The Marsh King's Daughter(46)

My father’s laughter echoed back from the other side, high-pitched, like a woman’s or a child’s. My father fell silent, but the echo of his laughter continued. My heart pounded. Nanabozho, the trickster, it had to be, hiding on the other side of the river, magnifying my father’s laughter at my foolishness and throwing it across the water to mock me. I jumped to my feet. I wanted to see what form that old shape-shifter had taken today. My father grabbed my hand and pulled me down. I raised my head anyway. If Nanabozho was visiting this forest, I had to see.

A new sound, like clanging metal, and two people ran down the stairs. This was not what I was expecting. Normally, Nanabozho appeared as a rabbit or a fox. But Nanabozho was the son of a spirit father and a human mother, so I supposed it was possible that he could take on human form. However, unless he could also split himself in two, the humans on the platform had to be real.

People. The first people other than my mother and my father that I had ever seen. They were wearing hats and scarves and coats, so I couldn’t be sure, but if I’d had to guess, I would have said I was looking at a boy and a girl.

A boy and a girl.

Children.

More voices, deeper-pitched, and two more people came down the stairs. Grown-ups. A man and a woman. The children’s mother and father.

A family.

I held my breath. I was afraid if I let it out, the sound would carry across the water and frighten them off. My father squeezed my arm, warning me to stay quiet, but he didn’t have to. I didn’t want to draw their attention. I only wanted to look. I wished we’d brought the rifle so I could watch them through the scope.

The family talked, laughed, played. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell they were having fun. When the father picked up the smaller child at last and sat it on his shoulders and carried it up the stairs, my legs were stiff with cold and my stomach was growling. The mother followed more slowly with the other child. I could hear them laughing long after the family disappeared.

My father and I crouched behind the log for a long time. At last he got up, stretched, opened the rucksack, and set out our lunch on the log. Normally my father would have built a fire to make tea, but he didn’t, so I ate snow to wash down my mother’s biscuits.

When we finished eating, my father put everything back in the rucksack and turned to leave without speaking. As we hiked back to our cabin, all I could think about was that family. We were so close, it felt like I could have thrown a rock at them and hit them. Certainly I could have gotten their attention if I had put a bullet above their heads into the trees. I wondered what would have happened if I had.

—

I’VE BEEN TO TAHQUAMENON FALLS many times since. The falls are always impressive: two hundred feet across, with a vertical drop of almost fifty feet. Fifty thousand gallons of water pour over the lip every second during the spring runoff, making Tahquamenon the third most voluminous waterfall east of the Mississippi. Over five hundred thousand people from all over the world visit the falls every year. For some reason, the falls are especially popular with tourists from Japan. The park has a visitors’ center, a restaurant/microbrewery, public bathrooms with flush toilets, and a gift shop where I sell my jams and jellies. The path to the falls is paved for easy walking, and the park service built cedar fences along the edges of the cliff so people won’t fall off. People have died at the falls, like the man who jumped into the whirlpool at the bottom to retrieve his girlfriend’s tennis shoe, but that’s not the park service’s fault.

Stephen and I brought the girls last March. This was the first time I’d been back during the winter. In hindsight, I should have anticipated what was going to happen. But at the time, I was thinking only about how much the girls were going to enjoy their first look at the falls. Stephen had been pushing for the outing for a while, but I wanted to wait until Mari was old enough to appreciate what she was seeing. Plus, it’s ninety-four steps down to the viewing platform and ninety-four back up, so you don’t want to bring along a child you have to carry.

I was standing at the railing on the viewing platform, watching Stephen and the girls laughing and throwing snowballs and just generally enjoying the day, when I turned to look across to the place where my father and I stood all those years ago. Instantly I was eleven years old again, crouching behind the log with my father, looking back across the falls to the platform where I now stood with Stephen and my girls. It was then I realized.

We were that family.

I was overwhelmed with sorrow for the eleven-year-old me. Most of the time when I look back at the way I was raised, I’m able to view things fairly objectively. Yes, I was the daughter of a kidnapped girl and her captor. For twelve years, I lived without seeing or speaking to another human being other than my parents. Put like that, it sounds pretty grim. But that was the hand I was dealt, and I needed to call a spade a spade if I was ever going to move forward, as my court-appointed therapist used to say. As if the analogy would mean anything to a twelve-year-old who had never seen a deck of cards.

But as I stood at the railing looking across the falls at the ghost of my past, my heart broke for the poor little wild child I used to be. So clueless about the outside world despite her precious National Geographics. A child who didn’t know a ball bounced, or that when people greeted each other with their hands outstretched it was called shaking hands because their hands actually moved. Who didn’t realize people’s voices sounded different because she had never heard anyone speak other than her mother and father. Who knew nothing of modern culture or popular music or technology. Who hid from her first opportunity for contact with the outside world because her father told her to.