The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp Read Free Book Online Page A

off, paid them no mind.
    When Cora was her daughter’s age, eighteen, she was already married. On the eve of her wedding to Russell Weld, who would become the father of her three children, Cora gnawed at the skin around her nails until it bled. She wore gloves for the ceremony. Calfskin. White. They were not new, and there was a tea stain on the inside of the right wrist where the second button closed. Her mother, Hannah, in a rare act of domesticity, had baked the wedding cake—sweet and rich, a buttery lightness, so full of hope—it fluttered up like wings in Cora’s mouth.
    That night there was a meteor shower. She and Russell stood outside, still in their wedding clothes, her feet chilled against the doorstone. He held her tightly, their faces upturned toward the heavens as those thin green lights sliced open the sky all around them. They stood there for over an hour, gripping one another, in that strange and silent storm of dying stars.
    Cora had expected that when she woke up the next morning, she would find herself changed. She had expected that to be a wife would add some weight to her, some root. And as her husband lay sleeping on the bed behind her, his naked chest rinsed in the early morning light, she had stared into the mirror above the washbasin. She scoured every inch of herself, looking for some altered feature, some sign. Her face was still her face—more peaked than usual perhaps from lack of sleep—stiff dark pockets around her eyes. She bit her teeth into her lip to flood it with color, and lingered awhile longer before the mirror, but there was nothing different, nothing changed. She dressed, gathered up their wedding clothes from the pile on the floor, and went downstairs, and it was only as she stepped outside onto the back porch that she realized that the world itself was different—everything around her, everything familiar—trees, yard, sky—all of it suffused with a new and deeper hue.
    And then there were babies—one, two, three—two daughters, a son—and the world was full. Then one was lost, under the ice, and Russell was lost, in the swine flu—so much lost, so suddenly, so soon, her mind divided like a sheet of glass—and boxes and boxes of grief. They piled up and there was no room for her, so she removed herself, and it happened then: the mystery of the wind in the curtains, the mystery of light shed through the leaves—all of it died to her then.
    It was the wash work that she clung to. She soaked and scrubbed and rinsed and wrung and starched. She hung nightshirts, linens, trousers, socks. She set clothes out on the line in every type of weather. She pulled and washed the sheets until there was no bed left to strip, then she went down the road to the houses of their neighbors and begged for their soiled clothes. The money she brought in from the work was slight, but steady, enough to caulk the gaps.
    Each morning, she sets out the tubs. Boils the water to fill them. One for the dark wash. One for the whites. Two for the rinse. She cuts out a fresh bar of soap with a warm bread knife. Then, with a finer blade, she slices off thin chips and flakes them into the hot water. She stirs the clothes as they soak, battling out the dirt, she opens up the creases, the folds, so the soap can work its way through. The water scalds her hands. The most stubborn dirt is always in her daughter Bridge’s clothes. (For her stubbornness, Cora thinks.) Each piece rinsed, battled, rinsed again.
    It is in the water that all possibility lives. And this morning, as she sits in the kitchen with Mary Milliken’s white nightshifts billowing up through the sudsy water, she notices that the men are still there—the men in the dark suits and Honey Lyons. Her father has come home from the beach and they are speaking with him. She can hear their voices through the moving surface diced with light as if the voices live under the water, as if they live in