Take me to the Water
/B. B. Garin
It was hot and we didn’t know where we were going. Out the highway, past the
scrapyard, mangled cars glinting in the sun. Past the billboards for personal injury lawyers and
Jesus. Past the exit for the Reservation and the red-faced power plant. We meandered down the
escarpment, through a quaint old town to the edge of the gorge, following the river though we
couldn’t see it yet.
That felt right. We were always drawn to the water.
The kids slumped in the backseat, sugar from the doughnut-holes still powdering their
lips and not yet in their bloodstreams. Condensation from my iced coffee dribbled down my
wrist. Decaf. Useless. The doctor said cutting out caffeine would help with the migraines. But it
hadn’t. Had only made them worse.
“Caine? Caine?”
I flinched, as always, at the sound of my own name. Who burdened a baby with a name
like that? When I’d ask my mother, her mouth would press flat. It’s a strong name.
“Caine, what’s that?” Willow pointed ahead, the glass beads on her wrist clinking against
the steering wheel. She hadn’t turned the radio on. A bad sign. Music had always been at her
fingertips. Now the notes were fraying. Like my nerves and the hem of our daughter’s sunflower
dress. The one she’d worn every day since June.
“Is it a castle?” Kate asked from the backseat, roused at last by the slowing car.
“Don’t be dumb,” Jay told her.
The ice rattled in my plastic cup. I shoved it in the holder and ran a damp hand over my
face.
“It’s not dumb,” Willow said, voice an octave too high.
She looked at me for help, but I turned my face to the broad, stone building punctuated
by dormers and a sharp, copper-colored roof. Heavy panes, probably lead, divided the windows,
restraining whatever sunlight reached between two towering chestnut trees.
I didn’t recognize the building. But then we’d never gone exploring like this before. Our
lives patterned over familiar streets.
“Caine?” My name a reflexive breath this time. Willow was growing used to my silence.
“It was a monastery, I think.”
Or an orphanage. A boy’s school? Convent? Something religious with stark, charitable
overtones.
My answering at all surprised Willow. Surprised the kids. Surprised myself. I felt half
awake. A headache yawning in the spaces behind my eyes.
Willow slung us in a U-turn, the kids slanting and shrieking in the backseat, hostilities
momentarily forgotten.
“Let’s take a look.” Willow grinned.
She pulled over, tires shifting from cracked asphalt to gravel-studded grass. The gorge
split wide beside us. The drop-off wasn’t as steep here. A scrub covered hill sloped down to a
wide meadow. From up high, the river looked calm and clear and cool. Inviting in the summer
sun.
Willow and the kids spilled out on the shoulder, Kate pointing at a car flash on the
opposite side of the gorge. Jay slapped at her arm. Willow forced her way between them,
dragging them around, toward the not-quite-a-castle. For a moment, I considered leaning my
head back and closing my eyes against the windshield glare. I could sleep here in the car on the
brink of the gorge, while Willow and the kids did whatever they were going to do. Let them get
used to my absence.
But I wasn’t used to it. Not quite. I sighed out of the car.
We’d parked by a tarnished historical marker. The British had done something in the
meadow during a war. Not the Revolution, the one after. But the years were wrong, weren’t
they? History had never been my best subject. I gravitated to science with its formulas and
ordered charts. Been the only one in my class not to gag when I cut open a frog and found a belly
full of tiny black eggs, like swollen poppy seeds.
But science was only good for so much.
Jay squinted through black-rimmed glasses, pretending to read the sign so he could
ignore his sister and mother crossing the deserted road.
“Come on, buddy,” I squeezed his shoulder. “Let’s catch up.”
He recoiled as he had all summer at any sign of affection. But he followed me to where
the building’s shadow blended with the chestnut trees.
The path to the massive double doors split, curling around a statue. It looked like marble,
faded after years of snow, exhaust and biting north winds. The carving was grand in scale, an air
of Rome in its sweeping lines. A proud angel, wings spread wide standing on the back of a
cowering figure. I wondered who the poor sinner was meant to be. Cain? Judas? All us mortal men?
“Cool,” Jay said.
“Why’s the angel being so mean?” Kate asked.
“The Bible’s like that,” Willow said, taking her hand.
The path was overgrown, dandelions snaking toward our feet.
“It’s locked,” Willow said, muscles flexing in an exaggerated pull on the long brass
handles. Muscles sculpted by guitars and amps and speakers. If she didn’t pick those things up
again soon, all that strength would melt away. Like mine.
If she didn’t pick those things up again soon, there’d be nothing to pay the bills with
either. We’d never bought life insurance.
Laughter climbed halfway up my throat and met a bitter wall.
“It’s abandoned,” I said.
Willow batted strands back from her braid and set off down the steps. The children trailed
her, sneakers slapping. I wanted to stay in the cool shadow of the portico. There were no carved
figures to judge me here. Just cold gray stone and the crimson doors. Red for the Virgin’s sacred
heart? Or the apple that tempted? A reminder that the flesh was weak? That it wasn’t always our
own.
We waded through unmown grass, wispy-tipped and pale. I winced at Kate’s soft, bare
legs. I should’ve made her wear high socks. Ticks must’ve been crawling everywhere, left
behind by wandering deer. But we hadn’t planned on stopping here. We hadn’t planned
anything.
The front of the building ran on for what seemed a long time with smooth gray skin and
even, empty windows. No graffiti or cracked glass. But we were nowhere. A long way for
teenagers with pressurized paint canisters or casually lobbed rocks to travel. We’d only reached
it by Willow pressing on the gas as if she could outpace the pressure building in my head.
Willow found another door around the corner. A modern, beige fire door, incongruous in
the sainted old walls. It opened when she tugged.
“What are you doing?” I grabbed her arm, holding her back from the dark hallway. I
hadn’t imagined she would actually go in. That this wasn’t all some performance. A distraction
for the kids. A detour on the way to wherever we were going.
Except the drive had been the distraction and we didn’t have a destination. Hadn’t since
June.
“Aren’t you curious?” she asked.
“No.”
The kids stared between us.
“Let’s just get out of the sun for a minute,” Willow said, as if the heat were a reasonable
excuse for trespassing.
The open sky beat down on us. A perfect blue reflecting an imaginary peace below.
Willow’s cheeks glowed pink. Sweat darkened the collar of Jay’s t-shirt and left a line between
his spikey shoulder blades. Kate scratched her elbow. I rubbed the remaining bristles on my
head. Once, twice, defeated.
The dark interior carried the promise of coolness on its stale breath. I flicked a fat wall
switch. A brief buzz of forgotten electricity ghosted through my fingers, pressing on my ears.
But nothing was illuminated.
“It’s dark,” I said.
“We have our phones,” Willow said, not quite brushing me aside as she stepped into the
hallway.
I gave my phone to Kate, who never complained the way Jay had at her age, and so was
without a device of her own. It was hard to keep up with Willow. It always had been. A musician
needed drive she said. Not her parents’ wishy-washy hippie crap. Business before art.
I found myself drifting behind my family down a long hallway. I wondered if this was
what it’d be like. Losing step after step. Too slow for them to notice, until they were too far away
to care.
That wasn’t fair. That was cold. I was a bastard.
Closed doors appeared at regular intervals. Classrooms, maybe. Offices? Impossible to
see through their frosted-glass windows. Up ahead, Willow had already disappeared beyond the
reach of Jay’s light.
“Willow?” My voice echoed, hollow and mocking.
“Wait up,” Kate snatched at her brother’s shirt as Jay pulled away from her.
He deliberately quickened his stride, and then they were both pelting down the hall like
trapped birds. I froze. For a moment, I forgot I was their father. That I was meant to protect
them. To hold them back and cautiously venture into the dark myself.
By the time I woke myself up and moved, their faint lights hovered in the distance. Stars
preparing to vanish. I reached for my phone before I remembered my pocket was empty. I
should’ve made the kids share Jay’s phone. It probably would’ve been good for them.
I hurried forward, stumbling over unseen litter. My feet crunched mouse-frail bones. An
aluminum can hissed away from my heel. My shin barked something hard and plastic, its bulky
outline a grayer patch of darkness. A photocopier? Fax machine? Torture device?
Kate should’ve been wailing with a skinned knee by now. Willow cursing a stubbed toe.
Only Jay was impenetrable. It had skipped a generation, direct from my mother’s unyielding
eyes to his. She would’ve marched straight ahead. Anything that belonged to God, belonged to
her.
Finally, I stumbled out of the hall into a wide entryway. The locked front doors stood on
my right, traced in clean daylight. Opposite the doors, a grand staircase curled away into a mist
of dust and shadows. The rest of the space was empty. Not a forgotten chair or an empty picture
frame.
No Willow or Kate or Jay.
We used to be a team, the kids and I, tongues between our teeth, conquering math
worksheets. Transforming precise measurements of flour and yeast into sticky globs of pizza
dough while Willow worked the club circuit. But Kate hadn’t asked me to read her to sleep since
June. And Jay wanted cooking lessons for his birthday, so he could “do things himself.” I’d have
been proud, if it didn’t feel like an accusation.
Music twirled through the dust moats. Willow must’ve found a piano upstairs.
My mother had promised I’d regret marrying a musician. She’ll never have time for you.
And what about children? What will you do then?
And she wasn’t wrong. It just hadn’t seemed to matter. I would have time.
I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t have the will. So she smiled with grim satisfaction when I
was late to pick up Kate from ballet practice or scrambling to bring Jay the homework he’d
forgotten. She left science journals open to the peer reviewed articles of my colleagues on her
coffee table and I let her think I was jealous. That I missed those late nights at the lab.
I even told her I was sorry I hadn’t listened to her more when I kissed her parchment
forehead and left her alone in a white, dusky room with a cricket-chorus of machines.
Now I wondered what lies Willow would leave me with. If I’d be glad of them.
If they’d truly be lies.
“Come on guys,” I called up the stairs. “We should go.”
The piano stopped. Sudden, devouring silence.
I cleared my throat, fingers tight on the waxy banister.
“It’s not a playground.”
That was me, always ruining the fun. Insisting on reality. The piano started again. Softer,
as if praying I wouldn’t notice. Willow could be such a child. One of us has to be. So they can
relate to us.
My mother never worried about relating to me. She read me tales of floods and
destruction. And left me to cry my own way through the night. In that way she made me as
strong as she hoped.
My knees ached at the thought of inching up the half-lit stairs. As soon as I arrived,
they’d only want to come down again. Willow would decide the place was empty and boring and
not the adventure she’d counted on. I might’ve told her so outside, but she wouldn’t have
listened. So, with a taste of righteous resentment, I left them to it and opened the door on the far
side of the entryway.
The room was long, an empty banquet table stretching from end to end with barely
enough space to maneuver around. But then, the fathers or nuns or orphans with swinging feet
probably had no one to serve their meals. They would’ve passed the heavy silver dishes from
hand to weathered hand on all the holy feast days.
Even in the dim light, I could tell the polish was gone from the wood. There wasn’t a
candlestick or soup spoon left to speak of grander times. Just a heavy ceramic coffee mug, the
kind you’d get in an old-fashioned diner, abandoned by the last secretary to check-off a list and
ensure everything important had been boxed up and taken away.
There was another door past the banquet table, but dust thickened the air and I was afraid
to go further. As if my own breath might choke me.
The floor creaked beneath my shifting weight, and the door trembled on rusted hinges.
For a dizzying moment, I thought someone was there.
“Willow?”
Silence.
Of course, no one was there. In flesh or spirit. Even Kate didn’t believe in ghosts. Our
plain-named, practical children, so different from Willow or I they might have been strangers.
We’d wanted it that way. When Willow’s stomach first began to swell, we promised there’d be
no loose-limbed drifting. And no iron-bound dignity. We didn’t want to be our parents. But we’d
failed Kate and Jay. Made them into children who could walk through a haunted house without
fear or imagination.
I retreated to the brighter light of the entrance hall, leaning on the smooth banister.
“Willow?” Dust coated my tongue. The white lightning of a migraine threatened. “Kate?
Jay?”
Their names were losing meaning. Blurring and bleeding to nothing in the swallowing
silence. It was like slipping into deep water. Cold. Comforting. Arresting.
Footsteps raced above me, dislodging a flurry of ceiling plaster. Kate’s laughter filtered
down with the dust. Surely, that was Kate’s pitch? A door slammed. And another. Cracking like
gunshots. They were probably chasing each other through moldering dormitory rooms. Rattling
spotted, brass bedframes and offending the memories of whatever pious people had slept there.
Making all the little ghost orphans envious. I shook my head, if only I believed in such things. If
only ghosts worried me as much as splinters and tetanus-laced nails.
I climbed the stairs in resignation. My eyes had adjusted enough to distinguish the
patches Willow and the kids had left in the dust. My feet landed in the same blank spaces,
leaving no marks of my own. As if I were the ghost.
At the top, another long hallway stretched in either direction. It was empty, except for
occasional fingers of sunlight crawling under doors. The music and the noise had stopped again.
I swallowed curses, a cobweb catching on my lips.
How could Willow and the kids be so hard to find? The building was massive, but the
corridors ran straight, west to east. Our paths should’ve crossed by now. Unless they were
hiding. In which case, how would I ever choose the right door?
Maybe I should’ve left. Waited by the car. Let Willow call me a bad sport and fill the
drive home with half-hearted silence. Help the kids think of me as someone who would always
disappoint. Who would never feature in their memories.
Instead, I found a classroom or a chapel. Rows of hard chairs and an unadorned lectern
beneath a plain cross. I slumped down. The dim interior had kept my migraine in check, and the
sweat had dried on my neck. But my legs felt cramped. Electrolyte imbalances. I knew the
science. But knowing didn’t change anything.
The chairback in front of me had been scarred with a name. No, not a name. I leaned
closer, inhaling a nearly forgotten wisp of wood polish. Two letters. A M. Initials? Lovers? The
mere convenience of straight-sided letters when confronted with boredom and a penknife?
Impossible to know.
When I first met Willow, I didn’t ask about her name. Didn’t want to have to explain my
own in turn. She told me anyway. Of course, she’d been conceived beneath the swaying branches
of a willow tree, her parents carving their names in the wrinkled bark to mark the occasion.
Imagine telling a six-year-old that. Six! She’d shuddered and I’d laughed.
And then we’d kissed.
We’d scratched our names side by side on all sorts of papers since then—marriage
license, birth certificates, deeds. But papers were easily torn. Lost. Faded. Wood was as solid as
bone. Harder to mark. Harder to erase.
I traced the two letters, gouged deep. At the tip of the A, my finger caught on a splinter. I
jerked up, sucking the thin bubble of blood. Copper and salt and pine whirled in my mouth.
I spat in the dust, apologized to the cross, and headed for the door.
Leaving the rest of the rooms unexplored, I reached the end of the corridor, no sign of my
family. I turned around half expecting, half hoping, to see a hallway lined with specters—stern-
faced nuns and sepia children in starchy collars. But the shadow-streaked boards remained
empty. I supposed, like any good horror movie, the monsters were behind me now.
They were in the entrance hall. I heard them before I saw them; tiny chirps of some game
on Jay’s phone pinging up the grand stair. Kate’s muted voice, sniffling tears. And Willow’s,
losing patience, trying to assemble them into a cohesive unit and failing. They weren’t a coked-
up drummer or a recalcitrant keyboardist. Her usual charms were useless. She didn’t have the
skills for this, and I’d promised her she’d never need to.
My feet landed heavy on the floor and she looked up from where she knelt by Kate.
“Where were you?”
I waved at the cavernous space. “Lost.”
“I want to go home,” Kate said, scampering to my side.
“It’s boring,” Jay said, pocketing his phone without being told and folding his arms. Willow was frozen on the dusty floor, hands flat on her knees. A statue to match the one
outside—repentance.
How my mother would’ve crowed to see it.
But my mother had been wrong. Willow hadn’t let me down. It was me who would let
Willow down, leaving her alone with these two familiar little strangers.
And I hadn’t said I was sorry, not once since June. I’d only left the single, flimsy page of
the test report along with the pastel pamphlets on the counter by the microwave and gone to bed.
It was a school night, after all. The papers were gone the next day, so I’d known she’d seen
them. But we’d never talked about it. Not like we should have.
It was probably too late now.
I swallowed a breath gritty with dust and walked over to Willow, offering a hand to pull
her up. She didn’t need it, but she took it.
“Where to next?” I asked.
“Kate wants to go home.” Willow’s voice seemed small in the empty room.
“Nonsense,” I said. “You’ve got a little more in you, don’t you guys?”
I turned to the kids standing shoulder to shoulder now in the dusky light. Not quite
touching, but connected nonetheless.
Jay shrugged. Kate bobbed her head.
“Sure.”
“I guess.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We filed back down the long corridor out into the eye-smacking daylight. The afternoon
had hardly flickered. We’d only been inside a half hour. We circled the avenging angel and
crossed the road back to the edge of the gorge. The water curled below, deep green with veins of
white, unchanged and forever moving.
We piled into the car and followed the river a little further. Until the road curved in a new
direction. Until our voices were worn low and stillness didn’t cling to our shoulders. Until the
light began to change, and the smell of a lingering summer evening crept through the windows to
Author’s Statement:This was meant to be a haunted house story. Caine and his family were going to go inside, have a poke around, get a few scares, and get out. It turns out, I'm not very good at haunted houses. But there were ghosts here, I knew it. The longer I sat with this character in this place (inspired by the real Stella Niagara perched in all its old stone glory on the edge of the Niagara Gorge) the more I thought about the ways we disappear. And the ways we remain alive.
Bio: B. B. Garin is a writer living in Buffalo, NY. Her work has appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Westchester Review, Luna Station Quarterly, and more. She is currently a guest editor for The Masters Review and CRAFT Literary. She earned a B.F.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, and continues to improve her craft at GrubStreet Writing Center, where she has developed several short fiction pieces, as well as two novels. Connect with her @b.b.garin or bbgarin.wordpress.com.
