Julie said something in a low voice to May but Beth had gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and started down the road. She called back, “I’m going to take a walk,” and headed down the hill toward the river, the sound of Julie now speaking in an angry tone to May and May’s high-pitched protests pinging off the assault becoming distant, the beeping sound of Beth’s keys still in the ignition behind it all.
AT THE BOAT LANDING behind the Chevrolet dealer’s lot the river was broad and flat and black beneath a sky gauzy with the moon’s veiled light. Like old location westerns where they’d shot night scenes during the day using something like smoked glass over the lens. She stood there listening to the faint gurgling of the current near the bank, seeing ripples from the stronger current out in the middle.
She waded in to her waist, feeling her way with her old sneakers, and stood feeling the current pull gently at her jeans and the water soaking up into her faded purple T-shirt. The river was warm like bathwater late in the bath. She leaned forward and pushed out, swimming with her head above the water, and turned back to look at the bank now twenty feet behind her. She felt the need to be submerged for a moment, to shut out the upper world. She dunked her head in and pushed the sneakers off with her toes, then swam a few strokes under water before coming up again, where she heard a shout, “There she is!”
She threw a hand up. “Here I am!”
It was Julie shouting again. “Beth, that’s too dangerous! Come back to the goddamn bank, you idiot!”
“Beth!” May shouted. “I’m sorry! Come back!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Beth said to herself. Farther out the water was still warm, though she passed here and there through columns of cool. She called out to them, “I’m just going to float along here for a while!”
More shouted protests, but she was farther out now, and moving downstream. She saw them start trotting along the bank, then came a crashing of leaves and branches, a jumble of cussing and some shouting, and then she couldn’t see them anymore. She was maybe thirty yards off the bank, mostly floating or treading water, moving with the current. The moon was beautiful overhead, its light on the water and the trees on either bank silver and weightless. The river was almost silent, giving up an occasional soft gurgling burp, and she could feel a breeze funneling through the riverbed, cooling her forehead when she turned her face back upstream. Nothing out there but her. There could be barges. This thought came to her. But she was lucky, none of that just then. Some large bird, a massive shadow, swooped down and whooshed just over her head, then flapped back up and away toward the opposite bank. “My God,” she shouted. “An owl!”
“Beth!” she heard from the near bank again, and she saw them, jogging along in a clearing atop a little bluff no more than a few feet above the water level.
“Here I am!”
“Swim in!”
“Beth, please!” May struggled to keep up with Julie’s long strides, and Beth heard them both, between shouting, panting, Shit Shit Shit. “Fucking cigarettes,” she heard Julie say. They disappeared into a copse of thick pines. There must be a trail, Beth thought. From the pines she heard Julie’s voice come up again. “Goddammit, Beth! Are you still floating?”
Their voices carried beautifully across the water, with the clarity of words transported whole and discrete across the surface, delivered to her in little pockets of sound.
“Still floating!” she called back. Then, “I’m not going to be able to hear you for a while, I’m going to float on my back. Ears in the water!” And then she turned over onto her back and floated, the water up over her ears to the corners of her eye sockets. Wispy clouds skimmed along beneath the moon, or was she moving that swiftly down the river? There was a soft roaring of white noise from the water beneath her. So much water! You couldn’t even imagine it from the bank. You couldn’t imagine it even here, in it, unless maybe you were a fish and it was your whole world. She heard a clanking, a moaning like whale soundings that could’ve been giant catfish she’d heard about, catfish big enough to come up and take her in one sucking gulp. Some huge, sleek, bewhiskered monster to swallow her whole, her body encased within its own, traveling the slow and murky river bottom for ages, her brain growing around the fish’s brain, its stem lodged in her cerebellum.
Half ancient fish, half woman with strange, submerged memories. She senses Tex on this river, in the early morning before first light, casting his line out into the waters. She follows some familiar current to where she hears the thin line hum past trailing the little worm, fluke tail squibbling by. It’s an easy thing to take it in, feel the hook set, sit there awhile feeling the determined pull on the line, giving way just enough to keep him from snapping it. Rising beside the little boat and looking wall-eyed into his astonished face, wouldn’t she see him then as she never had?
She remembered Tex fucking her the night she knew Sarah was conceived, their bodies bowed into one another, movements fluid as waves. Watching his face.
Tex saying two weeks after it happened, We could try again, Beth. But it was almost as if he hadn’t meant to say it, as if the words had been spoken into his own brain some other time, recorded, and now tripped accidentally out. He sat on the sofa, long legs crossed, looking very tired, the skin beneath his eyes bruised, though she marveled at how otherwise youthful he was, his thick blond hair and unlined face, a tall and lanky boy with pale blue eyes. Though younger, she was surpassing his age.
“I had this dream,” he said, “the other night.”
In his dream he was talking to one of the doctors, though it wasn’t one of the doctors who’d been there in real life. The doctor said that if they had operated and taken Sarah out carefully, they could have saved her. But she was dead, Tex said in the dream. Well, we have amazing technology these days, the doctor said.
Tex’s long, tapered fingers fluttered against his knee. He blinked, gazing out the living room window at the pecan tree in the backyard.
“I woke up sobbing like a child,” he said. “I was afraid I’d wake you up, but you were as still as a stone.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said.
Tex shrugged. “It was just a dream.”
In a minute, she said, “I just don’t think I could do it all again.” Her voice quavered and she stopped, frustrated at how hard it was to speak of it at all.
“We’re not too old,” he said. “It’s not too late.”
But she hadn’t said just that.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said.
SHE TURNED HERSELF OVER in the water and came up again into the air, and her knees dragged bottom, and she saw the current had taken her into the shallows along the bank. She floated there and then sat on the muddy bottom, the water lapping the point of her chin. She wished she could push from herself everything that she felt. To be light as a sack of dried sticks floating on the river. She heard the thudding weary footsteps of the others approaching through the clearing at this landing, breath ragged, and they came and stood on the bank near her, hands on knees, heads bent low, dragging in gulps of air. “Oh, fuck, I’m dying,” Julie gasped. “Are you all right?” Beth raised a hand from the water in reply. May fell to her knees and began to throw up, one arm held flat-handed generally toward them. They were quiet except for the sound of May being sick, and when she was finished she rolled over onto her back in the grass and lay there.
Beth and Julie carried May, fortunately tiny, with one of her arms across each of their shoulders, back along the river to the downtown landing and then up the hill to Beth’s car. They left her in the back seat and struggled to walk through the deep pea gravel of the lot into the bar and borrowed some bar towels for Beth and then sat at a table drinking Jameson’s neat and not talking for a while. May dragged herself in and sat with them and the bartender brought her a cup of coffee. She lay her head beside the steaming cup and went to sleep again.