This is all I want for her: I want Jeanette to grow with the same strength, the same resilience, as that sunflower.
ALONE
As soon as school lets out for the summer, Dan and Jeanette board a plane to their father’s house. I have three months to myself, and nothing to occupy my time besides job searching and home improvements. That first night, alone in my father’s house, my house, the muggy hot day unravels into a breathless night. There’s the blink of fireflies in the yard and the rhythmic chirp of crickets.
I go around and in each room I turn on lights, place fans in the windows. In the master bedroom—Jeanette’s room now, since I figured she’d earned the extra space in this past year—I find her bed made, her teddy bear leaned against the pillows. She’s grown so much, she left her favorite stuffed animal at home for the summer.
Maybe I haven’t wrecked her after all.
I am constantly surprised by my kids’ ability to adapt. I worried this town would destroy them, like I’d completely failed when I had to move them back here. But they’re okay.
Jeanette didn’t run away to her room that day after the funeral, or get angry that I’d never told her. She didn’t pull away as if I were contagious. Instead, she shook her head and said, “I can’t even imagine.” And then she hugged me. My trauma is so far out of her experience that she can’t imagine it. For that, I am truly grateful.
I also take some pleasure in knowing my kids didn’t want to go to Greg’s this summer. Dan didn’t want to be apart from his girlfriend. An entire summer seems like a lifetime to him. He has no idea how short it really is—a lifetime, I mean. Three months is just a blip. When Linda moved into this place, I bet my father thought he had years, decades to go, that he was just starting another phase of his life.
Dan would go to his father’s only after Greg agreed to fly Kelli down to Charlotte to visit. Not that I think Deb will allow that. Still, it seems like something of a win that Dan and Jeanette both feel at home in this town, that they have connections here, unlike I did at their age.
In my bedroom, I take stock of River Bend, the roofs I grew so familiar with over the winter. They are transformed, stripped of snow, and their chimneys stand out dark and bare. There is a gap where Gilmer’s house used to be. They finally tore it down last week, the house, the crabapple tree. They’ve ripped the yard out, which makes me think someone has bought the property, is starting over from scratch.
In addition to his house, my father left me a small sum of money he had squirreled away. He was, above all, a thrifty man. Tomorrow I will begin searching for contractors: new pipes and, if there’s money left over, a new back porch. The rains in April flooded the basement, mostly, but there was some damage to the carpet, too. I hoped insurance would pay, but I’m still arguing with them. I’ll probably have to foot that bill myself. Then, too, the kitchen could use remodeling. For now, it’s enough just to air the place out.
I go to the kitchen, pour a glass of white wine, and sit on the back porch with my laptop. Before my father’s last stroke, he spent most mornings out here with a cup of coffee. I never joined him; I stayed in bed until I could hear him puttering around in the garage, because I didn’t want to be that close, that quiet, with him. Now it’s like he’s still kind of here. I visit a few Web pages, request some quotes on pipes. There are holes in the porch screens, and pretty soon the mosquitoes chase me back inside. After some preliminary pricing, I realize that the job will cost way more than I can afford, that the money my father left isn’t even close to what I would need. Unless I knew a handyman who could do it on the cheap. Which, of course, I do.
I need a better job, and so I carpet-bomb my résumé over every decent restaurant, country club, resort, and bed-and-breakfast within fifty miles. After an hour of filling out job applications, I feel really helpless, and go to the fridge for another glass of wine.
When I enter the kitchen, a mouse scurries across the floor, and it startles me so badly I drop my wineglass. Add hire an exterminator to the list of things I need to do with my inheritance. And maybe adopt a cat. After cleaning up the broken pieces, I go for another wineglass. Pushed toward the back of the cupboard is an old pink teacup, printed on the inside with flowers. It seems terribly out of place among my father’s dishes. I wonder whether this was Linda’s, if she forgot it here when she moved out. It’s so small, it seems like it could belong to a child. All of this stuff should be replaced with decent tableware. Still, this teacup is kind of sweet, pretty. So I pour my wine into it.
I’m about to leave the kitchen when there’s a knock at the back door. It’s eleven o’clock at night, and there’s a knock at the back door.
I know who’s there. I can picture him in the dark, swatting mosquitoes from his neck. Who knows how long he’s been knocking? I could have easily missed it with all these fans running. He knocks again and I’m frozen, standing in the kitchen with a teacup full of wine. A chill starts where my fingertips make contact with the cup and spreads up my arm, and I hear, or think I hear, him whisper my name, so quiet, like he must know I’m here, even though he can’t see me from the stoop.
And, for once, I can imagine a day when I won’t even want to open the door.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It takes a village to raise a book baby, and this book is no exception. I’d like to thank my thesis adviser, Alex Parsons, for his insight and artistry, and David Haynes, whose feedback proved invaluable. Also, Robert Boswell, whose prompts got me started on this whole thing. Big thanks to Dino Piacentini for his feedback, as well as his camaraderie during the long and grueling agent search, to Laura Jok for her keen eye and many reads as I filled in the vowels of this n(o)v(e)l, and to Talia Kollouri, David Messmer, Liz Davies, and Ashley Wurzbacher for their reads and feedback. Shout-out to my entire Kimbilio family for great conversations and insights, but especially my 2016 workshop group: Asali Solomon, Nana Nkweti, Donald Quist, Lakeisha Carr, and Ty Coleman. Of course, I got to thank my bae, J. P. Brandenburg, for putting up with me while I was moodily processing. Thank you, too, to Nancy Emmerich, for encouraging me at a time in my life when not a lot of people did. Much love and gratitude to Janet McFarland-Idema for her unending support, and Aliah Lavonne Jahan-Tigh for our many conversations on grief and trauma, and for all the ways she helps me make sense of other people. Thanks to Darlene Campos for her advice on querying, and Jason McFarland for all those hours on the phone talking about all the things that needed to be said. And to Lee Romer Kaplan for our bespoke writer’s retreat on the fly! And thank you to Andrea Morrison for her feedback, support, and an amazingly painless submission process. And, finally, a huge thank-you to Helen O’Hare for her fantastic editing, and to the rest of the team at Putnam.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeni McFarland holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Houston, where she was a fiction editor at Gulf Coast Magazine. She's an alum of Tin House, a 2016 Kimbilio Fellow, and has had short fiction published in Crack the Spine, Forge, and Spry, which nominated her for the storySouth Million Writers Award. She was also a finalist for the 2015 Gertrude Stein Writers Award in Fiction from the Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. She has lived in Michigan and the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two cats. The House of Deep Water is her first book.
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