“What water?” Aster asked, alarm now skittering chaotically at the edge of his voice.
“The water you pretend I almost drowned in!”
If she could feel rage, could feel need, could feel anything like the rush of emotion her father battled daily, it might look like her face right now. Laisvė lunged at Aster, hugged him as hard as she knew how, her head driving into his gut. For a minute, it felt as if she were trying to press her head into the meat of him and beyond, to hollow out a womb in his body, but his stomach pushed back with the muscles of a laborer, their two bodies clenched tightly against each other.
Just as her small force was relaxing into him, everything crashed. Aster heard footsteps pounding up the apartment stairs. His heart a stiff apple in his chest. He put his forefinger against his lips so hard that it would leave a bruise. “Get down,” he whisper-yelled.
His daughter dropped to the floor, then crawled to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and climbed into the space behind the wall just as they’d practiced, as stealthy as an animal diving into a burrow.
Aster’s head swam. His arms went numb. His legs collapsed. He saw stars. He couldn’t say which happened next: the seizure that wracked his body, or the Raid breaking down the door.
The Water Girl and Her Story
Laisvė crawls hard and fast, drilling down like a worm into the bowels of the apartment building. The sounds she feels at her heels make her feet hot. Her knees scream.
This is not a story. This is a Raid.
The crawl space she navigates for the hundredth time behind the kitchen sink is made from old boards lodged between walls. Sixteen feet deep, she hits the dug-out hole in the crawlway. She turns and places one foot down a rough hole onto the rung of a ladder. Do not stop for anything. Do not even turn around to look back. If they are here, then your only choice is to go. If they have come for us, your only choice is life or not-life. This is the right time to have no feelings. She drops her whole body down into the eye of the hole. Rung under rung, she watches her own hands, imagining in her mind’s eye how many floors until she touches the ground. Her father a question mark, a tension, a vibration made of fear the color of a blood river, becoming more and more distant above her with each foothold. Will they take my father? Will I ever see him again? Will they shove him from the roof like the woman with the locket who dropped dead from the sky in the indigo flowered dress? Did they come for her in a Raid? Did they push her out of a window? Will Aster die or will he be taken? Her heart in her eyes.
To calm the rush of her own fear, Laisvė imagines her collection of coins — making head lists of things is the only way she knows to give a pattern to the racing colors in her head. She pictures her coin collection. The Flowing Hair cent. The Liberty Cap cent. The Draped Bust cent. The Classic Head cent. The Coronet cent. The Braided Hair cent. The Flying Eagle cent. The Indian Head cent. The Lincoln penny.
She sees a kind of glowing copper ribbon, but then her thoughts click like marbles in bright yellow sparks, so she starts to speak out loud as she descends. The collection of pennies dissipates in her mind’s eye.
She moves on in her imagination to other objects she hasn’t been able to stop collecting, still climbing the ladder ever downward. Out loud now, she names the objects she collects, to no one but her climbing self: “Rocks from every river or ocean I have been to. Pennies. Spoons. The bones of animals. The wings of insects. Maps. Feathers from different birds. Animal and bird skulls. Hair: deer hair and dog hair, the hairs of goats, cows, horses, cats, donkeys, bear hair, fox hair, beaver hair, rat and mouse hair, the hair of a reindeer, the moss from a reindeer’s antlers, my mother’s hair, my father’s, Joseph’s knife, Aurora’s hair.”
Something besides words rising in her throat. The Raid team may take her father. The Raid team may kill her father. The Raid team may follow her. This is the right time to have no feelings.
She smells the damp reality of dirt underground pluming up toward her. She says the number of ladder rungs out loud—“twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one”—and a purple color like a helmet forms around her head. She knows the ground is near because the number 1 is purple.
Mercifully for her brain flux, Laisvė’s right foot hits solid ground. Against the mud wall, hanging from a wooden rod, is a backpack. Inside the backpack there is food and water and the address of a safe house. Laisvė reaches into the pack and pulls out a miner’s cap with a headlamp, a pair of kneepads, thick work gloves. Do not slow down for any reason. Do not stop. Do not remember anything about what your life has been, since you might have to forget it to have a life at all from this point forward.
She begins her dirt crawl. The tunnel is about a foot wider than her body on the sides and above her; she feels lucky to be a child, not an adult. She thinks briefly of Aster falling to the floor, having a seizure, and she begins to cry, but not in a way that would slow her down. The tears fall but her breathing is steady. She licks the salt of the drops when they reach her lips. They have told each other this story hundreds of times: The story is in her skin. The story says move or be captured or put on a boat and sent away to god knows where, a final fracturing forever.
The pack on her back scrapes the ceiling now and again, and each time it does, she gets a jolt of silver white in her peripheral vision. The sound of her knees and hands is blue and purple and yellow, in bursts in front of her eyes that extend as far ahead of her as she can see. The smell of the dirt floor and walls is a low vibration in her ears, a kind of constant low-noted hum. What she smells is red. A dark, almost black, red. Color in her where fear would be in some other child.
At a bend in the tunnel, its throat opens up some. She scrapes her shoulder and the side of her head near her temple on the wall trying to move too quickly. She knows that soon after this bend she will be able to stand, to run, to run like children do. She can run to the safe house that is the father-daughter plan.
Except she isn’t going to the safe house, and she knows it. Forgive me, father. She will make for the water. The Narrows.
Her crawling is frenzied now. She touches her head and her hand comes away red, but not a lot, not enough to stop her. Her knees ache and the balls of her hands ache and her heart aches, but she sees the color turquoise ahead of her, so she doesn’t stop; she thinks of all the people who have come and gone in the world; she thinks of all the journeys across history of all the people and plants and animals and water. She thinks the most about water, how water cut the shape of land everywhere on this planet, how water took her mother and hid her brother from her, how she must enter the water, how she must find people and things not now but in an otherwhere, how she cannot save her father but she must follow his wail anyway, how water is where she must go because water is without time, and yet water could still swallow them whole.
Feet first, arms at her sides, into the plunge.
Bubbles.
Then calm.
The water is the only place on the planet where her body instantly calms.
“Girl, is that you?” A small wavering voice.
Laisvė turns, her hair swarming around her like seaweed, and sees the box turtle swimming up to her face. Her urgency and fear subside; everything underwater loosens into blur and wet.
“Bertrand?”
“You seem agitated. What’s wrong?”