Drowned Town Rising

The water remembers what the town forgot.

I know that sounds like something a poet would say, some wide-eyed kid with a notebook and waterproof mascara. But I've been welding at three hundred meters where the pressure turns your bones to chalk and the dark gets so thick you can chew it, and I'm telling you: the water remembers. It holds things. Keeps them. The way a lung holds a breath it never lets go.

My father's toolbox is down there. I've known it for eleven years, the way you know a splinter's still in your palm even after the wound closes over. He dropped it the day the water came. Dropped it and never went back for it, and now he's dead and I'm the only one left who gives a damn about a rusted steel box with a broken latch and a lifetime of cheap wrenches inside.

The dive suit smells like the inside of a gym bag. Rubber and old sweat and the particular sourness of recycled air. I checked the seals twice at the surface, third time out of habit, and now I'm sinking through green murk with a headlamp that cuts maybe four meters of visibility. The gauge on my wrist says I've got ninety-three minutes. Plenty. More than enough. I've done jobs in less.

The town comes up on me slow, the way a memory does. First the water tower, its legs furred with algae, the tank still holding whatever it held when the flood took it. Then the rooflines. Then the streets.

I stop kicking and let myself drift.

There's the diner where my mother worked doubles for six years. There's the library with its windows blown out and its books swollen to pulp, drifting in the current like dead jellyfish. There's the church. White clapboard, steeple snapped off at the base, the bell somewhere in the silt. My father built that steeple. I remember him coming home with splinters in his forearms and a look on his face like he'd done something that mattered.

I check my gauge. Eighty-eight minutes.

The toolbox should be in the vestibule. He was doing repairs on the pews that week, the week before the water came, and he'd brought the box with him. Left it there when the evacuation order went out. I've seen the photographs. I know where it sits.

I kick toward the church.

And that's when I see her.

A woman. Standing in the doorway of the diner, apron tied at her waist, hair floating around her head like smoke. She's facing away from me, toward the counter, and her hands are moving. The way you'd move if you were wiping down a counter. The way my mother used to move, quick circles with her right hand, left hand on her hip.

I stop swimming. My heart does something complicated in my chest.

She's dead. I know she's dead. Everyone in this town is dead, that's the whole point, that's why it's flooded, that's why nobody comes here. The dam broke and the valley filled and three thousand people drowned in their beds and their kitchens and their cars. I was fifteen and I was on a school trip to the capital and I came back to nothing.

But she's moving. Her hands are moving.

The water's clear enough now that I can see the details. The apron's blue, faded to gray. The hair's the color of wet straw. She turns her head, slow, like she's checking the clock on the wall, and I see her face.

It's not my mother. Of course it's not. My mother's bones are somewhere in this silt, and this woman has a different nose, a wider mouth, a mole on her cheek that my mother never had. But she's doing the same motion. The same wipe, wipe, wipe.

I should leave. That's the smart thing. I've got a job to do and a finite amount of air and no time for ghosts.

But I don't leave. I float there, suspended in the green, and I watch her wipe a counter that isn't there.

She stops.

Her hands go still. Her head turns, slow, the way a flower turns, and she looks at me. Through the murk. Through the dark. Her eyes are open and they're the color of milk and they're pointed right at me.

My gauge says eighty-one minutes. I check it twice because I don't trust my own eyes.

She takes a step.

It's not a swim. It's a walk. Her feet move the way feet move on land, one in front of the other, and the water just gets out of her way. She steps out of the diner doorway and onto the street and her apron floats up around her waist and she keeps walking toward me.

I don't move. I can't move. My fins are useless. My arms are useless. I'm a stone in the water and she's coming and behind her, in the library, in the general store, in the houses along Main Street, other shapes are moving. Other figures. They step out of doorways and windows and they all turn their heads and they all look at me.

Nobody makes a sound. That's the thing that gets me. There's no groaning, no wailing, no ghost-story noise. Just the hum of my regulator and the thud of my heart and the soft displacement of water as thirty, forty, fifty people start walking toward me.

My gauge says seventy-four minutes.

I think about my father. I think about him dropping this toolbox and running for higher ground and looking back once, just once, to see his town disappear. I think about how he never talked about it. How he'd go quiet every April, the month of the flood, and how I'd find him in the garage with his hands in a bucket of water, just holding them there, like he was trying to remember what it felt like to be submerged.

The woman is ten meters away. Eight. Five.

I can see her face clearly now. The mole. The milk-white eyes. The way her mouth is moving, just slightly, like she's trying to say something but the water's filled her throat.

I check my gauge. Sixty-eight minutes.

And then I do the stupidest thing I've ever done, and I've done some stupid things. I've welded pipeline at four hundred meters with a torn glove and a prayer. I've surfaced too fast and spent three days in a decompression chamber hallucinating my mother's voice. But this. This is different.

I raise my hand.

I don't know why. Maybe because she looks like my mother. Maybe because I've spent eleven years being angry at water and I'm tired of it. Maybe because I want to know what she's trying to say.

The woman stops. Three meters away. Close enough to touch.

She raises her hand too.

And behind her, all the others stop. All the others raise their hands. Fifty dead people in a drowned town, standing in the street, reaching toward me like I'm something they've been waiting for.

My gauge says sixty-one minutes.

I don't know what happens if I let her touch me. I don't know if I'll drown or if I'll join them or if something worse will happen, something I can't imagine. But I know I can't leave without that toolbox. I know I can't leave without knowing what my father was trying to hold onto when he dropped it.

The woman's hand is open. Her fingers are pale and wrinkled and they're reaching for me through the water.

I've got sixty minutes of air and a decision to make.

I make it.