Laura van den Berg - What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“It’s good for you to struggle against the water,” he said when it was all over. We swam back to shore slowly, Daud’s hand on the center of my back. “In case you ever get sucked down by a strong tide. You have to know how to fight.”

When we reached land, I lay in the sand, exhausted. It was late in the afternoon. The sky was darkening. Daud sat next to me, asked if I was okay, and I nodded. My shorts and tank top were soaked, my white bra straps exposed. I looked down and saw the small ridges of my nipples. I didn’t try to cover myself, feeling too tired and too brave. Daud’s body was lean, his forearms and calves roped with muscle. He had a pale scar in the shape of a horseshoe on his chest. I wanted to press my hand over it, but sensed I should not. I told him about the lists I’d started keeping on my own, different from the ones my mother encouraged me to memorize. The one I thought about the most was famous disappearances: Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce. I wondered if the mysteries of their lives would ever be solved, how long someone would look for me before my name was added to such a list. He didn’t ask me questions, just let me talk. We stayed there — close but never touching — until it was nearly dark.

We returned to the hotel an hour late for dinner. My mother was waiting for us on the terrace, her plate empty. As Daud and I took our seats, I noticed our plates were heaped with food. My hair, still wet, stuck to the back of my neck; my clothes were dusted in sand. Before I started eating, I tucked my bra straps back underneath my tank top. I was relieved Daud had put his shirt on before we arrived at the hotel.

“Turnips with garlic and ginger tonight,” my mother said. “I’m sure it tasted better when it was hot.”

“How did it go this afternoon?” Daud asked.

“I got amazing footage of the Red-Ruffed lemurs,” my mother said. “When you see the clips, you’ll wish you’d been there.”

“It sounds like you managed well enough without me,” he said.

“I always manage well on my own.” My mother sat a little straighter in her chair before telling us meaningful scientific research was best done in solitude, that collective thought only diluted the strongest ideas. “Did Walter Buller have research teams?” she asked us. “Did William Swainson?

“June,”Daud said. “They were working at the turn of the century.”

“That’s not the point,” she said.

In the dusk, I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes through her sunglasses, though I suspected she was looking at me. I focused on scooping turnips with my spoon.

“Celia took me swimming today,” Daud said. “I didn’t realize she had such talent.”

“You do have a few trophies at home, don’t you?” My mother tapped her upper lip with her index finger for a moment, pretending to not remember.

She stood and dropped her napkin. “I already checked with the cook, and there’s no dessert tonight.” The sky was dark, the terrace lit only by the dim glow of lightbulbs hanging from a wire. She walked away from the hotel, towards the tall grass and trees. Daud looked at me, started to say something, then followed her.

I called my father once from Madagascar, a month into our stay. The hotel owner let me use the phone in his office. Lana answered and passed the phone to my father without saying anything. He asked after my mother and I told him that I didn’t think she’d be returning to New York after all. I had been longing to tell someone about the way she was changing, how much she seemed to have aged in the last year and how hard she was pushing against it.

“She’s not changing,” my father said. “She’s just laying her cards on the table.”

“But why now?”

“Because she doesn’t have to pretend she wants to live the same life that I do anymore.”

“She’s making me call her by her first name.”

“When your mother turned thirty, she took off to Mexico for two weeks. She’s never taken aging well,” he said. “And I never understood why she was so interested in those lemurs. I always thought they looked like deformed cats.”

“It’s because they’re starting to die. Too many trees are being cut down.”

“It’s just like your mother to pick something like that,” he said. “It’s not the lemurs she really cares about. It’s being able to alter something bigger than she is.”

“But couldn’t she find another purpose? Something closer to home?”

“That’s the problem,” my father said. “She only has one. And it’s not you or me, either.”

I pressed the receiver against my forehead. Even in the hotel owner’s office, the windows and door closed, I could still hear the Indris faintly. “I’ve decided to become a professional swimmer,” I told my father.

“You mean like the competitions you did in high school?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean long-distance, open water.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“To go as far as I can.”

“Celia,” my father said. “Couldn’t you pick something a little less dangerous?”

I wondered if he thought distance swimming was the kind of thing my mother would do, grueling and lawless. I told my father I had been swimming every day and was learning to not be afraid. I told him that I always imagined some world famous coach trailing me in a motorboat and shouting commands through a megaphone: straighten your legs, keep breathing, reach like you’re grabbing onto the person you love most. I didn’t tell him that when I was frightened by powerful tides or strange shadows, I thought of Daud holding me under, of the way he made me struggle, and kept swimming. Or that when I paused to catch my breath, I sometimes turned in the water and saw my parents on the shoreline, as I had as a child, two ghosts in my memory.

Not long after my swim with Daud, I heard shouting in my mother’s room. It was late in the night. I had wrapped myself in a white sheet and was trying to read enough Delta of Venus to fall asleep. I pressed my ear against the wall, but I only caught foot-stomping and door-slamming, which made my room shudder.

It occurred to me then that I should go to my mother. When I opened the door, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away, head in her hands. She was naked, her clothes heaped in the corner. Her sunglasses and the postcards she usually traveled with — pictures of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River and the desert where the Aral Sea had once been — were scattered across the floor. Some of the cards had unfinished messages on the back, notes to friends and colleagues that were never sent. Her hair sat stiffly on her shoulders; her back was dotted with freckles. She’d lost weight since coming to Madagascar, and I could see her spine, curved and stretching her pale skin into translucence. She looked small and frightened, a huddled child. The sheets were tangled; the unshaded lightbulb hung from the ceiling at an odd angle. She was not crying, just sitting there, unmoving, and I did not know what to say. I closed the door, gently as possible, and went back to my room.

The next morning, my mother woke me early and said she was taking me to the rainforest. When I asked about Daud, she told me the lens on their spotting scope had cracked and he’d gone to a nearby village to have it repaired. We drove down a grooved dirt road for about a mile and parked in front of the rainforest’s dense treeline, fat with spade-shaped leaves and vines. She sat in the driver’s seat, pale and sweating, and I thought of the way her naked back had looked like it could have belonged to some primitive animal.