Tess O’Bannon

Tess O’Bannon is the younger daughter of the O’Bannon family and the sister whose drowning becomes a lasting wound in Scarlet O’Bannon’s life. She is introduced through Scarlet’s memory of a summer at the family lake: a playful twelve-year-old whose familiar games turn suddenly dangerous. Her death is not only a family tragedy in the story; it also gives form to Scarlet’s recurring guilt, which returns in dreams long after the accident.

Identity and Family

In the lakeside recollection, Tess is twelve, shorter than her fifteen-year-old sister, and marked by freckles and distinctive teeth. Scarlet remembers her as funny and lovable, but the scene also shows how easily the sisters’ play becomes a contest. With their parents in the cabin and the curtains closed, Scarlet sees herself as the responsible grownup for the afternoon, while also taking pride in being the show-off. Tess accepts the challenge to demonstrate that she can stay underwater, and her sister’s teasing helps turn a game into a perilous test.

The family had spent five years at the lake, a place associated in memory with the possibility of living as though nothing bad could happen. The O’Bannon Family Lake House sits at the end of the oval lake; in Scarlet’s recollection it is shuttered against the world. That remembered setting frames Tess’s death against the sisters’ ordinary summer freedom, while the parents’ presence nearby makes the change from play to emergency all the more stark.

The Accident and Failed Rescue

Tess has a particular way of playing in the water: she likes to sink toward the bottom and float back up, an experience she compares to feeling like a balloon. When she goes under during the sisters’ exchange, Scarlet initially remains caught in the rhythm of their teasing. As the danger becomes clear, she tries to call to Tess and reach her, but cannot make herself act at first. She then dives repeatedly, hindered by her lack of goggles and her difficulty seeing underwater, and has to return to the surface when she runs out of air.

On a later attempt, Scarlet finds Tess’s foot caught beneath a rock. She frees her sister and carries her toward shore, where Tess is unresponsive. Scarlet drags her out of the water and runs to the cabin for help. Their father, Derrick O’Bannon, tries to revive Tess, while their mother waits for an ambulance. The account then moves to the family travelling in black clothes, establishing Tess’s death and the funeral’s aftermath without dwelling on the medical details. For Scarlet, the sequence fixes the accident to one unbearable contrast: she had thought herself grown-up enough to supervise Tess, yet could not prevent what happened.

Scarlet’s Guilt and Recurring Dreams

At Tess’s graveside, Scarlet attributes the death to her own teasing and believes that others blame her too. Her grief takes the form of self-condemnation: she imagines that she, rather than Tess, should have died. A subsequent nightmare turns that private accusation into an encounter with Tess’s image. In the dream, Tess appears at the grave and speaks in a grown version of Scarlet’s voice, confirming Scarlet’s worst fear that everything was her fault and that she should have been the one lost.

The dream is not evidence that Tess has returned; Scarlet wakes in her apartment and checks the rooms in fear before recognizing the experience as a nightmare. Its force lies in how it gives her guilt a voice and a face. The dreams recur and worsen during a period when Scarlet has gone months without seeing Cormac MacKay. Even as she works to confront the Irish mob and investigate corruption in the FBI, her private fear remains the memory of Tess and the imagined judgment attached to it. The narrative places public danger beside this older, intimate trauma without suggesting that one resolves the other.

Family Memory and Narrative Significance

Tess’s place in the family is also preserved through a photograph in Derrick O’Bannon’s home. Cormac MacKay sees a picture of Scarlet beside a younger girl, with Tess’s name written in the corner. The photograph identifies Tess as part of the sisters’ shared past and makes her loss visible in the family’s present. When Cormac considers that Derrick has already lost one daughter and may now lose another, Tess’s death shapes the stakes of Scarlet’s later danger as well as her father’s response.

Tess has little time in the narrative outside the remembered accident, but the details attached to her are specific: her age, her playful habit of sinking and floating, the sisters’ teasing, and Scarlet’s desperate attempt to bring her back to shore. These details keep her from being only an emblem of loss. At the same time, the story is chiefly concerned with what her death leaves behind in Scarlet: a memory that returns as accusation, a photograph retained by her father, and a bond between the sisters that persists through grief and guilt.