by CJ Hauser
The point is to see your father in the rain, Ingrid said. The light in the room was weak and gray and the whole day made Elsa feel as if everything were intangible and sad and crushing her under its dogpile fatness.
He hates me, Elsa said.
Oh, he doesn’t really, Ingrid said. Your father says he hates all sorts of things, but he never cares enough about the feeling to hang on to it for long.
You realize that makes him sound like an idiot, right?
Ingrid turned to page fifteen of Anna Karenina. Let’s be kind, she said. He’s a savant.
It’s been five years.
You might consider the fact that you were the one who behaved so badly. It’s him who should be in a bad mood about seeing you.
How can you say that? You’re supposed to be on my side.
Because I love you, and no one else is brave enough to talk to you properly. You’re a rather frightening young woman.
I’m twenty-five years old and I live with my mother. I teach second grade.
A suspicious cover story, Ingrid said.
There was knocking at the door. Elsa pressed herself deeper into the couch. She was afraid of seeing him, but more than that, she’d spent the past five years trying not to think about what she’d done and avoiding the thought that she might be a kind of monster person. A person who, in the face of her father and the knowledge he carried, it was impossible to deny she might be.
They went to the door. Ingrid opened it, Elsa standing behind her mother.
Ian was wet, but it wasn’t raining. He held a dripping umbrella.
Caught in the neighbor’s sprinkler. Hullo, Ingrid.
Hullo, Ian.
I won’t keep her out too late, Ian said, as if Elsa were not grown.
Even though she had known for five years that Ian was not her biological father, Elsa could not quit the old habit of seeing her own face in his. Ian had always said she looked like her mother, Scandinavian genes running strong, but Elsa had only ever seen Ian.
Hullo, Elsa, Ian said.
He smiled. Such an effort to smile.
In that moment Elsa knew Ian was committed to pretending that everything was fine, just dandy, and that they would not talk about the past or Nolan or what had happened five years ago, after all. She hated him for that.
* * *
——————·
Ian had told Elsa the history of the place a hundred times. But on the car ride there, he told her again. She let him, because this was safer than talking about anything else.
Eight thousand years ago, nomadic tribes hunted bison and moose near the unnamed headwaters with flint-tipped spears. Eight hundred years ago, Woodland people created burial mounds near the shores. After that, there were the Dakota and the Ojibwe. After that, French fur traders.
It was only after all this that the headwaters were “discovered” by American geographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in 1832. Schoolcraft’s wife was part Ojibwe, and he wanted to give the place an “Indian name.” He spoke no Ojibwe, so he made one up. Schoolcraft combined the Latin words veritas, for “truth,” and caput, for “head,” and the lake and source of the river was named Itasca.
* * *
——————·
Elsa and Ian hiked the path to the headwaters, because while there were scattered ruins and other inlets, the little pool was the only true reason to come to Itasca.
There were very few people in the park. The threat of rain had kept them away. So they were alone on the trail, but once the history lesson had run dry, they did not speak. It seemed impossible that Elsa should speak. She needed to be forgiven to speak, and so she had to wait until that came. Ian was meant to start them off, she felt, but he wasn’t making any signs of taking the lead.
They walked the path: crumbly pale sand, and rocks that got in shoes, and pine needles. Soon, Ian outpaced her, and she was lagging behind, which was embarrassing.
Elsa was out of shape, heavier than she’d ever been before in her life, and she wondered if Ian noticed and was disgusted by her, as she was disgusted by herself. She was fascinated and horrified by the new heaviness in her hips. The soft bulge of her belly and the way it formed a ridge above the waistband of her jeans. Even her fingers, Elsa swore, looked larger. The silver ring she wore on her thumb seemed tighter lately, her finger bursting around it, like tree flesh grown around an impediment. Elsa twisted the ring until it hurt. She suddenly needed Ian to speak to her so badly she could not stand it. She felt that she would die if she did not know, one way or another, if he still cared at all, and so she scurried farther ahead to catch up with him on the dusty slope, and she grabbed Ian’s hand in hers and continued marching determinedly fast alongside him, keeping pace.
Ian stopped and looked down at their linked hands, searching for an explanation. He looked at his twenty-five-year-old daughter confusedly and did not understand what she needed at all.
Are you okay? he said.
It was mortifying. And she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. So Elsa snatched her hand away. Elsa ran.
It was exactly as she’d feared. That the moment she felt safe and expressed her love, however small, he’d pulled away and she’d seemed foolish. And this was how she knew she’d been right, he still thought of her as a monster, a thing no one could love. Elsa knew all this. Knew better. Knew this every day. She had just forgotten for a moment how thoroughly she had ruined things.
It was the third rail of Elsa’s mind, and she had spent the past five years desperately training herself not to touch it.
She slipped up sometimes—thought of her father, which led to thinking about why she had not seen her father, which was because he was not her father at all, which led to thinking about Nolan—and just like that, Elsa might find herself crouching down on the school playground, unable to breathe, or shaking so hard in the quiet of her truck she had to pull over, or scratching at her own wrists so she left long marks along their pale undersides, clawing so she would feel anything other than the sickness of a remembering that chattered at her: Why had she done it why had she done it why had she done it?
She’d done it because they had lied to her, all three parents, for years. They were so intent on everyone getting along, on making things pleasant, that they had perpetrated this generational conspiracy to hide from Elsa who she really was. She’d only found out because she’d donated blood at a college drive, bragging to her friends how she didn’t faint at the sight of the needle, but when they’d given her the donor sticker, NEGATIVE O HERO!, she’d been sick after all. Ingrid was A and Ian was AB, so how the fuck was Elsa O?
She’d driven straight home to Potato Lake, and when she came screaming into the house, she’d found Ingrid still in her scrubs, eating a tomato omelet. Ingrid sighed and told her the story, which had the nightmarish quality of being so strange it could only have been the truth. In this moment, everything Elsa had feared since Ian left them when she was six, the thing she’d exhausted herself worrying over for years, had arrived. It was finally true: she was losing her father.
He’s still your father, everyone kept saying. I’m still your father.
She’d done it because Elsa didn’t trust that. There was no more biological safety net. He would not stay with her no matter what, the way a real father would. There was no reason for him to love her at all unless she was very good, and Elsa knew she was not very good, so it was only a matter of time before she would lose him. The unconditional had been made conditional and she could not bear it.
How bad a thing could she do and still have him stay? If Elsa could stake out the outer limits of how wrong she could be, and still have Ian love her, maybe then she could stay safely within those boundaries. What were the conditions of Ian’s love?
Maybe she’d done it because Nolan had grown so tall and had seemed, for a moment, like a stranger. Or because they hardly eve
r saw each other and so he was a stranger in all the ways except the one that mattered. Maybe she did it because he had baked her that stupid hopeful coconut cake.
Or maybe Elsa had sensed ruin coming for the Greys and wanted to get it over with quickly. If she was the one doing the ruining, yes, everyone would be angry and hurt, but at least Elsa would have chosen it. She hadn’t chosen anything at all, it turned out, the whole twenty years they had been lying to her. This choice would be hers.
But she had gone too far.
Because even so many years later, Ian had looked at her hand in his like it was an impossible thing. So Elsa ran and ran until she reached the headwaters, and when she got there she was gasping, beyond out-of-breath. She tried to breathe more slowly. She could not be like this when Ian caught up with her.
Surely he was running, even now, about to catch up? She didn’t see him.
Water flooded the plain of flat, tannish rocks in the bed. It pooled in places where the rocks were heaped up. The headwaters were absolutely clear. It looked like nothing. But it was something. And there was a message to remind you. A tree, hacked into a signpost. The trunk was carved and painted with yellow lettering that read:
HERE 1475 FT
ABOVE
THE OCEAN
THE MIGHTY
MISSISSIPPI
BEGINS
TO FLOW
ON ITS
WINDING WAY
2552 MILES
TO THE
GULF OF
MEXICO
Elsa leaned against the signpost and heaved, desperate for breath and hating herself totally.
When Ian appeared around the bend in the trail, Elsa saw that he was walking—ambling along in his green pants and stupid white sneakers—that he had not sped up at all to catch her.
Ian walked until he was standing next to her at the mouth. He did not look at Elsa’s ugly red face. He bent down and started unlacing his shoes. He peeled off white sport socks, revealing his pale feet with the clean, rounded nails. He balled up his socks and put them into his shoes. Then he rolled up his pants. All the while, Elsa’s chest heaved.
Ian rose and walked into the water. It must have been cold, but he didn’t wince. He just looked around and nodded, as if satisfied by the arrangement of life available to them. The water coursed around his ankles. He held out his hand. He waited, Elsa on the bank.
(Sometimes Elsa thought of that day and how she did not let Ian pull her from the shore. Sometimes she told herself that if she had taken his hand again, if they had gone into the headwaters, maybe years later neither of them would have wound up choking on the Gulf.)
Leap’s Island
Elsa stumbled over divots in the sand, the backs of her legs burning as she trekked across the beach. There was light coming through the waxy blur of the shack windows, she carried a Coleman lantern, and then there was the moon to see by. The strap of her bathing suit was tangled and she pulled at it, trying to make it lay straight.
Elsa stepped in a hole. Her foot came away wet. She had crushed a clutch of turtle eggs and a mucusy strand hung from her foot. She rubbed it clean with a handful of sand. There were turtles along the shore, flippering, making more divots, filling them with more slick ping-pong eggs. Elsa’s chest felt tight. She wheezed.
She found it hard to breathe when she was made to think about things she’d done wrong. And she had done something wrong. He had been fourteen, and she had been twenty. It was awful, because twenty was so much older than fourteen. And it was awful, because twenty was still so young. Because, from the very first day, when she left him in that hole, she should have taken better care of Nolan, but also her fucking parents should have taken better care of her. It had happened the week Ingrid admitted that Ian was not Elsa’s father. That they had lied to her for twenty years. Back then, Elsa could barely hold herself together. She’d been exploding and collapsing in on herself like a goddamn dying star.
Why hadn’t anyone helped her?
Elsa approached the tide line. She set down her lantern and waded in.
The water was blood-warm. The fucking South. Everything ran hot and bodily. It wasn’t good for her. She needed Potato Lake, which smelled green and reassured her of who she was. She needed the Minnesota freeze.
Elsa waded deeper into the warmth. How did a person drown himself? The water was black and reflected the lantern light from the shore in garbled spots. Elsa could not see her feet, and she thought maybe it was like disappearing yourself. A magic trick. She waded ahead. The small push and pull of the current urging her to go one way and then the other. You didn’t swim to kill yourself, did you? Probably, you walked. Or carried something in your pockets. But Ian had been naked, only as heavy as his own self.
She imagined Ian carrying a great invisible something wide in his arms, rambling along the ocean bottom, walking through a forest of kelp, until he’d found a spot so deep he could put his burden down. She could do that.
Back then, what had wrecked her most was the fact that Ian had known she wasn’t his since he’d left when she was six. That this was why he’d left, and that all that time afterward he’d only been pretending he was still her father, when he knew full well there was nothing of him in her at all.
The water came up to the small of Elsa’s back. She slogged deeper. It came to between her shoulder blades.
When she’d first heard Ian was dead, she’d imagined violent southern riptides. Hot-weather storms. She had not imagined the Gulf. The water lapped quietly.
He would’ve had to swim through this bathwater until he’d exhausted himself. Elsa started to paddle. He must have worked to drown himself.
Elsa stroked. She swam a long time. She was a good swimmer. Was Ian? How long had he paddled before the water took him? Back on land, the lights in the shack went out. Elsa treaded water. The moon was bright, but the new darkness Nolan had created spooked her. She was very far out now.
She paddled back a bit, too fast, and then had to stop to catch her breath. She was still very far away.
Why hadn’t anyone helped her?
Elsa laughed, choked on water. Spat it up again.
Elsa had always told herself she’d lost Ian once he’d found out she wasn’t biologically his. But she hadn’t—Nolan was right. She hadn’t even lost him yet when they’d walked in Itasca and he’d tried to pull her into the headwaters. Even after everything, Ian had held his love out to her again and again, and every time, she’d refused to take it. Because it wasn’t perfect. Because she couldn’t tell the difference between unconditional and infallible. Because she wanted back the illusion of her childhood, that era of certainty, and if she couldn’t have that, she would take nothing.
It was too late now. She dunked and choked again.
She was too far away.
She had only wanted to know what it felt like. Not to do it, really. She was so sure Ian had drowned on purpose, but looking back at the distant shoreline, she supposed she’d now proved that it could have been an accident. Maybe he’d come out this far not really meaning to do it, just curious about what it would take. She laughed. She was so stupid. She floated on her back. This was what they told the children of Potato Lake to do if they got tired while swimming. The dead man’s float. Elsa floated like Ian. She saw Orion and Cassiopeia. She saw the moon. She did not see Mars, but she knew it was there.
Then she smelled boat diesel. A waft of it over the water and the sound of a motor. Someone was coming toward her. Someone would save her.
She treaded water as the lights of the boat got nearer. Her legs grew rubbery. The engine got louder. She was alone and half naked off the coast of an island full of quacks. Whoever it was might do something horrible to her. Was that better or worse than being left to drown? The diesel was thick, and she coughed. Fine, she thought, let the boatman come.
&n
bsp; But then there was music. As the boat neared, she heard the distinct beat of a dance song everyone was playing that summer.
Hello? Do you need help? came a voice from the boat. The song went away.
No! she shouted, suddenly afraid. Go away! She tried to swim, but her legs cramped and she dunked under. Came up again.
I don’t need help, Elsa said again.
Elsa Grey? he said.
The boat drew near, and in the lantern light she could make out a case of beer on the bench. A radio. And Mitchell Townes.
Mitchell? Elsa said. She was out of breath. She dunked under again. She could not keep treading much longer.
He reached over and grabbed her elbow. I’m going to heave you up, alright? he asked. As if, without her permission, he would let her drown. Would be too polite to keep her from doing it.
Fucking help me, Elsa said.
She kicked as Mitchell grabbed her under the armpits and hoisted her into the boat.
She scrambled up and sat on the bench. She panted, dripping water into the boat. She pulled her bathing suit straight. Mitchell was close, and she could feel his breath, which smelled like beer. Could tell by the way he was looking at her that he was at least a little drunk.
Elsa hugged her arms across her chest. Suddenly she was cold. Mitchell took a blanket from beneath the bench and handed it to her.
What are you doing out here? he said.
I was drowning myself. Experimentally, she said. But I didn’t factor in all the variables and I almost actually did it.
She’d tried to jettison her whole self into the sea, and the sea had taken her too seriously. Elsa could now see how distant the shore was. It seemed impossibly far, one girl’s body across all that way, and it was just pure luck that Mitchell had come along.
You could be sad and also die the wrong way. You could be sad but not be dead because you were sad. Shivering in Mitchell’s boat, she saw this. So maybe Ian’s death was a kind of unforced error. Maybe thinking that she and Nolan had supplied Ian with the force to kill himself was straight-up millennial narcissism.