—MY FACE WANTED TO KEEP CRYING, BUT IT RAN OUT OF WATER

                             Something

You are busy reading the water. 

It knows things it shouldn’t.  It is always running away from you, like Jane that day after a fight about nothing. 

You are a woman, a mother, a maybe-wife.

You watch the waves pucker and curl over gray, clammy-looking stones while wondering what Jane’s path was, what she was thinking.  You wonder if anyone ever really knows someone else.

The rush of water sounds urgent and threatening, a stampede of brackish-green, racing rippled and parallel with the unseen wind.

Trees on the other side of the river lean and bend into each other awkwardly, like geriatric square dancers, like scarecrows wearing stilts.  Their branches tremble and shake.  Pinecone bombs drop and skitter off boulders underneath.

It’s all a dance of nature, stunning and frightening.

You inhale air smelling of spruce and sap, hold your breath, keep it caged inside your box of lungs until it feels your bones will snap.  Then whoosh.  Hacking, a grape-sized nugget of phlegm flying out of your throat.

A stump floats by, headless and legless, but about the size of a body.  You question your eyesight, judgment, sanity.  You question your ability to live fully in the present, to truly cherish the things you love while you still have them.

The river has been dredged a record seven times, the expense for the last two covered by you.  Even so, the men used exasperated sighs and would not meet your eyes.  “Please stop asking questions.  If we find something, we find something, and we’ll let you know.”

Something. 

You don’t hear the car pull up shoreside, but you do feel Jane’s hand on your shoulder, a brush of skin, not a squeeze.  She seems a ghost, and more or less has been since it happened, rarely speaking a word.  Even the brief feel of her hand is colder than the river.

Jane takes a seat on the mash of dirt and pebbles beside you, though the ground is damp with tide foam.  She’s a gangly colt, all loose legs, getting too thin and gaunt.

She picks up a stone, checks its flatness as if for skipping, then tosses it back on the ground.  This is not a place for joy or pleasure, not even in the smallest dose.  

“I’m so sorry, Momma.”

She hasn’t called you that—Momma—in at least ten years.  Still, it doesn’t sound disingenuous.  Instead, there’s yearning and a wounded frailty in the word, the folksy title.  Momma, as in please, mend me.

“I miss him,” you say, short and clipped.

“I know.  I do, too.”

“He loves you,” you say, still unable to use past tense.

“He saved me.”

“Yes.”

This is where you need to turn and look at your daughter.  This is where forgiveness is supposed to come in and supersede despair.

But you’re not ready yet.  There’s all this water to study, the way it gallops and hurdles to wherever it is water goes when it’s tired and finished.   

You point to a middle section where an eagle totters on the end of a tree limb reaching out of the water.  The bird looks uncertain, yet fearless.  The sun glints off its beak and pupils.

You both watch rapt until the eagle spreads and lifts and flies away.