It was—I freely admit it—stupid to take the swan boat out for a spin. What had appealed to me more about it? The joke? The romance? All right, no, I know. The swan boat made me laugh out loud. And I hadn’t laughed ferdays. Boyfriend issues. Well, ex-boyfriend.
I was following my map that late September afternoon through the Preservation Trust Town Forest. My “map” was in fact a picture of the map posted in the parking lot that I’d snapped with my iPhone, so it took some squinting. Several hiking trails snaked through the woods for the delectation of the pleasure walker: the colored lines on the map corresponded to colored dabs on the trees. There was the short green loop, the longer red loop, the yellow trail—which led to some picnic grounds—and the blue trail, which wandered right down to the bottom of the woods, to the river. Which was where I found the swan boat.
That scabrous, black-eyed thing flat-out delighted me. Too much Hans Christian Andersen as a child, I don’t know. I was so delighted with it that I spent a good two hours excavating the swan boat from its muddy grave beneath a sweet pepperbush shrub. The wildly fragrant white flowers were falling away to fruit now, none of the leaves yet blushing yellow.
As I worked, digging away in the mud like a child, I wondered: who had the swan boat’s original owners been? Had they thrown out this whimsical, this retro, this highly metaphorical cygnine beauty for some sleek new kayak, color-gel-coated for their pleasure? Had they tired of this vintage white two-seater’s authentically distressed nostalgic novelty and gone in for a younger boat’s radiant orange fiberglass velocity instead?
Poor unwieldy relic. It had my sympathies. Liam “the Rugger” Boyle had done me a similar turn recently. Now, not only was I experiencing pangs of fellow feelings for a swan boat, I also had an ex-boyfriend named “Rugger”—which was terribly embarrassing, really, and made him difficult to talk about, or even think about, because he was just like his name sounds.
But back to the epic saga of my stupidity that day.
Since I was already down there by the river, and already head to toe in mud, and it was an uphill hike back to the parking lot where I’d chained my bike, and I wasn’t ready to go home yet, what did I do next? Well, having now entirely excavated the swan boat, what was there left to do but grab it by the grimy neck and drag it down the embankment for a test run?
(I know. I know. Choice by choice, inch by begrimed inch, there I was, Luz the Loser, cheerfully ticking off all five nomination requirements for my own personal Darwin Award. But wait. It gets worse.)
Even pocked with white petals and riddled with dead-and-otherwise bugs, the swan boat seemed a sturdy enough article. My final theory on its origins was that it had hailed from the Enchanted Forest, an abandoned theme park just a few miles down the road in Hope Valley. Mamita and I had stumbled across some overgrown signage for the park on an exploratory drive together and afterwards looked it up on Atlas Obscura. Apparently, the Enchanted Forest was very popular back in the ’70s and ’80s, with its kiddy rides and fairytale theme. Perhaps the park had once included in its full complement of attractions a goofily mawkish Tunnel o’ Love, complete with a flotilla of swan boats, which, decades later, was thoroughly pillaged by various teenager raiding parties gone on the hunt for illicit keepsakes. Bet you anything Rugger would’ve done something like that in his high school days—and then, after burying it in the woods and sleeping off his hangover, would have forgotten all about it by morning. But that was something else I’d never know for sure.
You see, I should have remembered the Preservation Trust Town Forest literature. Swans, however beautiful, were—like porcelain berries or kudzu—an invasive species in these parts, unwholesome and unwelcome. I should have remembered that swans were aggressive and full of bluster, and recalling this, been a little more wary even of a simulacrum. Hell, I should’ve remembered all those aforementioned fairytales (of which mamita and I were both so fond): that swans nearly always show up where dead girls drown.
Last but certainly not least, I should also have remembered basic meteorology. Late August and early September had been hurricane-heavy. Now, at September’s close, the Pawcatuck River was engorged like a well-fed tick. When the swan boat capsized, so did I.
It wasn’t long before all of this and my life flashed before my eyes.
Mamita is a magpie for ephemera. When we first moved out east together, she immediately goes out exploring and comes home with bouquets of brochures, factsheets, flyers, leaflets, and pamphlets—whatever is on offer at the local tourist bureau. Whereas it takes me weeks simply to pop my head into a place and window-shop, feeling that I have no right to a place of business when I have no intention of actually buying anything, mamita will be on a first-name basis with its owners from day one. She’s always been adventurous. When I ask her how she does it, she only beams at me and quotes me one of her happy hippy songs: “I’m a summer child, lost in love.”
The year I turned thirty (last year), we’d decided to try living together for the first time since I was eighteen. I’d moved out of state for college and had been working in Minneapolis ever since. Between phone, internet, and annual visits, mamita and I had managed to stay close, but after twelve years of that, we were missing each other, feeling our mortality, and on the whole, ready for new horizons and new adventures. Adventures being easiest with a companion, we’d opted for each other, and settled on a date and a destination. Mamita left New Mexico, I left Minnesota, and we struck off for Rhode Island with a few thousand dollars in savings and not much of a plan.
Mamita is an ideal roommate. She loves cooking, does more than her fair share of dishes, doesn’t mind that I randomly burst out singing at the top of my lungs and dress in outlandish crinolines and combat boots. I keep my bedroom tidier than she does, but she deep-cleans things I ignore for months on end. She’s intensely project-motivated and forgets to take breaks; I’m really good at gently haranguing her when she’s been working non-stop. I force her to lie down and put her feet up and read a book for pleasure, even though it always makes her feel guilty.
“Look, Teresita Floracita,” I tell her, using her own nickname for herself from back when she was a good Catholic child and was totally convinced she would grow up into her glorious martyrdom and eventual sainthood, “you and I work whatever part-time jobs we can get, all at minimum wage, just to make ends meet. We’ll never retire. That age has passed. Retirement is for rich baby boomers. So we have to take our semi-retirement wherever we can get it.”
“Semi-retirement” is an optimistic way of viewing a work schedule wherein, if we are lucky, we are each given a couple of half-days a week. No one is hiring full time around here, not even fine women with English degrees and years of experience behind them. With the hours we’re given, we have enough to pay rent—if we never ask our landlord for little things like repairing the leak in the roof or fixing the holes in our floor; and utilities—if we mostly do without light and heat; with a little left over to set against the ever-accumulating interest on my college debt. But it is definitely not enough to replace the Honda’s transmission, which has just failed, or buy the next round of bus tickets, which are are running low, or buy mamita’s migraine meds, which are so expensive she always cuts each pill into thirds to make the bottle last.
Heigh-ho, and so this week’s grocery shopping will be done at the Pawcatuck Neighborhood Food Pantry, but they are always kind and generous and cheerful, and the pasta is abundant. And the library, we love to remind each other, is still free!
Corkers, unlike the library, is very much not free. It is the town’s very hip (and only) café-cum-bar, where Rugger bartends and occasionally plays gigs with his band, the Flying Wedgies. When we are first eyeballing each other with mutual interest, he woos me by giving me drinks on the house. Later, when I am out of the picture, Rugger immediately starts dating a dark-haired poet girl who makes her own t-shirts and binds her own books. She gets the free drinks now, and I am cut off from Corkers and the society of my peers. Mamita never goes there anyway; caffeine and alcohol both bring on her migraines, and the music is too loud. But I miss it. I don’t harbor any real rancor toward either Rugger or his new lady. Only, the idea of seeing them together irritates me, like willfully rubbing my eyeballs with nettles.
As I walk through the Town Forest—yea, verily, right up to the moment when I decide to take my newfound swan boat out for a little Lady of Shalott re-enactment!—I am just starting, very slowly, with the profound relief that comes from resentment finally lifting, to sweat off my sour attitude towards my break-up. That’s what had sent me off on my bike ride in the first place. Mamita yet retains some of her childhood saintliness: she has a vast and compassionate patience for her beloved only child. I, however, heathen and atheist that I am—that she, in all fairness, raised me to be—have been more than a bit snappish with her since Rugger and I—politely, via text message—decoupled ourselves. And no adult should have to live of her own free will with another adult who snaps at her.
Despite our poverty, despite being two strangers come from the far west to try and scrape up a living in a small New England town, I adore cohabitating with her. I want her to love cohabitating with me too, in our bright, shabby, darling third-floor apartment, where we are within biking distance to all the woods and rivers and salt marshes and coastlines our too-long-landlocked hearts could desire. I do not want her to flinch at the sharpness of my voice or shrug off the fiery glare I am hasty to throw at her.
And so, I think, climbing into my swan boat: I shall go home directly after this, and apologize, and offer her oblations in the form of a foot rub.
And as I float further from the slippery pebbles of the shore, paddling away at the pedals of the swan boat, I start actually looking forward to the post-breakup peace and quiet. Mamita and I can go back to watching weird independent foreign films together on Friday nights. She has been missing that, missing our closeness, these last few months I’ve been dating Rugger. She’s pretty cool and independent and all that, but we’ve always agreed that popcorn nights are better with two…
What will she do, now that I was drowned?
So, right. Yes. Yes, the swan boat, as I may have mentioned previously, capsized. Of course it did. The current was a sea-swift rush to the belly of the giantess Atlantic, and the boat—rotten, water-logged, unworthy—drifted a bit, overturned, and sank, taking me with it.
And where, you might ask, was I in all of this? What did I do? How did I act? Did I fight the mighty current? Did I thrash and rage and cry out? Was I pinned beneath the swan boat? Bashed in? Bewildered? Knocked out cold? Was my leg caught? My arm? Did I succumb to weariness or hypothermia? We must both of us be forever curious. I did not recall.
I did remember a certain topsy-turviness. A mirror-flip of sky. My world of air funneling as through an hourglass, emptying into a world of water. But I was aware that at some point transition had occurred. That I had gone from human person to something else, plonked right there at river’s bottom. My scarlet frolic-in-the-wood frock, courtesy of the Groton Goodwill, dragged at me like plate armor, exerting a tidal pull and spreading around me like a dark stain. But I was not in any discomfort. Even the enormous wooden agent of my demise, with its DayGlo orange beak and unholy black eyes, which sat atop me, crushing my legs beneath it, did not so much hurt as frustrate me. There I sat, stuck, seething, contemplating everything that had brought me there. Silt and stone beneath me. Everything rushing by. Water in all directions.
But no direction was up.
What worried me most was this: I’d left my red Converse high tops on the riverbank, my bike locked up in the parking lot. Sooner or later, someone would find them and report back to my mother that they were all that was left of me. I could not stop imagining what her face would look like when they brought her my shoes.
I was down there in the rushing dark ferdays. “Ferdays” was a word that Rugger had taught me while describing my ass as “cake ferdays.” I liked the word—the whole phrase, really—despite myself. It was almost Shakespearian in its poetry and vulgarity, and I have a weakness for the Sh’peare. (See above, re: English degree, college debt.)
To be fair, it wasn’t really days. Or, okay, it might have been. Might have been forever for all I knew. I wasn’t wearing a watch after all, and I’d lost my iPhone with its map of the woods—not that it would’ve worked underwater. I didn’t even have a heartbeat to count by. They say you lose all sense of time in a sensory deprivation tank. They say the same about Faerieland. Wherever I was, it was a little like both. My katabasis tank. My fairy holding cell.
After some time, I realized I missed breathing, and I sighed, unhappily. Water rushed out of my nose and mouth. There was no air in me anymore. Then I heard another sigh, not my own. Like a new pressure on the ears, a new direction of current.
I turned and saw him.
His hair drifted around his head like several surprised squirts of octopus ink. Looking at the direction of all that floating hair, I thought to myself, “Ah, that must be up,” but couldn’t do anything about it, pinned as I was.
He was sitting not far from the swan boat: cross-legged, elbows on knees, chin on hand, all angles, on the top of a very slick, very green, very large rock. Watching me. A lifetime of deep current rushed between us. We were in no hurry to do much more than observe each other. He reminded me of a cormorant.
Cormorant, I recalled, meant “sea-raven.” At least, that was what it said in the Preservation Trust Salt Marsh brochure, one of the plethora of brochures mamita used to bring back to our apartment (in those halcyon days of yesteryear or perhaps a minute ago when I had both a mamita and an apartment) and stuff into a basket, labeled in her best calligraphy-on-notecard style, “Ephemera & Realia, Tra-La!”
“Sea-raven,” I’d told my mother, looking up from this newest brochure, enraptured at the alien etymology. “Isn’t the very name thrilling and wonderful and wildly romantic?”
“Wildly!” she’d agreed. “I can’t wait to see one! I’ll have to dig out my binoculars!”
But when I’d confided our fond ambition of cormorant-spotting to him, Rugger just laughed and asked, “What, those armpit birds?” with the hard shine in his eyes of a tried and true Rhode Island tease. “They’re ridiculous,” he assured me, with the authority of someone who had lived in New England his whole life.
They were a little, maybe. The way those gawky black water birds perched on telephone wires or on rocks in sheltered coves, wings outspread, awkwardly drying themselves. But the look on mamita’s face when she witnesses her first cormorant! The love beaming out from her. That bright grin. The unguarded eyes of a newcomer to the miraculous. She kept that look even after seeing hundreds of cormorants, hundreds of times. After her first encounter, she would always take the scenic Route 1A on her way home from work instead of the expressway, even though it added twenty minutes to her drive, just so that she could pull off to the side of the road and watch them dry their wings—proud and patient, like they were practicing for the day they would finally become heraldic achievements.
Mamita was a cormorant for last Halloween. We didn’t have any money for costumes, so she dressed all in old black clothes, and made herself a plague-doctor’s beak from old newspaper and flour and water, and flapped around our kitchen raggedly, joyously, armpits exposed and neck extended, making big, honking, cormorant-like pig grunts as I laughed and laughed and laughed.
You will know from having read such things that weeping underwater after drowning results not in tears but freshwater pearls. These baroque beauties were large and pinkish and irregular, and tumbled away from me, disappearing into the silt they’d disturbed.
When I blinked my eyes clear again, I went immediately back to observing my new companion. Our gazes met a second time, and he lifted his head as if surprised I could see still him. Maybe he always looked surprised; he had those kinds of eyebrows.
He was like a cormorant in more than just coloring. Raggedy and ridiculous, barely more than a silhouette. A Rorschach blot in the water. Shy and worn, with thin arms. Thin everything. My mother would have loved him on sight, loved him forever, adopted him as her own. Me, I didn’t know what to think. It was enough, for the moment, not to be alone.
I tried out a smile. It was shockingly easy, as if my face had just been waiting for me to ask.
He smiled back, dazzlingly. His teeth blazed. Small white stones. Quartzes. Ground to smoothness by the running water. Immediately he pushed himself off his rock and launched himself toward me, hooking his arms beneath mine the minute we made contact, and heaving. The swan boat toppled.
Up we went. Straight up and fast. An eruption from the riverbed. A geyser. Up.
Or maybe down.
The riverbank we ended up on wasn’t the riverbank I’d left. Not the bottom of the Preservation Trust Town Forest in our small Rhode Island town. Nor was the river water I was puking up the Pawcatuck river. It was not even really water but mouthfuls and mouthfuls of small white stones, water-worn glass, ammonites. It occurred to me that maybe I was only puking because I thought I had to. As soon as I was ready to stop, I did.
The man—or whatever, thing—my companion from the river bottom was still there, crouching near me, watching, just as he had been when we were underwater. All knees and elbows and worried forehead, with eyebrows that rose so far into his hairline they kept winking out of existence. His face was absurd, sort of scrunched and whimsical, like a long-eared bat or a baby monkey. Heaps of wrinkled shadows piled on top of the other, black-on-black, smoothing out like onyx cabochon or contracting like crumpled crêpe depending on his expression. It was more like a dozen paper puppets all collaborating to form features than an actual face. Eyes as crystal-white as his teeth.
I realized my hands were shaking. Or perhaps the right word was rippling. I held them out and examined them. I had known, when pinned under the swan boat, that I had changed, but now I saw how. My skin was become all the colors of hurtling waters: clear, silvery brown, with flecks of sunlight, glints of sky and tree, and deep cold shadows the farther down I peered. As soon as the ripples calmed, I watched a rainbow trout swim up my left elbow and into my left shoulder, where it disappeared behind my clavicle.
I looked up from myself. My companion was still watching me, intent on every expression I didn’t know I was making, every small sound of astonishment I unconsciously uttered. I wondered if he could talk.
“Shake hands?” I offered, sticking out my right hand experimentally.
He automatically stuck out his left, a mirror image. We did a funny sort of hand clasping, all backwards. His ink-puppet hand didn’t pass through my river hand but rested atop it, light as a water strider. I was aware of his touch but not as pressure—more like an event, a series of infinitesimal ripples spreading from the dimples his fingers made on the surface of my fingers. I sat as still as possible, feeling the repercussions of contact for a very long time.
The bank where we were sitting was ankle-deep in white stones, like the quartzes of his strange teeth, or the stuff I had been vomiting. The white incline rose steeply to the woods. These were not the woods I’d left, with those four clear paths marked by paint and tamped down in pine needles. The Preservation Trust Town Forest was small: mostly birch, hemlock, and beech. Some swamp maples, not many, drops of scarlet in the garish gold like grenadine in orange juice. When I’d left those woods, they were only just starting to shake out their summer clothes, folding them away to put on autumn, becoming what mamita calls “The Yellow Wood.” Enough leaves had already fallen to make a lacework of the upper canopy, white diamonds of sunlight twinkling in the gaps.
Here, I wasn’t sure that the sky was the sky. It might have been the surface of the river, high above me. The trees were white-on-silver, or conversely, silver-on-white, like trees etched on plates of glass, pressed between other plates of glass etched with more trees. Things darted through the branches, but they were not birds.
I blinked. An eel slithered across the thin water-skin of my closed eyelid, tucked itself shyly behind my ear.
“Am I a ghost?” I asked my companion, who shook himself like the glass-etched birch above us was doing. He seemed pleased to be asked, and answered immediately.
“No,” he said. Then, “No, not ghost… precisely. Not ‘ghost’ like we’d once thought, when we were alive. What is ghost? A malfunction of memory, doomed to repetition, utterly dependent on a living—or rather untransformed—witness for validation of its existence. No, we operate independent of those strictures. We have passed beyond any need of witness. So we are not ghost, I think. Spirit, maybe. Yes—a spirit—a sprite, a wight… Spirits to enforce or to enchant?” He opened the inkblots of his palms, half sheepishly. Finger-like shadows unfurled. A many-winged moth. A horned sumo wrestler.
Ah! I thought triumphantly. The gentleman—or gentlething anyway—hath quoted the Sh’peare! So he as well must have been human once, whatever he was now. Like me.
I asked, “Did you drown too?”
His flyaway eyebrows flew away from him again. His mouth opened in a clown’s O, then pronounced the “Oh!” out loud as an afterthought.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “It occurs to me that that may be a very personal question?”
His shoulders heaved, instigating a vast, full-body shrug. “Drowned? I don’t know. We seem to have, with practice, an ability to curate our memories here, and I’m afraid I…curated my own rather too vigorously the last time I… So, as to drowned, I cannot say. But dead…”
I waited.
“Dead, yes,” he said. “Or something else.” He shook his long-eared head. The ragged crest of his hair-feathers whipped to and fro. A look of disquieting tranquility settled over his face. “Can the dead do what we do?”
Then he sang something in a voice that came not only from his throat, but clapped out from him bodily. A sharp shockwave. The white pebbles—or crystal teeth—upon which I sat rose up beneath me and formed a throne. There were little armrests and everything. Delighted with this turn of events, I applauded enthusiastically. Between the splashing wetness of my palms, a tiny rainstorm played out.
“Did you always know how to do that?” I asked. “Or did you have to learn?”
“I learned. When I came. It took me…” He waved a hand. “A while.”
“It’s so cool! I never expected it. And now I don’t know what to expect!”
He nodded. “That is a good start. Strong. First, to shed assumptions. And then…” A starry, tar-black flush stood out upon his cameo-cut cheeks. But he also smiled, bold as a little boy who having drawn something in crayon that pleased him, knew full well that praise was his due. “Then,” he said softly, “to commence invention!”
I patted the armrests of my throne. “Well, this invention is so totally faboosh!” I used the word mamita had invented for my more outrageous outfits. “A throne suits me, don’t you think?” He nodded vigorously. I went on, “Mamita says I have an imperious nature. She doesn’t mind—although she does refer to me as ‘Lady Jane’ from time to time, whenever I take too much to the tyrannical. The threat is implicit,” I reflected, “as Lady Jane was eventually beheaded.”
My companion snuggled down at the foot of my throne, leaning against my thigh to listen contentedly. Minnows swam up from my feet and ankles to explore the contours of our connection. I began petting the shining oil slick of his hair until it gleamed wetly. He practically purred; I knew the feeling.
“Mamita likes to pretend she’s my lady-in-waiting. Helping me with buttons I can’t reach, painting my nails, braiding my hair—I get so impatient with hair—things like that. Zippers. Mending. You know. Everything I’m not good at. I’m better at time. Organizing. Herding. Planning ahead. Making snap decisions.”
I looked around, remembering the swan boat: my last snap decision. Some decisions, I thought, were better left to rot under the sweet pepperbush tree where they’d been sensibly buried. And some realizations came too late.
If we could indeed curate our memories in this place, I could probably just forget about the swan boat. Right now. Forever. It would be less embarrassing that way. I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life, or whatever this was, with bruised pride and a smarting dignity. I toyed with the idea of erasing the events leading up to my death, starting with Rugger and the Flying Wedgies and ending with my last revelation in the middle of the swollen Pawcatuck.
But almost as soon as I considered it, dread at the thought of discarding what so closely concerned me caused a small quake at my epicenter. Quick as tossing salt over my shoulder, I scooped up a handful of small white stones (or teeth) and flung them back into the river, thinking that they could join the swan boat there, at the bottom—as assurance of my continued remembrance. But they merely clattered and skipped across the water’s surface, went skidding and sliding, stopped at last at the far side of the embankment. Never sank below the foam. The river rushed solidly by, as if its surface were covered with a thin sheet of glass or ice.
I brushed a few more baroque pearls off of my face and lap. They joined the white stones, slightly pinker and shinier. My companion’s hand came once again to rest on my arm in gentle understanding.
“I… I had a tower, once. I built it with my… She was… I was…” Another of his shuddering shrugs. “Someone else was here. I forget her name. I remember she left. So I made the tower fall.”
“Hm.” I splashed a smile his way. “Exile,” I said with great wisdom and greater pomposity, “is often a common denominator in friendship. At least, if my memories of surviving parochial school still serve me.”
He looked up hopefully. I bent down and reached for his hand. “So is kindness. You were kind to me first thing. I won’t forget that.”
“I won’t forget this,” he said.
That was the first promise we made to each other, the shadow of his hand under mine, my fingertips flickering with the silhouettes of tadpoles. He opened his palm, and I rested my current upon it. My hand held its form, only sometimes over-spilling the edges. He let me pour over him, and I heard him breathe out, breathe in. If you can call it breath. Like a desert breathes after it rains.
“Let’s build another tower,” I said. “I like to live high up.”
The tower he sang up from the ground was drawn from a substrata of black rock deeper down than the toothy white quartz of the riverbank. Where it arose, it left a trench in a wide circle all around it, which dove down bottomlessly. While he rested—which he needed to do from time to time—I took over, singing tentatively. At first, I only spat out more pebbles, more shards of smooth glass. But as I grew bolder, better results attended my efforts. The first time a whole sun turtle crawled out of my face, it headed straight up one of the incomplete walls of the tower, where it settled in and became a small, translucent, turtle-shaped, green window that seemed not only to let in light but to produce its own luminescence. Encouraged by this, and by my companion’s delight upon waking, I sang louder, with even more vigor. I sang like I used to sing Sondheim in the kitchen while making popcorn for weird indie movie night. I sang Leonard Cohen (everything) and Joni Mitchell (likewise) and Hamilton—well, everything but Lafayette’s rap from “Guns and Ships,” which I’d never managed to memorize and couldn’t now recall—and random AC/DC lyrics I remembered from my Zombies, Run! workouts, and “O Mio Babino Caro” and Pete Seeger’s “One Grain of Sand,” which I’d come to via Odetta.
Soon our tower had many window-lamps of varying shapes and sizes. There were otters, crocodiles, boas and beetles and bats, calla lilies, cranes, frogs, toads, one hippopotamus, one pink freshwater dolphin—all of which had tumbled out of my watery integument and made their way up the walls, where their forms froze into something like glass, something like light. Later, when I was more confident and precise, I made windows even out of the very water that rushed over and through me, falling sheets of water that was as much me as the shape I was walking around in. I made walls of water. Floors of it. Water was the bed we slept in. It spilled down the edges of the tower into the trench below and filled it until we had our own moat, as turquoise-green as the canals of Venice.
When the tower was several stories tall and beginning to feel like home, my companion and I ventured together to the riverbank to explore. That was when we began our “mudlarking for spirits”—trying to find others like us, who might be trapped, either under objects, or inside them, or who had become such strangers to the way they remembered themselves that it took an outsider to recognize them for what they were.
There was a spirit we found in one of the silver-on-white trees that looked like a bird, but when my companion coaxed it into his hand, it had a human face and spoke with a human voice. Its name was Dhanvi. It did not want to live in our tower with us. The forest was its home; it had built many a palace nest among the glass branches, and had friends enough like itself. But it would, it promised, look in on us from time to time, and introduce others to our acquaintance, if we wished. We did.
There was a spirit caught in the frosty cattails who looked as desiccated as a dried sunflower, but when we extricated her and brought her home, she filled out as golden and sweet-smelling as harvest wheat, and remembered her name: Mahalia. Mahalia loved our tower; it was shortly as much hers as ours. She proved a master mosaic artist, laying down makeshift tiles that she had plucked from the tidal shallows of my belly and thighs and spine: pottery shards and old doorknobs, miniature brass muskets and tiny clay pipes and broken bone lace bobbins and false eyes and ancient shoe buckles and free-blown bottles and rare silver fanams and many more objects which she lured forth by touch and call.
More joined us. Some stayed only a while. Others merely looked in. Others kept well away from us, hidden and flinching and burrowed down. Sometimes I thought we were surrounded by invisible towers just like ours, that we were not permitted to see, and from out of a hundred invisible windows our neighbors were watching us in secret, their oyster-scraped shyness such a repelling force that it felt at times malevolent. But even these secret watchers we hoped to win over by and by. There was time. Or maybe not. Maybe there was just the memory of time, which some forgot.
My companions and I did not attempt to hide our own tower. When I’d lived with mamita we’d tried to keep an open table, for all that none of our chairs ever matched and we’d curb-picked the table itself from a neighboring house on trash day. We’d re-labeled all traditionally “family” holidays as “Feasts of the Forsaken,” in which any friend estranged from blood-ties or too far distant to claim them could come celebrate with us. Mahalia told us that when she had lived, she’d shared a house with four generations of women, and during the brief time she had lived alone, after illness and accident had claimed all of her progenitresses, she couldn’t seem to cook for fewer than six people and would always end up with a week’s worth of leftovers.
Our third companion could not remember his time from before; his “vigorous curation” had assured that. But anyone could see he thrived in company and grew more cheerful with every service he could perform on our behalf.
As we built our tower, therefore, we sang it visible, we sang it useful, and motley, with more rooms than we could possibly use, and in memory of the families we had left behind, and of those who had gone before us, we kept an open table, and we sang it home.
“Corazón!” I called from my seat by the window. “Come look!”
As our third companion could not remember his given name, Mahalia and I lavished him with endearments that made his silhouette-self blossom like a night-blooming flower. “Corazón” was my favorite and had taken the place of a name in my head. But “Sweetling” and “Loveliest” and “Noggle” and “Flittermouse” were also standards of address, along with several of my mother’s favorites: “Cariño” and “Mi Vida” and “El Aire Que Respiro,” and some in Mahalia’s Tagalog, like “Dayong” and “Irog”—though she says “Irog” is old-fashioned, and only poets use it anymore.
Today, Corazón was immersed in his new project and did not seem to hear me the first time I called for him. Recently, Mahalia had mentioned wanting a chair-and-a-half for her bedchamber. So, of course, our beloved Corazón had at once thrown himself into constructing one for her. Right now, he was crouched near my feet—his preferred place of rest—busily plucking out his wild black hair to stuff the chair’s cushions with. There was no lack of stuffing: the more he plucked, the wilder and wilier his corybantic crest of cormorant fluff did spring. If I looked long enough, I could see black wings of feather-hair growing and flapping out from the sides of his skull. Corazón’s mobile face expressed a reverential pleasure in this self-deracination; he looked like a dog scratching deeply at an everlasting itch. I could observe him for hours and often did; there was leisure for distraction here. But the scene outside our window tugged at me.
“Corazón,” I tried again, running a few fingers of cold current through his hair.
Grinning and shivering at my caress, he glanced up. “Yes, Luz?”
“There is something in our moat.”
“Huh.”
“It’s sort of… I can’t tell what shape it is. Do you think it’s a new spirit?”
He leapt up with that glad gawkiness I loved so well. “Maybe. They don’t usually come into the moat, though. It’s always via the river, or near it. I will look.”
I was sitting near a large, silvery-green window the size and shape of a giant manatee. Corazón came to stand beside me, peering through the paddle-shaped tail. He peered and peered. Squinted. Pressed his face to the pane. He opened the pane outward and stuck his head through.
And then he started to wail.
“Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no!”
Abruptly, he withdrew his head and slammed the window shut, as if sealing off our tower from an oncoming hailstorm. But nothing was falling from the sky—which may or may not have been the sky. However, small white stones did come tumbling from his mouth to clatter all over the floor.
“No, no, no,” he pleaded with me. “It is too soon! It’s too soon, Luz—we haven’t even—please don’t…”
At the continuing noises of his panic and distress, Mahalia glanced up from her workspace on the other side of the room. She was finishing a new mosaic today: a table-top made up of found objects: memento mori love tokens, crinoid fossil stems, marbles, broken teacups—all items that had emerged inexplicably from the region of my kneecaps. It was close, intensive work, and she tended to focus on her projects to the exclusion of all else, but for Corazón’s sake, she deserted it immediately and came to investigate the new wrongness in the room.
I had thrown my arms around Corazón. He was shaking, spilling splotches of anxious ink and flakes of shadow everywhere like scattered ants. “What’s wrong?” I begged him. “What is it?” But even as I spoke, I glanced out the window again, trying to see the thing in the moat.
“Don’t look, Luz! Please.” His face was buried in my shoulder, sunk puddle-deep, as if he wanted to dive into me completely. His hands splashed into my waist like striped bass at sundown.
Mahalia enfolded us both in her large golden arms, wrapping us in bands of sentient sunlight. “Gently,” she murmured. “Gently.”
“It’s the strangest thing.” I craned for another glimpse as Corazón clung to me tightly. “At first, the shape of it beneath the moat was barely visible. But it keeps getting bigger.”
“Not bigger,” Mahalia told me sadly. “Just closer. I’ve seen this before.” She pressed a kiss to Corazón’s forehead, leaving a brand of golden lip-marks upon his lustrous blackness. “So has he.” She sighed. “It happens from time to time. It’s always so disheartening—and after all our work! After all this… happiness.” She sighed a second time. “Last time, I didn’t have the heart to try again. That’s why I fled to the riverbank. To dry up. To forget. And I did—I forgot why I fled in the first place. Because this, this,” she squeezed us both harder, like an angry Corn Queen or a cloud of swarming bees, “is unbearable.”
“But what,” I asked, “is this?”
Corazón at last emerged from the shallows of my shoulder, the woeful quartz of his eyes like heartbroken stars.
“Someone,” he said, “loves you more than anything. Someone loves you enough.”
The moat was a glassy flatness of circular momentum where no drowned thing could drown again. I could walk atop it—we all could—but as with the river, we could not pierce the surface without a great deal of effort. We walked in this world with the lightness of damselflies.
Inside the moat, the object that had first caught my eye was still growing larger. It had been the merest speck when I’d first laid eyes on it, a pale blot in the surrounding green. Now that indeterminate pallor was taking shape.
First a head emerged. Orange beak, black mask, black eyes. The rest of the head was white: a dingy, dirty, muddy white, the white of maggots and mushrooms and wilderness abandonment. Then the neck, carved into that signature S curve. No wings, just the bulbous body of a one-time pedal boat. A two-seater for lovers, or best friends, or a parent and child. It sank slowly upward until it broke surface and began bobbing heavily on the water.
I stood on the bottom floor of the tower, the coyote-cut glass door flung open right over the moat: no deck, no steps, no footbridge. The water lapped at the water of my toes; we were all the same river. The swan boat was only a few feet from where I stood.
And so was mamita.
“Luz!” Her voice, like the cracked-open sky. “Luz!”
“Mami,” I whispered.
“Luz,” sobbed Corazón, pressing against me from behind.
Mahalia, who stood next to him, told me, “Go to her,” and tenderly peeled Corazón from his desperate embrace of my waist, cradling him in her beams of summer, her sheaves of wheat and daisy fields and dandelions dancing. “Go on, Luz. She came a long way to talk to you. They always do.”
“Don’t go!” Corazón begged me. “Please! Don’t leave us! Don’t let the tower fall! Don’t leave us like…”
Mahalia set her forehead against his, sunshine to midnight. “Her decision, kabagong.”
My decision. My mother.
I threw myself through the open door, and fell upon mamita like rain.
She is wearing my old red Converse high-tops. Her feet are bigger than mine by a whole size—“whopping elevensies” as she likes to say—so she’s had to chop off the round rubber toes to make the shoes fit. Her Solmate socks stick out the ends, bright and mismatched, like crazy quilts that keep only your toes warm. Her hair is… different. Frizzled. Undyed, undark. Like the silver-on-white wood. Like rain-clouds. It is much shorter than I remember it, as if she cut it all off at some point. There is a child’s vulnerability in her skull; it gives her a priestly cast. The veins stand out on her hands. Shadows like too-full trash bags bulge out under her eyes. The delicate sparrow-feet lines I recall around her mouth and nose are now carved chasm-deep.
“Hi, Mamita.”
Once I am in the swan boat with her, I stand back to gather more of my shape. I want her to recognize me. But I do not think she can hear me when I speak. Not all the way. Or see me either. Not properly. She leans forward, like someone staring into the depths of a dark pool, trying to hear whoever is shouting at her through several thousand tons of water.
“Luz.” She is staring. I wonder if she can see her face reflected in mine, which, when calm, can become like a pond or a mirror.
“I’m so happy you’re here!” I tell her, raising my voice to shout. Something on her face wavers, as if she has caught just the gist.
“I… wanted to see you again,” she says, and her voice is harsh, like she has been wailing a whole year without surcease, and would be wailing now, except her throat has failed her. Her voice is like dynamite to a fall of boulders. Everything in me falters, cut off at my source, severed from the thing that feeds me.
“I…” I pause, uncertain. Try to smile. Raise my voice to bellowing again: “Do you want to see our tower? Come on in!” I wave an inviting hand toward the coyote door behind me, but I do not turn away from her. “We’re still under construction—so much to be done! You have to meet Mahalia. And Corazón! You will love th—”
“Wait.” Those words, the dry rasp of tears wept out. “Luz! Don’t go.”
Her words remind me of Corazón’s. I wonder if he is still there, behind me in the doorway, waiting, watching me. I do not look. I do not dare. My mother is lifting a shaking hand to my face, her fingers practically translucent with thinness. The skin sags from her arms, robbed of all jolly surfeit. Her feet shift in the boat as she tries to keep her balance. The red canvas of the sawed-off Converse high-tops is wet. That makes no sense, for water here is not wet.
“Are you,” I ask, uneasy, “drowning?” But I do not say it loud enough for her to hear me. The thought is filling me with a suffocating melancholy that even my own drowning had not merited. “Don’t do that,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Don’t do that, Mamita. Not for me…”
“I need to ask,” she says in a low voice, the knees of her jeans now soaking wet. “What is lost in the river… it comes here, in the end? If I… if I direct them to cremate me, and bury my ashes in the riverbank, or scatter them on the water, will you find me—after?”
I imagine Mahalia reaching into my belly some bright morning to scoop out more objects for her mosaics. But instead, her massive midwife arms, slick as summer sunlight on a stream, pull my own mother out of me, strange and silvery with scales. The reverse of birth. Mamita, bare and barefoot. No red shoes. No swan boat. Here to stay.
But this is fancy, not fact. And since I do not know the true answer to her question, and do not think she would be able to hear me anyway, I lift my arms and shrug helplessly. Her face falls. The brine of her eyes falls. But she nods, decisively, and shakes herself out, even though her T-shirt (an old one, practically cobwebs, a favorite oversized nightie that reads: “1987: I survived 120°!” sold everywhere in the southwest after a particularly deadly summer), is soaked up to the armpits.
“Never mind. I’ll take my chances, Luz. I’m putting it in my will that I’m to be cremated.”
She takes a deep breath. But what is she breathing, I wonder, when this air is not air? It is difficult for her; I can see that. Like sucking oxygen through a noxious cloud. There is a red strain in the tiny capillaries of her eyes. The effort to ask the next question darkens her dear face, as if she was bending to lift a barbell twice her body weight.
“Luz. Mi vida. Can you come back with me?”
“Come… back?” Where my heart used to be, a frog leaps. “But I—” I want to glance over my shoulder at our tower, at my beloveds. But mamita’s gaze fastens me, dry and red-rimmed and desperate.
“Come back. In this boat. I can lead you back. The red shoes will help. I will give you half my heart. One of my lungs. I would live half a life to take back half your…”
She cannot say the word. And, I? I do not know how to tell her that dead is not dead like we thought. That I am just… rivermade. Remade into a rivermaid.
This time, I lift my voice to decibels that could take on a storm, compete with a tidal clash of water, give the thunder a scolding: “What if you stay here instead?”
If I wait a few more minutes, she will no longer have a choice. The water-mark has crept up to her throat: the wet water of another world. She is like the betrayed lover in a Childe Ballad, sinking slowly in a rising current I cannot see. I offer my hand. If she touches me, maybe the waters will rise faster, and we can get this all over with, and she can come inside our tower with me.
“Luz!” Mahalia’s voice pops in my ear, makes me flinch. She must have crossed the water to stand right behind me. “Family does not pull family under. We pull each other out.”
I snatch my hand back from mamita, just in time. Mahalia is right. Of course she is right. And yet, if she were not watching me, I would do it. I would.
“But you can go back with her,” says Corazón, from my left side.
He is standing right beside the swan boat. But he is not walking lightly on the water; he is hip-deep in the moat. The water does not wet him; it vivisects him. Traps him in its green glass ice. He treads, but he is sinking, like mamita is sinking. I wonder if this is how he had come to dwell at river bottom when I first met him. If he had sunk there for sorrow. For loss. When his last companion left, and he let their tower fall.
“You can go back with her,” he repeats, his voice now calm though he is crying steadily. White stones tumble from his eyes. Quartz. Teeth. Freshwater pearls.
“She offered you half, which is fair. Half of everything. You can go back—at least halfway. You will not be the same. Neither will she. But you will be together. Half-enchanted. Half-haunted. And then, at the end…”
His fingers tighten earnestly on the edge of the swan boat. “I do not know if there will be enough of either of you to come back here. Maybe you will go elsewhere. I do not know. But I know that if you let her leave now, without you—and she does as she says, with her will, with her ashes—then you will see her again. We will lift her ashes from the riverbank, or from the weeds, or from your left shoulder, and we will re-kindle those ashes in the flame of our hearth. She will take for herself the freedom of a firebird, and you will never be parted again.”
I look at mamita with longing, but I do not touch her. The water is up to her mouth. I want to embrace her. I want her to live in my tower with me forever, with new wings of fire, a new flamelight in her once-red hair. I want her to grow strange gardens on the riverbank with her long green hands, and braid the river of my hair until the currents flow three ways at once.
I also want to go back to our little apartment. I want to make abuela’s tamales in our kitchen together with groceries we’ve picked up from the food pantry. I want our movie nights again, and trips to the Groton Goodwill, and all the free library events on the bulletin board, and all the Town Forest foraging walks the Preservation Trust can offer. I want it all, and I cannot choose.
Mamita, of course, sees this. Somehow, she can read my riverface like she used to read my frowns, my ups and downs, my sighs and grumbles and sudden fits of giggles. The lines on her face shift, lighten, brighten. She even seems to smile, and tells me, her words spluttering through unseen waters: “Never mind, cariña. Never mind. Entiendo perfectemente.”
And then, suddenly, her hair is floating all around her head, and she is drowning in water from a different world.
“Push her back!” I shout to my beloveds, to Mahalia and Corazón. “We’ve got to get her back!”
Mamita begins to struggle in the swan boat, to fight, to thrash. Her movements are slow, weighty, languorous. This, more than anything, tells me what I must do. She is not ready. She must not come here now, not like this.
“Te amo, Mamita!” I whisper, and for once, for once, she seems to hear me with the clarity of a hard-struck bell. Her eyes meet mine.
Leaping from the wobbly wooden deck, I crash through the green glass water until I am shoulder to shoulder with Corazón. Mahalia is there too with us, treading the quickwater current, strong as summertime. Together we three grasp the edges of the swan boat, and push, push, push the boat with all the mightiness in us, back down to where it came from, down and down and down,.
Or perhaps up.