Quiet Like Water
Erin says I’m supposed to find us a house that looks like the one we’re already in: a Dutch Colonial with arched doorways, a staircase wider at the bottom than the top, and a too-small kitchen. She wants a fresh start in a familiar place. None of the houses that match ours are close by or in residential neighborhoods. One of them is in a remote forest. I find one at the base of a dam. There’s another one that’s in the middle of an abandoned amusement park.
I take pictures of each and print eight-by-tens that I overnight to her. I send pictures of the inside of the houses so she can see the walls don’t hold the same haze of disappointment and guilt that ours do, and that none of the rooms are decorated for children. I send pictures of the view outside as well. This way she can decide if she would rather be surrounded by trees, or concrete, or the metal skeletons of broken-down rides.
When the pictures arrive, she calls and asks, why did I make them so big? Why didn’t I just text her?
I say that it’s so she can see the details. I don’t want her to miss anything. I want her to be sure about where we go next.
When she was little, Erin’s dad installed a swimming pool in their backyard. He suffered from a severe depression that medicine couldn’t touch, and building the pool was the only thing that made him feel better.
We can’t leave our current house until someone else moves in. Erin is in charge of finding someone to take our place. She put an ad in the paper. The response has been overwhelming. She has been conducting interviews every day.
When the pool at Erin’s house was done, her dad built pools for the neighbors. He didn’t charge them a dime and he had never been happier.
All the candidates take something with them when they go. They say they need to live with a part of us to determine if they can be comfortable there. When they know, they will come back. This never takes long, so we should keep our bags packed.
Her dad put his initials on the cement floor of each pool he made. Most people never even noticed.
There is nothing left to pack. The candidates have taken everything. Erin stacks our empty suitcases in the foyer and waits on the steps.
I get back and we look through the pictures together. I start to tell her about the houses, but she already knows where she wants to go.
After everyone around them had a pool, the depression seeped back in, and this time it was worse than before. Her dad said he had to leave to get better. He packed a bag and set out to find more people who would let him build them a pool.
We leave our house empty. We understand that this is a quiet form of betrayal.
Erin swam to the bottom of every pool in the neighborhood to see how long she could hold her hand against her dad’s initials before going back up for air.
We tour the dam. The things the candidates took, Erin’s C-shaped body pillow, our kitchen chairs, the books on clean eating, the plastic food containers we stopped using when we switched to glass, our window treatments, the mobile of imaginary animals, our instant pot, and even the bills from the fertility clinic that we kept stacked on the counter long after our final appointment, are all floating in the water.
Erin wants to go in and recover what is ours. She’s sure she can do it. She’s a good swimmer.
I tell her it’s not worth the risk. There is a slow, swirling current. It’s not pulling anything under, but it’s not letting anything go, either. Seeing them here will have to be enough.
They said her dad’s body was discovered on a boat, so she never believed that it was him.
Erin goes to the dam in the middle of the night. She takes a knife from the kitchen and scratches her initials on its concrete skin. The next day, she checks to see if it left a mark. It didn’t. It never does. If it did, she could stop.
Nathan Willis ( @Nathan1280) is a writer from Ohio. His stories have appeared in Passages North, X-R-A-Y, Necessary Fiction, Lost Balloon, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.