Our father was trying to leave us.
“But he always goes to work,” said the five-year-old.
“This is different,” said his sister, who was ten.
“You’ll see me soon, baby, okay?” said our father.
“After work?”
“Lucas!” said his sister. “This is different!”
Our father didn’t know what to do. There were four of us, the five-year-old and the ten-year-old and the two middle brothers sitting on the staircase, stunned. Our mother, still young, hovered in the hallway.
On a different day, in an alternate life, she’d have stepped forward. “Just go, Gary,” she might have snapped. “Honey, let Dad leave,” she might have soothed her youngest. But she believed in reality.
“Honey,” said our father, and he knelt to look the five-year-old in the eye. “I’ll see you soon, okay. Be good for Mom.”
“Will he be back for bedtime?”
“Lucas!” said the ten-year-old, her posture breaking. “Stop!”
Our father looked with purpose at each of us. His eyes were great, glassy puddles, gleaming and forlorn.
He tripped on his own feet as he turned. “Shit,” he said
Everyone except for the five-year-old gasped. Shit, thought the five-year-old. Shit!
“Okay,” said our father. “I’m sorry. I love you all.”
But the front door stuck when he tried to open it. He made a broad gesture, like an audience might enjoy the conundrum. The door relented and he saw his used truck and the flat, clear horizon of American promise. He sighed. Would anyone respond to his sigh? They would not. He didn’t mean to search for pity in this moment. He wasn’t confused. He was becoming a reduction of himself. Our father, who left us.
As he closed the door, he could feel our mother staring after him with those eyes of hers. Her brothers, her piano students, her children, even strangers in the grocery store—she watched in confusion or concentration and the whole world was startled. “Are you okay?” they asked her. “Are you angry?”
He stepped off the porch as his four children planted themselves in the front window to see him drive away. Another car pulled onto the road behind him.
◆
“That’s him,” says the man behind the wheel. He is living in the present. His face is a loose beard too thin for its length and there’s a gun at his hip. Others are in the car as well. Her, and him, and him. The four of them. They all speak in a way that is purposeful, alert.
◆
For a while, our father drove without direction.
“This is gonna kill you,” our mother had told him. It was her final argument against his leaving. “You’ll never forgive yourself. It’ll destroy you.”
◆
“Not too close,” says the woman in the second car. She sits in the backseat.
◆
Our father felt hemmed in by the options. He could go to Miranda’s, but he’d be mopey and dissolute and soon, he could feel it, furious. She’d want to celebrate. A hotel was the better option, or camping. And of course he could always shoot himself.
“Ha,” he said aloud. But it was a possibility.
The second car continued to follow him. Not that he noticed it or even knew where he was driving. He glanced around and realized he wasn’t heading west, like he thought, but south. He’d been going south for longer than he could guess. The clock on his truck didn’t work. His watch was in his suitcase.
“Where the hell did this wood come from?” said our father. There weren’t a lot of woods in this part of the country unless you went to the mountains. Not like his childhood, with the lakes and the heat and the humidity wrapping you in its unrelenting breath. Here the shade was chilled even in the summer. And he felt the chill. The trees around him were vertiginous pines whose heads swayed in disapproval at his choices. Maybe he was giving the trees too much license.
◆
“You’re gonna lose him,” says the woman in the backseat of the second car.
“We’re fine,” says the driver.
“Closer. Get closer.”
◆
Now he knew where he was going. He turned off his lights, which he didn’t need, and continued along a dirt road, his tires chattering of rocks and divots. The mouth of the cave rose from the ground and might have been found by anyone in the last few hundred years. The Spanish had explored it when they ruled the territory, and the Núuchi-u and Nʉmʉnʉʉ once knew it as well, he suspected. He’d looked up the tribes’ names the first time he’d found arrowheads. If they knew more of the cave than the entrance, they’d left no further evidence. The Spanish had only left musket barrels.
◆
“I don’t have a freaking clue how he already got here, okay?” says the driver.
“Why would he turn his lights off?” says the woman.
“Why did we?” says another of the men. They stop and get out quietly. Our father’s car is ahead, empty. He might hear the thunk of their doors. He might know the four are behind him.
“Into the cave, huh,” says the driver. The woman says nothing. She takes the lead.
◆
“Dark,” said a voice.
“Yes,” said our father. He was walking without a light. The cave descended evenly, and the voice came from just ahead of him.
“Hungry.”
“Yes,” said our father. His stomach growled.
“I remember,” said the voice. “I remember.”
◆
“How deep are we,” asks the driver, no longer driving. The four walk in darkness the same as our father, nearly 200 yards behind.
The woman glances at her watch. “Unsure,” she whispers.
“I think it’s behind us, too,” says the driver.
“Be silent, then,” says the woman. The three men continue to follow her. There is only one path, but it’s wide. And the driver is correct about the voice. The four can’t hear our father, but they can hear the soft rumble of the voice. It’s behind them, but speaking to our father ahead of them.
“Dark,” it says. “Hungry,” it says. It trails them.
There is another noise, if you listen. Not a rustling. Not a burrowing. Something wet. It’s on the other side of the cave wall, faint. A sliding. The hum of the sound is pitched. The woman can match it if she tries.
“Deeper,” says the voice, behind them, but also ahead.
◆
In a huge chamber, with a vaulted ceiling and vast tunnels leading up, down, out, south, a nexus for unmapped connections, our father stopped. The voice was still shrouded. A scuffle echoed from the path he’d exited. He swiveled around. No one had ever followed him before. It was unlikely. It was almost impossible. But he’d been distracted. He hadn’t taken the usual precautions.
“You’ll be devoured,” he yelled into the darkness. “Go back if you want to live!”
He shrugged to himself. It was worth a try.
◆
“We’ll have to shoot him,” whispers the driver. The other two men nod, silent. “This could be the place. We know there’s a chance.”
“Maybe,” says the woman. “We can always try.”
◆
Our father listened for a time, until he heard the trickle of water, the stream.
“Why does it move?” he asked the voice. “Tunnels, I mean. Why different tunnels? Is there a pattern?”
“There is only one stream,” said the voice. “And only one tunnel.”
Our father rolled his eyes. Another brush of feet behind him.
“Was I followed?” he asked the voice. The voice said nothing.
◆
There is a silent debate among the four. The driver indicates with his drawn weapon that he can take the shot. They are on the edge of the chamber, which gives no light, and our father uses no light. The woman knows some of the tunnels, but not like our father. It is time for a decision. Time in the old sense. Time is a landscape. This is one of the places where she must make a choice. The driver shakes his gun, emphatic. Kill. Kill! And the two other men agree, nodding. She closes her eyes. The sound of the men gesturing, the stretch of their shirts. She feels them staring at her. They hate the deep hole our father has found. Maybe he creates the hole, she thinks. There are many theories.
The driver risks a whisper. “I don’t want to,” he says. “But we have to try.”
“Enter,” says the voice, both behind them and ahead of them.
◆
Our father found the stream. He crouched in its narrow tunnel and let the water pass over his hand.
“Enter,” said the voice.
Maybe I’ll keep coming here, he thought. Maybe I never will again. He was unsure where in the geography he’d be dropped.
A gun fired behind him. At him. A bullet hit him and left him. He shrieked.
“Shit,” he said. But it was too late. There was blood. He’d never been bleeding before. He entered the tunnel barefoot. The floor sloped downward, the water rising. Another shot, but nowhere near him this round. He kept going until the water was at his waist, the blood sucked free by the rushing wet, the water diluting and spreading his blood across his chest, his shoulders, covering his body. The water was at his throat, his chin. He didn’t bother taking a breath. He kept going and when the water covered his head, his feet remained on the ground. A human can’t feel wet, he thought. I feel cold and pressure, but not wet. His throat opened. He believed the passage to his lungs knew wetness for itself. He began to drown.
◆
“Keep going,” says the woman. The three men are behind her, and scared. But they follow. This is the first place that they’ve been able to trail our father. They enter the water and the blood. They take deep breaths. One by one, they also drown.
◆
A many Edenic. A waltz that welts in the whisper of wonderment. Whoops. Whappening. Happening. The wakening of words and we whee I mean whoa to be. Whom. Thee. Happening. The lesson of the octopi the cephala-bod mind of we in the joy sparking the joy of the worst winded wavering wetness I wonder. I glean. Wander. The octopi of many limbed limbus un-nimbused into oneness. I. Fingers. Me. Minding the mended mold of motherself by molded into mad mixed memory. Mind in the fingernails. Ahh! Is the next nimbus unnumbing deposition of departing demon-y dopes into done. Many into one. Me. Making the most.
“But he always goes to work,” said the five-year-old.
“Razor!” yelled Gary.
“Just go, Gary,” said the eyes. Green.
Eyed. Eying. Evolved innocence.
“Dad?”
Movement. Motion. Unmouthed. Unmaking amends. When the Ichthyostega first walked on land it was one small step for standkind. Gary stood. Gary at the door. Gary’s mustache leaving.
Our father.
“I don’t have a gun,” said Gary.
“That’s him,” says the man behind the wheel in the car that is tailing Gary.
“He has my gun,” says Gary.
“Our guns,” says Gary.
“Who shot me?” said Gary.
He is alone in the truck. He is driving too fast.
“I’ll just kill myself,” said Gary.
Gary agrees with Gary, Gary, Gary, and Gary.
“Shit!” says Gary four times, and runs his car into a Ponderosa pine.
◆
Our father came out gasping. He was naked. He crawled from the tunnel dripping, his hair leaking the water into his eyes, his nose pointing the water to the ground.
“Are you there?” he asked. He sat on the rocky floor, uncomfortable. “Are you fucking there?”
“Yes,” said the voice. The hum behind the cave walls returned.
“I’d like to see you,” said our father.
No answer.
“Can I just talk for a bit? Will you listen?”
“Yes.”
But our father couldn’t think of what to say. He began to search for the stream. The voice remained silent as he went down tunnel after tunnel. None ended, as far as he could tell, but neither did they lead to the stream. He had a system for the tunnels. They didn’t branch. He couldn’t find the water.
“Do you ever sleep?” he asked.
“I was born today,” said the voice.
“Yes,” said our father. “I know.”
“I remember what comes next.” We wanted him to understand.
“You told me you were born another time, too.”
“I was,” we told our father.
“Yes,” said our father. “I know.” He began to cry. He slept.
Some hours later, he woke. “The stream!” he yelled. He could hear it in a nearby tunnel. “Yes, yes,” he muttered. He was riddled with desire for the stream. An addiction. He was in withdrawal from its use of him. To die in the water, to die where the water has sent you. It had been too powerful an experience. He was shaking. When the stream rose to his waist, he dispensed with the wading and dove into its black throat. We ate him. The water drowned him, which we never enjoy.
◆
“Lucas,” said the ten-year-old. “Just stop!”
“Kate,” said our father. “Look, I’ll just go for a drive. Yeah? I’ll just go for a drive. And then I’ll come back. Please, Kate.”
“Come on, Mom!” said the ten-year-old. As if Kate were overseeing her husband’s breakdown. As if Kate might hold our father to his word that he would leave us, her strength outgaining his own. You said it, now do it! She didn’t know why this was rebounding on her.
“Okay,” she said. “Sure, Gary. Go for a drive.”
“Closer,” says the woman in the backseat of the second car.
“What?” asked Kate. Her four children were setting the table for dinner. Six plates, rather than five. No one answered her question, so she removed the casserole from the oven and found a serving spoon.
Maybe Gary would make good. Maybe he’d be able to unwind the last six months, the last few years. He might gather the loose ends of himself. He was at Miranda’s, she knew. But that wasn’t the real battle. The fight would be Gary versus Gary versus Kate.
When he didn’t return that evening, when her daughter and two older boys wept themselves to sleep, when her youngest kept reading and playing and being unaware of his father’s failure to return, our mother decided to take a drive herself. She gathered Gary’s professional maps.
“If you wake up,” she told her daughter, “and there’s some kind of problem, go next door and grab Mrs. Bendtner, okay?”
She hesitated in the garage. She always left her daughter with too much. The first-born. Like Kate.
On the highway, her window open, Kate felt a pang of joy. This was almost an adventure. The Black Forest lay ahead of her. Its official name. Its romance, its surprising geography, its unoriginal label. The Black Forest. An aural fossil of some German who once crossed too much of the American prairie, the American desert—maybe ventured through the state’s great sand dunes—and had found this wood, an unmountained density, and hadn’t been able to resist the echo of the old world. The Black Forest. There was a generic green sign as you entered its boundary. “Welcome to the Black Forest!” The trees flattened beneath her headlights, the trunks stacked by the yellow light. Gary’s maps were laid on the passenger seat.
She found his car on accident. He came here often, she knew, both from his comments and the maps. He’d gone to Miranda’s earlier, she was certain, but then he’d come here. Besides the trees and some bushes and the night surrounding her, though, there was nothing to see. She was on the verge of leaving when her flashlight caught the tread of a hiking boot. One clear print in soft dirt.
“Gary!” she called. No answer.
Moving further into the woods, she saw the cave. It was a deep yawn amid the lesser black of the evening, the glow of starlight and moonlight above her.
“Gary!” she tried again.
She entered the cave, flashlight sweeping from side to side. Not panicked. Thorough. Her eyes steady marbles in the beam’s feedback.
“Gary!” she yelled. She was starting to worry. Maybe he was alone in the dark, bleeding or with a bum ankle. “Gary!”
The stream surprised her. It was a trickle across her path. It issued from a side tunnel she hadn’t noticed. The cave mouth was behind her but not too far. Visible and reassuring. The stream gathered strength, became more than a trickle. She could smell the water, which bemused her. A waft of floral pinesap, a gust of spring that came from the thickening thread. She sniffed, a little stunned. She turned toward the water, toward the tunnel from which it came.
We decided to speak.
“Leave,” we said.
This was a mistake.
“Gary?” she said.
We adjusted our voice.
“Leave,” we said.
“Who is that!”
We made our selves a body in the shadows. This was a joke we performed sometimes. We became Not Gary. We dripped into a form like his form. We made a black outline in the black cave. A silhouette. The silhouette wriggled. The outline, the form, could show our mouth, and all the years which were beyond the years of all the lives in our mouth folded into immensity. A joke. A hungry punchline. Mother. Mother. We were a mouth which grew from the form of Gary’s head to the whole of Gary’s chest. And like Gary. But Not Gary. A mouth.
Our mother screamed. She screamed and our father hurried from deeper in the cave to find her. He also found us, and he screamed, too. Father! Mother! We rose, we stretched, we wanted to consume them. It surprised us. We wanted them. We were to decide what happened for the first time. We. Us. We were not water. We were not bone. The pebbles rose before our gravity. Our mouth gaped its physics, its glimpse of compressed existence.
“Come on, Kate!” said our father.
And we fell on them.
But too late. Too near the starlight, the moonlight, the end of the cave. We roared as they fled.
“I’ll drive,” said our father, shaken. His terror was our mistake.
Our mother said nothing. She and our father were going mad as they fumbled inside his car, as they slammed through the bushes, back to the road, back toward home.
“Gary, look out!” screamed our mother.
He tried to swerve. But we rose from the road, the ground rising with us, splitting, hungry, full of unguessed vengeance. We didn’t know ourselves. We didn’t know our anger. We made a new entrance. A new mouth. Screaming, we closed it, too.
Our father awoke in the stream alone. We said nothing. He drowned himself again.
◆
The woman wakes in the second car. She is sitting in the backseat.
“He’s leaving,” says the driver.
The woman fiddles with a small container in her palm.
“You going back?” asks the driver. The other men roll their eyes.
She takes out a pill.
“Aqua Vitae.” The driver is reading the capsule with sarcasm.
The woman doesn’t answer. She swallows the pill.
In her home, in her bed, she tries to remain calm during the seizure.
“It’s almost done,” says our mother. She is older. Her eyes are not. The woman says nothing and continues to feel the clinch of her jaw tighten. Her mouthguard is in place, but she still worries about her teeth. The vanities, she thinks. Others stronger than her break their fingers, their ribs, their minds, their lineage. Not her. No, no. She is determined to be spared.
“Almost there,” says our mother.
The woman weeps when it stops.
“How is he,” asks our mother.
“I didn’t bother.” The woman is quiet. “Where do you usually see him?” she asks.
Our mother concentrates on the woman’s face. “Somewhere in the middle, I guess. Where I see his parents. I drive to them when they’re in Oklahoma. They don’t understand my visiting. But I like to see them anyway. And often he’s just there.”
Memory chooses what it chooses.
The woman leaves the apartment and wanders into the horrible world.
WHERE DO YOU SEE HIM reads a sign. Our father is pictured on the billboard. A city, but nothing is decrepit. The streets are made of painted cement and silence. A hushed, gleaming city. She walks beyond the inner buildings, following a path she knows from her beginning, her childhood and her visits to her childhood. A path which leaves the gleaming city and soon weaves among long grass. Scattered trees pock the skirt of the foothills.
Some bodies hang in the trees. They stink. There is only one man who cannot kill himself.
The driver phones her.
“We’re stuck in the cave,” he whispers.
“I remember,” says the woman.
“I sure as hell don’t. Not well enough.”
We speak. We want the woman to hear us, too.
“Leave.”
“Holy shit!” says the driver.
“It’ll be fine,” says the woman, trembling. “It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine!”
“Oh my god! Oh my god!” says the driver. He screams as we open a new mouth. His line goes empty.
In ten minutes, he phones her again.
“You okay?” she asks
“I fucking hate that thing. I don’t fucking understand it at all.”
They don’t say much else, and she says goodbye. That could have been his moment, she thinks. He could have met his time then. She lies to him often. “I remember,” she says. But that’s what everyone says. And everyone is lying. Usually.
Back in the city, a truck is removing the body of a child from the gutter. A girl. The girl’s parents are howling and crying. The woman recognizes the scene. Memory chooses what it chooses. The girl has a childhood illness. A common illness. She keeps being born.
The woman concentrates. Things are sharp here, clear. She must have a good reason for being so aware.
“Hey!” calls someone from the truck. He is speaking to another pair of men arriving in a car, but he is pointing at her. They are not from the city. They are removing the girl but they are pointing at the woman. “Hey!” he calls again. They have firearms.
She runs. She is far from the billboard—WHERE DO YOU SEE HIM—but our father’s great face looms as she glances over her shoulder. No one will shoot her. If she runs fast enough and far enough, she escapes. That happens. At some spot. Less clear is whether that happens here.
The bodies in the trees sway. The birds keep their distance. There are always birds. No other stray animals, unless the woman counts. She feels like she might.
“They catch you,” rasps one of the bodies in the trees. A man, hanging.
“Shut up,” she says.
“You never help me,” spews the body in the tree. He spasms. He dies.
No one else is out. No one is ever out unless they work for the city. The truck is moving behind her. The car of the other two men is nowhere to be seen. It cuts her off, she knows. She remembers the face in the tree. Not a brother or a cousin or a friend. She knows him from the tree. This is an important location. Maybe the essential one.
A car skids before her. A truck stops behind, revs its engine.
“In,” says one of the two men in the car. They slap her and bag her head to be safe. They slap her again when she’s hooded.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says. She doesn’t mean to sound so vulnerable. She’s crying. The seat cushions are soft, dirty. She can smell the thick dust. They don’t bind her hands. Maybe this is where she dies. Maybe that’s okay. The exhaustion is pouring out her eyes, her throat.
She blinks in the hood. “Lucas,” she hears herself yelling. “Stop!”
“Okay,” says our father. The hood sucks against her mouth as she inhales, blooms in release. “Okay. I’m sorry. I love you all.”
“Dad,” she says. She’s in the cave. She might as well, she thinks. The control loosens, the pills are nowhere to ground or direct her, and she’s in the cave. She’s ahead of her brothers. She’s sprinting. The ghost of the hood catches the air, a dark corona surrounding her vision.
“Dad!” she yells.
“Where are you?” he responds. She can’t see in the cave, not well, but his outline is clear. He’s naked and dripping water. He, too, is crying.
She’s slapped again. “Stay here,” one of the men in the car insists. Another slap. “Stay right here. No family privileges.”
“Dad,” she says, in the cave. She’s in the air. This is where death finds most people. In the loop. Death, she thinks, happens on repeat for many in the present. But a final time, too. A surprise.
“Are you spiraling?” he asks her. He stays in the shadows. The stream is a clear middle C. The sound of her brothers’ feet is faint. She hums.
We are silent. For now.
“I want to see you,” she says.
But he doesn’t respond. He stands, not responding. We are considering taking him again. We are considering taking her. We are not death. We are something unsure. Our father is unsure. His daughter, before him, thinner than atmosphere, in danger, in the spiral, in need. He remains unsure. He stands, dripping. She opens her mouth to speak, but vanishes.
Someone slaps her again, hard enough she nods forward, unconscious.
◆
“You’ll never forgive yourself,” Kate told him.
Gary nodded. He wasn’t really listening.
“It’ll destroy you,” said Kate. “Leaving will destroy you.”
“Hi, Mom,” says the woman.
“Hi,” said Kate. Says. Saying. “Hi,” said our mother.
“I think I want to be destroyed,” said Gary.
“No one wants that,” said Kate, says the woman beside Kate. “That’s what people say who have never been destroyed.”
◆
“Hey, baby girl,” says our father. Baby girl, she thinks. It annoys her. A pet peeve to eclipse the apocalypse. Baby girl.
She is also repeating a catechism. There is only one man who cannot kill himself.
Someone removes her hood, gently. Our father.
“Let me show you around,” he says.
She keeps touching the bruise on her cheek. Her headache is terrible, but she follows.
They’re back in the cave. There are no electric lights. No machines. There are men and women in masks. There are torches. The stream is down some dark slant, and the men and women are handing bottles back one to another, a conveyer belt of hands meeting hands. The bottles do not belong to the cave. Plastic that crinkles, filled with pills. A way to chain the stream.
“Why can’t anyone else find this place on their own?” she asks.
“Your mother finds it,” he says. “More than once she’s found it. It never goes well for some reason.”
They walk in silence among the men and women, who are also silent. Eventually they reach the stream, where the men and women each fill a capsule with the water, and other men and women place the capsules in bottles, and every minute or two a full bottle is passed up the line. She and our father walk beside the stream until the torchlight recedes and the men and women cannot be heard. The stretch of their clothes, the click of their joints, the brush of hands against the water all fade. We are silent.
“I don’t even know what questions to ask,” says the woman. She sits down in the darkness. Her father, she can tell, sits beside her.
“I’ve been trying to catch you,” he says. “I know you won’t believe me. But I’ve been trying to catch you for a long time. I don’t know how we keep missing each other. But we usually do.”
She has no weapon. She has little voice. She feels certain he could have found her.
“I still can’t decide if it really matters anymore,” he says. She can sense him making a gesture with his hand, the kind of flourish that encompasses everything, all scenarios and contingencies, the kind of back porch sentiment that somehow touches on all of life, even though neither party really knows what’s being said. Except she does know.
“You mean everyone dies anyway.”
He shrugs, as if he can sense her objections. And he probably can.
We, however, are still. We can sense her restraint, her anger, her fear, her need, her exhaustion. We vibrate. Our father, a man who’s changed too little. Or too much. He is always spiraling. The pills are not for him.
“A time plague,” she finally says.
Our father laughs. “A time plague.”
There are men and women closer now, filling capsules, filling bottles. They’ve inched nearer as part of the work. They are heavy, thin, old, young. They stop at the words, “Time plague.” We stop them, and we look at the father and the woman. We gaze with many eyes.
“Haha,” we say, and all the voices say it with us. “A time plague.”
The woman stands, startled.
“Ha,” we say, and we rise and move toward the father and the woman. “A time plague.”
“Dad,” she says.
The men and women are closer now and there are more than a few. They are not filling bottles. We are done with the work for today. We have filled the capsules and filled the bottles and we’re going to have a laugh. Another joke.
“Haha,” we say. “A time plague.”
“Dad!” she screams, stumbling. She crawls backward.
“Ha,” we say, many-voiced and towering around her. We encircle the father.
“A time plague.”
Her fingers find the edge of a flat and jagged rock.
“Haha,” we say.
She rises and the rock comes to our nearest temple, passes, connects with our father’s.
“Hon,” says our mother, in Oklahoma, in the dark. “Hon, say hello to your grandparents.”
The rock comes to their temples. She is standing beside her mother, bringing the rock against her grandparents. She is not a child.
“No, God, please!” screams her grandmother. But the rock is already in motion. We don’t know what to say. This is a strange joke.
“Honey! No!”
Her grandfather doesn’t resist. He’s taller than her but sitting, and she’s moving as she blinks. The rock.
“No!” screams a man she’s never met. A dark night in the woods. The rock dripping in her hand. The man’s drunk and there’s no electricity. She can see her father’s face in the man’s face, her grandfather’s face in the man’s face. Her brothers, herself. The rock comes to his temple. The stars are immaculate. The rock separates them from the woman as it arcs above her head. Our father says nothing as she lands another blow. There is only one man who cannot kill himself. She is weeping.
“Lucas!” she yells. “Stop!”
In the darkness, the only sound is the water.
She lies in the stream and drowns.