Under the Lake I Heard My Grandmother Call Me Home

People who have never drowned think it looks like the movies, all splashing and shouting. It does not. Drowning is quiet. I know because I did it, all the way, and the last thing I heard above the surface was nothing at all.

I was nineteen and stupid the way nineteen is. We had been swimming out to a float in the reservoir, and I had eaten too much and swum too soon and gone too far. My legs cramped first, then my arms felt like wet rope, and the float that had seemed close was suddenly a long way off. I went under once and came up. Went under twice and came up. The third time I did not come up.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. When I finally stopped fighting, it was not terror. It was relief. My lungs quit arguing. The green water above me held the sun in wobbling coins, and then even that dimmed, and there was a darkness that opened like a corridor, and I moved into it without swimming. There was a light at the far end, small and steady, and I was not afraid of it. I was curious. I was going toward it the way you walk toward a lit window in a cold field.

And then my grandmother was there. She had died when I was seven, and I would have told you I barely remembered her face, but I knew her instantly, the way you know your own hands. She was not old and sick the way she was at the end. She was young and she smelled like the bread she used to make, and she said my name, my whole name, the way only she ever said it. She said, not out loud but straight into me, this is not your turn, go back, your mother is not finished needing you.

I did not want to go. I want to be honest about that. The light was so kind. But she turned me around by the shoulders, firm, the way she used to steer me to bed, and I felt myself being pushed the wrong way up the corridor, back toward the cold and the green and the coins of sun.

The next thing that was real was pain. A boy from our group had a hand fisted in my hair and was hauling me up, and when we broke the surface the air came into me like fire. They got me onto the float and someone pounded my back and I brought up half the reservoir and cried and could not tell them why. I could not say, my dead grandmother sent me back, without sounding like I had hit my head.

The lifeguard said another thirty seconds and I would have been gone for good. Survived, is the word on the report. I survived.

I am thirty-four now. My mother did need me, badly, through years I will not put in writing, and I was there, and I know why I was there. I do not swim in deep water anymore, not from fear exactly, but out of a strange respect, like you do not go knocking twice on a door that already let you go. And every time I smell bread baking, I stop whatever I am doing and I say, out loud, hi. My kids think I am odd. That is fine. I know who I am talking to.