What you were thinking as the railing collapsed and you and the child tumbled together into the lake: what would she remember of these days of slammed doors and late-night shouts, of furtive phone calls, drunkenness, sudden fits of sobbing, mysterious absences—would she look back in anger, or with pity? Would she talk shit about you to her lovers and friends, or wish, at some desperate juncture, never to have been born?
But years later, in a wine bar of her stepmother’s choosing, in the city where she and her wife lived, she would tell you nothing of her memories, would carefully avoid any statement that might be perceived as incriminating her mother (evidence of a maturity that might have told you more about her than her childhood memories would have, had you been paying attention), only remarking, in a world-weary tone that made you wish you hadn’t come or at least that you hadn’t brought your wife along with you, that until that day at the lake, she had imagined that every body of water harbored an unimaginable beauty and complexity, idealized peaceful, subaquatic civilizations living in majestic natural opulence, mermen and mermaids riding eight-foot seahorses to grand aquatic ballrooms; but on that day she learned that water was hostile and dangerous and that there was nothing down there at all, she said, with a lingering glance at your wife, who was typing something furiously on her phone, nothing down there but cold and death and mud.