Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  The possibility of being reunited with Earl inspired Simon to quicken his pace. Grace and Audrey, after exchanging a pessimistic look, also increased their speed, in their case out of fear the man needed urgent help. After the third bend they went around, the three of them were enveloped in a gasoline smell that grew more pungent as they approached. Finally, after cresting a slope, they found the source of the smoke.

  It was Earl’s pickup.

  And, parked beside it, was a family-sized motor home.

  Grace blinked to dissolve the mirage. She felt as if she’d been transported back in time, as if a wormhole had taken her back two days, when life had been so different. But even when she rubbed her eyes, this motor home that resembled their own so closely was still there, and so were the two people walking around Earl’s truck gesticulating wildly. It was turned over on the road, burned out, with the front and rear windshields smashed. Grace told Audrey to stay with Simon and ran by herself to the accident scene.

  The two people turned around when they heard her footsteps. It was a couple, her and Frank’s age. They wore shorts and pristine white sneakers, like a cliché of the suburban couple on a summer excursion. They both had polo shirts on, and sweaters around their necks. They stifled a scream when they saw her arrive.

  “And what happened to you?” The woman’s many bracelets jingled when she held her hand to her mouth. “Another accident?”

  Before responding, Grace knelt by the truck and peered into the cab, fearing the condition in which she’d find Earl.

  “There’s no one there,” the man said, turning his head in all directions. “We haven’t found anything. We saw the wreck and stopped, but it doesn’t look like there’s anyone. You weren’t in there, were you?”

  He asked the question while looking into the distance, as if calculating how far Grace could have flown after the impact. Her appearance must have been bad enough to be in keeping with the consequences of a serious road accident.

  Before she could reply, Simon started yelling.

  “He’s here! It’s Earl!”

  The boy was waving his arms by the roadside, pointing at something in the bushes. They all ran over. It was a body. Earl. Simon was the first to take off his T-shirt and hold it on a wound on the old man’s thigh.

  “Are you OK, Earl? Earl!”

  The old man opened his eyes. He smiled when he recognized the boy.

  “I’ve been in worse situations.” He touched Simon’s leg, thanking him for his concern. “At least I didn’t lose my hands this time.”

  He held up his stumps.

  “Oh my God. We have to find them.” The woman turned around, searching the area. “The hands, we have to find them. They couldn’t have gone far, they can still be sewn back on.”

  Grace stopped her and explained the reality, eliciting a sigh of both relief and embarrassment.

  “And what happened to you all?”

  “Everything,” replied Grace. There was no other word. “Everything happened to us.”

  Grace asked Earl if it had been Mara who rolled the truck, who cut his leg. The suburban couple looked at each other without knowing what to say.

  “She had a knife,” Earl confirmed. “She got as mad as an angry bison, she wanted to go back for you.”

  “She did something to my dad, too,” said Simon. “We have to get help.”

  Earl looked at Grace, inquiring about the seriousness of the situation with his wrinkly eyes. Her slow blink was enough for the old man to understand the tragic outcome that Simon did not yet know.

  Earl stroked the boy’s face. “You saved me, Simon, you’re a hero. And heroes are very strong. Don’t ever forget how strong you are. You can do anything.”

  The man with the sweater around his neck announced that he had just called 911, that help was on its way. His wife said they couldn’t wait for the ambulance to arrive, that there was only this road and it would take a long time to reach them, perhaps too long. The smartest thing to do would be to start taking them in the right direction, so the help reached them sooner. It moved Grace to see that it was possible to be good, as the man had already been with his actions, but that it was also always possible to be even better, as the woman had been, sacrificing their own trip to assist a victim.

  “Come on, let’s get him in.”

  The couple, Audrey, and Simon surrounded Earl. Grace asked the man for his cell phone. She stepped away from her children, who helped move the old man. She dialed the emergency number’s three digits and told the dispatcher what had happened to Frank, and the approximate location of his fall, in case it was still possible to recover his body. She would wait at the point in the road where the first ambulance met the motor home to take Earl. Applying the lesson the woman with the sweater had just taught her, Grace did even better and informed them that another woman had crashed her car in the same area.

  “Let’s go!” Leaning out of the motor-home door, the woman with the sweater was gesturing at Grace to hurry up. “We’re leaving!”

  Audrey and Simon waited to climb in with their mother. Once inside, they found two children of similar ages sitting at the table with their seat belts on, except the eldest was a boy and the youngest a girl.

  “Did you see the hot waters?” the little girl asked, slotting her tongue into the gap left by a missing tooth as she spoke. “We came to see the hot waters. They’re hot.”

  “No,” Grace replied, sniffing. “We didn’t get to see them.”

  “Hot springs, Sophia,” her mother corrected her from the passenger seat. “And now we’re going to take a little longer to get there, OK? We have to give the gentleman back there a ride.”

  Grace saw that Earl was lying in the main bedroom. The couple hadn’t minded soiling their bed with blood, vegetation, and earth to help a stranger.

  “All set?” asked the man, starting the engine.

  Grace sat with her children on the sofa, one on each side, Simon without a T-shirt. She hugged them, kissed them on the temples, the tops of their heads. As long as she could repeat that kiss once a day, her life would be filled with meaning. Audrey interlinked her fingers with those on Grace’s right hand, and Simon did the same with her left. They both rested their heads on her shoulders. The motor home set off, rocking them. Through the kitchen window, Grace watched the wooded landscape pass by. She distanced her mind from worse thoughts by listing the conifers Simon studied: Western white pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, western hemlock . . .

  The woman with the sweater took her husband’s hand on the armrest, just as Grace had done two nights ago, holding on to Frank so he would guide her toward the future. In the couple at the front of the motor home, with their two children of similar ages, Grace saw a family portrait as ideal as her own had been two days before. When her and Frank’s had also seemed like the perfect marriage.

  38.

  Grace had been waiting for the children to go back to school for weeks. Restoring their routine would help reestablish some of the normality they’d lost at the start of the summer. She did up her robe as she was preparing breakfast—the mornings were already cold in early September. She still opened the wrong cupboards, still searched for the cereals and bowls in the wrong place, her brain still accustomed to the layout of the house they had left with Frank and to which they never returned. Though they’d gone back to Seattle—neither she nor the children found any reason to leave the city they felt was their true home—Grace turned down the offer from Frank’s company to move them back into their old house, accepting a smaller one in the same area. Like Frank after the accident with the gun, Grace didn’t feel she could live in a house with a hole in it from the bullet that cost her son an eye. Now that she knew the truth, that hole, even repaired, would always remind her of the handgun her husband bought to protect himself from the lover who was breaking into their home to pressure him, and whom he ended up killing in a hot tub before running aw—

  Grace halted the obsessive train of thought that began
with the hole in the wall and always ended the same way, in disaster and emotional pain. That was why it would have been impossible to live in the other house. This one was sufficient for the three of them—in fact, the kitchen was bigger, and that was why Grace kept opening the wrong cupboards and drawers when she made breakfast. As soon as the children finished and left for school, she would record her first video in two months for her YouTube channel. She’d already arranged the set and prepared herself mentally to face the camera. One day she’d tell her subscribers the true story of what had happened. She had always been very honest with them, and she had no intention of changing. But for the time being she preferred not to address the subject. Through a piece in the local newspaper, one of those stories about lost tourists or hikers who end up burned or dissolved in hot waters they hadn’t given enough respect, some followers leaked the news on social media that the husband of Gracefully—many of them called her by the name of her channel—had suffered a fatal accident in the mountains, and all that was recovered were some bone remains. Grace planned to maintain this version of events by default until she felt ready to tell the truth. Just as she’d shared her marital happiness to serve as an example and encourage people to aspire to perfection, now she would share all her pain, shame, and suffering to serve as an example of how to face up to the toughest setbacks that life hides from us.

  The microwave beeped when the milk had finished warming.

  Grace took away the finger she was rubbing against her eyebrow and called the children.

  Audrey was the first to arrive, less dressed up than one would expect of a nervous girl about to start a new school year. But she always wanted to show herself as she was—she felt comfortable in her own body, confident about what she wore, and she didn’t need adornments or to trick her classmates by making more of an effort for the first impression than she would later on. Grace knew her daughter wanted to be as true to herself on the first day as she would be on the last.

  Audrey, unlike Gracefully’s subscribers, did know what really happened on the mountain. She made Grace tell her not long after the events, arguing that she had every right to know the truth about her father. Grace told her one night, the two of them crying with their hands interlinked on the kitchen table, drinking cups of hot chocolate that she made following the recipe from one of her videos. She even put marshmallow pieces in, as if the white candy could somehow combat the bitterness of the world, make the darkness of reality a little lighter. Audrey, the young teenager belonging to a generation many adults mocked, demonstrated that she was more grown-up than her own mother when she asked to see a therapist. For these young people, long gone was the cliché of a mother recommending a psychologist to her daughter and the girl rebelliously rejecting the idea, arguing she wasn’t crazy. That didn’t happen anymore. Today’s teenagers were mature enough to know how much therapy can help, and they could talk about mental health without fear or reservations of any kind.

  Audrey knew that with professional psychological help she would be able to accept the bad her father had done, a bad that had to be confronted and acknowledged but that shouldn’t be the only thing to which Frank’s memory was reduced. Audrey wanted to be able to remember all the good things about her father, of which there were many, almost everything. She refused to allow the bad to eclipse the good, as it did in so many other situations in life, when in reality the bad is almost always smaller and less powerful than the good. Even at sixteen, Audrey spoke about people as complex beings, full of conflicting feelings, and she argued that it made no sense to condemn such a quality in others when we all have this complexity within ourselves. The only coherent approach is to accept the contradictions in others the way we accept our own. Grace was left speechless when she heard her little girl talk like this. She even felt envious of the open mind with which Audrey was able to cope with what had happened. What most surprised her was that she was the same girl who sang Taylor Swift in the shower and still cried watching The Fault in Our Stars. Perhaps it showed that criticizing the cultural references of subsequent generations is a very superficial reading of their reality.

  Grace herself didn’t feel as mature as Audrey. She was still struggling with the despair that had overwhelmed her since the incident on the mountain. It was the opposite for her than for Audrey: she could barely remember the old Frank she had loved. Every time she thought of him, as she did every day, at all hours, all she felt was fury, sadness. Hate. For everything. For the deceit, for the gun, for Simon’s eye, for jumping off the precipice as if there was no other way out. Grace knew it wasn’t fair to only remember Frank for the bad things, that in twenty years, he hadn’t just lied and cheated on her with another woman. He had also made her happy, very happy, during the same twenty years. As Audrey said, allowing the bad in the last part of their marriage to eclipse the good in all the parts that went before it—much more important ones—would be a mistake, an injustice, a terrible road to go down for her and for humanity in general. The Frank who leapt into the abyss was the same Frank who recorded a Jewel song for her twenty times on the two sides of a cassette. But Grace couldn’t see it that way yet. She would have to keep working on her anger, on her capacity for forgiveness.

  Simon walked into the kitchen, trim and neat, smiling even though he was more nervous than Audrey about the first day of school. Opening both eyes, he asked Grace if his classmates would notice which one was fake. With complete sincerity, she answered no. The first time they implanted the prosthetic eye at the hospital—in the end, he completed his treatment where it began—Grace was so surprised at how realistic it looked that, for a second, she thought a miracle had restored her son’s eye, that it had all been a strange nightmare from which they were finally waking. She even felt Frank’s hand grab her from the empty chair beside her, asking her why she’d suffered so much these last few months when nothing had happened, when everything was fine.

  Simon still believed his father had fallen off the precipice accidentally when he was running away from the crazy lady, as he still called Mara. As far as he knew, she was nothing more than a stranger they crossed paths with, one who wanted to harm them for the hell of it, because she was a bad person. And the crazy lady had to be a bad person if she’d made his father fall into the void.

  Grace never heard from Mara again, and Earl didn’t want to have anything to do with her, either—he didn’t even report her for assault. When Grace asked him why, he replied that she would be punished by a different kind of justice more fitting than any invented by man, and that he would rather just be grateful to her for pulling him out of the truck. If she hadn’t done it, he said, he would be a cloud of ash flying among the pine trees right now, and his wife would have to kill the stinkbugs all by herself each summer. Earl had already written two postcards to Simon by this time, demonstrating everything he could do with no hands. Grace had sent him a photo of the boy with his new eye not long ago, and Simon was eager to receive his response.

  Audrey spilled the milk when she poured it in her cup—maybe she wasn’t as calm as she seemed.

  “You’re going to do great, everyone’s going to love you,” Grace told her, certain of what she said. “It’s impossible for them not to love you. And who knows, you might meet your senior-year sweetheart today, the man in your life.”

  “Or the woman in my life. Mom, when are you going to ditch your heteropatriarchal ideas?”

  “All right, all right, the person in your life,” Grace corrected herself.

  “Much better.” Audrey cleaned up the spilled milk and finished filling the cup. “Person is the best word to describe one another: genderless, ageless, everything-less, just humanity and personality, which is what we all have in common.”

  “Mom, are you sure her classmates are going to love her if that’s how she talks?” Simon blurted out.

  Audrey was the first to laugh, and Grace and Simon joined her.

  They all fell silent at once when they heard a strange sound in the living roo
m. Or perhaps it had been on the rear porch. Simon was unconcerned, but Audrey and Grace exchanged worried looks, both of them ascribing the same terrible explanation to the noise. Grace was struck by a wave of anxiety, a carbon copy of the ones she experienced on the nights they heard noises in the house when Frank was still there.

  “Don’t move,” she ordered the kids.

  She took her cell phone from her robe pocket.

  She dialed 911 without making the call, listening to the silence in the house.

  “What is it, Mom?” Simon asked.

  She instructed him to be quiet with a finger on her lips.

  The next time the floor creaked, Grace tapped the green icon on the screen. She held it to her ear, ready to announce she had an intruder in her home. But before dispatch answered the call, there was a particular noise, like a whistle, that made Audrey hold a hand to her chest. Her features untwisted her worried expression to form another look closer to expectation. Then they heard a peculiar pitter-patter.

  “No way.”

  Audrey’s expectation was turning to joy. More whistles, which in reality were high-pitched whines, were audible along with the patter of scurrying feet approaching the kitchen. Two little snouts with whiskers appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s them!” Audrey yelled. “It’s Hope and Joy!” Her ferrets scampered into the kitchen and ran straight for her. They climbed her legs, the table’s legs, they jumped onto her chest. They sniffed their owner’s face as if covering her in kisses to celebrate their reunion.

  “You came back!”

  Audrey hugged the restless animals, which went around her neck, investigated her belly, stole cereal from Simon’s bowl.

  Moved by her daughter’s reaction, Grace paid no attention to the voice in her ear, asking her what her emergency was. It asked the question again just as, through the window, Grace saw a bush move near the backyard entrance.

  Mara had just been there.