The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  As we paddle farther upstream I realize that the tranquil effect of the stream has not been left to nature or chance. The trees that line the banks, trailing their long branches in the water like girls bending over the stream to wash their hair, have been planted there and so have the sedges and reeds, cattails and rushes that fringe the shore. I catch a glimpse of a pale figure crouched beneath a weeping willow and nearly cry out before realizing it’s a marble statue half submerged in the water and covered in moss and creeping ivy.

  “Do you see that one?” Bea calls, backpaddling her kayak to stop opposite the statue. I come up beside her and peer into the deep gloom of the willow’s shade. The marble boy is perched on a stone ledge that might have once been on the edge of the bank but is now under a foot of water. His lips just touch the surface of the water, but it must have looked once as if he were staring at his own reflection instead of lowering himself to drink. He’s surrounded by yellow daffodils.

  “Narcissus,” I say to Bea. “Look—” I use my paddle to point at another statue sitting a little farther along the bank—a slim girl sitting on a crumpled bit of stone wall, up to her waist in water. Her head is turned toward the self-absorbed boy, an expression of longing in what remains of her ruined face.

  “That’s Echo, right?” Bea asks. “She loved Narcissus.”

  “That’s right,” I tell Bea, glad that she’s remembered at least a little of the mythological tales I used to read her at bedtime. “But he only loved himself.”

  “She should have gotten over him,” Bea says, dipping her paddle into the water to push her boat away from the bank. “No boy’s worth that grief.”

  “You can say that again.” I push off from the bank and end up in front of Bea this time, and even though I prefer to have her in front I paddle on ahead of her. I figure that if my fifteen-year-old can show such good sense about romantic entanglement I can summon up a little practical bravery.

  As we go upstream the creek becomes narrower and darker. The light-limbed willows cede to the dense foliage of weeping beeches. Several times I’m startled by fragments of statuary submerged just beneath the surface. An arm curving out of the water, like a swimmer in midstroke, the crested head of a sea serpent and, most disturbingly, a submerged face of a girl looking up through the water with sightless marble eyes. I don’t know if they’ve toppled into the water or Penrose planned it this way—taking the idea of a sunken garden one step further and placing even the statues underwater. Christine would know if she were here.

  I’m glad when the creek widens again into a deep pool surrounded by stone walls, carpeted in water lilies, and shaded by the long heavy branches of a giant weeping beech. It’s like entering the apse of a church that’s been glazed in green and yellow glass. Dappled with leaf shadow and light, the water lilies glow like travertine marble. This must be the water lily pool that Penrose depicted in the Lady window. I’m loath to disturb the quiet with my paddling, but when I rest the paddle across my lap I begin to drift backward. I dip my paddle into the water—remembering what Kyle always says: Just put the water behind you—and pull myself forward through the curtain of beech branches. For a moment the sunlight is so blinding I can’t see but then I make out the ruins of the old mansion, Astolat: four ruined towers rising above terraced ledges like a castle in a fairy tale. I’ve seen photographs of the mansion before the fire, but I’ve never appreciated how well its setting on the water echoes Tennyson’s poem. Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. I’m about to share the lines with Bea when I hear a scream, followed by the sound of something slapping the water.

  “Bea!” I start paddling on one side to turn the kayak around and nearly tip over.

  “Bea!” I call again, barely righting myself.

  “Mom, come here, quick—” I hear a sob in her voice, but at least I know she’s above water. I try to concentrate on turning, but even when I’ve gotten the kayak pointed in the right direction I can’t see anything because Bea’s still under the beech tree.

  “I’m coming, honey, don’t worry.” I paddle through the thick curtain of branches, moving quicker now that I’m going with the current. I nearly bump into Bea’s boat. She’s backpaddling to keep herself stationary, her eyes fastened on something near the bank. After the bright sunshine it’s hard to see in the tree’s shadow. I paddle closer to the shore and make out, wedged between a half-submerged boulder and stone wall, half hidden in a thick clump of water lilies, something long and yellow. The underbelly of a kayak.

  “Maybe it’s the one stolen from Kyle’s …,” I begin, but then I realize that Bea is sobbing.

  “I didn’t mean it when I said that whoever stole the kayak deserved to drown.”

  I want to reach out and touch Bea but I’m afraid I’ll tip us both if I get too close. Instead I move carefully toward the capsized vessel. As I do a breeze stirs the beech branches, parting the heavy curtain. A swath of sun cuts through the water between me and the upturned kayak. When I lean over the water I think, for just a moment, that I’m looking into my own reflection. Beneath the water a woman sits in a yellow kayak. Her hair, standing straight up from her scalp, is like a cartoonist’s idea of someone scared out of her wits. Only that’s not it at all. It’s a woman suspended in the water, her long yellow hair swaying in the stream’s current.

  “IS SHE DEAD?” I HEAR BEA’S VOICE FROM BEHIND ME. “SHOULD WE TRY TO GET HER out of the water?”

  I lean a little farther over to get a better look and see a white face, indistinct in the shadows, and a plume of yellow hair rising like smoke … no, not rising … I’m still reading the scene below the water as if it were a reflection of something above the water. In reverse. The woman’s arms, hanging down toward the bottom of the creek, seem to be raised above her head as if she were fending off an attack. One white hand moves languidly in the current as if waving at the passing crowd of fish. Then I notice one of those fish delicately nibbling on the woman’s fingers.

  I jerk backward so quickly I nearly tip and have to slap the water with the flat of my paddle to right myself.

  “I’m sure she’s dead,” I tell Bea. I’ve angled my boat so that I can look at Bea and, at the same time, block her view of the body. “There’s nothing we can do for her and we probably shouldn’t disturb the position of the body until the police come.”

  Bea nods. “It’s one of Kyle’s boats, isn’t it? That means she’s probably been in the water since Sunday, right?”

  A sickening thought occurs to me and I look back at the mass of yellow hair swaying in the water. I bend down to look closer and suddenly I have a sense not so much of sinking as of the water rising to engulf me. When I look back up at Bea the sky spins and for a moment it’s as if I’m the one hanging upside down under the water, the branches of the weeping beech like so much seaweed choking my path to the surface.

  “Beatrice,” I say, gripping the paddle to keep my voice from shaking, “it would take hours to hike out of here. I think one of us should stay with her … with the body … while the other paddles across the river to the boathouse to call the police.”

  “I’ll go,” she says quickly. “I can’t stay here with that. But what about you? Why don’t you come with me?”

  I shake my head. As much as I hate the idea of Bea crossing the river alone I know she’s more equipped to do it than I am. And even though it’s clear that the woman trapped under the kayak is beyond help, I can’t give in to my fears and leave her here.

  Beatrice must see the pain on my face. Her eyes flick past me to the water lily bed. “Do you know who it is?” she asks.

  Our boats have drifted close enough for me to touch Bea’s hand. I reach out and squeeze her cold, callused fingers. “I think it’s Aunt Christine.”

  As SOON AS BEA TURNS THE PROW OF HER BOAT DOWNSTREAM SHE’S QUICKLY GONE, the current taking her under the curtain of beech branches and around the next bend in minutes. It won’
t take her long to cross the river and reach the boathouse, I tell myself. Still, the idea of spending another minute precariously perched on top of the water above a drowned body—a drowned body that might be my best friend’s—is almost unbearable.

  I scan the shore for a place to beach the kayak, but the banks here have been reinforced with stone walls that rise steeply from the water’s edge. I paddle downstream, and then upstream, but this stretch of the Wicomico has been corralled between stone, the whole bucolic setting engineered from the water lilies to the weeping beech, from the statues lining the banks and lurking in the water to the sudden view of Astolat when you come out of the beech’s shade.

  Augustus Penrose was such a control freak—he had to orchestrate every detail of his surroundings. It’s Christine’s voice I hear, happily expounding on an article she’d read senior year about our founder. He was into the whole total design thing from the British Design Reformation. Not only did he draw the plans for his faux-gothic castle, Astolat, he designed its stained-glass windows, its tapestries and furniture—even the china and glassware used to set its tables were designed and manufactured by the Rose Glass Works. He even had to design the gardens himself because he wanted them to look like the water gardens back in England.

  The voice in my head is so alive that I can’t believe that I may never hear it again in life. I paddle back under the beech branches and position my kayak as close as I can to the water lily patch and the overturned kayak, hoping I suppose that I’ll see on closer inspection that this horrific tableau is just one more planned effect. But no, there’s no mistaking the bloated figure beneath the water for a classical statue. And although I can’t tell for sure if the woman suspended beneath the water is Christine, I have a strong feeling it is. What, though, would she have been doing here?

  I run through in my mind watching her board the train and waving to her—or to the blank screen of her window—until the train left. Could she have possibly gotten off the train without me noticing her on the platform? It seems unlikely, but possible, especially if she walked to the north end of the train and exited on the other side of the stairs leading up to the station waiting room. From the station it was a short walk to the boathouse.…

  When we stopped at the boathouse on the way to the station Bea had enthused over her trip up the Wicomico through the ruined water gardens of Astolat. Christine had been interested that so much of the sunken gardens remained and that you could reach them by water. She’d been fascinated with those gardens since she read about them senior year. Could there have been some piece of research she thought she could discover by paddling up the creek in the middle of the night? It seems crazy, but then I remember what Nathan Bell said about Christine seeming obsessed by the Penrose window. We’d laughed about Christine soaking herself in a cold tub to replicate Millais’s Ophelia.…

  I lay my paddle across my lap and wipe my eyes, forgetting that my hands are covered with salt from the spray off the Hudson. Immediately the stinging is so bad I can barely see. The stream is fresh, but I’m certainly not going to dip my hands in that water. I use some of the water from the bottle of Poland Spring strapped under a bungee cord across the prow of my kayak to wash my hands and flush my eyes and decide I can’t afford to start crying now. If I give in to these images of Christine I’ll be a wreck by the time the police come. I also notice that while busy with hand-washing maneuvers I’ve drifted downstream. I paddle closer to the yellow kayak and force myself to look at the whole picture.

  Again I hear Christine’s voice in my head. You have to stick with what you see and follow where your eye leads you. Advice she once gave me on writing art history papers.

  My eye is certainly drawn to the bright yellow kayak—a strong diagonal slash in the bed of water lilies leading the eye to … what? There’s a pile of rubble half-submerged beneath the water, part of the stone wall that’s caved into the stream. The prow of the kayak is wedged between it and the part of the stone wall that’s still standing. If Christine paddled close to the wall she might have struck the submerged rocks and flipped over. But why would she drown? Even if she was unable to flip her kayak up because it was trapped between the wall and a boulder she should have been able to release her spray skirt from the rim of the kayak and swim to the surface. Right on the front of the skirt there’s a nice big bungee loop that you can pull to free yourself from the boat. I’ve gone over the drill in my mind dozens of times to assure myself that what has happened to Christine would never happen to me—or to Bea. Even if Christine didn’t know about the loop a little struggling should have released her. Unless she was unconscious when she went over.

  I let myself drift downstream a bit and then approach the lily patch closer to the wall, coming up behind the yellow kayak, and peer into the water at the collapsed wall, where I see a hand reaching out from the stone. For a horrible moment I think it’s another body trapped under the rubble, but then I realize that the hand belongs to a statue that’s been toppled headfirst into the water, probably when the wall caved in. I can just make out a marble leg and then, when a ray of sun creeps into the water, something metallic flashes like the bright gills of a carp. I bend over and see that it’s a flat piece of bronze—probably a plaque identifying the statue. When I straighten up I’m so dizzy I nearly topple backward. Is that what might have happened to Christine? Had she paddled over here to look at the statue—at night? with a flashlight maybe?—and lost her balance and flipped over, her head hitting the rocks hard enough to knock her out? Trapped beneath the water she would have drowned.

  I look down into the water, where the woman’s golden hair sways between her white swollen fingers. It almost looks as if she’s grasping her own hair—as if her fingers had instinctively grabbed for something to hold onto in her last conscious moments. It’s the same gesture that the Lady makes in the Penrose window.

  WHEN THE POLICE COME THE FIRST THING THEY DO IS HELP ME OUT OF MY KAYAK. Two uniformed officers take an arm each and yank me unceremoniously out of the boat—like pulling a cork out of a wine bottle—and deposit me on top of the stone wall, where I instantly sink to my knees. I have no feeling in my legs at all. Bea, who’d been hanging back by the patrol car, runs over and practically dives at me. I gather her close to me and we stay there—leaning against each other just like Francesca and Paolo—and watch the three policemen.

  The two uniformed officers crouch on the edge of the wall while the third man, who’s wearing gray slacks and a white button-down shirt, makes a call on a cell phone. Within minutes a police van arrives and three more men approach the shore holding diving gear and what looks like an inflatable raft.

  “Ma’am, you’ll have to move back now and clear the way for the recovery team. Do you need assistance moving?”

  I look up at the plainclothes officer. In the shadow of the beech I can’t see his face clearly. While he waits for me to answer he unbuttons his shirt cuffs and rolls his sleeves up over tanned forearms. I look up into pale gray eyes spaced far apart—the same silvery color as his short-clipped hair. His nose is slightly hooked. When I first moved into the factory I surprised a screech owl in the warehouse rafters with much the same steely expression.

  “Ma’am? Do you need help getting up?”

  I shake my head and, with Bea’s help, struggle ungracefully to my feet. A little ways up the bank is a rustic bench. We sit there facing the water, but only I watch; Bea lies down, draws her knees to her chest, and lays her head in my lap. My legs are throbbing with pins and needles, but I stay put, stroking Bea’s hair and watching the “recovery operation” under a darkening sky. The day that started out so clear is turning overcast. As the divers disappear beneath the beech tree I notice that the surface of the creek dimples with raindrops and realize that I’m already half soaked from the rain. Even though I’m pretty sure the woman in the water is Christine I’m hoping that maybe I’m wrong. By the time the men in wet suits have laid the grotesquely bloated form on the stone wall I’m praying th
at I’m wrong.

  The gray-eyed officer comes back up the hill. I can make out his face better now and see that he’s probably a good-looking man when he hasn’t just had to look at a drowned corpse. He runs his hand over his close-cropped silver hair and cuts his eyes sideways to signal me to come with him. I nudge Bea off my lap and walk with the detective down the embankment toward the prone figure on the wall.

  At first I think the body on the grass has been encased in black neoprene—like the wet suits the divers are peeling off—but then I realize that it’s just that the black leather jacket and the dress beneath it have been stretched tight by the body’s swelling, and the leather and cloth have taken on an oily sheen from algae.

  “We’re guessing she’s been in the water a week, so you may not be able to identify her, but your daughter said something about you thinking the deceased might be her aunt. Would that be your sister?”

  I shake my head, swallow, try to speak, and find my throat’s a little dry. I try again. “Not my sister—my best friend.” I remember what Nathan Bell said on the phone. “My oldest friend.”

  “Don’t pay too much attention to the face,” the detective tells me, “look for distinguishing marks—a birthmark, a scar.…”

  I look away, not just from the face but from the body. I look straight up into the heart of the giant beech, where its branches spring from the main trunk like the ribs of a groined vault. A groined vault made of green glass. If Neil were here he’d already be halfway up the smooth-skinned trunk. He was able to find handholds and footholds on surfaces that looked unbroken to others; he could see where the hidden cracks were.

  Look, he’d said to Christine and me the night he’d decided to scale the library tower, can’t you see it—like a ladder leading to the moon. And up he’d gone, clinging to the side of the gray stone wall like a water strider skimming the surface of a moonlit pond. Christine had followed, but for once I hadn’t. Looking up at the sheer wall had made me nauseous—everything had begun to make me nauseous. I hadn’t known it at the time, but I was pregnant. I’ve wondered since if that was the reason I didn’t climb the tower with them that night—not just the nausea but because of some subconscious instinct to preserve the life growing inside of me. It’s what I’d like to think, not that I could have done anything when Christine fell.