The Drowning Tree

For their continued support and good advice I wish to thank my agent, Loretta Barrett, and my editor, Linda Marrow, who knew when to offer praise, when to offer criticism, and when to offer dessert. Thanks, too, to Nicholas Mullendore at Loretta Barrett Books and Arielle Zibrak at Ballantine Books for all their help.

Thanks, as always, to my loyal circle of first readers: Barbara Barak, Laurie Bower, Cathy Cole, Gary Feinberg, Emily Frank, Wendy Rossi Gold, Laura Lipton, Mindy Siegel Ohringer, Scott Silverman, and Sondra Browning Witt.

For their expert advice, I’d like to thank Dr. Robert Dicker, Evie T. Joselow, Ph.D., Julie L. Sloan, and Ray Clagnan at the Gil Studio, Inc. Any mistakes or liberties I may have taken with the facts are solely my responsibility.

I couldn’t have written this book without the love and patience of my family. All my love and gratitude to Lee, Maggie, Nora, Mom, Bob, Larry, Nancy, Katy, and Andrew.

T
HE RIVER FEELS WIDER FROM THE SHALLOW BOAT, THE HUMPBACKED HILLS OF THE
Hudson Highlands looming like the giants Dutch sailors believed dwelled there.

“Just put the water behind you,” he says.

I can’t see the man in the boat behind me, and I don’t want to risk my precarious balance turning to see him.

“You’ve been through the drill,” he goes on.

And I have. Six weeks practicing in the indoor pool under the watchful eye of the kayaking instructor, tipping myself into blue chlorinated water and rolling up again, gasping, into the humid air, all in one long indrawn breath. I’ve practiced it until it’s become second nature, but it’s
one thing to turn over in the clear, warm pool water and another to imagine myself hanging upside down in the cold gray water of the Hudson, trapped in the currents.…

“This is where the current is most dangerous,” the voice says. “The Dutch called it World’s End.”

“I know,” I say, and then, because there’s something about the voice that has made the back of my neck prickle, I start to turn, searching the sweep of water behind me for the kayaking instructor—dark, long-haired Kyle, who coaches my daughter’s crew team as well—and instead catching the flash of blond hair gleaming between the stone-gray sky and the glittering skin of water. In that moment before the sky and water switch places I see him, and I’m not afraid; I’m glad.
He’s come back
. After all these nights of seeing him in my dreams, he’s really come back … but then I’m under the water, hanging suspended from the boat.

I reach for the cord that attaches my spray skirt to the rim of the kayak to free myself, but my hand grazes, instead, something smooth and slimy—long tentacles that reach up from the bottom of the river and have swamped my little boat. The hands of all those drowned sailors reaching up from their wrecks to pull down one more shipwrecked soul. When I open my eyes I see it’s only the broad-bladed zebra grass that grows at the bottom of the Hudson, but then, looking through the tangle of greenery, I see something else emerging from the depths, a face, haloed by bright hair.…

I awake, gasping in the dry air of my bedroom as if still drowning. Sun is streaming through the glass skylights above my bed, filtering through the pattern of green vines that I set into the glass, casting a snarl of green reflections onto the sheets. I can hear, from the next room, the sound of my daughter getting ready—she has an early crew meet today—and the sound of the dogs’ nails on the tiled floors of the loft. Today is Christine’s lecture, I remind myself, which is probably why I had the dream. Or maybe this dream of hanging upside down in the Hudson—this new variation of the dream I have every night—comes from my fear over Bea’s impending summer rafting trip out west.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed, throwing the twisted sheets back, trying to shed, as well, the residue of the dream.
How long will they
go on?
It’s been thirteen years since I last saw Neil—and fourteen years since we both nearly drowned in the river—and I still dream about him every night, and because he told me once that he believed that we could visit each other in our dreams, I always have the feeling that that is what he’s doing—coming to me in my dreams each night. And what really frightens me, I think as I look down at the stripes of green light that coil around my arms and legs, is that a part of both of us was left behind at the bottom of the river, where the zebra grass grows over the bones of shipwrecked sailors, at world’s End.

I
WAS LATE FOR
C
HRISTINE’S LECTURE
.

I almost didn’t go. I wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t especially asked me to come. The force of her preference was as irresistible now as it had been nearly twenty years ago when of all the girls at Penrose College she chose me to be her best friend. So even though I’d made a vow to avoid the campus during reunion—and had managed to do so, so far—I find myself on Sunday afternoon rushing through the lengthening shadows toward the library, just as I had on so many Sunday evenings during college, making a last dash to catch up on everything I’d avoided doing all weekend.

Usually it was Christine herself who had lured me away from my
work in the first place, who had unearthed me from whatever hole I’d buried myself in. “The Middle Ages can wait,” she’d say, “but the Sargent exhibit at the Whitney is ending this weekend.” She was always reading about some art exhibit that was just about to close. Carried along by her enthusiasm, I’d follow her to the train station, trying to keep up with her fast stride, in the wake of her long blond hair that streamed out behind her like the wings of a dove quivering on a current of air.

As I open the heavy library door I almost catch a glimpse of that hair, shining in a swath of sun behind me, but of course it’s an illusion. Christine is inside, standing at the podium, miraculously transformed into this older, more constrained woman
—a lecturer
—her long golden hair tamed into a sleek coil.

“This is where you’d find me,” Christine is saying to the audience as I slide into a folding chair in the back of the crowded hall—even the second-story galleries are packed with students sitting on the floor between the stacks—“after dinner Sunday nights, when the work I’d happily neglected all weekend finally caught up with me.”

Rueful sighs stir the group seated beneath the stained-glass window. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’d been reminded, walking toward the library through the late afternoon sunshine, of those last-minute penitential pilgrimages. And this is where I
would
find her, already at work on some paper due the next day, somehow arrived before me even though when we’d finally gotten back to the dorm from the city she’d claimed she was going to her room to sleep. While the escapades she’d led me on left me tired and bleary-eyed, they somehow left Christine refreshed and inspired. She had managed to write through the night and the paper she’d turn in on Monday morning would be the one the professors would hold up as the most original, the most brilliant.