For years my mother told the same story about the afternoon I almost drowned in the quarry, a disused limestone pit cut into the edge of the town, chalk walls breaking away in pale, crumbling shelves, the water at the bottom green, perpetually motionless—even in the worst Grey County winds, through gales off Lake Huron that come in off the water and flatten the fields. She never waited for anyone to ask: she just told it—over birthdays, Christmas dinners, to the neighbors we’d only just met, laughing all the while—before she reached the frightening part, because she already knew the ending. I loved listening to it, like children love any story wherein they occupy the starring role. I loved it even when it changed each time: the color of my shirt, the number of boys on the bank, whether or not she heard my shouting from the road, and because I heard it so often I began correcting other people whenever they remembered it differently. No, there were only two boys; no, Mum jumped in immediately; no, I was only under for a few seconds. It was only after she died—after the eulogy, when people had begun folding up the chairs and carrying their half-finished plates back into the church hall—that an aunt touched my arm and asked whether my mother had ever told me what had really happened that afternoon—that before anyone else arrived she had already been there in the quarry with me, and that the men who pulled me out had first had to pull her away because she would not let go, because even after I began struggling she kept forcing me back down beneath the surface. I cannot stop hearing her cries, her disbelief as they dragged her away, the grief that must have followed—and what haunts me isn’t the possibility that my mother once tried to drown me but that I can no longer remember the story without hearing myself interrupt it, softening it, pausing where she paused, laughing where she laughed, helping her to remember it in the only way she could.
this is masterful. hats off!
Haunting as hell. This was a great read, incredible compression.