I’d been at the kitchen window long enough for the coffee to go cold in my hand.
The garden was still in the gray of pre-light when I started watching. The slope down to the waterline was not yet visible. The wisteria along the east fence was a darker mass against a darker mass and the cypress past the boundary held its leaves at the angle they held them in the second week of April, when the leaves came in soft enough that they barely moved in the predawn air. The frogs were still going. The insects were still going. Underneath both, the bayou kept doing what the bayou did before dawn—a layered weight of small sounds whose silences I had learned to read.
This morning it was off.
Leste always came up from the channel with the morning. He’d been doing that for eleven mornings of mine, for forty years before me, for an indefinite count of years before that. Not all at once. He came up in increments, moving by the channel’s own clock. By first full light, he was supposed to be beside me at the kitchen table with his hands wrapped around the mug, fingers green-pale at the joints, the gills along the side of his throat just visible above the collar of the shirt he’d dried into wearing.
The bank stayed empty.
I’d been worried since the first morning he’d come up late, three weeks ago, and the worry had settled deeper every morning since.
I watched the gray lift from the garden. I watched the slope come into view. I watched the flat stone at the bank remain only stone.
When waiting stopped being waiting and became an answer, I poured a fresh mug of coffee, took the second mug down from the hook and filled it, and went out the back door.
The salt line at the back-door threshold was Colette’s, fresh from the night before, still grain-bright in the gray. Undisturbed. The Marchand children were asleep upstairs and Sable allowed it. I stepped over the line. My right foot landed on the first flagstone of the path and the cold of it went up through my heel and stopped at the back of my knee.
The slope down to the waterline was at a gradient I’d measured in a previous month. Soft ground at twenty feet from the water. Wet ground at ten. By the time my second foot reached the wet ground the frog song had thinned—the highest voices going first, then the middle band, then the deep bellowing from the cypress knees that didn’t quit until the sun was up over the trees. I’d taught eighth-graders about ecotones once, the species-overlap zones at the edges of biomes. Louisiana had ecotones I’d never heard of in Ohio.
By the time I made it to the bank, he had partially surfaced. The crown of his head was clear of the water. His shoulders were under. The line of his collarbones was at the surface and the surface was not letting them through.
The water around him was not moving. Not slack, not still—held. The channel was holding him as the channel held what it was about to keep.
I set the mugs down on the flat stone where I always set them.
“Leste?”
The water moved a fraction. His eyes came up. The green of them at this hour, before light, was the green of the channel—under-water green, the bioluminescence not on, the pigment doing all the work. He looked at me a long moment. Then his hand came up out of the water as far as the wrist and stopped.
“Today I almost didn’t make it.”
The voice was channel-deep, like his vocal tract was going to need air to do this and the air was going to cost him something he didn’t have to spend.
I sat down on the flat stone, took my socks off, and rolled my pants up to the knee. I put my feet in the water beside him and the cold of the channel went through the bones of my ankles and stopped halfway up my shins.
The light came up over the cypress on the far side of the Hollow. It slid down through the moss in long thin angles, finding the cypress knees first, then the standing water, then the bank where my legs were going numb. The first frog cut out. The second cut out after it. The third did not stop, which meant the boundary at the southeast corner was holding but in a way I couldn’t have called confident. Somewhere upstream a kingfisher started its rattling call and didn’t finish.
His head turned a quarter inch toward me. Not because he had decided to turn it. Because the water had let it.
“Leste, what does today look like?”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I would like the second mug.”
I gave him the second mug. He drank with one hand still under the water and the mug in the hand at the surface. The coffee was already cold, but he didn’t seem to find that a problem. He gave the empty mug back. His fingers, when they brushed mine on the handle, were also cold.
“I’m going to sit here with you for a while,” I said.
“Please do, Della.”
The sun came over the cypress. The light hit the surface of the Hollow gold and stayed there. The dragonflies came up over the water. A heron passed over the slope without lowering. Somewhere on the Marchand side of the fence a rooster did its morning work and stopped.
Leste’s pulse, when I rested my fingertips on the wrist still above the surface, was three beats apart.
As I sat, the cold went up past my shins. Twice his hand moved under the water and stopped. Once he took a breath through the gills along his throat instead of through his mouth, and the breath was longer than a man’s breath was.
I thought about the first morning he had emerged from the channel late, three weeks ago, when I had not yet known what I was looking at. I thought about the morning before that, when he had come up on time. I thought about Hortense’s last entries, which I had read twice through in November and not understood and was understanding now. The sun finished its climb over the cypress. The light went ordinary.
When I finally stood up, the morning had already gone bright.
My feet had stopped being cold a long while back. They’d been numb for some time. Standing required me to find them again first, by leaning my weight into the flat stone and waiting until the feeling came back in three stages: the heels, then the arches, then the toes. The tremor in my hands was there when I bent and picked up the mugs.
“I’ll be at the window,” I said.
“Stay there until I’m under.”
“I will.”
I went up the slope. The salt line was still bright; I stepped over it without looking. My hand found the door handle the same as a hand finds a door handle in a house it has known for seven months—without negotiation.
I came in and went to the kitchen window.
He hadn’t gone under yet. He’d stayed at the bank with his collarbones at the surface and his crown clear of the water, waiting for me to be where I’d said I’d be. The window framed him at the bottom of the slope, the bright of the new light catching the wet of his shoulder in a sheen.
He slipped under as he had come up. I watched the line of his collarbones recede into the water and then his face and then the crown of his head and then there was nothing. The surface of the channel closed over the place he had been. Somewhere in the canopy a bird I still couldn’t identify did the two-note call I’d been hearing for seven months. Low, then high. Three repetitions, then the silence.
Sable was standing in the kitchen doorway, his eyes already on me. He’d been there before I came back. He’d chosen to be there. The kitchen was warmer than it had been before light, the warmth no longer sourceless but located in the front of the doorway he occupied, which meant his attention was on me and had been on me for some time.
I set the mugs on the counter.
“He couldn’t climb out,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Did the tree tell you?”
“It told me. I was already coming.”
I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes for a count of three. When I opened them, Sable was still in the doorway. He hadn’t moved closer because he was choosing not to; like he didn’t know what to do with my emotions.
“How many days has he been like this?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Sable.”
“I don’t know, Della.”
The kitchen made a small sound around us. Sable was the house. The house was telling me what he couldn’t say in air. I am here. But I cannot answer you.
Then I heard it. A car. Coming up the access road. I shouldn’t have heard it yet—the road was three-quarters of a mile of gravel before it reached the gate. I’d heard it anyway. Not through the binding, exactly. But connected to the binding. A vehicle moving over packed shell, the engine note a four-cylinder, the suspension finding ruts.
Sable’s head came up a fraction.
“Whose car?” I asked.
“Not Beau’s.”
“Not Lou’s truck, either.”
“No.”
The car kept coming. The engine note climbed the small rise at the curve before the gate, slowed down, and then crested. Somebody was driving who knew the road well enough to take the curve at speed and didn’t. They hesitated.
Sable looked at me with the not-quite-smile he had for things he couldn’t tell me.
“Della,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Others will come.”
I went to the front door.