Drowning Ruth

  “Get in here,” Amanda said, pulling her hard, and Ruth fell forward into the boat, face first onto the seat. “Get up.”

  Ruth was frightened—the voice didn't sound like Amanda's. She obeyed, though, smoothing her sodden skirt over her knees, keeping her eyes on the water streaming from the hem of her dress around her feet.

  Amanda began to row. She didn't look at Ruth but kept her gaze on the island over the girl's shoulder. She clenched her teeth and pulled hard on the oars until the veins in her arms stood out like wires. They went farther and farther out into the lake, but Ruth did not look back.

  Finally Amanda stopped rowing. She lifted her oars to let them drip for a moment before tucking them inside the boat. Then she stood and took a step toward Ruth. The boat pitched wildly and she gripped the gunwales to steady herself. She stood still until the boat stopped rocking and then came toward Ruth again. “Stand up,” she said when she was close. “Up on the seat.”

  “No. What are you doing? I don't want to.”

  “On the seat, I said.”

  Slowly, Ruth pulled her feet onto the seat under her, and slowly, she straightened her knees. The boat rocked and she crouched, grabbing the gunwales.

  “Stand up, Ruth.”

  “But, Aunt Mandy!”

  “I have to teach you, Ruth!” Her voice was shrill, frantic. “Stand up!”

  Even more slowly than the first time, Ruth stood.

  “Turn around.”

  Ruth turned. Amanda stood behind her so close Ruth could feel her there without a touch. “I told you not to go to the water, Ruth.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “I told you, and you did it anyway. Can't I trust you, Ruth?”

  Ruth stood defiant. The sun glinted and sparked on the green water in diamonds and stars, flashes that dazzled her eyes. Do it, she thought. Go ahead. Do it.

  “If you come to the water, you have to learn to swim.”

  Amanda's push was hard, but not so hard that Ruth could not have kept her balance if she'd tried. But Ruth did not try. She flew out over the water, her shadow dark on the waves beneath her, and then at last she dropped.

  With a rush the water filled her ears and her eyes as it closed over her. It wrapped itself around her legs, around her arms, around her neck. It pulled her deeper and tried to hug her to its bosom. For an instant, she let it. For an instant, she sank.

  And then, with a jolt, she panicked. She thrashed, struggling against the softness that would not push back. She kicked and kicked and beat her arms, and finally she rose.

  Her head broke into the thin air and she gulped, swallowing a mouthful of water. She saw with relief that Amanda was right there, standing in the boat, looking down at the water, watching her.

  “I'm doing this for you, Ruth. I have to teach you to swim,” Amanda said again. Then she sat down and started to row toward the shore.

  Ruth's panic this time was mixed with confusion. “Stop!” she gasped, and water ran into her mouth again. She whipped her arms and legs in every direction. Her feet tangled in her dress. Her hands pounded against the water. But she knew it was all right. She could tell now that she'd be able to stay afloat for a moment or two, the time it would take for her aunt to fish her out.

  But Amanda didn't fish her out.

  “Come on, swim,” she yelled, holding the oars out of the water.

  The boat was only a few yards away. Ruth kicked and thrashed. She threw her arms in front of her, one and then the other, reaching for the boat. Somehow she began to move forward. The space of water between her and the boat got narrower and narrower until she could almost touch the stern. She held out her hand. She reached, waiting for Amanda to grab her, to rescue her, to pull her in, but Amanda dipped the oars back into the water, and the boat slid away.

  Amanda did this over and over again, allowing Ruth to get almost close enough to save herself and then rowing away. Ruth screamed and gulped the green-tasting water; she begged Amanda to stop, to save her, but Amanda only turned her head to get her bearings and to wipe her tears on the shoulder of her dress, and rowed on.

  When they were nearly to the shore, Ruth stopped screaming. She was too tired then, too cold. At last Amanda lifted the oars into the boat. She sat still until Ruth came alongside and then she smiled and held out her hand. Amanda reached down for Ruth but Ruth swam on.

  Somewhere on the other side of the boat a fish jumped. Ruth heard its body fall into the water with a heavy splash. Amanda heard it, too, and, startled, instinctively turned toward the sound. When Ruth saw Amanda turn away, she held her breath and went down. She ducked under water and came up behind the curtain of the willow.

  The waves sucked loud against the rocks and bits of sun fell between the leaves and squiggled on the water in bright splinters and specks. She sat on the lake bottom, her knees drawn up to her chin. Through the vines, she could see Amanda staring at the spot where she had been. She saw her face as if magnified, all disbelief and fear.

  Then Amanda lunged and threw herself sideways off the boat. One of the oars slipped in behind her. She was flailing then, diving, clawing the water, slapping the air. “Ruth!” she screamed. “Ruth, come back!” But Ruth gave no answer. She wished she could let Amanda save her, but it was too late. She was no longer drowning. At last she parted the willow vines and moved through the water, not gracefully like Imogene, but in a fury of splashing that nevertheless propelled her steadily forward. She kicked up a froth behind her, so all of them would see that she could swim.

  Chapter Eleven

  Amanda

  Mattie didn't say, “How could you?” as I would have. It wasn't her nature to do so, and I was almost sorry for that. It was hard having to shoulder the whole of it myself, the recriminations and the guilt. Sometimes I felt I could barely crawl forward under the weight of it.

  “Who is he?” Mattie dared to ask instead.

  The thought of him and what we'd done made the bile rise in my throat. “Never mind,” I told her. “I'll never see him again, if I can help it.”

  And if perhaps I'd hoped otherwise, if once or twice I'd longed for him to appear and pull me into his arms with a story that would somehow make everything all right, I knew as I said those words that it would never be so.

  Mathilda said very little to me for two days after that, but on the third night she stood in the doorway of my room, crying. “Poor Amanda. It must be so awful for you.”

  “It's my own fault. If I'd done right, this never would've happened.” But I cried then too. What were we going to do, this other one and I?

  Mattie got into the bed with me, and we slept together as we used to, when she was a baby and needed comforting.

  The next morning she told me that she had a plan. “We'll say we found it.”

  “Found it where?”

  “Oh, anywhere, it doesn't matter. Say some girl came to us. Yes, she knew you were a nurse, so she came to us for help. A poor hired girl. But it was a terrible birth. Yes, the worst you'd ever seen in all your years of nursing.”

  “Only three.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “It doesn't matter. It was a terrible birth and she bled and bled. And you did your best. You did everything mortally possible, but still, it was no use.” Her head drooped dramatically and tears caught on her lashes. “And there was no one else, no one at all to raise this poor little thing, so you brought it to me. Because you knew I would be good to it and raise it with my daughter just as if it were my own.”

  For a while I protested that I couldn't ask such a thing of her. I would find some other way, I insisted; I couldn't drag her into this. But hadn't I done so already? When I made her come to the island with me, hadn't I been hoping that somehow she would take care of me, the way I'd always taken care of her?

  The heaviness seemed to lift when I heard Mathilda's plan. Perhaps I hadn't spoiled our lives after all. I would be Aunt Mandy to this baby, as well as to Ruth. I would hold it on my lap and rock it to sleep. I would kiss
its soft head and teach it to count and keep it safe from all the world. And I would be safe too. No one would ever know what I had done.

  That night for the first time since we'd been on the island, I knelt with Ruthie and Mattie on the green rug beside Mathilda's bed and whispered along as they recited, “now I lay me down to sleep.” I couldn't sleep, however. I was too relieved. For the first time I felt excited at the prospect of this little one, who was rolling and kicking now inside me, as if he or she were excited too.

  “Mathilda will be your mama,” I whispered, stroking my firm, round belly, “but I will always love you.” And I did feel that now I would be able to love this restless being. “Go ahead,” I said. “Dance.”

  When I'd lain awake an hour or more, I woke Mathilda. “Let's take Ruthie for a swim.”

  While Mattie and Ruth splashed in the shallows, I swam far out into the lake. I floated on my back to let my baby rise like a pale little island out of the black water, and I smiled up at the milky white moon.

  Afterward I made us a feast—mashed potatoes and bacon and raspberries drenched in cream. Ruth fell asleep over her berries, but the eastern sky was pearly gray by the time Mattie and I crawled, exhausted, back into our beds.

  It had been a mistake, what she'd done with Ruth, pushing her in the water that way. Amanda tried to tell herself that at least the girl could swim, but she knew underneath that teaching Ruth to float hadn't been her purpose. What that purpose had been, she wasn't sure, which frightened her. She found herself glancing upward at odd moments. What would Mathilda think?

  She'd wanted to pull Ruth back to her; she knew that much. Ruth belonged to her, not to those boys, not even to Imogene.Amanda felt indignant even now, remembering the scene, the children's silly paddling, their shrill voices. She had to shake herself even now, three years later, to throw off the bitterness she'd felt. How could Ruth betray her for those others? She and Ruth were meant to brave the water together and emerge triumphant from the element that had taken everything from them. Instead, with a creeping sense of disquiet, Amanda felt that the lake might have stolen from her again. Since that afternoon Ruth, whom she'd once brought back to life, whom she'd lifted bleeding from the bottom of the stairs, whom the school had had to pry from her side, had been slipping through her fingers.

  Ruth was subtle about her escape mostly, only spending more time than she used to in the barn with her chores, taking longer to walk home from school, asking her father for advice when before it would have been Amanda, always Amanda. Someone else mightn't even have noticed the change, but Amanda did. She knew she oughtn't to respond, knew she should let the girl withdraw—eventually, she would turn back—but it was impossible. Almost against her will, Amanda found herself grasping for Ruth again and again, but every time her fingers closed they seemed to scratch, and the girl who'd once clung to her as if she were life itself shrank away.

  But it wouldn't go on forever, Amanda thought; it couldn't. And in the meantime Ruth had brought her Imogene.

  “Girls!” Amanda called from the bottom of the stairs, as she mopped her face with her sleeve. They'd promised to help her can tomatoes, and the water was boiling, the kitchen already hot.

  She liked calling them, liked the idea of the two of them asleep in her house together, as they should have been from the first. “Girls,” she called again, pushing a note of impatience into her voice. “You don't want to sleep the day away.”

  Still there was no answer. Amanda climbed the stairs and opened the door to Ruth's room. When Ruth was awake, her sixteen-year-old face, its baby roundness disappearing as its adult bones emerged, seemed almost an affront to Amanda, as if this development, too, were part of Ruth's efforts to transform herself into someone her aunt wouldn't recognize. Unconscious, however, curled tight, as she was now, she was still the little girl Amanda knew intimately. And here was precious Imogene, also looking younger than her years as she lay sprawled across the bed, one perfect foot hanging off the edge. Amanda cupped her hand around it.

  Who knows how odd her Ruth might have become if she'd been left to herself, shunned by those horrible children at the school? Instead, Imogene's approval had made her, if not popular, at least acceptable, and consequently she'd learned to care what others, besides Amanda, thought of her. She'd begun to curl her hair and smile just like any other girl. She even wanted a bob. Although Amanda missed the child, at once frightened and fierce, who'd seemed attached only to her, she knew this change was for the best, and she was grateful to the girl whose foot lay in her palm.

  “Wake up, Imogene,” Ruth said suddenly, lifting her head from her pillow and startling the girl so that she gasped and yanked her foot out of Amanda's fingers. “We're up,” Ruth said to Amanda. “You can go back downstairs.”

  But Amanda went into Carl's room and made the bed and then tidied her own room, listening to the girls chatter as they dressed. She was plumping pillows when she noticed Imogene standing in the doorway.

  “My mother usually does my hair for me,” the girl said. “Will you do it, please?” She held the brush out.

  Amanda sat on the bed and patted the space next to her. Her hand trembled as she took the brush, but steadied as she stroked Imogene's hair, lifted it in her fingers, smoothed it with her palm. She held a piece to her cheek and lowered her nose to the crown of the girl's head. But Imogene was getting restless. Too polite to say anything, she squirmed in her seat.

  “Shall I do it in braids,” Amanda said, “the way I used to do Ruth's mother's?”

  “Like in the picture?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Imogene nodded, satisfied.

  They'd been examining the picture on Ruth's dresser last night, asking Amanda to repeat the stories she'd told Ruth about Mathilda. It was a casual picture of the two sisters, sitting on the edge of the porch. Amanda remembered how her mother had stood in the yard with her head bowed over her new Brownie camera.

  “Look at me,” she'd said, and Amanda had obeyed, but Mattie had been distracted by something at the last second—a dog barking or a chicken fluttering its wings or just a flicker of light in the lilacs—who could know now? Their mother had thought the photo a failure because of Mathilda's inattention and had dropped it in the back of a scrapbook, not even bothering to mount the corners with black paper triangles.

  Carl had liked that picture, though. “That's just like her,” he'd said. “And a good likeness of you, Amanda,” he'd added kindly. He'd had the photo enlarged and gave it to Ruth in a pretty wooden frame for her twelfth birthday, the age Mathilda had been when the picture was taken, as near as Amanda could remember.

  “Where's Dad?” Ruth said when they were finally all in the kitchen. Carl was seldom where he was supposed to be lately, and his absences troubled her.

  Jealousy pricked Amanda and at the same moment she burned her fingers pulling a freshly sterilized jar from its boiling bath. “If you'd gotten up earlier to help, you would know,” she said crossly. “He went up to Slinger with Rudy to see about a new tractor.”

  Carl was irritable too. “Wasted a whole morning,” he complained when he and Rudy were driving home. He hadn't been sleeping at all lately, since closing his eyes only opened the curtain on a scene once dreamed, now unforgettable—Mathilda sinking through a dark abyss, her arms and legs twisting, a loop of hair drifting away from her face to reveal her mouth, either screaming or laughing, it was impossible to tell.

  “Well, what can you do?” Rudy agreed that the tractor hadn't been worth the price.

  “I just don't like to waste time is all. And we need a tractor.”

  But they couldn't afford a tractor, even if the farmer had accepted a reasonable offer. It'd been stupid to use the gas to drive up and see it. Weiss and some of the others had been talking about dumping milk right onto the Watertown Plank Road, not that Carl believed they'd actually do it, but they all might as well—prices were so low, it was costing more just to keep the cows fed than the milk brought in. Aman
da had, in fact, suggested he look for some work for the winter, when the farm, as she said, would pretty much run itself. She liked, Carl thought, to point out how little he mattered.

  But no—he shook his head, trying to make himself see the situation clearly—that wasn't fair anymore. After all, she was asking for his help. She'd started nursing again, assisting Dr. Karbler with deliveries and helping Hattie Jensen recover from her fall, and even Ruth had set up a stand at the intersection to sell vegetables and pies, minding her “store” after school. He ought to do his part, at least for Ruth's sake. But he couldn't. Not if it meant leaving, even for a few months. Not with Mathilda behind every tree and door teasing him to find her.

  He was thinking about the island house. About an hour ago, while frowning at the tractor's gunked-up engine, he'd remembered a space, a little pocket under a loose kitchen floorboard, where a teething ring of Ruth's had once hidden. It was a place he'd checked, but now he realized that he hadn't examined it carefully, at least he could picture without any effort at all a photograph or a letter slid in there on one edge, so that only if you knew at just what angle to look could you find it. When they got home, he would row out there, look from every angle.

  Rudy rested his elbow on the windowframe and gazed at the passing fields. When had Carl gotten like this, so impatient, so easily thrown off course? It was no use talking to him when he was acting like a horse with a burr under its saddle.

  The girls were sitting on the porch shucking corn when the men drove up. She was a nice friend for Ruth, that Imogene. Carl worried about Ruth being lonely, the only child on the farm. It would have been nice if he and Mattie had had another. He slammed the door of the truck behind him and went to the pump in the yard to wash up. The cool water made him feel better, and he threw some over his head, raking his fingers through his hair.

  “You girls having a good time?” he called across the yard. He went on without giving them a chance to answer, “Aunt Mandy inside?”