He looks at me for a moment as if to challenge my authority, but then quickly acquiesces. “Very well! Now, if I were a swimsuit, where would I be…?”
We locate his forest-green trunks on the back of his bathroom door, and I leave him to change into them. I know there will come a time when even this task will require my help, but for now, I encourage him to be as independent as possible.
Once in my own bathing suit, I wait in one of the wicker armchairs on the porch, my feet up on the railing, which is supported by two diagonally crossed logs that form an elongated X, as is the architectural style in these parts. My father is taking a while, and I wonder if I should go check on him. But soon enough, he emerges and calls, “Pond-ward, ho!”
We walk arm in arm, my father setting the pace with his careful shuffling. There are five stairs to navigate, plus a stretch of grass and then the sloped dirt path. As a child, I could hurtle from the porch of this house to the pond in thirteen ecstatic seconds, my sprint culminating in a triumphant splash. Today, we take our time, pausing to examine a flamboyant mushroom that has sprung up beside the path and then to analyze the song of a bird overhead. Dad was once an expert on such avian matters, but now his guesses are as arbitrary as mine. A whippoorwill? A warbler? Probably. Who knows.
When we reach the dock, the slats are warm from the sun, which lingers heavy and orange above the trees across the pond. We hang our robes on the rusted hooks of the boathouse wall. My father approaches the ladder and turns, backing down carefully. I’m glad that I recently took the initiative to clean the algae-coated steps so he won’t slip. It was an absolutely disgusting job, and one that would havemade me squirm in my youth, but now, algae removal is simply a part of my existence. It’s up to me to keep my father safe.
“Here he goes…” my father announces. “The mighty amphibian!”
He releases his grip on the ladder and wafts gently backward into the water. These days, he is light enough to bob like a raft. He commences the elementary backstroke. His range of motion is smaller and joltier than it used to be, creating an uneven wake as he moves away from the dock.
“Aaahhhhh, that’s refreshing.” He closes his eyes and lets the pond hold him, indulging his arthritic joints in a moment of weightlessness.
I dive in and shoot through the dark water, eventually emerging beside him. The surface ripples and reacts, but soon settles around us. My father scoots further and further out. He is still a competent swimmer, but I stay near him just in case.
“You know, you taught me to swim right here,” I say.
His face is tilted up to the sky. “Is that right?”
“Yep,” I say as I tread water. “It took a while. You were very patient with me.”
“Oh, good. I’m glad I was.”
It’s true: we spent hours upon hours here in the shallows, me floating on my back, then my front. I loathed when my feet touched the silty bottom of the pond, where who-knows-what was lurking. My father held me so I wouldn’t encounter the murk, but sometimes he let me drown a little, just to get a feel for it, before supporting me again. Once I got the hang of swimming, the real fun began. There was no end to the elaborate aquatic games my father invented. There was Dolphin Show, where I played the part of the trained dolphin who did tricks on command. There was Feeding Frenzy, where we pretended to be sharks and circled Nina menacingly. And then, of course, there was Whale Ride, where I would hold on to my father’s shoulders as he swam deeper and deeper into the cold depths, me trailing behind him like a remora fish.
I’ve already told him all this a few times this summer, but he doesn’t hold the information long before he forgets. Even a briefconversational lull can wipe the slate clean. It’s not lost on me that I now have the power to control our shared narrative, to pick and choose which aspects of the truth I want to unearth or bury. Our family story is mine to craft now. If I don’t like the version I relay to him today, I can always tweak it tomorrow. The truth, whatever that is, seems more fungible than ever.
We glide our way back, and I hoist myself onto the dock as Dad slowly ascends the ladder. Donning our robes, we sit in the flimsy aluminum folding chairs that have been here forever. The sun is now gone, and the sky is a hazy pink over the blackening trees.
We sit for a moment as the pond stills and finds its balance, mirroring the sky. It has never occurred to me until now that this must be why it’s called evening. Theeven-ing, when the ragged edges of the day soften into something more calm and reciprocal. The air holds a hint of humidity, and the quiet is commanding and layered: the chirping of insects, the steady drill of a woodpecker, the occasional crack of a twig along the shoreline, my father’s deep nose-breathing.
Then suddenly, an interruption:Aaaa-oooooooo-looooh. Aaaa-oooooooo-looooh.
It’s a distinctive call—strong, searching, spectral. I run into the boathouse to grab the binoculars we keep hanging on a hook. Returning, I peer toward the center of the pond. There’s no mistaking it: a loon.
“Look,” I gasp, handing my father the binoculars. “Do you see?”
He fumbles with the focus and I help him adjust it. After a moment, he whispers, “What a fine fellow…”
We watch as the loon cuts a sharp course through the water, then dives and disappears. After a moment, it emerges even closer to us. Now we can see its white spotting, the reddish cast of its eyes, the sharp dagger of its beak.
“Dad, you called it.”
“What’s that?”
“Earlier, in the car… you said something about the loons coming back. I had no idea what you were talking about because they haven’t come here for years, but you predicted it.”
He looks into my eyes plaintively: “Did I? How clever of me.” The loon calls again, and from somewhere we can’t see, his mate answers. My father picks up the binoculars and peers through them again. “If I were a loon, this is where I would make my home, too.”
If it had just been the return of the loons (the mate eventually revealed herself, with a fluffy gray loonlet in tow), I wouldn’t have paid it much mind; but over the next week, my father has a series of other minor premonitions. At least, I think that’s what is going on. It’s also possible that I’m losing my grip on reality, although I didn’t expect that to happen so soon. Yes, we are isolated in the woods, but I was hoping to maintain my sanity until at least midwinter. We haven’t even hit July yet.
The next prediction comes a couple of days later. We wake to a torrential downpour, but Dad assures me we will be able to go out in the canoe that afternoon. The forecast indicates otherwise, but sure enough, the sun breaks through just after 1:00P.M.
Then there is the evening we are watchingJeopardy!and a smug, bespectacled contestant from Bethesda takes an early lead. “He won’t win,” my father says. “Not with a smirk like that.” The smirker increases his sizeable lead until the final question, when he overconfidently bets it all and is defeated by a plucky history teacher from Des Moines.
And the afternoon when my father announces: “It’s time for blueberries.” I know it’s far too early in the season, but we walk up the driveway to check the bushes anyway. Sure enough, the first berries have just ripened from green to purple. They’re tart, but promising—and weeks earlier than usual.
