Free The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman Page B

before.
    She’s curled in there like a hedgehog or a rolled-up centipede, you think as you pass a houseboat moored near the caravan park. In the distance you see lightning crack open the sky for an instant. The thunder grumbles, a lion pacing up there somewhere. The waves are much bigger now as you steer the boat through the choppy water. This could be a bigger storm than ’26 or 1914 or the one just before they reenacted the Great Trek. No wait, it’s still summer, you think, stopping the flood of panic and excitement in your chest, that same mad thrill you get staring at a bone piercing through skin, or at a wound as open as a flower. Betsy can swim, you’re thinking, but for how long. This is the first year Mrs. God packed away the orange cork-filled lifejacket Betsy hated so much. But the boat won’t go over and if it does the river is deep only in certain places, not nearly as deep as it used to be when you dived off the bridge for golf balls. Of course there’s the lightning flashing now here, now there, some mad giant in the heavens playing pin the tail on the donkey.
    What if you’re the donkey and that long crooked spark lights up you and your boat and me, hidden but not safe? What if your heart is the one that stops? You don’t say anything to me about electricity or hearts that go bump-bump, lubb-dupp, bump, putt-putt, bump-lubb. Putt. Stop. I know you’re worried because your face has that slightly grim, serious look, the look I remember when you bent over my knee and extracted a rose thorn buried deep in my flesh. You washed off the blood and laid the thorn on a white towel and the two of us stared at it, as if it was a moon rock or a secret talisman or a hook that could speak.
    At the top of the right atrium is the sinoatrial node that sends out the electrical impulses that keep the heart going. Through the fabric of your short-sleeved shirt, you feel your own heart, its right margin under the right side of your breastbone. I watch you, as if I’m watching a magic show. I’m all curled up, your own offspring turned into a small black fox before your eyes. You’re torn between the miracle of nature crashing all around you, the bang bang of your own electricity, and me, so small, so curved, that it takes you back to the day I was born. You remember walking into the delivery room, Mrs. God and the fancy obstetrician from Cape Town smoking and cracking jokes. You shouted at them and tried to wave all that smoke away, to protect the tiny, folded life that was on its way. Now I’m here and I’m big, my scarred knee blinking at you. You have so much you want to tell me but you say nothing. You can never speak what’s in your heart because no one understands. Gertrude is probably married or dead—or married and dead!—and Bunny was killed when his plane was shot down in ’42. Remember when there were soldiers everywhere? Remember those days?
    I suck my knee and Don’t do that is what you tell me. Your knee has been all over the place, collecting germs, wet ones and dry ones, ones that sit and ones that fly.
    I’m cold, I say again, tired and slightly accusing, my teeth banging like castanets. You clear your throat and try not to look at me, as if I’m going to leap out of my hole and bite you, or even worse, move closer to you so that the front of the boat lifts up and you almost sink. Stay where you are, you say. It’s not so bad. Not like the one in ’26. You crack a thin, crooked sort of smile and I rearrange myself. You can see that every part of me is shivering. My cheeks are glazed with tears or rain, you can’t tell which. I suck my knee again, looking at you defiantly. Good, you think, she doesn’t seem sleepy or confused. No hypothermia. And then my eyelids flutter shut. Betsy! You shout. Pull yourself together. Buck up!
    Are we there yet? I say, and then I laugh. You look funny. Your shirt is all wet. I giggle, the same giggle engine Maisie had, or still has, for all you know. It makes