American War(106)

I watched her through the kitchen window. She worked in a monotone way, her eyes focused nowhere, lost in her own space. But then she looked up, and she saw me, and she came outside. Often she wandered around the property, walking among the greenhouses. But this was the first time I’d seen her come near the levee in the daytime. It was as though she was repelled in some invisible way by the river—not by the sight of it, which was hidden by the seawall, but by the sound of it, the sound of water moving.

“How’s the arm?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I replied. “In two weeks it’ll be good as new.”

“It’ll be better than that. Bones that set right grow back stronger.”

It was an amazing thing to hear, and whether it was true or not, instantly I believed it.

I stood up. “Do you wanna see something cool?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Come on, then,” I said. Without thinking I took her hand and led her to a place near the levee protected by the shade of a hanging willow tree. It was there, in a small pen, that I kept my pet.

“This is my turtle,” I said, pointing at the mounded, unmoving animal.

She seemed to forget me for a moment. I watched as she knelt down until her face was almost in the pen, inspecting the yellow, symmetrical markings on the shell.

“He’s real slow,” I said, embarrassed at my pet’s reluctance to even show its head. “Some days he doesn’t even move at all.”

“She’s a girl,” Sarat said.

I asked her how she knew, but she didn’t answer.

Finally she broke from her trance and stood up. I wiped the dirt from the knees of her pants.

“Is it true you were in prison?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“They never told me.”

“How long were you there?”

“Seven years.”

The number was incomprehensible to me; a lifetime.

“What are you gonna do when they get that cast off you?” she asked.

“Play basketball,” I said. For weeks I’d thought about little else. “My team’s in first place, and if we win the rest of our games, we get to go to the championship in Atlanta. They have a water park there, got the biggest swimming pool in the whole country.”

“You like swimming?” she asked.

I nodded. “I go twice a week to the pool in Lincolnton. I’d be there today if I didn’t have the cast.”

“What you doing in a pool in Lincolnton when you got the river right here?”

I laughed. “You can’t swim in the river, silly.”

She looked at me as though I’d come from some other planet, and then that vague confusion turned to pity. She walked past me to the levee, shuffling slowly in that way of hers, the frame hunched and the knees threatening to give.

Where the seawall passed our backyard, my mother had painted a crude mural, the kind they have in kindergartens. It was of stick-figure children playing in the field among the apple trees, a smiling sun watching over them. She had given the children names and sometimes she’d talk to me about them as though they were real. I never understood why.

Sarat stood by the side of the levee. She was tall enough to see past the wall and through the willows. She watched the river. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood the courage she was struggling to summon, the demon she had to bury before she could set foot once more into the moving water.

She turned to me. “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s go swimming.”

Instinctively, I turned to see if my parents were around. Going over the levee was the one thing I was forbidden to do above all else. Beyond the wall lay death by drowning and death by disease and all the monsters that populated my mother’s stern warnings. My feet froze to the soil.

“I can’t swim with my cast on,” I said, but it was not the cast that scared me.

“Yeah you can,” she said. “C’mon, I won’t let nothing bad happen to you.”

Slowly she climbed down the other side of the levee, and soon she was walking among the willows to the riverbank. Suddenly the sight of her fading behind the braided leaves filled me with panic. I imagined she might step into the river and never return, taken by that green snake to the end of the world. My feet unfroze, a newfound courage took me, and I chased after her.

From atop the levee I saw her walk into the water. She walked barefoot and fully clothed. I climbed down the wall and ran with my head to the ground, following her footsteps in the soft riverbank soil.

And then I looked up, and the monster was upon me. For the first time in my life, I was at the river. Its sound and size astounded me, the banks wild and wide, the speed of the current readable in the branches and leaves that raced along its surface. I had never seen water move this way.

She stood waist-high in the river, the water curling around her. I remember the way she looked in that moment, that violent euphoria barely sheathed behind the lips. The water curled around her wounded body and as it moved it did not heal her wounds, it cauterized.

She was motionless. I waved at her to come closer to the riverbank, but she seemed not to see me at all. She was breathing hard though she had not run. She looked in that moment like a child, wide-eyed, uncertain. Then it dawned on me: she was afraid.