Like the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem, sometimes I tell a story of water. It may not be as vast as the mariner’s sea with fortunes and storms in equal measure, but it is just as full of torment and desolation, curses and mercies.
The fish pond is the center of my parents’ backyard, a natural refuge, an Eden-like garden delight and a playground for my then two year-old son, a wild boy running free. Circling the pond is a Buddha statue, a carved pelican and my grandmother’s garden girl sculpture which all seem now to be guardians of the pond.
The Koi fish swim deep, unseen mostly, but I saw them after in a quiet moment of unspeakable gratitude. After the sparing, after the shadow passed, after the reaper walked by and breathed on us all as he departed. After it all, I stood staring at the pond, at my son’s would be grave, at the murky, quiet undisturbed depths, a sheen glowed green and brown. The tangled net that held him lay ripped and snagged, torn apart by his father, to free and to save this miracle boy, this little fish, this wild Huckleberry boy of rivers, oceans, pools and ponds. This boy who was saved, spared, blissfully alive and crying and kicking swimming, all movement in his father’s grasp, all slimy fish and gills breathing somehow underwater.
Later that evening, I went to the pond and from the stillness after the chaos and in the afterglow of evening dying, in the quiet, a splash erupted as insistent as a voice, a call. I stared into the pond and the fish were at the surface slapping their fin bodies and moving their mouths for food, of course, but in my myth they spoke of what they saw, bearing witness under the water.
For they must have seen the will my boy had to live, the grasping hands seeking air and sky and other arms to hold him. The fish must have seen his strong legs and body twisting, fighting the weight of water, sinking depths. They must have seen the shadow of his cousin running, leaping, reaching, clinging and struggling to save my boy, my boy, my boy. They must have felt her fall in with all her effort and love holding him, lifting him, trying to untangle him. Until his father overtook them, scattering the fish, the lily pads, the algae and the slime, a force moving the pond, moving time, hands reaching and reaching, feeling the slippery boyfish caught, stuck in the netting that kept the birds out. They must have seen him slipping, slipping, slipping away while the seconds, minutes, hours ticked and ticked and ticked until his father ripped the netting and lifted the boy from the depths of the earth holding tight to life.
The fish swam on that evening. The stone and wood statues were quiet, mute with explanation. I walked away from the now tranquil scene, from the wise and knowing trees silent with reasons to tell me why we were spared. No one can tell how much time really passed, how long he was under water, why the splash made his cousin alert and wondering, looking once and looking again from the hammock hearing a splash but seeing nothing, laughing in the hammock, sorrow hovering so close to happiness. Only the trees bear full witness towering above it all, filtering the wind, sheltering the birds, watching the humans, the mistakes, the triumphs, pure chance, pure action.
I don’t know what my two year-old saw in the depths, but I know he felt his father’s hands sure and solid, of this world, holding him and lifting him out of the dark, out of the water.
In my more melancholy moments filled with strange, deep fears of mariners’ curses, I believe the water still waits for him and wants him. So, when my husband wants to go whitewater rafting in Colorado, a flash image of drowning Henry lights up inside me. I used to see the world with that rosy tint of optimism, with expectations of awe. Now I mostly imagine all the possibilities of our destruction.
So, I didn’t see my husband floating down the Colorado River with the sun on his face. Only our daughter, Emma, and a raft full of strangers saw him do a front flip off the raft into the Colorado then drift through the scenic route of the world with some kind of Rocky Mountain High. I stayed in the hotel feeling unwell and full of regret holding Henry too close in the early morning hours as Chris and Emma headed upriver.
Henry begged to go swimming in the hotel pool while we waited for their return, and I relented and he gloried in the triumph with a cannonball into the deep water followed by furious kicking and deeply held breath that propelled him to the shallow end. When he jumped I flinched, I gasped as I always do and tried to ignore the fleeting image of his head crashing into the cement as he leaned back unaware. I wonder if anyone else hears the thud of Henry’s head bouncing off the rock solid side of the pool. I know it’s not real, the endless tragedies playing on a loop in my paranoid brain. For Henry emerges from the water sleek and glistening as if covered in shiny scales.
We have no pictures or video of Chris and Emma whitewater rafting, only the gloating, gleeful story they told over and over as we drove out of Colorado. The highlights included Emma “riding the bull” at the front of the raft then landing in the lap of a stranger when the whitewater gushed over her. And the two of them learning to paddle through the rapids taking direction together and looking ahead for calm waters which came as they always do. And Emma shaking off her middle child syndrome in the afterglow of so much undivided attention. I see her in the backseat packaging this memory up in pretty ribbon and placing it on the top shelf. It will grow dusty as memories do, but it’s the one she will unwrap one day when her father is old.
As for me, my great and wonderful water memory will not be of Chris and Emma and what I missed out on that day on the mighty Colorado, it will always be of Henry and the pond.
My heart started beating so fast as I realized what had happened... beautifully written.