Trudy had quit school when she was sixteen to work at the mill. By the time Tammy was pregnant with Mercy, Trudy had already been working there for a year. One year that felt like forty. Every night that summer, she left early for work so she could go swimming. She would throw her bag over her arm and set out walking.
Ten at night and everything would be dead quiet. The sky was always black, the silver stars sparkling, the streets deserted. Almost all of the houses dark. The soft summer breeze smelled like the river.
She would walk right down the middle of the street, slowly, daring a car to come, daring the universe to break her perfect record: in the whole time she had been working at the factory, she had never once seen a car or a person on the street at this time of night. Straight ahead, up the hill, past the park, she could see the lights of the mill. But instead of going straight, she would turn left, cut through the school parking lot, across the baseball diamond, and down the gravel road to the beach. Each night of the summer, she would walk to the far end of the beach by the pier and the boathouses, place her folded towel on top of her bag, take off all her clothes, and walk into the water until it reached her neck. She would stand there, shivering a little in the black water, watching the moon’s reflection on the surface until her heart slowed down.
A moment of cool peace between the heat and noise of home and the drone and glare of work.
She could see the lights of the factories across the river on the American side, and she could see the towering shadow of the hydro dam to the west.
One night, she stood there, about twenty feet from shore, her toes pressed into the silky clay of the riverbed, when she felt the rumble of a ship engine coming up through the ground. A green light flashed at the top of a buoy straight ahead. She heard the ship’s horn and turned to the east to see the glimmer of it in the distance. She stood rooted as the ship took form, the vibration growing stronger, rattling her body. She was thinking about how long you can see things coming sometimes — sometimes for your whole life — when she turned and saw him standing on the shore.
Jimmy looked around, making sure nobody was nearby, and took off his shirt and then his pants. With the glow of the town behind him, he was just a shadow. But Trudy knew exactly who it was. She knew the shape of him. Looking at him standing there on the shore, she felt something brush against her ankle under the water. She kicked at it and took a few stumbling steps toward shore. She felt it again, slick and muscular. Higher on her leg now. Was it an eel? She lurched forward again, her bare breasts now well above the water line. The ship was right behind her now, easing past, stretching across the horizon. The ground was shuddering. He ran into the water, splashing, tripping forward, until he fell at her feet.
And that was it. The end of reason. Three years of firm resistance overcome by his hand on her knee under the water. His breath. The bubbles fluttering up her bare legs.
Once, she told him. And never again. And she really did think that she meant it.