Chapter 9 - The Clear Water
The water at the Buffalo Canoe Club in Point Abino doesn't look like pool water.
It isn't that bright, chemical turquoise that comes out of a chlorinator, smelling of bleach and sunblock. Lake Erie water in late June has the deep, green-black color of antique bottle glass, cold enough at twelve feet to make your ribs ache, but soft and buoyant with the fresh, clean mineral weight of three thousand miles of northern shale.
It was eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning.
The annual midsummer regatta was in full swing, but the far end of the stone breakwater was deserted, shielded from the clubhouse lawn by a thick stand of cedar and wild sumac.
I was sitting on the flat limestone slabs with my legs dangling six inches above the surface, wearing a dark blue one-piece swimsuit and an old linen shirt unbuttoned over my shoulders.
My right arm was thirty-six weeks post-op.
The scars had faded from angry violet to thin, silver-white seams that looked like salt marks left by receding tide water. The muscle had come back—not the soft, symmetrical fullness of my left side, but a lean, functional hardness that let me carry four municipal ledgers from the archival vault to my desk without my clavicle complaining.
Behind me, the cedar branches rustled.
Sophia stepped out onto the rock, carrying a metal cooler in one hand and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips between her teeth. She was wearing cut-off denim shorts and an enormous straw hat that flapped in the southwest breeze like the ears of an elephant.
“Arthur is parked in the lower lot,” she said, dropping the cooler onto the limestone with a dull *clunk.*
I looked back. “Dad’s here?”
“He’s sitting on the tailgate of his Buick eating a ham sandwich,” Sophia said, pulling two cold cans of ginger beer from the ice. “He said to tell you he brought your grandfather’s brass transit level—the one from the Pan-American survey you asked for. He said it was in the attic behind your mother’s holiday wreaths.”
“Did he come inside the gates?”
“He said he didn't have the right shoes for the clubhouse terrace,” Sophia smiled, sitting down beside me and handing me a wet, dripping can. “Which is code for ‘Eleanor’s sister is having lunch at table four and he’d rather eat gravel than listen to her ask about the legal fees.’”
I took the can with my right hand.
I didn't think about it. I didn't position my elbow first. I didn't brace my shoulder with my left fingers. My hand simply reached out, closed around the cold aluminum, and brought it to my mouth.
The joint didn't click. It didn't burn. It just worked—an ordinary, unremarkable hinge of bone and muscle doing what it was made to do.
“Have you heard from her?” Sophia asked, looking out toward the lighthouse where the white sails of the lightning class were leaning hard against the fifteen-knot wind.
“Marcus saw her at the Wegmans in Amherst last week,” I said, resting the cold can on my bare knee. “She’s working for an interior design showroom on Transit Road. Selling Italian floor tile to suburban contractors.”
“Does she have the Audi?”
“A used Honda Civic,” I said, a small, quiet puff of laughter leaving my chest. “Dad told her he wasn't co-signing the lease renewal on the German car. He said if she wanted heated leather seats, she could buy them with her commission on marble baseboards.”
We sat in the sun for twenty minutes, listening to the rhythmic *slap-slap-slap* of the waves against the limestone and the distant crack of the starter’s pistol from the race committee boat half a mile out.
The last year had been long. It had been slow, filled with the dull, repetitive labor of lifting yellow rubber bands, filling out insurance appeals with my left hand, and learning how to sit in an empty apartment without waiting for the other shoe to drop through the ceiling.
My mother had sent two letters.
The first, in November, had been six pages of single-spaced, handwritten indignation about “family loyalty” and the “tragedy of unforgiving hearts.”
The second, in April, had been three lines on an Easter card: *The garden looks nice this year. The peonies are early. I hope your shoulder is behaving itself.*
I hadn't answered either of them.
Not out of vengeance. Not because I wanted her to suffer in that big, silent house under the eaves where the radiators clanked in the empty rooms.
I didn't answer because there was nothing to say to someone who looked at a broken bone and saw only an inconvenient stain on the wedding linen.
I stood up.
The limestone was warm against the soles of my bare feet. I shrugged out of the linen shirt, letting it fall onto the rocks beside Sophia’s straw hat.
“What are you doing?” Sophia asked, shading her eyes with one hand.
“Dr. Vance released me for full impact last Thursday,” I said.
“Tessa, that water is sixty-two degrees. It’s Lake Erie, not the YMCA pool.”
“I know,” I said.
I walked to the edge of the limestone ledge.
The drop was six feet. Below, the water was so clear you could see the round, smooth river stones on the bottom, ten feet down, green with moss and shifting slowly with the surge.
A year ago, I had stood by a body of water with my feet braced, terrified that someone’s hand would touch my back. I had spent thirty-four years making myself small, making myself soft, waiting for the shove that would send me over the edge so everyone else could laugh at the splash.
I didn't look behind me.
I didn't check to see who was watching from the terrace.
I bent my knees, lowered my center of gravity, and reached both arms out in front of me—straight, symmetrical, and strong.
I leaped.
For a second, there was only the blue sky, the sound of the wind through the hemlocks, and the weightless, floating certainty of a body that had learned how to fall without breaking.
Then came the impact—cold, sharp, and clean.
The water took me in, green and silent, rushing over my ears, through my hair, and pressing hard against the silver scars on my right arm.
I didn't flail. I didn't twist.
I pulled with both arms together—long, powerful, even strokes that drove me down through the cold layer and then swung me smoothly around toward the sun.
When I broke the surface, I didn't cough.
I took a deep, full breath of the northern air, shook the water from my eyes, and looked back at the shore.
May you like
Sophia was standing on the ledge, waving her ridiculous straw hat in the air, her laughter carrying bright and clean across the rocks. On the distant lawn, the regatta sails were turning toward the open lake, white and free against the horizon.
I rolled onto my back, spread both arms wide against the surface of the green water, and let the current carry me wherever it wanted to go.
