Songs from the River

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I was the first to notice the water pooling in front of the staircase. I looked up, but didn’t see any watermarks, no sign of a drip from the high ceiling. I soaked up the water with towels and buffed the floor with lemon-scented wood polish. But the puddle was back the next day. I told my husband Henry when he got home from work. The puddle wasn’t there when we checked though, only the innocent floor and the faintest smell of lemon.

“Sara,” he called the next morning.

I hurried from the bath, pulling my robe tighter around my waist, which was still only slightly rounded. I was hardly showing yet.

He stood at the top of the stairs, watching a steady stream of water as it dripped from step to step. It joined our puddle at the foot of the stair.

Although it pained him to do so (Henry considered himself a handyman), he called a plumber who diagnosed a leak in the main waterline and promised he could have it fixed in less than a day. “There you go,” he said as he packed up the last of his tools. “Should be good as new.” When we called him back a week later, he stared at the water cascading down our stairs and shrugged. He recommended something that cost more than the used mini-van Henry had just purchased so we thanked him for his time. Besides, the sound of water dripping down the stairs was kind of soothing. Like one of those white noise machines that played forest or jungle sounds. I needed all the help I could get. At night I was having trouble sleeping, plagued by dreams that were dark and red and terrible. My legs hurt and my back, but I didn’t want to worry Henry so I said nothing, telling myself the pain was good, a sign that the little one, our first, was growing.

Then the night came where the red pulse of my nightmare joined the pain and I screamed my husband’s name. By this time, the trickle had become a gush, a river flowing right through our house.

By the time the paramedics came, stepping over the silver ribbon of water running through the bedroom door, it was too late. I refused to go to the hospital, turned my face to the spider branches of oak outside my window.  Henry dipped a corner of the bloody sheet into the stream by the bed and wiped my face.

We bought the house nearly a year before the water came. We were young, newly married, and we wanted to start a family. A home, I believed, should hold all our dreams. We had been to see many houses, but had seen nothing that said this is It. From the outside, the house was nothing special, just a simple farmhouse style with a pitched roof and narrow rocking chair porch. But that day, after the real estate agent unlocked the door, after we walked through empty rooms with planked wood floors and over-large windows, we knew. Also, we agreed that we liked the neighborhood, its neat lawns and quiet green shade and rows of trees standing guard over the street. We imagined dinner parties with other smart young couples, and Henry tending the lawn, me preparing meals in the kitchen.

We imagined children.

We bought the house, then, and furnished it with cast-offs from our parents’ attics. We painted each room a different color: rose red in the front room, turquoise in the dining room, and yellows and pinks for the rooms that would house our children.

We were future-full and happy. We joked that we were two pieces of the same puzzle; Henry tall and blonde with fair skin that flushed with every strong emotion, and me who scarcely came up to his shoulder, my small neat hands that I took pride in.

Months passed, a year; we were no longer newlyweds. We settled in, made the house our home.

We learned to live with the river; we undertook measures to protect our home. We built temporary dams so that we could waterproof the hardwood floors. We tiled the bottom half of the walls and moved electrical sockets to above waist-level.

In those years the water ran clear. On bright days, the river tossed spangles of sun through the motes dancing in front of the window in the rose-colored living room. At night, the river music lulled us to sleep. The smell, at times, was of green and earth and life beneath the surface. I took pride in keeping all the surfaces in our home immaculate.

The second time we took every precaution. Despite the obstetrician’s assurance that I could continue to live life at my normal pace, I spent most of my time in bed. Gestating. I listened to music that was panpipes and ancient drumbeats; I hung sheaves of dried sage above my bed. I stopped highlighting my hair and let it return to its natural dark brown. I banned negative thoughts from my brain and refused to let Henry watch the nightly news while lying in bed next to me. I ate organic and drank only spring water from a certified spring located in the Alps.

No coffee or wine. No sex.

“Honey,” I said one night after I had woken from another red dream, but the river sound was loud and drowned out my voice. “Henry.” I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t wake, scarcely moved. I rolled over onto my back and tried to sleep. Everything would be better in the daylight, I told myself, although deep inside my lower belly I felt something clench and spasm. The pain was so loud that I couldn’t believe Henry didn’t hear it, didn’t feel it as it clawed its way out of my abdomen and through the smooth skin of his back. I was tears and blood and flowing water. Finally, when morning grayed the sky, the pain stopped. A bird chirped loudly outside the window and Henry rolled over, threw his arm across my chest. The sound of the river seemed softer now in the murmuring light.

I bathed and dressed and put on make-up. While Henry was in the shower, I stripped the bed, bundled up the sheets, put them in a plastic bag and placed them in the trashcan by the shed. I took down the sage and put it down the garbage disposal. When Henry came into the kitchen, blond hair still damp from the bath, the morning news was on the TV. He sat at the table and I poured us each a cup of coffee.

“The river is running strong,” I said.

Henry didn’t answer. He looked at me, then out the window. Was he crying? I couldn’t be sure. I washed out the cups, dried them, and put them away. Then it was time for him to go to work.

“Sara,” he said.

He put his arms around me. I let him hold me, stroke my hair, and rub my back with his large strong hands while I arranged a smile on my face. “Please talk to me,” he said, but my smile barred the way.

“I’ll call the doctor as soon as the office opens,” I said.

“I’ll go with you.”

I shook my head. I was angry that he could look so hurt when I was the one who had suffered. “I’m fine,” I said.

I could see he didn’t believe me, but he was running late so he kissed me goodbye. He paused at the back door and I flapped my hands at him: leave already; I’m okay.  He left.

In the early years, we had visitors. My parents would visit from upstate or Henry’s mother would stop by to bring us casseroles, scented candles, or bread from her local bakery. We often invited Burton and Clarissa, our neighbors who lived across the street, over for cocktails and conversation. In the summer, Henry and I’d open all the windows; serve fruity drinks, interesting dips and complex h’ordeuvres made with ingredients like capers and chives. They, the neighbors, had one – then two children – and they, the children, delighted in playing in the stream while the adults drank and ate and talked. The children made boats out of twigs and old rags and had races to see whose boat could make it past the kitchen without capsizing. They made rudimentary fishing poles and caught pretend fish, which their mother gently urged them to throw back. After a while the children grew, preferred their friends to twig ships. We found reasons not to invite our neighbors over. We were busy; I was laid up in bed once again. They were busy, too, with baseball games and karate tournaments. Birthday parties.

Henry worked more, often arriving home after I was already in bed. I worked too, part-time at the library checking in books and stocking shelves. Once I had dreamed of being a teacher – kindergarten or first grade – but the thought of children was an ache in the center of my skull. I preferred the books and quiet of the library where I could retreat deep into biographies or the reference section during Tuesday morning story hour.

We lived a quiet life, Henry and I. I took up painting. I set up a little studio in the yellow room and painted watercolors of barren landscapes. Henry was promoted, then promoted again. The river was beside the point now. Something that we lived with like the creaky floorboards or the warped bottom step leading to the backyard.

Time passed and the moving water picked up clots of dust, lost buttons, scraps of food. In some places, the river was the color of blood from the rusted nails in the floor. The floor itself sagged and buckled; pieces of it splintered off and floated on the surface of the stream. Now the house smelled musty, mildew and wet wood. The house is giving itself to the river, I wanted to tell Henry, but didn’t. Sometimes I lay down beside the river and wept. I didn’t tell Henry about that either.

I wondered what Henry didn’t tell me.

The third time was an accident. Married for almost seventeen years, we had stopped trying. The truth was, we hardly ever turned to each other anymore in the wide bed beside the river. But the day the dead rat floated by as I prepared burgers in the kitchen, I sat down in one of the chairs and put my head in my hands. That’s how Henry found me when he came home from work. He put his briefcase on the table and took me in his arms.

“What is it, honey?” he asked and in his voice was our separate worlds of pain and loss.

That night we made love. Although the river flowing through our room sang a low muttering song, for a brief time we found our way back to each other. Henry held me in his arms under blankets piled high against the damp. Two weeks later I knew I was pregnant. This time I let the secret grow inside of me. I continued to work at the library and paint my watercolors in the little yellow room. If Henry noticed anything different, he never said a word.

At the same time, the river turned a bilious color. It no longer meandered and burbled; it surged. The widening stream tore up chunks of floorboard. The smell…the smell was of life turning the final bend. Henry bought waterproof laminate and pounded it into place, but laughingly, the river spit it back.

When I wasn’t painting, I slept, heavy dreamless sleep that felt like a light switching off.

It was late December. The house was dank and cold no matter how high we turned the thermostat. Henry and I layered on sweaters and drank tea laced with brandy. We moved through the house, stepping over and across the river, scarcely speaking to each other. Then, on the last night of the year, Henry asked me to sit with him in the rose-colored living room. He had built a fire in the fireplace that did little to dispel the chill. “We have to leave,” Henry said, taking my hands and pulling me down beside him on the sofa. He said it again louder above the roar of the river. But I only smiled at him, cradling the secret growing inside of me. He put his hands on my shoulders and shook me. “Don’t you see what’s happening, Sara? We have to get out of here. We can go to my mother’s. This is dangerous.” I noticed the skin of his hands was thin now with blue veins that showed through the skin. Little rivers, I thought to myself.

He packed our bags, piled them up on the front porch (careful to keep them in a dry spot) and turned to me. “Sara?”

The expression on his face. But I stood in the entranceway to the livingroom and shook my head. The river flowed over my feet; it tugged at me. I held tight to the doorjamb so I wouldn’t get pulled along.

“Sara.” This time it wasn’t a request. “If you don’t come now, I’m leaving. I don’t want to, but this is insanity.”

When I didn’t move, he turned to go.

“Henry,” I said and he stopped. He turned. “I’m pregnant.”

And he looked from my eyes to the six-month bulge of my belly and saw the truth of what I said.

I smiled and held out my hand. He sobbed and came to me, pulled me into his arms. The unborn turned over between us while Henry held me tight against the implacable river. We held each other.

A river runs through my house. Its origins are mysterious, but we think the source is inside the north-facing attic wall, the one with the watermark that looks like McKinley. It starts out as a slip of stream meandering down the attic stairs.  By the time it gets to the hallway outside the bedrooms, it is a brook, a full fledged one with burbles. It flows through the master bedroom, takes a detour through the half bath by the landing, then cascades down the stairs, around the bend into the living room, through the kitchen, and then finally slides under the back door, down the steps, where it disappears in the haphazardly tended back lawn. Evenings, I kneel by my husband’s feet. I pull off his shoes and peel off his socks. I bathe his feet in the river that runs next to our bed and he sighs with pleasure and relief. Then I dry each foot with a clean white towel, careful to get between each toe. He slides his feet into the warm slippers I hold like an offering. He stands, then kisses me, his lips rest against my skin for the briefest butterfly moment before we make our way down the hallway to the little yellow room.