with Emma and Ali. It is later revealed that she is the ghost of Teresa, the former friend of Claire and Dulcie who drowned at Gull Cottage one summer 30 years earlier. Sissy protects her identity by avoiding being seen by any of the other residents of Webster’s Cove who were around at the time of her disappearance. She is especially careful to avoid Dulcie, always visiting the cottage when Dulcie is absent. With a touch of dramatic irony, Hahn undercuts Sissy’s efforts by using imagery and similes to hint to readers that there is something unnatural about Sissy. For example, when first introduced, Ali finds her voice “too high pitched to be easy on the ears” (39), invoking a siren and foreshadowing Sissy luring Ali into the water to drown the same way she did. Moments later, she describes Sissy’s shoulder blades as jutting out “like wings.” Monster-like imagery later reoccurs in a scene where Sissy is described as crouching “like a gargoyle on the rock” (96). All these details encourage readers to remain apprehensive about Sissy and always on guard to the danger she poses.

Sissy is angry about her death, particularly because her remains have been unrecovered for decades. However, she was a bitter, angry child before she died. As Ms. Trent notes, “she was just too difficult. Always mad about something” (99). As a result, she was disliked by both children and adults in the area, including her sister. As a ghost, she revels in making Emma and Ali feel similarly miserable, delighting in hurting them because of her own pain. Her goal, though, is more than just the suffering of the Thornton family—she wants “the truth” of her death to be told. In the end, she admits that all she really wanted was a friend, and it is her friendship with Ali, as much as the proper burial of her remains, that allows her to move on.

In the concluding chapter, Sissy’s inhuman imagery transforms to more benign, spectral-type descriptions. Ali describes her hair as “silvery [and] bright against the gloomy woods” (183), giving her an almost angelic appearance. With her unfinished business concluded, she becomes “nearly transparent,” and her voice weakens until it is no louder than a whisper. She disappears one final time, finally at peace, as Ali says, “gone for good” (187).

Dulcie is a tall, skinny, and curly-haired woman who lives with her daughter, Emma, in New York City. An abstract artist working in paint, sculpting, and other media, Dulcie is Claire’s sister and Ali’s aunt. She and Claire have had a tense relationship since childhood, with Dulcie resenting Claire because people found her more likeable. Dulcie’s wild hair, brightly colored nails, and fashionable bohemian style are symbolic of her lively spirit. Like many artistic personalities, she is creative and impulsive. This impulsivity is behind her decision to spend the summer at Sycamore Lake—a plan her sister thinks is “the worst idea [she’s] ever had” (8). Claire’s criticism proves prescient as the summer wears on and life at the cottage changes Dulcie. Persistent sleep deprivation leads to a borderline compulsive consumption of coffee. This overreliance on caffeine makes her tense and irritable, behavior that negatively affects her relationships with both Ali and her daughter. She changes from Ali’s “sophisticated, worldly aunt, smart and talented, witty and quick and daring” to an angry, nervy shell of her former self (109). Her anger towards Ali and Emma—at one point almost slapping Emma—is especially surprising because of how affectionate their interactions were before the summer.

Teresa’s death was largely an accident, but because Dulcie threw the doll in the lake in anger, she feels partly responsible for causing Teresa to drown. Dulcie’s strategy for coping with her guilt was to stifle any thought or mention of that day, even when questioned by authorities. However, between the nightmares and her art’s subject matter—particularly the macabre dolls reminiscent of Edith, and the dark paintings of the lake—it is clear that while Dulcie may not actively be addressing the memories of what happened that day, they continue to resurface. By the narrative’s conclusion, she has embraced the darkness in her work because she has freed herself from the guilt of her secrets. She gives her art show the title “Deep and Dark and Dangerous,” from which the novel gets its name.

Ali’s mother, Claire, is an avid, even obsessive gardener and partner to Ali’s father, Pete. She is one or two years younger than her sister Dulcie, and, like Dulcie, Claire has an artistic side, having previously drawn and written poems. However, this stopped at the height of her depression. Their art is one of few similarities between the sisters as Claire is, in many ways, Dulcie’s opposite. Dulcie’s wild hair and bohemian wardrobe symbolize a similarly wild personality that is contrasted by Claire’s straight hair, neat style, and tightly wound disposition. Further, while Dulcie is carefree and energetic, Claire is tense and withdrawn, described as easily upset and a quick crier. From childhood she was “sensitive, delicate, [and] sickly” (35). She is often laid up in bed, sometimes for days at a time, with intense migraines. In the novel’s early stages, a frustrated Ali describes Claire as “fragile,” but it is later revealed that she has diagnosed depression and has been in clinical treatment for it.

Claire’s sensitive emotions seem irrational, at least to Ali, until the knowledge of her and Dulcie having been on the canoe when Teresa drowned puts them into context. Claire’s regret and guilt from that day have manifested in a lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression—typical responses to having experienced trauma. Her tone and manner, especially with Ali, in the final chapter is a marked contrast to that of the first. She is “soft and tender, her voice calm” (173). After putting Teresa’s remains to rest, Claire seems to have found peace and relief from some the emotional weight that burdened her.

Kathie Trent is a slim woman with grey hair and a youthful face. She lives in a small, bright house on a road through the woods and creates quilted artwork “in shades of blues and grays ranging from dark to light” that parallels Dulcie’s melancholic paintings of the lake (99). Ms. Trent performs a mothering and nurturing role that is absent in Ali’s life during the summer at Gull Cottage. Initially, Ali found comfort from her mother’s coldness in a freer and more fulfilling relationship with her aunt. As Dulcie changes during her time at the lake, becoming sourer and angrier like Claire, Ms. Trent emerges as a surrogate mother—at least emotionally. By sheltering Ali, washing her clothes, and calming her, she functions as a maternal, protective figure. She is invaluable to Ali in one of the more difficult moments of the summer. After being rescued from the lake and suffering Dulcie’s wrath, Ali is standing devastated and alone. In her own words, it is a moment where she “needed comforting” (136), and Kathie Trent steps forward to do just that.

Additionally, with her knowledge of the Thornton sisters and the history of Sycamore Lake, Ms. Trent is an informed, rational counterbalance to the spiraling emotions of the cottagers. Unlike Jeanine, who was Claire and Dulcie’s close friend, or Linda, who has an even closer emotional attachment to Teresa’s disappearance, Kathie is a distant and relatively objective source of information on the community.