Free The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman Page B

and comfortable as a broken old couch from my rooftop, now seem to loom over the water like giants. The grinning goblins of Washington Irving’s stories. The Hudson River looks wide as a sea here and, in fact, it is still part of the sea—a tidal estuary all the way up to Troy. The spray that lifts off the whitecaps and washes over my face tastes of salt.
    I try to breathe in rhythm with my paddling, and concentrate on how beautiful the river is and not on what it would feel like to find myself hanging upside down in it. That’s what scares me so much about kayaking: the idea of being trapped in the boat, suspended in the water. I haven’t always been this fearful. When I was Bea’s age I’d hop the train tracks and take my dad’s rowboat out into the river. When I first met Neil he said he loved my fearlessness. We went rock climbing across the river in the Shawangunks—or the gunks, as rock climbers call them—and scaled every building on the Penrose campus. We climbed over train trestles and sneaked into abandoned Hudson River mansions, sometimes spending whole nights in the ghostly ruins of Gilded Age splendor. I’m not sure what changed me—whether it was having Bea or watching Neil descend into madness. Sometime during Bea’s first two years of life I lost a tolerance for hanging over the edge.
    “Isn’t this great, Mom?” Bea calls back to me, turning her radiant face toward me.
    “Beautiful,” I tell her, wishing she’d face forward in her kayak. It makes me nervous to see her swiveling around in the narrow craft. “Absolutely beautiful.”
    And it is. Still, I’m glad when we turn into the Wicomico even though it’s harder paddling against the stream’s current. I’m happy to be held on both sides by green banks and more distracted by the creek’s tamer charm than by the wild beauty of the Hudson. There’d been something in that beauty that had made my heart race. Here the meandering curves of the creek soothe. Wild iris and narcissi fringe the gently sloping banks, and water lilies carpet the water’s surface. Even the great blue heron, which is startled into flight by our approach, rises into the air with unhurried grace. Nothing sudden or unexpected will happen here.
    As we paddle farther upstream I realize that the tranquil effect of the stream has not been left to nature or chance. The trees that line the banks, trailing their long branches in the water like girls bending over the stream to wash their hair, have been planted there and so have the sedges and reeds, cattails and rushes that fringe the shore. I catch a glimpse of a pale figure crouched beneath a weeping willow and nearly cry out before realizing it’s a marble statue half submerged in the water and covered in moss and creeping ivy.
    “Do you see that one?” Bea calls, backpaddling her kayak to stop opposite the statue. I come up beside her and peer into the deep gloom of the willow’s shade. The marble boy is perched on a stone ledge that might have once been on the edge of the bank but is now under a foot of water. His lips just touch the surface of the water, but it must have looked once as if he were staring at his own reflection instead of lowering himself to drink. He’s surrounded by yellow daffodils.
    “Narcissus,” I say to Bea. “Look—” I use my paddle to point at another statue sitting a little farther along the bank—a slim girl sitting on a crumpled bit of stone wall, up to her waist in water. Her head is turned toward the self-absorbed boy, an expression of longing in what remains of her ruined face.
    “That’s Echo, right?” Bea asks. “She loved Narcissus.”
    “That’s right,” I tell Bea, glad that she’s remembered at least a little of the mythological tales I used to read her at bedtime. “But he only loved himself.”
    “She should have gotten over him,” Bea says, dipping her paddle into the water to push her boat away from the bank. “No boy’s worth that grief.”
    “You can