I Found a Girl in the Water

1.

I was out on my parents' boat, you know, the one with splintering wood and peeling paint and ropes that were more fray than rope. I used to love that boat and the silence it gave me at dawn and just before dusk would come, and my parents would call me home from across the water.

I was out on my parents' boat and the waves were low and lapping the sides like friendly tongues. They knew well the taste of that wood, and I knew well the taste of those waves. They tasted like bitter copper and the musty smell of lakes, if it could be tasted.

I was out on my parents' boat when I saw her body floating in the water.

It was pale and cold-looking as drowned bodies were said to look, and I remember being very scared to go over and look and see if she was facing the surface and if her eyes had the white spider webs that drowned bodies were supposed to have. Somehow seeing something on a screen a thousand times does not make seeing it with your own eyes any better.

But then I remembered that drowned bodies weren't always bodies, sometimes they were still alive and still people, so I leaned over the edge of the boat with that same fear I would have when I leaned over the edge of the dock and looked into the gray-green water.

To my sick relief, she was facing down.

I reached my hands into those cold end-of-summer waves that I knew from experience and many years of swimming tasted like the blood that wells up when you cut your arm, accidentally or not accidentally, diluted with the chilly taste fall sunsets bring to the water, and grabbed her hand. It was slippery as a well-used bar of soap and soft as the pork fat I used to cut off my chops to feed to my dog before we had to put him down. I pulled up and my fingers sunk into her slippery, soft arm, and I was worried that she might be dead and fall apart, but instead of being dead she was warm underneath the cold water, and I could feel hard bone under her soft flesh, and that reassured me. I pulled her hard into the boat.

On the worn-down bottom of my parents' boat she looked like that painting of Ophelia, but she didn't have any flowers and she was out of the water now. Her white dress was made transparent as oiled hide, and it clung to her body and then pooled around her so she looked like she was in the wet middle of all the drapery Roman masters had ever sculpted.

I touched her cheek and then her wrist and then under her jaw. I asked her if she was okay. I asked her why she went swimming in a dress.

She spat out the water she had been carrying that must have tasted like old pennies and told me she was not okay. She hadn't gone swimming, and she was once going to be married.

As she began to cry on the bottom of my parents' boat, the old one with a missing oar and a breaking bench, I gave her my jacket and said to her that I was taking her back to my parents' house, unless she had somewhere else she would like to go.

Tears that I knew from experience would taste like slightly thicker seawater started to drip onto her dripping dress as she told me that she would rather go back in the water, thanks. Her voice was shaking and low as a singer's voice that no longer sang.

We have to go back to my parents' house, I said. You cannot go back in the water, I said. I will make you some hot cocoa, I said.

She told me then that she didn't like hot cocoa, but back at my parents' house, she drank from the chipped mug until only the chocolaty sludge was left on the bottom.