Page 14

“The most important thing about water is that it has memory.” Meryl sat on the edge of a large, flat rock that jutted out into the rushing creek, occasionally bending over to swirl the sand and mica bottom to investigate a stone. She navigated the creek as if it were a room in her own home, never slipping, always oriented, noticing the smallest details.

Meanwhile, Tressa Fay had hardly taken in the layout. She was covered in chill bumps, her skin reddened and numb with cold, slipping and splashing in her heavy, wet Converse, laughing when her swimsuit flashed Meryl and the birds as she tromped and knelt and fell.

But she didn’t feel childish or excessive or in any way less than , and Tressa Fay understood it was because Meryl didn’t think of her that way.

“What does water remember?” Tressa Fay asked.

“Water remembers every place it’s ever been, no matter what people construct to direct it somewhere else, make it something it’s not, or control it.” Meryl rubbed silt off a stone with her thumb. “I will give you an example. In the Pacific Northwest, in Washington State, people built a dam in order to make a river into a reservoir and a source of power. The dam was there for a long time.”

“How long?”

“A hundred-ish years. It was a big project. And then they decided to take the dam down, and this was going to be one of the biggest dam removals ever. Scientists and engineers and politicians and wildlife managers and rangers and students were talking to each other, trying to figure out what was going to happen.”

“When they took down the dam.”

“Yep. And at the same time, there were Lower Elwha Klallam people who had not previously been invited to the table—”

“Of course.”

Meryl nodded. “And they were reaching out to people like me to say, in a very paraphrased nutshell, ‘We know what’s going to happen. This river is one of our relatives. We know them well. As soon as they are freed, they have preferences and habits and rituals and journeys that they will take up again.’?”

“Because the river has been dammed up, everyone pretending it’s, like, some kind of lake, but it was really a restless, caged entity that wanted to go about its usual business.” Tressa Fay steadied herself on the creek floor.

Meryl’s smile was as wide as a child’s. There was a drop of water on her cheekbone. “Exactly. So, of course, the scientists and engineers and managers and rangers and politicians and students made models. And the Elwha people were able to get to a few of them and walk the land with them and show them where the water would go when it went on its journey again, what the land would do. But what the Elwha people said would happen seemed improbable, given what the scientists and engineers had modeled with their equations, physics, and understanding of fluid dynamics. And the Elwha people—who, by the way, shared a name with the river—were like, ‘Cool, cool, but we know our relative.’?”

“I’m starting to see the shape of this story.”

“Come sit next to me on this rock so I can be more acutely murdered by you in that swimsuit.”

Tressa Fay lurched through the creek, laughing, then collapsed on the sun-warmed rock, checking that the scraps of her suit were covering her most important bits. “Then they took the dam down, and…”

“The river went on its way. It filled in places that the white people hadn’t remembered were riverbanks, that they’d thought were valleys or rock formations. These places made more sense as a riverbank. Several villages were uncovered that had been alongside the river, all of them places the river’s relatives said would be there. It overtook places that had been difficult for rangers and managers to keep from having problems with fires or landslides, because they were places that should have always been riverbed. And it didn’t go anywhere that its relatives said it wouldn’t go. The scientific models predicted nothing.”

“It’s like the whole land was waiting for it to come back.” Tressa Fay leaned against Meryl’s warm arm, which was a little tacky with sunscreen. The sensation made her breath hitch.

“This is true about all water. It has a memory, even little creeks like this. You know how there’s always some parking lot that has a bunch of Canadian geese and sandhill cranes wandering around in it every summer?”

“Yes! There’s a parking lot like that at the hardware store my dad likes.”

Meryl nodded. “And I would bet my new waders that—”

“You have waders? Like the kind fisherman have with the suspenders?” Tressa Fay traced her finger over Meryl’s swimsuit strap, grinning.

“I do. Sure.” Meryl narrowed her eyes at Tressa Fay. “That’s doing it for you?”

“Absolutely it’s doing it for me. Imagine. A short redhead engineer with a fucking fire body in a white tank top and waders , barking orders at water guys twice her size while she’s standing in the middle of a stream of rushing rainwater. I’m certain there are other details involving what you can see through the tank top, but that’s the sketched-in version.”

“Hmm.” Meryl looked away from Tressa Fay and tried to suppress a smile while she blushed. “Okay.”

Tressa Fay laughed.

This was so rare, to like someone this much, to feel so much ease with them. It made her think about how many love stories she’d read where two people met and felt nervous butterflies, which she’d always thought sounded like they were afraid, when obviously this was the way she would want to fall in love with someone—to slip into it, warm and happy, excited and joyful.

“You were talking about the hardware store parking lot,” she said, giving Meryl a chance to recover the conversation.

“Yes. With the geese and the cranes. I would bet that this parking lot either had a tendency to flood when it rained a lot, or else it had a culvert alongside it.”

“It has a culvert.”

Meryl nodded. “I think I know the hardware store you’re talking about. So that culvert is managing the water. Really, it’s draining the water away from the whole property. But what the property actually is, what the geese and cranes know, is wetlands. If we knocked that hardware store down and took up the concrete, dismantled the drains and the culvert, then water would filter into that space. Dormant water plant seeds would sprout, hornwort and duckweed and other oxygenators would proliferate, and it would make a lot more sense why there were geese and cranes everywhere. Someday, if we don’t completely fuck it up, your dad’s favorite hardware store will be wetlands again.”

Tressa Fay liked thinking about that. “So all the water in the world remembers what it is and what it’s for and who it belongs with, no matter what. No matter how hard we try to tell it what to do.”

“That’s right. It remembers everything.” Meryl went quiet. “I think that’s so important. Because if that’s what water does, it means that’s what everything elemental does, right? Water, air, fire, earth. They must have a memory of everything, even as other things come and go. We’re not good at understanding time. We’re not good at understanding how unnatural it is to even try to measure time or observe it.”

Tressa Fay looked at Meryl’s face. Her glasses were speckled with water, and her eyes were far away. Tressa Fay loved her soft profile. She loved this beautiful date. She hadn’t known this woman for very long. She tried to scare up some worry about how big her feelings were on a second date, but she couldn’t. There weren’t any worries at all. Meryl had just said that people weren’t good at understanding time, and right now, that meant that it felt like she’d been sitting on a warm rock in a Wisconsin creek with Meryl for eons.

“I found this for you, speaking of time.” Tressa Fay picked up the stone she’d spotted in the creek bed on one of the many occasions Meryl had needed to rescue her from falling. “I think it’s a fossil.”

She handed it to Meryl, who studied it carefully. “This is such a good find! It’s a stromatolite. You can really see the layers on this one. Stromatolites are mats of microbial life, stacked up together.”

“Oh! I love that even teeny, tiny things get fossils! You are not forgotten, bitty microbes, even though you were so small.” Tressa Fay ran her fingers over the stripy sections of the rough piece of rock.

Meryl handed it back to her. “It should be yours.”

“No. I want you to have it. To thank you for this date.”

She meant something more than that, although she didn’t know how to say it—or, maybe, if it was the right time to say it. She meant that she wanted to thank Meryl for reminding her that they were both part of something bigger than either one of them.

Unexpected for a second date.

“So I was wondering,” Meryl said.

“Yes?” Now that Tressa Fay had been sitting a bit and was out of the knee-deep rushing creek water, she was starting to get genuinely cold. She scooted closer to Meryl, whose skin felt furnace hot.

“If you’re going to let me kiss you on this date?” Meryl tipped her head, and her face caught a shaft of sun coming through the trees, picking up the layers of freckles in her skin. Tiny bits of sun captured forever, like the stromatolite. “Because I’d like to.”

The chill Tressa Fay had been feeling washed away in a whoosh of prickling heat, as fast as the creek. “When you imagine kissing me, what do you imagine?”

Meryl reached up and traced Tressa Fay’s birthmark where it dipped from her temple to wrap around her jaw and the side of her neck, reminding Tressa Fay of its inkblot shape, new again under Meryl’s fingertip. “Is this okay?”

“Hmm.” Tressa Fay closed her eyes. “Yes. It doesn’t hurt. Nevus flammeus. Port-wine stain. Doesn’t bother me. In school it did. Until then, I was around kids in my neighborhood and had Linds and Guy with me, and you know how little kids are—they just kind of accept that what you look like is what you look like. Maybe they ask one question about it. But school is new people. Questions every day. In high school, I tried getting the makeup to cover it up, but I couldn’t stand that much makeup over so much of my skin. I did have long hair that kind of covered it up. I actually cut a client’s hair today who was dealing with something similar.”

“I’m always asked where my red hair comes from,” Meryl said. “If I dye it. People would tell my mother it was lucky I was a girl instead of a boy with red hair, I guess because redheaded men are supposed to be less masculine?”

“Sexism is especially revolting when it gets into the gritty details.”

“Yes. I also get asked if my carpet matches the drapes. Strangers will stop me on the street or talk to me about it when I’m waiting in line. Red hair is one of those things that people think is permission to talk to someone about things they wouldn’t talk to anyone else about.”

“People will sometimes ask me what’s wrong. If it’s a burn. Like I’m supposed to reassure a stranger about my health.”

Meryl kept tracing over where the birthmark traveled down Tressa Fay’s collarbones. Her shoulder. Part of her upper arm. It felt nice. Studious, as though Meryl were completing an enjoyable assignment.

She stopped tracing and met Tressa Fay’s eyes. “Will you?”

“Let you kiss me?”

Meryl raised her eyebrows.

“No.” Just saying the word made a deep, terrible throb between her legs. Tressa Fay pulled them up on the rock and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Not this time. Maybe next time.”

“Don’t you believe in carpe diem? Some people would say we’re supposed to live as though this is all the time we have.” Meryl didn’t sound upset, only amused with Tressa Fay, intrigued by her refusal.

“If it is, then this is how I want to spend it,” Tressa Fay said. “On this rock, next to you, anticipating the first time you’ll kiss me. You didn’t answer my question.”

“What do I imagine when I imagine kissing you?”

“Yes, that. Be very, very detailed. I’ll close my eyes so I don’t inhibit you.”

Meryl laughed. “I’ve imagined it lots of different ways.”

“Oh, good. Tell me that you applied true engineer precision to it.”

“Shh,” Meryl said. “Or I’ll get shy, and I won’t be able to give you this.”

“I will be good.” Tressa Fay kept her eyes pressed tightly closed, anticipating, happy that she’d thought to ask this question, because she’d never done this before, never asked a woman she wanted to kiss and hadn’t yet what it would be like.

It meant that every possible first kiss was in front of them, hundreds or thousands of possibilities, and the only constraint was what they could think up. They could have all of those kisses. They could decide on which kiss they wanted to have together.

“I’ve come up with at least half a dozen ways to kiss you this afternoon,” Meryl said slowly. “I’ve thought of how your skin would feel against my body in that swimsuit, and how you’d taste like creek because you’ve fallen so many times.”

“Is it bad to taste like creek?”

“No. It’s good, because I brought you here, so it’s like I imprinted on you.”

Tressa Fay smiled, her eyes still closed. “You’re a little possessive.”

“More than a little, maybe. I also have a recurring daydream that involves you washing my hair and, not to put too fine a point on it, taking advantage of me.”

She laughed. “My imagination so did.”

“If I want to get off, I start right in the middle of kissing you. Tongues.”

Whoa. Her inner thighs got hot as she thought of that, gripping Meryl by her swimsuit straps or rucking up her tankini—whether her skin would be cold from the water, her hair hot from the sun beating down. “I’ve daydreamed that, too.”

“Sometimes we’re grabbing each other.” Meryl’s voice was getting huskier. “And sometimes we’re doing a slow manga-comic-like buildup.”

“I love a buildup.” Tressa Fay opened her eyes. “You might have guessed. This is my best first kiss ever. I’m going to die from the anticipation, and it will be such a happy, horny death.”

Meryl snorted, then wiped her hand across her mouth, her eyes on Tressa Fay’s. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but my favorite thing to imagine is kissing you in the snow.”

“Yeah? Do you like snow?”

Meryl shook her head, smiling. “I do not. Hate shoveling. Hate winter sports. My skin gets so dry in the winter, and the worst is driving in snow, and the prettiest snow always happens when it’s the coldest. But if I’m kissing you in the snow, it means that we made it.”

Tressa Fay exhaled in a whoosh. “That’s so…” She looked at Meryl, who had gone pink and was watching the creek again. “It’s such a not-second-date thing to say, which makes it very sexy and brave. But it also might mean you have to wait longer than you want to kiss me.” She grinned.

“Do you even like root beer floats?”

“Yes. Only a monster wouldn’t.”

“I know where we can get one with Wisconsin-made root beer and soft serve. You’ll have to put your clothes on, though.”

“Take me there.”

Meryl helped her across the creek, holding her hand and laughing when Tressa Fay slipped and tried to keep her swimsuit on, and then they scrambled over the grassy bank on the other side.

She fell asleep on the way to root beer floats, finally warm in her hoodie and shorts in Meryl’s car, with Meryl’s hand on her thigh.