The Marsh King's Daughter(51)

I didn’t know what time of day it was or how long I’d been in the well because the lid didn’t let in any light. My father said the people who built the cabin made the lid this way so that children wouldn’t fall in. All I knew was that my father would keep me in the well as long as he wanted to and let me out when he was ready. Sometimes I thought about what would happen if he didn’t. If the Soviet Union dropped a bomb on the United States like the Geographics said Nikita Khrushchev wanted to do and the bomb killed my father and mother, what would happen to me? I tried not to think about things like that too often. When I did, it got hard to breathe.

I was very tired. My hands and feet were numb and my teeth chattered, but I’d stopped shivering, so that was good. My father let me keep my clothes on this time, and that helped. My front teeth were loose and the side of my face ached, but what I was really worried about was my leg. I cut it on something sharp when my father threw me in. I wiped up the blood with my shirttail and tied my scarf around my leg up high like a tourniquet, but I couldn’t tell if it was working. I tried not to think about the time I shared the well with a rat.

“Are you okay?”

I opened my eyes. Calypso was sitting on the front seat of my father’s canoe. The canoe rocked gently in the current. The day was sunny and warm. Cattail heads bent and nodded in the breeze. Overhead a hawk swooped and dived. In the distance, a red-winged blackbird called. The canoe was nosed into the reeds. Cousteau sat in the back.

“Come with us,” Calypso said. “We’re going exploring.” She smiled and held out her hand.

When I stood my legs felt shaky, like they wouldn’t hold me up. I took her hand and stepped carefully into the canoe. My father’s canoe was a two-seater, so I sat down in the middle between them on the bottom. The canoe was made of metal. The bottom was cold.

Cousteau shoved his paddle into the riverbank and pushed off. The current was very strong. All Cousteau and Calypso needed to do was steer. As we floated downstream, I thought about the day we met. I was glad Cousteau and Calypso and I were friends.

“Do you have anything to eat?” I was very hungry.

“Of course.” Calypso turned around and smiled. Her teeth were white and straight. Her eyes were blue like my mother’s. Her hair was thick and dark and braided like mine. She reached into the rucksack between her feet and handed me an apple. It was as big as both my fists put together, a Wolf River, my father called it, one of three kinds of apples that grew near our cabin. I took a bite and juice ran down my chin.

I ate the apple, seeds and all. Calypso smiled and gave me another. This time I ate the apple down to the core. I tossed the core into the river for the fish to nibble and trailed my fingers in the water to wash the stickiness away. The water was very cold. So were the drips that splashed my head when Cousteau switched his paddle. We passed marsh marigolds and blue flag iris, Indian paintbrush and wood lily, St.-John’s-wort and yellow flag iris and pondweed and jewelweed. I’d never seen so much color. Flowers that didn’t normally bloom together were all blooming at the same time, like the marsh was putting on a show for me.

The current got stronger. When we came to the wooden sign that hung from the cable that spanned the river, I could read the whole thing: DANGER. RAPIDS AHEAD. NO ROWBOATS PAST THIS POINT. I ducked my head as we passed beneath.

The roar got louder. I knew we were going over the falls. I saw the canoe tipping forward when we reached the edge, plunging through the foam and the mist to disappear into the whirlpool at the bottom. I knew I was going to drown. I was not afraid.

“Your father doesn’t love you,” Cousteau said suddenly from behind me. I could hear him clearly, though the last time I was this close to the falls, my father and I had to shout. “He only loves himself.”

“It’s true,” Calypso said. “Our father loves us. He would never put us in the well.”

I thought about the day we met. How their father played with them. The way he smiled when he picked up little Calypso and carried her on his shoulders, laughing all the way up the stairs. I knew she spoke the truth.

I wiped my jacket sleeve across my eyes. I didn’t know why my eyes were wet. I never cried.

“It’s okay.” Calypso leaned forward and took my hands. “Don’t be afraid. We love you.”

“I’m so tired.”

“We know,” Cousteau said. “It’s all right. Lie down. Close your eyes. We’ll take care of you.”

I knew that this was also true. And so I did.

—

MY MOTHER TOLD ME I was in the well for three days. I wouldn’t have thought a person could last that long without food and water, but apparently you can. She said when my father finally pulled the lid aside and lowered the ladder I was too weak to climb it, so he had to sling me over his shoulder like a dead deer and carry me out. She said she wanted to slide the lid to the side and lower food and water to me many times, but my father made her sit on a chair in the kitchen with the rifle pointed at her the whole time I was in the well, so she couldn’t.

My mother said that after my father carried me into the cabin, he dropped me on the floor beside the woodstove like I was a sack of flour and walked away. She thought I was dead. She pulled the mattress off their bed and dragged it into the kitchen and rolled me onto it and covered me with blankets and took off all her clothes and crawled under the covers and held me until I got warm again. If she did all of this, I don’t remember. All I remember is waking up shivering on the mattress though my face and hands and feet felt like they were on fire. I rolled off the mattress and put on my clothes and staggered to the outhouse. When I tried to pee, hardly anything came out.