Come High Water Sneak Peek
He’s twelve and doesn’t know who he is anymore when Mary tells him to think of Forthlin like an island.
Water will come where it’s supposed to, she says. The waves will rise, and the rivers will flood, and it’ll be a grand soft day, and all of the land and the islands and the sky will remain and life will go on, and he wonders if she knows. If she knows how aware he is on the permanance of that motion—the forward march of time. If she knows he’s been as aware of it as anything since the moment he sat in a church pew and thought of the meaning of forever.
He’s prone to fits. That’s what Mary calls them. Fits of fancy, only the fancy he knew existed stacked high in grocery store aisles—brightly colored tins too high up for him to reach, Mary holding him firmly by the hand and tugging him down the aisle, away, towards the dented things nearly expired that she said they could do something with if they thought hard enough.
She thinks too much, Jim says. That’s the problem with him. He thinks too much about the wrong things, and not enough about the right ones. Do well in school. Tuck in your shirt. Wash those grass stains off your knees. It’s not proper for a lady to sit that way. It’s not right for her to roll around in the dirt with the boys.
He thinks too much. He thinks too much of the wrong things. He sees things in the picture shows. He sees things on stage. That’s all it is. She’ll grow out of it. She was like that, at his age. It’s a season. A season of change. A season of change that comes and does it’s work and lengthens limbs and swells with green and fruit and new life, and then it will leave and he won’t be able to think that way again, he won’t be able to be.
He thinks of rain when he sits at the dinner table in trousers too big for him, stolen from the floor of Mike’s room. He thinks when the plate shatters on the floor behind his head.
“James Jim McCartney!” Mary yells as she begins to stand, a sound punctuated by the slap of skin against skin as Jim backhands her. A thump. A weight hitting the floor.
Paul stares down at the table. The scuffed and pitted surface. A wedding present from your grandparents, Mary had told him time and time again, when Paul had groused as a child at being made to polish something so drab.
The spoon wiggles back and forth as the table quivers. Paul follows the wood grain with his eyes, looks to where Mike is perched across from him, eyes wide and unseeing like twin moons as he shakes apart.
“No daughter of mine will be prancing about in lad’s trousers!” Jim menaces, taking Paul by the arm and yanking him sideways from the table.
His chair tips over. His feet catch on the table leg, and he ends up halfway to his knees, dangling uselessly from the arm Jim lofts into the air.
His shoulder socket pops. The feeling in his arm tingles out to nothing.
“Mary,” He says. “Your name is Mary, like your mother. And you are my daughter. Do you hear me? You’re my daughter,” he says, and Paul nods, and he nods, because he knows, he knows, because his body changes, and he’ll never stop knowing.
