Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  Grace’s appearance in the clearing subdued Frank’s instincts. He stopped dead, still some distance from Mara, when he pictured what his wife was seeing: the man she loved disguised as a grotesque parody of a murderer.

  “Frank?” She observed him, as horrified as she was confused. “Who are you?”

  The question, his wife looking at him as if he were a stranger, hurt more than all Mara’s accusations, more even than all the things Grace had yelled at him before.

  “Do it for your wife, Frank.” Mara had regained her composure, the weapon no longer trembling. “Confess and set a good example for your children, show them that taking responsibility for your own mistakes is the right way to behave in life.”

  “I can’t stand the sound of your voice.” Frank let out an exhausted sigh—Mara’s holier-than-thou attitude exasperated him. “My kids don’t have to know anything about what I’ve done. They won’t know about it. I have no example to set for them with anything that’s happened here.”

  He sought confirmation in Grace’s eyes that this was how it would be, that they would protect Audrey and Simon from the truth.

  “Someday they’ll have to know.” Grace shook her head. “I’m not going to lie to them like you.”

  “Shit, Grace, are you on my side or hers?”

  “I don’t know anymore, Frank. I honestly don’t know. You . . .” She stuttered, as if saying words that didn’t fit in her mouth. “You . . . you tried to kill her.”

  “No, Grace,” Mara said. “He didn’t try. He killed me. He left the apartment believing he’d done it.”

  Frank bit his tongue to stop himself from saying what he was thinking, but it came out. “And you don’t know how much I wish now that you really had died.”

  “Frank!” Grace shouted.

  “You know what?” Mara took a step forward. “At one stage, I even thought dying would’ve been less painful. A dead woman doesn’t have to remember every day how she was left for dead underwater, drowned, forgotten like a bad secret. A dead woman doesn’t wake up and discover how insignificant her life must be, her entire life, for a man to think her life is worth nothing. I was just an inconvenience to you, a shameful secret who deserved to die underwater. You don’t know how much that hurts. You didn’t break my heart, Frank, you broke my soul. Something changed in me forever. Have you ever been so sad you no longer fear pain or death?” With the knife, she traced a bleeding line on her forearm. “I have, since that night. Now the only way to make sense of all this suffering is to see you pay for what you’ve done.”

  Frank snorted to dismiss Mara’s words. Grace, on the other hand, nodded, wiping tears from her eyes. She approached and rubbed Mara’s arm to comfort her.

  “This is a joke,” he said, unable to believe his wife was taking Mara’s side. He turned around to scream his rage into the void. “Unbelievable, Grace! Unbelievable! Christ!”

  The immensity sent an echo back to him.

  Christ . . . Christ . . . Christ.

  At the bottom of the abyss, the water’s bubbling remained constant, and the rotten egg smell arrived in waves of growing intensity. The stench of sulfur sparked the image in Frank’s mind of hell opening up at his feet, calling to him. Maybe the only way to avoid it was to give in. Maybe Mara had always been right. If his stubbornness had brought him, literally, to the edge of a precipice, maybe it was time to start thinking differently. Or maybe not.

  “I’m not doing anything,” he decided, turning back. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He gripped his waist with his hands.

  “Then the video’s going on the internet,” said Mara. “Your children won’t just know what you did—they’ll be able to see it. And the police will end up coming after you all the same. I’ll have to wait longer to see you pay, but I’ll see it.”

  Frank shrugged, showing indifference.

  “First, you’ll have to prove the video’s real. It’s very easy to doctor them these days, there’ll be thousands of comments saying it’s a fake. And without a real victim, without a dead woman, don’t think the police will treat your case with much urgency. At the very least, it’ll buy me time. Time to get away. Not to another coast—to another country, if necessary.” Though he was speaking off the cuff, his arguments didn’t sound completely ludicrous. His plan could work. Bolstered by the logic of his strategy, he took on a triumphant tone. “There’s nothing you can do to make me go. You’ll have to stick that knife in me, because you have nothing else.”

  Mara swiveled the weapon in her hand. A breeze came up to the precipice, bringing with it steam from the boiling water down below. Frank saw her tense her eyebrows, her jaw, thinking about something.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” he repeated to her.

  Mara attacked Grace as she was searching for something in her pocket—a handkerchief to blow her nose, perhaps. She immobilized her with an arm around her belly, the other hand pressing the knife against her neck. Grace didn’t even have time to scream before the weapon cut off her breathing. She just opened her eyes wide, looking down as if trying to check that what was happening was real.

  “Don’t touch her!”

  Frank ran at them.

  “Stay back.” Mara retreated one step. She pressed the blade’s edge against Grace’s neck, spilling a drop of blood. “I’ll do it if you come closer.”

  “Frank . . . ,” whispered Grace.

  “You don’t want to hurt her,” he said, “not her. My wife hasn’t done anything to you. You wanted to help her from the start. It’s all my fault, it makes no sense to hurt her. Please.”

  “You’ve broken me inside so much I don’t even find it hard to hurt other people anymore.”

  “You don’t have it in you.”

  But Mara pressed harder with the knife.

  Grace coughed. Frank spun around, punching his own thighs. He grabbed the hair on his head, pulled it.

  “Christ!”

  Christ . . . Christ . . . Christ.

  “Honey.” He begged her for mercy with his palms held together. “I can’t go to jail, Grace. I can’t ruin my life like this, lose you like this.”

  “Frank”—Grace cleared her throat against the weapon—“you’ve already lost us. I’m not going to let you come near the kids ever again.”

  “Please, honey, don’t say that.” The anguish threatened to take away his voice. “Oh, Grace, don’t say that.”

  “You have no choice.” Grace’s voice was clearer when Mara eased the pressure of the knife. “It’s not about confessing with her or getting rid of her and coming back to us. We’re gone.”

  “Honey . . .”

  He felt his face crumple up, fighting back tears.

  “You’ve lost us,” said Grace.

  Frank moved away so he couldn’t hear her—what she was saying was too painful. He reached the edge of the precipice. The vertigo was so strong his legs shook, but he preferred to face the abyss than the terrible reality Grace presented him.

  “You have nothing left to lose,” she added behind him.

  Her words reverberated in his mind like the echo of his cries around the mountain. You have nothing left to lose. You have nothing left to lose. He whispered the last repetition to himself, into the void. “I have nothing left to lose . . .”

  The almost nonexistent moon in the sky reminded him of Simon’s absent eye.

  Frank looked at his arms, one of them covered in blood that was now dry, brown.

  “Who am I?”

  He repeated the question Grace had just asked him. After twenty years together, his wife had no idea who he was. Maybe he didn’t know, either. He’d fooled himself so much that it was impossible to recognize, in the bloodstained person trembling at the top of the precipice, the ideal father and husband he had believed he was. He felt his face, wanting to reaffirm his identity, but all he found were injured, disfigured features. It was as if another Frank, the real one, the one with a deformed and corrupt soul, had physically manifeste
d himself to demand that his ugliness be acknowledged. This degrading image of himself suddenly showed Frank the true gravity of what he’d done. The immensity of the pain he’d caused weighed heavy in his chest.

  “Grace, I’m so sorry.” His feeling of regret was infinite. “But Mara won’t hurt you if I’m not here. I’m the problem, I’m the one who caused all of this. And when this is known, I’m going to continue to cause pain and problems for you and the children.” Thinking about his son and daughter momentarily lit up the darkness that was eating away at him inside. “Please, Grace, never tell them anything about what I did.”

  “Frank, what’re you doing?”

  “Look at me. I’ve ended up on the edge of the precipice of my own lies.” He looked down into the abyss. “And I’ll receive the punishment I deserve: a gigantic tub of hot water. What do you think, Mara? It’s a goddamned enormous hot tub. Quite the lesson on karma, huh? And this smell of sulfur . . . I’m going straight to hell for committing the most terrible and ancient sins in existence: adultery and murder.”

  “Frank!” Grace struggled against the straitjacket that was Mara’s arms, that wouldn’t let her go. “What’re you saying?”

  “What else can I do, honey? How else can I avoid ruining your life and the children’s? I don’t want them visiting their father in jail, if you’d even let them come see me. I don’t want them to know the things I’ve done. What will Audrey say when she knows I tried”—he corrected himself to also honor Mara’s pain—“that I killed a woman? I don’t want Simon knowing why he lost his eye, his beautiful eye . . . because of me. My God, Grace, I’m horrible.”

  “Don’t do it,” said Mara. “Stop running away.”

  “It’s the easiest thing to do.” It really did seem so. Maybe running away was all he knew how to do, until the end. “This is . . . cleaner.”

  He encircled the beautiful landscape in front of him with his arms. The trembling in his legs stopped. The vertigo and his compulsion to leap into the void no longer seemed threatening. He turned to look at Grace one last time.

  “I love you, Grace, honey. My only love. I always loved you and I always will. I’m still certain you were meant for me”—he smiled at the memory of the two of them in a car, rewinding the cassette of their song with a pen—“but I don’t think I was meant for you, after all. Tell the children I’m sorry, and tell them how much I love them.”

  36.

  Grace started squirming in Mara’s arms as soon as she guessed Frank’s intentions, but he jumped into the void before she could free herself. Mara stood motionless, unable to react or relax her body’s muscles.

  “Let go of me!”

  Grace unfastened the hands that held her captive, cutting her chest on the blade as she escaped. She crawled to the edge of the precipice—her limbs had lost the ability to hold her up after the chase. Even with four supports, she struggled to keep her balance. Though she wanted to scream her lungs out in a cry that would bring her husband back, only a whisper came from her mouth.

  “Frank.” It was as if she were telling the abyss a secret. “Please, Frank.”

  The screams in her chest, in her mind, were nothing more than pants when they left her throat. She touched the wound on her neck to see whether it was causing the loss of her voice, but all she found was a superficial cut.

  “Frank,” she whispered again.

  Her elbows finally failed her and Grace collapsed, her chest on the edge of the chasm, her arms hanging into the void as if, somehow, she could still reach her husband, who had long disappeared into the darkness, so far below, so far away. The cry he let out when he jumped had grown quieter until the bubbling water and the murmur of the sulfuric breeze in her ears were all Grace could hear.

  Her tears fell into the void like miniature raindrops. She imagined them dissolving in the boiling, acidic water, where Frank would also dissolve. She remembered what she’d read in the Idaho guide about dangerous hot springs. Earl’s stumps, what had happened to his dog. The idea horrified her so much that all the screams she’d been unable to let out now came together in her throat. Grace yelled her husband’s name with such force, so many times, that she ended up spitting blood.

  She received no answer.

  Her delirious mind toyed with the idea of allowing the weight of her arms to defeat the mass of the rest of her body, to let herself fall into the void as well to die with Frank, to flee all her problems, all the pain, like him. Frightened by her own thoughts, she dragged herself backward to escape the influence of the precipice. She cried with her forehead on the ground, the taste of earth mixing with the taste of blood in her mouth.

  Mara muttered something behind her.

  Grace turned around, saw the moon reflected on the knife’s blade. When Mara dropped the weapon, it became a spot of light in the grass, a dim firefly.

  “Let me help you.” Mara walked toward Grace, knelt and took her elbow. “Come on, Grace, get up.”

  Grace shook her arm to free herself. She turned around without giving Mara a chance to help and got up by herself without even looking at her. Her hair was covering her face, going in her mouth. She spat some out, coughed.

  “Take it easy, Grace. I wasn’t going to do anything to you with that knife.”

  Mara held a hand to Grace’s face, perhaps to remove the hair, but Grace stopped it, catching the arm by the wrist.

  “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me again.” She shook her head to get her hair away. “I’m very sorry for what my husband did to you, but don’t you dare come near me or my family again. Ever.”

  Grace threw Mara’s wrist away as if it were trash. She finished brushing her hair with her fingers, wiped the blood from her chest, and picked up the knife from the ground. Just in case, she threw it into the abyss. Then she set off back in the direction of the motor home, of her children, unable to even think about how she would explain what had happened.

  Before Grace left the clearing, Mara let out a sob. She asked the air what she had done. She fell to her knees on the grass, set her backside down, and cried with her face in her hands. Grace’s first instinct was to console her, to alleviate another person’s—a victim’s—agony, just as she would have liked someone to alleviate hers. But she didn’t. She thought of Audrey’s grief at the loss of her ferrets, of her own suffering when she looked in the mirror and saw her hair falling out. Even if it was being a victim that had turned Mara into an abuser, she was an abuser nonetheless. Peace, true forgiveness, can only be achieved through magnanimity, and magnanimity means being able to overcome suffering without the need to transfer it to anyone else, not even the person who caused it. Grace left Mara alone with her grief. She could still hear her crying as she began the descent through the pine branches.

  She went down the mountain at the mercy of the slope, letting herself be carried. Her exhausted brain couldn’t even go to the trouble of thinking about whether there was a better way down—all she wanted was to reach her children as quickly as possible. She advanced with her mind blank, a night spirit wandering among the trees. When the upturned motor home’s light was visible, she used it as a beacon to chart her course. Pine needles, pine cones, and dry grass crunched underfoot, alerting the children of her arrival before she reached the road.

  “Dad?” asked Simon.

  Her boy’s voice asking for his father crushed her already broken heart. Her sobbing grew louder than her footsteps then.

  “It’s you, Mom.”

  She came out of the ditch full of vegetation and onto the road. Her children received her with frightened faces, the girl asking straightaway about the wounds on her chest, her neck. Grace held them.

  “What happened?” asked Audrey.

  “We have to go find help,” Grace replied.

  “And Dad?”

  “And the crazy lady?”

  Grace breathed, not knowing what to say. She felt unable to utter a single word—any response she gave would be equally terrible.

  “Is Dad al
l right?”

  She shook her head at the more direct question. She didn’t know how to lie, she could only remain silent.

  “I’m afraid not.” She swallowed. “There’s been an accident.”

  For the time being, she didn’t want to explain anything else. What she said could mark the children’s lives forever, and her head was in the worst possible state to make such an important decision. Even so, that small amount of information was enough to make Simon start crying. The doctor had managed to save the absent eye’s tear gland, so tears spilled from both eyes, until the patch was soaked.

  37.

  They walked toward the highway. The black sky had gradually turned indigo, and then the light swallowed up the tiny moon. The settling dew brought out the dense pine aroma of dawn, but in the little drops in which Grace had seen sparkling diamonds yesterday, today she saw nothing more than drops. Or tears, the whole forest mourning her misfortune.

  After the first few miles, Simon had sat on the ground swearing he wouldn’t take another step farther away from his father, and Grace had had to carry him on her back. She listened to him cry on her shoulder until he fell asleep. Now the boy was walking on his own two feet again, holding her hand and his sister’s. Audrey had asked a lot of questions at the start of the walk, but Grace’s complete silence finally wore her out.

  The three of them walked with short steps, the grit crunching under their footwear the only conversation they had until, when they turned a bend, a line of smoke was visible against the pale blue color the sky had taken on. It seemed to be a long way off still, but it was a destination more reachable than the roadside restaurant, which seemed as far away to Grace as Boston, the place where they’d been headed in some other life that was no longer theirs.

  “Could it be Earl?” asked Simon.

  Grace had thought the smoke would be coming from a camper’s fire, but her children’s sharpness never ceased to amaze her. It was very possible that it was Earl, though his truck issuing smoke like that worried her, not knowing what Mara might have done to it.

  “We don’t know what it is,” answered Grace. “We’ll see.”