Perhaps my mother sensed the treachery of my dream. Or maybe she believed that the water had leaked into my head, intending to drown me as I slept, because only moments later, she was sitting on the edge of my bed. “Mel. Are you under there?”
“Mmmmm.”
Then she ran her hand across my face and felt the cool traces of the raindrops. She sprang up and closed the window.
“Mama? Why does Max love the rain so much?” I asked.
“Max,” she said, considering her oldest child’s name. “Max,” she repeated, springing up from the bed although she had just lain down. “I forgot to tuck your brother in.”
Thunder pounded near the house, mimicking my mother’s rising panic. “Max?” she screamed. The thunder cracked again. My mother reappeared in my doorway. “Do you know where your brother is?”
“No,” I replied. I followed her into the bathroom. Max’s towel was gone.
“Max!” she hollered, trying to outdo the thunder.
We stood on the steps of the back porch, which ended on the flagstone path that led down to the river. My mother was counting aloud, never quite getting to the number three that would send her out into the storm. Then she took a deep breath and held it, preparing to dive into the storm. She didn’t move.
“Is Max by the river?” I asked.
That did it. She took me by the arm, her human lifesaver, and we plunged into the darkness. It was my first exposure to a thunderstorm, a hot swirling assault that cut maniacally through the August night. This was not the dangerous calm of the water in my dream, but an active aggressor that blinded my eyes and swam up my nose. The whip-crack thunder urged the storm forward, driving it around the final post. The rain and wind that shook the trees resounded in my ears like breaking glass. And in the distance, I could hear the angry stomach growl of the river.
We crossed the lawn, now a plush swamp of muddy grass, and arrived at the gate that divided our backyard from the dirt path to the river. When my parents first moved into the house, they had scrambled down this muddy path, picnic basket in hand, to eat by the water. But as the water became their enemy, their picnics retreated—first to a blanket spread just inside the gate, then to the middle of the lawn, and now to a modern picnic table a few feet from our back door. My mother had not been down to the river or even opened the gate since I was a year old. Only Max, during his forbidden solo explorations of the riverbed, had prevented a rusty arthritis from immobilizing the latch.
My mother’s legs and hips banged against the gate. Over the pounding rain—which sounded more like the emptying of buckets than like the simultaneous splatter of individual drops—we could hear the deep snarl of the river as it rushed past us, chewing up the bank and swallowing rocks and tree branches. This was not the water of my dream, which had held its hunger at bay. This water was insistent and unwilling to compromise. And although I tried to listen for the song that Max heard in the rain echoing in the swirling river, I disliked the water’s angry voice. I knew that if I fell in, it would chew me up and spit me out against the shore. My mother sucked her breath in again and pulled me down the muddy path.
We half walked, half slid as the warm, soft mud cushioned our tumble. The river had already devoured most of the bank, leaving less than two feet between the bottom of the path and the edge of the water.
“Max!” my mother shouted, her voice melting into the wind on its downstream course. “Max!”
“Max,” I cried, my voice not even penetrating the storm’s outermost shell.
“Flashlight, flashlight,” my mother said, frantically patting her pockets. “Oh, God,” she cried, discovering that she was unarmed.
We squinted over the riverbed, trying to separate the rain from the dark. The thunder cracked hard and close. My mother counted the seconds between each thunderclap. Ten seconds. Nearly overhead. As the thunder approached, chariot driven, its horses madly pawing the earth, it brought with it sheets of lightning that electrified the whole riverbed, illuminating it with a phosphorus white.
Another sheet of lightning shocked the storm to life, showing the spidery outlines of the tree branches, the tumult of the water at our feet, and a small white rock bobbing in the middle of the river. When the next white sheet descended, the rock was gone. My mother gripped my hand. Her other hand seemed to be groping in the dark, either reaching out into the river or looking for a light switch to keep the storm’s electricity running. It was him—the next flash of lightning showed—floating in the river. Max seemed to be both fighting the storm and delighting in it. One moment, his arms would churn wildly, searching for some stability in the fluid madness—and the next, he appeared to be lying calmly, waiting for the river to sweep him along.
My mother let go of my hand and crept into the water until it reached her knees. I moved backwards onto the shrinking shore and held on to a tree branch that protruded from the small slope. “Max!” she shouted. “Max!”
The sky lit up, and we saw Max turn toward us, his face contorted with a look of surprise.
“Max!” my mother cried, taking two more steps into the river. “Stay there.” Then the thunder cracked, and she whirled around, looking for me on the muddy bank. “Mel! Mel, are you holding on?”
Tears choked my reply as I watched my brother’s head devoured and regurgitated by the black water. My mother retreated to the bank and extended a hand to me. I could feel Max’s eyes penetrating
