by Tai Dong Huai
To get away from her relations, my adoptive mother takes us on a motorboat across Kamaniskeg Lake. She has spent most of her fifty-five summers here among the loons and the blackflies, and has taken me along for the first time.
“Wait until you see ‘The Rock,’” she tells me.
The lake is vast and disturbingly beautiful and, as far as I can tell, we are the only two people on it. After a few minutes – after the adoptive aunts and uncles with their inflatable rafts, and folding “gravity chairs,” and sand-covered children have dropped from sight – my mother silences the boat’s engine and drops the anchor over.
‘The Rock’ is not just a rock, but a formation of boulders reaching at least thirty feet into the air.
“Watch,” my mother says.
She lowers herself into the water from the side of the boat and swims the short distance to the shoreline. I watch as she approaches the base of the rocks, as she slowly and cautiously climbs its ledges.
She is growing older, I find myself thinking.
Her hair looks grayer in the severe afternoon sunlight and her legs, fully exposed by a black one-piece bathing suit, are veined and dimpled.
“Let’s eat at the chip wagon tonight,” she’d yelled to me moments ago over the din of the boat’s motor. “We’ll do it Canadian style with vinegar on our fries instead of ketsup!”
By now she’s made it to the top of the largest, darkest stone. She stands erect, looking out, looking past me, looking as if she can see beyond all the world’s oceans. When she leaps, her arms rise up and she flies majestically in a cloudless sky. Her fingers break the water’s surface and she slides beneath, as silent as her own shadow.
She is gone no more than ten seconds, but in that time I wonder this: Suppose she does not come up. Suppose she has struck her head on the bottom. I am nine years old and cannot operate this boat. The relations are too far to hear my shouts. And then I think: I will wade onto shore. I will climb ‘The Rock’ myself and search until I find a cottage. And although it is too late to save my mother, the people inside will take me in. They will give me a butter tart and a cup of tea. Then they will contact my adoptive father who will drop everything and come for me.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps they will stop me at their door and shake their heads no. They will tell me that they have burdens of their own. Perhaps they will point north, up the gravel road where I have never been, where the winter comes even earlier, where night and day are both endless.
Her head breaks the surface of the lake. She is close to the boat, paddling water and laughing. She looks young, as if Kamaniskeg itself has just birthed her.
“Did you hit bottom?” I call.
“Not even close,” she calls back.
