To pretend it wasn’t happening. To go to rooftop funerals and say nothing. To stand with my hand in my wife’s or some daughter’s, while widows and widowers lamented that they’d never hear their loved ones again, and then to say, Well, perhaps not, but perhaps yes too.
And then my wife being lured out. My wife who should have known better being trapped in water over her head, treading for hours in the river that used to be our tree-lined street.
And then my not going to help her, my believing her dying words only the voices of our missing daughters, another of their tricks: That it was me they were trying to kill, and their mother’s voice the bait.
And then those daughters returned to my side, mock-crying into each other’s mourning dresses, each bedecked with my wife’s pearls, her costumed brooches and rings.
Long after her funeral barge had been pushed away, still I heard my wife begging me to save her from the steep waters beyond the bounds of our town, swirling beneath the all-day and all-night pitch of our cloud-darked world.
When my rowboat left again and did not come back, when my daughters who took it did not come back either, even then I did not fear for their safety, because still at night I could stand on my roof and listen to my wife crying out in the downpour, accompanied only by the frog-song and wind-roar that replaced all the other sounds I once heard upon our submerged street.
And now? How many wet years has it been? How long since I last saw land, since I knew the smell of grass or tree or rock or dirt?
How far removed those things seem, despite their voices still out there, somewhere upon the surface of the water, remembered only by my daughters who cry out in the yip of the coyote, the slither of the snake, the rustle of oak and fern.
Now there is only me, floating after them in the dark.
Now only me and also this barge, built from the flotsam and jetsam that bumped into my sunken home, and above me only these clouds, and around me only this rain, which I must bail every second I am not steering, not sinking my pole toward some hopeful bottom.
All this, so someday I might walk again on dry land, so I might stand before my three wife-voiced daughters, so I might tell them that I am not mad anymore.
That although they have cost me everything, I will not punish them.
That because everything they took from me was all they had themselves, they have already been punished enough.
Prescott, Presley, Preston
Know how we once believed our coming children would surprise us. And how we were wrong.
Know how as soon as he can speak our oldest tells us the day and date his first brother will be born, and then together they apprise us of the youngest’s coming, disclosing the hour of my wife’s water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother’s head.
Know that by the end of each family breakfast they predict the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and also how I will try to make them, to force them into saying anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.
Before my wife can send them to their shared bedroom, my sons have already told her she will.
It’s there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though its every word is the future, some event coming later, some doom to fear, to be traumatized by both before and after.
The day he turns thirteen, he tells me I will wait three more months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.
He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won’t.
Know it’s a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the early entry predicting I would: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.
Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.
Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone.
My wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, safely past the widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass, and what joy crosses her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned tribulations. To again live our lives with both doubt and hope.
Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?
And how I say, Not yet. But soon.
And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy’s room, secreted under their bunks.
And also not knowing that our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn’t be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.
And also: That there are only a few pages past today’s date, and on each page only a single day.
Know there is not much else to know.
Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.
Know this future is almost over, know we will live to see it end.
And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.
Quella, Querida, Quintessa
How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard: First the waltz, then the cha-cha, then the tango. Old people dances, she called them when she was eleven, but now, twelve years old, feet shod for the final time in bobby socks and dress-flats, she can’t wait to teach the others every step, every turn and twirl, every last aching contact of foot upon grass.
The band plays on while my wife cuts the cake, while she passes out thick frosting-dripped slices of vanilla to everyone present, whether they want cake or not. Only afterward is our flush-faced daughter allowed to open her presents, her gifts from her many aunts and uncles, this family extending to include our entire community, all us lonely adults closer now than when we were kids, when there were no Tethering parties to bring us together.
My daughter is all teeth and dimples as she says thank you to each gift-giver, to each sad-eyed parent in the crowd—and as she lifts her ankle to show off the present her mother and I gave her, opened during the Tethering itself: a steel cuff, clasped around her ankle, concealed by the fanciest lace and pearls we could afford.
After the party ends, I help her pack, placing each gift—each sealed bottle of water, each nonperishable food item, each oversized cable-knit sweater—into her tether-bags, attached to the braided-steel cord already fed through the carabiners and guide-loops, already secured to the clasp on her tether, that anklet which will for a time keep her life close to ours.
And then me hugging her goodbye. And then her mother doing the same, refusing to let go.
And then my pulling mother from daughter so that our child might climb the ladder to the platform where she will await her rising.
How great our sorrow is during the first few months, when she is still close enough that we can climb the ladder ourselves to hold her floating hands, to bring her food and drink so that she might not consume the supplies meant for the trip ahead. Already she longs to be farther away, to be up in the air with the other sons and daughters drifting in the wind, her cousins ballooned with this adolescent gas that fills their bodies and never filled ours.