It was a silent scene that played itself out in Abel’s mind, he could feel the cold, feel the peacefulness, feel in fact the calm lethargy that overtook his mother as she lay in the lake. He had to struggle to remember his own feelings then, and what he had done, and what he had said, and then her words to him. He had to rouse himself to feel the life in his limbs to remember how he had run down to the lake and into the water to his mother, and he had tried to lift her out of the water, and she had refused at first to let him lift her out of the freezing water and told him slowly, sluggishly, almost asleep, that she had had enough of life. “But what about me and Jamie?” he had asked her desperately. And she had said then, even as she moved to rise out of the water, “Oh you are old enough to take care of yourself…” and by then she was standing…“but you are right about Jamie…he is too young and it would be too hard for you to care for him alone.” And she allowed Abel to help her as she stumbled a little getting up out of the water and began walking back, shivering now, she was back among the living. They shivered and huddled together and once home, he wrapped her in a blanket and built a fire and it was just the two of them while Jamie slept. The man had long since gone and was not coming back. That they knew.
And then it was over, the long, sad litany of days. Abel went out, paying no attention to the cold water he tramped through, his body no longer mattered. He just walked and walked following the creek bed as best he could in the flooded landscape.
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