Turn 6 of 7
Ask her what she remembers about the water coming
She does not answer right away. Instead she looks down at her hands, turning them over as though reading something written on the palms. The cut on her knuckle has slowed to a dark smear. When she speaks, her voice has changed — lower, careful, the voice of someone trying to describe a room they visited in a fever dream.
"I was on the bridge," she says. "I'd been waiting since the afternoon. The light was going, the way it goes in October, and I heard — not a sound, exactly. More like the land changed pitch. Do you know how a bell feels in your chest before you hear it with your ears? It was like that. The ground hummed, and then the water came."
She pauses. Her hand goes to her throat again, and she swallows.
"It did not come over the bank. It came up through the stones. Through the road, through the bridge. I felt it in my boots first, cold, and then it was at my knees, and I thought — I thought I should run, but there was nowhere to run to. The water was everywhere at once. It was not a wave. It was the valley filling, like a bowl."
"I remember my shawl pulling," she says, and her voice cracks on the word, a clean break like a stick snapped dry. "I remember my feet leaving the stone. And I remember being under, and it was not dark — that is what I cannot — it was not dark. It was like looking through glass at a room I had been in before, a room I knew, but I could not find the door. I could hear the mill wheel turning. I could hear it clearly, and the mill was burned, I knew it was burned, but I could hear it turning."
She stops. She is shaking now, a fine tremor running through her shoulders and down into her hands, and she grips the parapet to steady herself. The blood on her knuckle has dried to a thin brown line. Behind her the reservoir lies flat and black and patient, and you understand with a clarity that settles in your stomach like a stone that she is not describing a memory she lost. She is describing a memory she only just got back. Whatever the water took from her, it is giving it back in pieces, and each piece costs her something.