Let us Gather by the River

“Mama, can we go play around there?”

I look in the direction my four-year-old indicates with his slender pointer. Wasn’t it chubby and dimpled just a few weeks ago? “No way, bub.” I shake my head and smile sympathetically at his crestfallen expression. “See how that part sticks out into the river?” I ask, gently turning him toward the small sandbar. “That’s nice and low like a little beach. But now look this way.” I gesture at the steeply rising slope that climbs from the water, creating a hill maybe six and a half or seven feet higher than my head, obliterating my line of sight in that direction. “If you go around to the other side, I won’t be able to see you. Y’all will just have to play here for now.”

His “Yes ma’am” could have been in response to an order to eat brussel sprouts rather than limiting him and his 18-month-old brother to just this part of the shoreline. His disappointment is short-lived though, and after a few stomps clearly tainted by pout power, he forgets to be angry and trots back to the mud castle they had been working on before I proved so intransigent.

As Nathan rejoins Jacob at the water’s edge, I turn to my husband and smile with everything I’ve got. It’s our first outing in months and I just want things to go well. I want things to work for us. Some days I cannot believe I left my entire family, all of my friends, and everything I knew and loved beyond the three people gathered here at the river’s edge with me. I thought a fresh start was what we needed. I believed that away from his family’s disdain and my family’s knowledge of his transgressions, we could be whole. Instead, he seems to have taken my willingness to isolate myself for him as a sign that he can further indulge himself at my expense.

But not the children’s. If I can just keep the peace, the children will be fine.

I dial the tooth power up a notch and will a look of affection to show in my eyes. I slip an arm around his waist and lean into him like I used to at the West Calvary Baptist Youth nights. Back when a touch like this felt deliciously illicit and filled with promise; before my skin started to crawl at his embrace.

“Can you watch them for a few? I packed a picnic lunch and some towels. I can go grab it from the car if you keep an eye on them.”

He grunts his assent to babysit his own children like he’s doing me a favor, and the smile I have plastered to my face - as I thank him profusely with what I hope to God sounds like genuine appreciation - aches with the weight of stifled melancholy.

The path we hiked down isn’t too long and I can’t have been gone ten minutes. I step into the clearing where the father of my children is sitting perhaps forty feet away, arms resting on his bent knees like he hasn’t a care in the world, staring out over the water.

The extremely empty water.

A vacuum opens inside me, emptiness where my children had been, sucking my ribs down so painfully against my lungs I cannot take a breath. The basket and towels and dry clothes - all of the things a good mother does - are gone in an instant. I don’t register letting them go nor hear them hit the ground. I am running and the movement frees something in me and I can breathe again and I struggle not to scream as I shout at him the most idiotic question imaginable:

“Where are the boys?”

Where are the boys? “Around there,” of course! Don’t stop, don’t even take the time to stop. Any moment you will crest the hill and see them splashing around in the water and you’ll feel so dumb for over-reacting.

“I thought you were watching them,” he responds, not stirring but to turn his face upon me as I near him in my beeline toward the slope. I catch a brief sight of his disgust as I sprint past and I almost falter at the inconveniently timed revelation that he hates me and he hates how I love our children more than I love him.

How could I possibly not?

I scramble up the rise through low brush thick enough to make me wonder if I shouldn’t have cut toward the beach instead of coming straight this way. Too late now. I am like an animal on all fours, a mother wolf who must protect her cubs. When I’ve verified they are safe, maybe I will feed them, put them into their safety seats with the air running and the doors locked in the remote little spot I parked and then come back here alone to my husband.

I will punch him in his mouth. With a rock. I will bash his horrible, judgmental, unloving face until all of his teeth are shattered and then the bones that once held them. I feel a hysterical giggle struggling to emerge as I think of a friend who was in a motorcycle accident. They had to rebuild his face with pins and plastic and his one eye is still a bit wonky. There won’t be enough pins in the world to put my husband’s face back together and there won’t be a skull to attach it to anyway. I’ll crush it, stomp it until what little brains he has spill out onto the ground.

As my head clears the apex of the hill, I nearly collapse with relief at the sight of Nathan, splashing happily and safely in the shallows. Then I am slip-sliding down the far side as I frantically search the shore for Jacob.

Nathan turns to me as I approach at a jog, and eyes filled with that pride only a ‘big bubba’ can feel, he points that same delicate finger out into the river - so far into the river - and exclaims, “Look, Mama! Jacob swims really good!”

For a moment I am relieved but confused. Where? Where is he swimming? But Nathan’s misunderstanding is soon clear. Now that I’m off the hill, the glare of the sun on the water is gone and I see the tiny swatch of neon orange bobbing perhaps twenty-five feet from the shore. Jacob is not swimming, Jacob is floating. Face down, only the butt of his suit visible near the brackish surface. Still as death, the only motion provided by the incongruously gentle flow of the water.

I launch myself into the river and am plunged into that nightmare where your every intention to run only manifests as a sluggish trudge. Knees alternately jerking up toward my chest, I struggle toward him, nearly hopping with every thrust forward in an effort to reduce the water’s drag on me. I am a strong swimmer and I know I could reach him faster if I dove, but there is no way I am taking my eyes off the almost vanishingly small orange beacon.

Then I am there, I am reaching down and snatching him up from the water and -

Oh dear God sweet Jesus he’s so heavy he’s so heavy he’s -

He’s waterlogged. The word erupts in my mind as I stagger back only far enough for the water to leave my torso clear. His lips are gray and he is dead and there is nothing that can be done and I can hear - but barely register - my dead boy’s father.

He is on the shore, dry as a bone.

I will crush his bones.

The moment the water is down to my waist, I flip the cold, wet, meatsack that was my beautiful, vibrant baby just ten minutes ago. Draping him over my forearms, hands clenched into a single fist, I focus on pulling that fist straight through him and into my solar plexus. I crush his tiny body back and up toward the breasts that nourished him and I watch with a horrified fascination as a veritable torrent of water floods from his mouth. Again, I crush and again he pours. A third time and there is no water left.

He is empty, and light again in my arms.

I think of a Drill Instructor who told us of administering CPR to an infant for forty-five minutes while waiting for an ambulance. That infant lived. My son won’t but how can I stop? I squeeze for a fourth time, and feel a convulsion where his stomach presses on my wrist. Vomit spurts out into the water and I finally begin to cry. He is coughing and sputtering and gasping and so very alive.

I am holding him like my baby now, and not like a resuscitation subject. Vomit-tinged spittle is smeared into my neck and dripping down the back of my shoulder and I don’t care. I want to feel his wet, filthy, chubby cheeks pressed into the crook of my neck for the rest of my life. I become vaguely aware of the words my husband has been shouting as he stood back and watched our son escape death by the narrowest of margins.

“Jesus Christ can’t you calm the fuck down? You have to make a drama out of everything, he’s fine!”

And so he is. Twenty minutes in the sun on the shore, sees the gray of his lips slowly yielding to pink, and by the half hour mark he is happily pointing to the butterflies that have gathered around us. One even lands on his golden hair and I know it is a sign from God that He gave my baby back to me. There was no mistaking; he was dead. God has seen fit to grant me a miracle this day and I won’t waste it. I won’t allow the petty angers and fears and betrayals of the past interfere with our family any longer.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Church, it’s that sometimes the Lord gives you a husband, not to make you happy, but to make you holy. Sometimes a wife needs to step up and accept that her husband’s sin is her cross to bear. And as I look at my two beautiful boys and the man I have loved since I was just 13, I know that this is one of those times.

We settle the boys into their seats and get the air going. They’re nodding off almost before their belts are buckled. I’ve forgotten the picnic basket where it dropped, and reluctantly, my husband has set off to retrieve it.

I lock the doors, pop the trunk and look at the supplies I had packed alongside the basket. Today had been the day. I swore to myself I would do everything I could to make things right between us. I had prayed all week - as my Savior had - “Father, if it be Your will, let this cup pass from me.”

The good Lord above could not have been clearer in his sign today. He had lit my steps to show me the way and - shotgun in hand - I follow my husband toward the clearing, keeping an eye out for a good rock the Lord may have placed in my path.

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