An Incomplete Story.

He died – drowned, actually – in the lake at the bottom of the hill from our shitty house. The middle of June. The lawn was yellowed from dog piss, the flowers were weeds, and the front porch paint flaked off in sheets instead of flecks. Home.

He swam every single night that I knew him, waiting until I fell asleep to creep out from under the warm sheets. It sounds calm – like cold black water on hot skin and a big crescent moon reflecting on waves. It was a compulsion and he had to do it, he explained to me every time I circled his thin wrists with my fingers.

I tried to stay awake most nights, hoping my presence could save him. He sensed my reluctance to release him. His body would spoon against me, filling my blood with a thick potion of love and security to lull me into the oblivion of sleep. His strong shoulders were my payout for all those nights I woke to find him gone.

The first time he did it, and I awoke to find the house empty, my footsteps were heavy as I checked each room. When he returned, still wet, I cried into his chest, tears of abandonment and fear and something I couldn’t describe. The tangy scent of the water filled my nostrils. He stood motionless as I wrapped myself around him, feeling his flesh soften against my breath. Hands on the small of my back, strong. Solid.

After that I began to wake early, the house still in darkness, and lay in bed listening for his sounds before I’d open my eyes. The soft thud of a mug placed on a wooden table. The whisper of the newspaper page being turned with care not to wake me. Hearing nothing, I’d pretend that I could fall back asleep, but panic would shove me awake and I’d make my way to sit in the hard-backed wooden chair by the front door. Exhausted, but unable to ponder the sweet release of sleep. He’d find me there when he returned, eyes cast downward, knowing he had betrayed me in some way but unable to stop himself. Sometimes he’d be sitting, a bemused expression on his face, by the front window – a book in his hands. Already safe and sound.

That day in June he wasn’t waiting at the kitchen table with small licks of still-wet hair at the nape of his neck, and I paced with a bowl of cereal in my hands. Window to window. Door to window. Finally, when it came time to trade the cereal for a sandwich on a plate, I slopped the soggy cereal and milk into the sink and picked up the phone. He had been gone for at least seven hours when I called the police, and they drawled reluctantly that they’d check the beach.

I sat on the tile floor in the bathroom, resting my head sideways on the closed door, waiting to vomit. I remained motionless, the phone sitting on the floor between my circled thighs, watching the light through the window turn brighter and fade. The sky grew dark again before I heard another human voice, two men speaking softly on the porch. They found his scuffed, sole-worn, running shoes (house keys in the toes) lined up pointing toward the water.

A month later, a month after the police threw their hands up in defeat and told us that he must have died, I kicked our black lab. She weaved in and around my legs, and through my tears I saw relief. Her side sank in slightly where my toe pressed, and she yelped as she flattened her ears and lowered her tail. A true test of love: she didn’t leave my side. I filled my glass from the faucet, and sat in the kitchen, hunched over my toes.

The water was still filled with white bubbles of oxygen from the tap when it occurred to me that every drop of water I consumed, every drop that washed over me, had a part of him in it. As he lay under the water, as his body bloated and split and turned white and pale, little cells would wash away from him – the way the waves smooth down a jagged piece of glass. Every drop of water I touched had also touched him.

I held the water in my mouth – feeling it warm, tasting the chlorine – and could neither swallow it or spit it out. Could neither accept him nor betray. The clock ticked on the wall, the condensation dripped onto my bare feet and I sat there unmoving, unswallowing, filling with a panic I couldn’t quell. They never found his body. He escaped.