Dawn Raffel - Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

She was frightened of the current, afraid — yes, she was — of being carried away.

“Yes, I was,” she said. “I was. I was watching,” she said, insisted to him. Because, of course, it was so. The house and its contents. The children. Herself. She was watching her husband sleeping, it seemed, or reading, it seemed, dogging a page, or walking away from her, it seemed — as he was, to the water, with nothing in his hands.

This is not a true story. Nevertheless, she was frightened of cold, and had a tendency, at times, to overdress.

She went walking alone along the lake, in the elements, wakeful, in the night, in rain. Night after night: a sweater, a jacket, forever a hood (unruly hair), against better judgment. She oughtn’t to go about like that; he’d told her that. The danger! She walked to where the children had played, hands up the sleeves of the opposite arms, poked a toe to an already fallen structure, sunken in, to parts of things abandoned. A handle to something. Body of water; a woman washed to bones: There was a myth about this, if she could only remember. She had grown up far from here. She had lived on a river, the bed of a river, a gentle stream, and yet a child had died there. Blink of an eye. He was given to irritation, it seemed, this man she had married — a check out of order, a drawer stuck — and she to bouts of sentiment and also to rage. Tip of the tongue. “Your problem…” he suggested. She fought to retain things…a story, a list, or an important precaution. A wind rose at night. She had a boy and a girl, tucked in — tucked in and kissed — before she left them and thought of them and walked; she had a house full of foodstuffs and other provisions — yes, she did — and she was chilly or thirsty or hot or short of breath, and always, it seemed to her, late.

She had been raised to believe that any body of water was serious business — and also, the effects of the sun.

Insubstantial, she thought, the time that had elapsed, and this was what she’d told him.

She listened to voices. The children — the ones who were clearly, robustly, loudly not missing — weren’t hers.

“No more than…” she’d told him. Inconsequential — that was the word she had meant to say.

There were — conceivably, in all probability — pills for her condition, whatever it was. There were sensible relations, as has been stated; pages of notes.

When she walked the riverbed, the width of the house, the battered path along the lake, she would cover her shoulders, or fingers, or mouth.

The town of her birth had been razed, or at the least, rearranged, made unfamiliar to her.

She could guess at an outcome.

Or cover her tracks.

She could skirt recrimination.

But that was back when nothing was at stake.

The water had risen.

A whistle blew.

A hole filled up.

Split second — the lifeguard, someone else’s fracas: a blow to a bony, sunburned arm.

“Cheater!”

“I called it!”

As if out of nowhere, as if they had been there all along: They shrugged at her, reached hands beneath the chest’s lid (such icy and relieving treats, under the umbrella). She saw that he saw, them, her husband did, from where he was standing, doused.

Look at them! A boy and a girl, beneath the shelter that had been so reliably purchased, pitched in sand.

She was frightened of watching.

“A fluke, an infection — in the lungs,” our mother said.

“God,” our mother said to us, standing by the telephone, confirming arrangements.

Roses in the garden, a finger in the dial. You could call out a window just as well. Where we lived were starter houses, latticed and treated, each house alike in dimension and plot.

The child who had died used to follow us home, a little brother we could already scarcely remember — neighbor’s boy.

This was the way that we learned about heaven.

A woman in her sweater used to shiver on a porch. She was out in the evening, a house away from ours. Her boys were who-knew-where — in the bushes, perhaps, where we were known to play war. Or in the street, kicking cans, and, on occasion, each other, and us, too. They had soundalike names.

Germs, she saw. “Bacteria,” she said to us. Duck, duck, goose and doctor with those downy boys of hers. Show and don’t tell. Scraped, we knocked. She would give us a bandage for anything cut.

She had lost the children’s father. “Marrow,” said our mother.

We would lie on our backs and watch the birds race south. Maple and elm leaves: bags full, we saved — till we threw them away.

The gunner on the corner took to aiming her rifle.

“Dinnertime,” our mother said. Her watch was in the shop again. “Crazy,” she said.

And as for the shuddering mother, who had once been a nurse, “She wouldn’t be so cold,” our mother said, “if she would eat. Now eat.”

My mother wants to tell me where the car is being serviced. “If something should occur,” my mother says. She says it’s at the Crystal-something and I ought to pay attention.

The telephone is beeping.

Someone has a mass, she says.

“The key to the house—”

Call-waiting turns out to be my long-distance carrier making an offer.

When I click back, my mother isn’t there.

Up to the tower was 420 something steps, one of which was broken.

We could see us from there — our house, almost, or think we could, or someone’s house, or fake it. We could squint there as if we could see ourselves playing, whacking a ball or skipping rope, unparticular children. Sometimes we could barely even tell ourselves apart.

Chicago was not visible.

The lake was an ocean — to us, it was.

“Guess where we’re going?” our father said. “Cessna,” he said. “A Piper Cub.” He had been in the Air Corps during the war, of which we did not speak. A master of circuitry, he’d wanted to fly. The uniform hung in a bag in the cellar.

“Tell us,” we said.

They had bitten him bloody, the insects had.

He had rigged what was airborne, readied it for discharge.

On display, the tea set from Japan — red cups.

A job in Chicago had fallen through. It was a problem of faith, our mother said. A trained engineer, he’d flipped a room of furniture (the family business, an issue of fallback) for hours of flight.

There was a medal on the premises.

Stuck in the plane, our faculties roiled. The royal us, sisters, doubled up in back. We vomited — takeoff. The whole world tilted, in a slant, through a windshield, beautiful — and down at last, reeking of puke.

Our mother was waiting on the ground for us.