Upside down underneath the water holding my breath things became oddly calm. You’d think you wouldn’t be able to see shit, but the water is icy and green colored clear up where we were on the McKenzie. And the underwater blur isn’t as pronounced as you might think. But it does make your eyes feel like ice cubes.
The boulders bigger than bodies rose up dark black jade and shimmered with the sun moving through layers of deep water. I could see the bottom of the river. Rocks, sand and plant life moving and moving by. More than one steelhead shaped itself, their dark shadow selves doing that thing where they water — hover in the current moving only their tails. The cold water made my temples pound. My heart beat me up in my chest and eardrums the way it does when you are running out of air. My lungs burned. My hands went numb. I closed my eyes.
Something-I think a rock — scraped my paddle. Oh. Yeah. My paddle.
I didn’t think get yourself upright, dumbass. My arms simply lifted to position until I could see the lines of my instructional paddle — exactly as they should be. I definitely had the right grip to flip myself upright — I definitely had the right angle with my arms — up until I slowly and simply … let the paddle go.
Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity. The rushing water and strength of current pulled my arms, rocked my head. The upsidedowness of blood in my skull made my head ache. I closed my eyes. Still smiling. The cold wet of my life. My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void.
It’s possible it would be impossible for me to drown.
After I shot through the rough and tumble of the whitewater tunnel I pulled the skirt and made a wet exit not even bothering to hold on to my kayak. I somersaulted twice in the current and banged my knees and shoulder and something else on rocks and saw my own air bubbles furiously leaving my nose. But I popped up anyway, taking in the biggest breath of my life. Coughing. Snot all over. Something warm on my cheekbone. Blood. The cold finally making me shiver.
I saw the entire posse on the shore, some of them yelling and waving or pointing. Then my exasperated instructor paddled up alongside me and grabbed me by my life jacket. “Let’s get you in — you gave us a scare — you gave us a goddamn scare, girl!” His voice controlled anger.
“Let go, Jeff,” I said, “I can swim it. Let go.”
It was true. I cut through the minor current easily. I swam upstream even though most of my strength had left my body.
Big red ended up swimming down my kayak and bringing it back to the exit edge. Magnificently. Hannah didn’t say much. She sat near me and ate an orange. She looked pale. She fed me orange slices. She looked extremely serious and soooooooo not high. I’d lost my high underwater. Jeff acted cranky — both because I nearly lost the kayak and paddle but also because he watched me enter the whitewater and surrender. It must be hard to know one of your students might drown. I wonder how often it happens. If at all. When we put our gear back onto the truck he pulled me aside. Were you trying to kill yourself? Jokingly, laughing the tight pitched nervous laugh of a man old enough to be one of our fathers.
Was I trying to kill myself. Letting go the paddle in deep water. Letting go the handlebars of the bike as a kid. Letting go the steering wheel. These are not questions I know the answers to.
Later at home Hannah put her arm around my waist at her front door. She kissed my cheek lightly as whisper. She tried to be womanish and caring, but it wasn’t what I wanted. My eyes stung. My chest hurt. I wanted to see stars.
She put her hands on my shoulders to gently usher me inside. I stopped and turned my head back to look at her — no, I said, harder. I put my hand on the door. She put her hand on my hand. She pressed my hand against the wood. Harder. Let lips do what hands do. Let hips.
I wanted to be pushed through her door and shoved to the floor knees first, my elbows pinned behind my back, my hurt cheek against the hardwood floor, my ass skyward, my good cheek exposed to whatever was coming next. Her face close to my ear: you could have died.
The truth is I was a woman who thought of dead things. All the time. I couldn’t help it. Dead daughters. Dead fathers. Dead steelhead. I wanted her to somehow knock it out of me body to body, even if it killed me, which it never did.
Maybe this is how the steelhead feels when it’s caught — thrashing itself against water, then land-a lifedeath fight. How some get released and others get eaten and others just float away, too weak to survive. All those body blows and wounds. Or when they swim upstream to spawn then die. Are they killing themselves? Or making life?
Inside her house, Hannah made me a cup of green tea.
But tenderness couldn’t touch me then.
I went swimming in the river alone every night that week. At a spot where hoodlums and teens got drunk and jumped in to shoot the rapids. Nobody cared that I was there. Or that I was older than them. Or alone. In nightwater, I didn’t have to feel what people are supposed to feel. There is a glooming peace there. At the end of the rapids, there is a still.
In water, like in books-you can leave your life.
Writing
AFTER MY MOTHER TRIED TO KILL HERSELF WITH THE sleeping pills, we shared a strange dream-time together. Every day after school and before swim practice I sat with her in the living room while she watched television soaps and drank. She looked exactly like a zombie. But one day, she put down the giant vodka tonic she was drinking. She dug into her purse. She said “Lidia.” She handed me a newspaper advertisement for a writing contest. Out of the fucking blue.
There was a prompt that required the story to include an important relationship between an adult and a child.
We talked for hours about what I could write about. I would say ideas and my mother would sit on the couch with her tumbler and southern drawl and say, “Yes. That’s a fine one.” Or, “And then what happens? Make it good, Belle.”
I won a prize. Like she had as a young woman-a story she’d tucked into a shoebox with old photographs and a drawing of a redbird my father made when they first met. My photo was in the paper. The day they took the picture my mother took me to get a haircut. My mother and I went to the 7-Eleven to get the newspaper the day the story was supposed to come out. We sat in the car and stared at the picture of me and read the small story about the “writers” who had won prizes. My mother said I looked like a woman. When I looked at the image of myself I looked … like a woman I’d never met.
The story I wrote was about a child who had witnessed a crime in a city park-a pedophile has been stealing and molesting children. The only other witness is a blind man on a bench. The blind man has no children. No wife. Just a gentle man. The child and the blind man have to piece the story together to help catch the pedophile. When called upon by authorities to speak, because she is afraid, the child loses her voice. But she is able to talk to the blind man when they are alone together. Each without a sense, they make a story that saves children. The police find out that before the pedophile defiles the child, he whips them on the bare bottom with a belt. The police are able to catch him when they hear the thwack.