The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared.

It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth. They stood there, the women and men and children, all of them shading their eyes and shaking their heads as they studied the flooded forty-some-odd acres that was the Carter farm. Some of them wondering to each other in whispers if it might be a sign from God, this unnatural flooding. Others speaking of a curse on the land or on the Carters themselves.

In time, though, the townspeople stopped talking of the water’s mystery and of the Carters, and all of it was forgotten by nearly everyone in the valley. Everyone except my father.

***

It wasn’t until nearly two weeks after the flooding had begun that Julia Carter drove to town and spoke of the water.

She entered the general store that morning and, before packing up her normal groceries, asked Mr. Matthews if anyone else had reported flooding on their land. He said no, asked her why.

In a voice just loud enough for those around to hear, Mrs. Carter told of how, several days earlier, she’d woken and stepped outside with her cup of tea and was stopped cold by stretching water that covered the land as far as she could tell. Mr. Matthews simply shook his head, said he was sorry, that he’d heard nothing of the sort from anyone. Mrs. Carter sighed and nodded her head and then went about her shopping.

“So sad,” one woman said to another after Mrs. Carter left the store with her tote of canned goods. “Her all alone out there. Hasn’t been right since—” but she stopped herself abruptly.

I only know what was said all those years ago because it was my grandmother that the woman was speaking to, and beside her stood my father, an eleven-year-old boy with youthful freckles still on his nose and cheeks. In fact, it was on account of my father that the woman did not finish her statement, though my father knew the absent words: Hasn’t been right since her husband died.

***

My father knew the Carters well, what with my grandparents’ home being the closest to the Carter farm than anyone else. In summers, when school was out and George Carter was still alive, my father would walk to their farm. Mr. Carter, who’d have been awake and tending the livestock and crops for hours already, would pat my father on the back as he walked up, and he’d hand my father a pair of gloves and set him off to one area of the farm or another with a short list of chores. Though my father never said it to me, I think he felt a closer bond to Mr. Carter than he did my grandfather. I say this because, whenever he talked of Mr. Carter, his eyes would drift off to some distant corner of the room and his voice would grow quieter and his speech would slow.

But that morning when Mrs. Carter showed at the store, my father hadn’t been to the farm in nearly two years. Not since George Carter had been killed overseas in the Pacific Theater.

My father often told me of that night two years earlier. When my grandparents learned of what had happened to Mr. Carter, they brought my father along with them to the Carter farm, though they didn’t reveal the reason to my father. My grandfather pushed wide the already opened front door, and they walked in with tentative steps. Mrs. Carter sat at the bare table, her eyes set forward as if studying some map not visible to anyone but herself. Eventually, when she did look up at my grandparents, she began to cry in loud sobs that shook her shoulders. And as my grandmother held the seated woman closely to her and my grandfather moved his eyes around the dark home, my father, then a just turned nine-year-old boy understood that Mr. Carter would not be coming home again.

“It’s a part of life,” my grandfather said to my father later that night as they drove the mile back to their own home. And though I can never know for certain, I believe that my father was forever changed by that single statement. That it was those words that caused him to devote his life to medicine, to doing everything in his power to prolong that “part of life” as best he could. In so many ways, then, it was through tragedy that he found the hope he lived with all his life. I say this because, on his own deathbed, he turned to me and whispered the words, “Let it return him.”

I’ve thought of those words often over the years. Words spoken in his old-man voice with a full life behind him. They sounded in my mind as I drove home from work or in those quiet moments before I fell asleep. I wrestled with them constantly, wondering why, of all the stories and moments he’d told me, he would choose those words to be his last.

But the answer eventually came. After the phone call last week, when I watched Kathy’s face pale and distort as she sat slowly in the chair and listened to whoever was on the other end of the line. I’ve only just come to realize that my father was directing me in those words, telling me what I needed to do.

***

My father was the one who first told the townspeople the truth of the Carter’s flooded land. And in so doing, he validated Mrs. Carter’s claim, proving that she wasn’t the mad woman that so many people, like the woman at the store, thought.

He often told me of that first morning, when he turned left, toward the Carter farm, instead of right to where the school bus would gather him and the others who lived off on the county’s periphery.

Whether we were sitting in the backyard beneath the stars, just the two of us, or driving to or from school, each time my father told me the story, he would tell it as if I’d never heard it before. As if it was some secret he’d never actually spoken aloud. His voice coming slow while he chose the right words, almost as if he were giving a confession. Now, as I think back, I realize he wasn’t trying to unburden himself; instead, he was reveling in that moment, when my father first saw the water. In the telling, he was reminding himself of the world’s mysteries and its magic and all that lay before him still.

As with each school day, he left his house that morning before the sun was high enough to do anything but throw long, skinny shadows over the land. I asked him once why he decided to go to the Carter’s farm that morning. “I don’t really know,” he said. “I think I just needed to see it for myself.”

By my father’s telling, what vestiges of rain from the storm that passed days earlier were entirely gone by that morning. So much so that dust lifted from the dry ground in the early morning breeze.

He walked the empty farm road without intention, letting it take him deeper into the valley. And before he realized where he actually was, the farmhouse had come into view.

Surrounding the house and stretching off in nearly all directions was the Carter’s farm. When Mr. Carter was alive, it had been beautiful and manicured: the various crops sectioned off into neat rows, an apple orchard in the middle distance that painted a forest backdrop while beyond it the valley’s walls seemed to rise into the sky and into the heavens. And to the right of the house was the barn where Mr. Carter kept the animals. But the land my father had known so well was lost after two years of neglect. The land now hidden by tangled weeds and waist-high grass that looked as if it might swallow trespassers whole.

As he continued on toward the house, he noticed the missing farm smell that had once been so familiar. Later on, he learned that Mrs. Carter had sold off the livestock and was living largely on the measly sum they brought.

Though he wanted to turn around when he realized the complete ruin of the place, my father made his way up the porch and knocked gently at the door. In the moments before Mrs. Carter drew back the side curtain and peeked out at my father, he told me he noticed the silence. The insects that had been so present on his walk no longer made a sound. No birds flew in the surrounding sky, no small animals rushed about, no breeze moved over the aged wood planks of the house or stirred the grass. It was silent, steady. Still.

When Mrs. Carter opened the door, my father realized he didn’t know what to say.

She nodded her head and said simply, “I’m glad you’re here.” With that, she led him around the side of the house, to where Mrs. Carter had once had a flower garden full of irises and lilies and azaleas and so many other colored flowers whose names my father could only guess at. But before they made it halfway around the house, my father found his feet splashing into water with each step. A little farther still, and his entire shoe was completely soaked through. And by the time they made it to the back of the house, the water and flotsam of weeds and grass and destroyed flowers were gathered around his shins and calves so that he couldn’t see his feet. Mrs. Carter stood beside him, her arms crossed in front of her, her eyes set fast on the land that stretched out before them.

The ground glimmered with water as far as they could see. “I don’t know if it continues on into the orchard,” Mrs. Carter said to my father. “Though I imagine it does.”

My father nodded, but he kept silent. What words could he have said? He thought of going out farther into the stretching field; imagined the water rising with each step until he was all but disappeared. Still, he remained where he stood.

“Something else,” Mrs. Carter said and then turned quickly to head back around the side of the house. My father only barely heard her words, so lost was he in the sight in front of him. It took Mrs. Carter calling his name two or three times for him to turn and see that she was ushering him back with her.

They walked into the house, my father first, followed by Mrs. Carter. She handed him a towel for his legs, and as he dried himself, he noticed the wood flooring beneath his feet. It had become faded in color, warped, no longer smooth and beautiful as it had once been. In his telling of that morning, my father would wonder at how often Mrs. Carter walked out the front door and down the porch, around the side of the house. How often had she stood out in the flood water? How far had she ventured before turning around in fear or something else unnamable?

My father’s gaze moved from the floor to Mrs. Carter when she walked into the room. She held something tightly in her hand. “Here,” she said, motioning to my father.

He reached out his own hand. Mrs. Carter set the ring down in my father’s open palm. He didn’t know what to do with it, and so he merely stared at the tarnished gold, lifting it closer to his eyes and then finally taking the index finger of his other hand and touching the metal thing to confirm that it was really there and not some trick of the dim lights in the small entryway.

It took her several attempts, and when she finally spoke, the words came out weak and shaking. “I can’t . . . prove it, but I know it’s George’s.” He turned to Mrs. Carter, who stood before him, a trembling hand covering her mouth and the lower portion of her face so that all he could see were her eyes. “But it can’t be,” she said.

She’d found the ring the previous day, she told him, just beyond the back of the house, out where the vegetable garden had once been. She’d been looking out the window from the kitchen, looking to see if the flooding had risen any higher since the day before. The sun’s reflection shined brightly off the metal, and the sharp shimmer of it drew her attention. Instead of walking around the house from the front, as had become her custom, she opened the back door and walked down the steps that led directly into the water. When she first picked the ring up and looked at it, she dropped it. Several seconds later, she reached down and took it up again and brought it directly into the house. Inside, Mrs. Carter dried the ring and set it on the table and went to get a light to better see it. Though men’s gold bands are nearly all alike, the thin scratches and knicks on the band that she’d known from studying her husband’s hands for so many years were all there on this ring. After telling my father this, Mrs. Carter said again in whispered words that he could only just understand, “It can’t be his.”

My father came to learn that neither George Carter’s body nor his personal effects were ever returned from the Pacific after his death. His plane had been shot down over the ocean and had been lost beneath the waters. There had been no survivors, nothing salvaged from the wreck.

But my father would not learn these truths until after he returned home and told his mother of the flooded field and how Mrs. Carter had been telling the truth in the store.

When my grandfather came home that evening, my grandmother told him what my father had seen. Though he thought his parents would be upset at him for missing school that day, they were more concerned with what he had reported to them, and so they drove, the three of them, out to the Carter farm that afternoon. My father sat in the backseat, studying the land as it passed in blurs of yellow and brown and dying green outside the window as the sun sank beyond the valley’s walls.

They spent nearly an hour out there, my grandfather sloshing around the back field several hundred yards out before coming back to where his family and Mrs. Carter stood. Mrs. Carter remained quiet the whole time, and though my father waited impatiently for her to tell his parents of the ring she found, the woman never made mention of it, and he knew that it was meant to be a secret between the two of them.

As my grandfather returned to them, my grandmother noted aloud how the water, as if blocked by some invisible dam, didn’t spill out past the sides of the house to the front. “It should,” she said, the confusion evident in her voice. Mrs. Carter only shook her head slightly and then mentioned that, despite the old planks that edged the basement and foundation of the house, none of the water had come inside, either.

***

By the next day’s afternoon, the townspeople began showing up at the Carter farm, having learned the truth from my grandfather and grandmother. While some of them walked out toward the back of the house, going just far enough so that their shoes and socks soaked through, many of the visitors simply stood along the dusty road and looked out on the flooded land, shaking their heads or taking photographs or speaking to one another in excited whisperings about how this could be. It was like Noah’s flood, one man remarked, but from the reverse direction—below instead of above.

In all, the attraction of the Carter farm lasted only two weeks for the town. During those weeks, there were four news stories written in the valley paper. Late in that first week, a group of geologist-enthused men led by Mr. Franklin, the high-school science teacher, ventured out into the field to discover the source of the water. When they returned nearly nine hours later, they reported that the water did indeed continue into and past the orchard but that it stopped a hundred yards or so beyond the trees. At that point, the ground became as dry and hard as the rest of the region outside the farm. And while they circled the farm’s perimeter several times, venturing into the deeper and more wild parts of the valley, they could find no evidence of rain or snow melt coming down the valley’s walls, nor was there any sign of a hidden spring that may have opened for whatever reason. In short, Mr. Franklin said, and this was quoted in the newspaper on June 8, 1946, “There’s no reason that we can find as to why the water’s accumulated here besides some undocumented curvature of the valley floor. But that’s merely speculation and nothing more.”

***

My father didn’t return to the farm during those two weeks when the townspeople flocked to the Carter place.

During that time, the school year ended, and my father was left largely to his own devices. My grandfather would leave in the morning and drive the four miles or so to the town, where he was manager of the valley’s bank. And my grandmother often left my father alone while she visited friends for coffee or to sit in circles and sew quilts and other clothing while they gossiped about everything and, ultimately, nothing.

Each afternoon during those weeks, my father sat beside the front window of my grandparents’ house and watched as cars streamed past, moving along the road toward the Carter farm. Those quiet afternoons, he found himself thinking not of the water that covered the farm but of Mrs. Carter. Had she locked the door and drawn tight the curtains? Did the visitors knock on the door, and did she answer? Did she listen to their questions, each of which she had no answer to? Did she wake early and walk out into the flooded land, before the townspeople came to tromp all over her front and side yards? How desperately he wanted to know these answers, but still, he didn’t visit Mrs. Carter, not once during those weeks. There was an unspoken trust between the two of them, one created with the confession of the ring, and he felt that going there and becoming just another face in the group would betray that trust.

And so, he waited by the window, his eyes rarely drifting from the outside world. Until one afternoon only two weeks or so after the attraction began. No cars sped along the road that day. Neither did he see any cars the next day, nor the one following. And on that fourth morning after the visitors stopped their pilgrimage to the strange and flooded farm, my father woke and, without telling my grandparents where he was going, he headed off down the road to visit the Carter farm once again.

***

I never knew my father as a young man.

While my friends growing up had dads that would throw the football with them in their front yards, my father preferred teaching me games of strategy or walking through the surrounding woods, pointing out various types of trees and bird calls. I never faulted him, especially as I got older and realized that he was simply doing the best he could. He’d never expected to fall in love and marry or be a father, but, like so many of the mysteries of the world, these things had simply happened. Now, thinking back on those moments, whether we were playing chess or rising with the morning sun to make our way to the hidden lake that sat a mile and a half from our backyard, my father was inviting me into his world the only way he knew how. Allowing me to participate in those hobbies he held so tightly to.

He was nearly twenty years older than my mother, and though they didn’t have the conventional love story that so many children want for their parents, it was clear how much they each cared for one another. The smiles shared between them, the way my father always laughed when my mother laughed, even if he didn’t understand why. The way she never once that I remember walked past my father without reaching out and gently touching his shoulder or arm or back.

Still, I spent much of my youth alone. My father would be at his office in town, tending to his patients with as much respect and attention that anyone, ailing or healthy, could ever hope for, and my mother would usually be out in the large shed that they’d converted to an art studio. There, she would paint the landscapes of her younger days. Many of those paintings were sold off at auction in faraway galleries in New York and Philadelphia. Others became the dreamlike pastels that appeared on greeting cards that we often found at the grocery store. Whenever he saw one of those cards, my father would buy one and keep it tucked away in his desk drawer at his office. After he died, we found his secret bundle of cards numbering in the dozens. To this day, I like to close my eyes and imagine my father sitting at his desk during the moments of quiet and peace at the office and flipping through those cards, a smile on his face.

He died when I was nineteen. I’d been away to college for a year, and though I knew how frail and old he’d become, I wasn’t prepared when my mother called and asked if I could leave the semester early and come home. “There isn’t much time left,” she told me. I was home by the next afternoon.

Against his protestations, my next month and a half was spent at his bedside. He was angry that I’d come home from school and abandoned my classes. But unlike my father, whose education meant so much to him, I didn’t care about my studies. In truth, I’d been wanting a way out of school, and the situation simply offered me the excuse I’d needed. Though I didn’t tell him, I decided early on during that month and a half that I wouldn’t be returning to the university.

A week before he died, he asked what I wanted with my life. I took a breath and then began to reach my hand out to take his but stopped myself, afraid the action might seem staged, melodramatic. I smiled at him, though. “I want to tell stories,” I said. He gave the hint of a nod. I wanted to tell him how his own stories of the flood and of Mrs. Carter had lived on in my mind long after each telling. I wanted to tell him how I replayed his words each night, and in my dreams how they would come to life. How I would become my father in those bedtime dreams, an eleven-year-old boy whose sense of the world was only just being shaped. It wasn’t until after he died that I realized just how accurate those dreams were. A young man with his entire life before him, unsure of which direction to walk. Turn to the right and live the life expected. Or turn left and follow the mystery of what might be. In the end, I found my way somewhere in the middle.

***

I find very few faults when I think back on my father. He was a man dedicated to himself and to the people around him. Though, if I am being honest, I become angry at him sometimes. Angry that he died before he could see the life I’ve created, before he had a chance to meet his grandson.

I wish he had been there the day Ethan was born, when I walked into the waiting room and announced that we’d had a boy and that he was beautiful. Kathy’s parents and her younger brother were sitting there. And my mother, three chairs removed from everyone else. My father should have been there. He should have shaken my hand or given me one of those rare hugs that he reserved for only the most special of occasions. Or the Christmas dinners when I looked down the dining table and saw the faces of everyone I loved, minus one. Or the awards ceremonies at school, the t-ball games when Ethan ran the bases, the purest of joy written on his face. And now, as I drive the winding roads that lead us there, how I wish my father had been there last week when Kathy answered the phone and learned what we’d both feared but could never speak aloud.

That moment—after she hung up, when Kathy told me through sobs what the doctor had said—has been burned into my mind. But it’s not the words I remember. Instead, it’s the feeling—that feeling of losing control on the entire world around you—that I can’t escape, no matter how hard I try.

In truth, I can’t remember what we talked about after the phone call. Just a scattering of words like Malignant and Surgery and Fatal. But nothing more.

Kathy and I went to the hospital the next day, while Ethan was at school. Dr. Philips sat across from us, patiently listening while we listed off his symptoms. Ethan had told us for weeks about the headaches and pain in his back, the tingling in his arms and legs like pinpricks that wouldn’t go away even when we told him to get up and walk around. Maybe by telling her about the symptoms we were trying to will away the reality of it all. Maybe we were simply hoping that by explaining it all one more time we could change things, make the tumor disappear simply by our breath and our words. But that couldn’t happen. Instead, Dr. Philips leaned closer to us and, with her trained voice, explained what the next steps were. Surgery and then likely radiation and chemotherapy.

Neither of us moved. Those words that the doctor hoped would calm us did the opposite. By the end of our meeting with Dr. Philips, we were only just able to stand and shake her hand and nod our heads. In the parking garage, we simply sat there while other cars rumbled behind us. Kathy started crying, and though I wanted so badly to reach over and put my hand on her leg or pull her close to me so that she could cry into my shirt, I couldn’t move.

We decided not to tell Ethan. Not yet at least. But even for six, Ethan’s a smart boy. He had to know something was wrong. Over the next three or four days, Kathy retreated into herself, staying hours shut up in our bedroom. Even with the door closed, her sobbing echoed through the rooms of the house. When this happened, I’d take Ethan outside to kick the soccer ball or go on walks around the neighborhood, trying my best to point out different trees like my father did when I was Ethan’s age. Nights, I spent in Ethan’s room, lying next to him while he slept. I’d doze off for a few minutes here and there, but most of the time I would just watch him. Watch the slow and rhythmic lift and fall of his bare chest, the flutter of his eyelashes as he dreamed, the quick twitches of his fingertips. I’d wonder at what dreams he was having and whether I was in any of them. But most of the time as I watched Ethan sleep, I’d try to understand how something so perfect could have something so wrong hiding within him. How could he be sick when I couldn’t see anything wrong?

Two nights ago, while I listened to the syncopations of Ethan’s breathing and the wind and insects outside the window, I found myself thinking of my father, whose memory had seemed so distant during the previous week. I closed my eyes and thought back to the stories he told me. I found myself thinking of the night he died. The way he’d turned away from my mother and his eyes found mine. How I moved over to him, knelt beside him so that I could feel the air from his breath tickle my face and neck. “Let it return him,” he said to me. He turned back to my mother. I couldn’t see him through the tears in that moment, but I’ve told myself since that he smiled at her and then nodded slightly—the way he always did—accepting in that small gesture the life he lived, with all its triumphs and setbacks. Then he took what were his last breaths.

***

I told Kathy last night that I wanted to take Ethan for the day, just the two of us. Before we told him how his body was failing him. Before the surgery and whatever else would happen. She nodded and asked if she was a bad mother for not coming. If I didn’t want her with us because I was disappointed in her. I felt the air leave me for a second when she asked, and I walked over to where she sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her forehead and told her that nothing she did would ever change the kind of mother she was or how I felt about her. She smiled at me, one of the few smiles I’ve seen since the phone call last week. It was her smile that brought the heaviness to my chest and made me turn and walk out of the room before she could see the tears running down my face. Tears of fear. That all my hopes would fail us. That I wouldn’t be able to save Ethan and bring that smile back to her face.

I glance at the rearview mirror now. Ethan’s still asleep. He’s been napping for nearly two hours. Early on, when we passed the street to his school, Ethan asked where we were going.

“Somewhere special,” I told him. “Somewhere magical.”

On the drive, I told him tales of brave knights and kind dragons, of birds that spoke to one another as they searched for a lost world. I told him of boys and girls who lived forever, never aging, whose parents greeted them each night with tight embraces and smiles of love.

I’ve never spoken of the farm and the flood. They were my father’s stories, and I’ve kept them hidden within my mind, a secret gift, I’ve always believed, from my father to me. But once I saw Ethan’s head settle against the side window and heard his breaths draw out longer and more peaceful, I began telling him of my father, a man Ethan knows only from photographs. I told of how his grandfather once delivered a baby after her mother was in a car accident on the way to the hospital and of how he’d once saved the lives of four people after their house caught fire from a faulty stove. How he’d ridden in the ambulance with them and spent that night walking between their rooms in the hospital just to make sure they were okay. I hope that in the telling the words and the images they bring will become part of his dreams.

Only after I finished telling of the man I knew did I begin to tell of those few weeks during the summer of 1946.

In the telling, I tried to use the same words, capture the same intonations and inflections as my father did when he told me.

And now, as I see the sign on the side of the road and realize that we’re almost there, I know I need to tell him how that story ends. Though as the tears fall down my cheeks, I hope with everything in my soul that his story is simply the beginning of Ethan’s.

***

Mrs. Carter had opened the front door and was waiting for my father even before he headed off the road toward the house. He could see that the ground was still covered by water.

She didn’t say a word as she ushered him in the house. When he was inside, she shut the door and then walked out of the room. Like several weeks earlier, he was left standing in the entryway by himself, though this time his shoes and socks were dry. As he looked at his feet, he wondered how he could explain why he’d come back, but his thoughts were interrupted by Mrs. Carter calling for him to come into the kitchen.

She held a mug of steaming tea in her hand, which she took a short sip from every few seconds. “Come closer,” she said after a short time of my father simply standing there, watching her. “Look.” She gestured to the counter beside her.

Laid out in a neat order were several items that my father couldn’t decipher until he was standing next to them. First was the gold ring she’d already shown him. Next was a plate with thin and jagged bones and the skull of a fish. Beside the plate was a piece of paper that had clearly been soaked through and dried, the page warped and curling at the edges. A shoe sat next to the paper, then a half-used candle, and then, seemingly out of place, was a bullet, its casing having turned a sickish green color.

My father studied each item, but he couldn’t understand what they were or why she was showing him. His eyes turned to Mrs. Carter for answer. Only then did she set the mug of tea down.

“I found them. In the back. Every few days, something new.”

My father stood there quietly, his face blank.

“They’re his,” she said. “Each of them.” She spoke slowly, as if balancing each word against the one that came before and the ones that would come after. “This letter. I wrote it to him, sent it only a few weeks after he landed in Europe, months before he left for the Pacific. You can see my handwriting, right here. It’s faded, but it’s mine. And this shoe,” she said motioning to it. “It’s his size. And I checked, it’s military, like he would have worn. It’s his. All of this. Don’t you see?”

But my father didn’t see. Or couldn’t.

She walked the step or two closer to where he stood and knelt down so that he was now looking down at her. “It means that he’s coming back. This water—whatever it is, it’s bringing him back to me.”

Though my father told me this story many times, he could never remember what else she said or what he’d done or what he’d told her. Instead, all he could remember was looking at the flooded land and how the water glimmered in the morning sun while he walked back along the road to his house.

He didn’t go back to Mrs. Carter’s house the next day. He wanted to, but he was too afraid, he told me. The following day, though, he made the walk to the farm. It was later in the day than he usually left, and the sun beat down heavily on his back. By the time he came to the house, sweat was running freely down his neck and arms.

Unlike two days earlier, Mrs. Carter wasn’t there to greet him as we walked up the drive, and when he knocked, she didn’t answer. He sat on the porch and waited in case she’d gone into town. The time seemed to drag on, but there was no way of knowing exactly how long he’d been there. Once, he walked around the house and let his feet touch the flood water. He bent down and cupped some of it and let it fall over his head. Even though it should have been hot from sitting stagnant in the summer sun, my father said that the water was so cold that he laughed when it hit his hair and fell down his face.

After a while more, my father tried the front door and found it unlocked. There was a difference to the house, he said, though he couldn’t say how. He took cautious, slow steps inside, calling her name, his voice becoming louder and more assured each time. But the house was empty.

In the kitchen, he found the counter cleared of the items that had lined it two days earlier. In their place was a single page of paper, and at the top was written my father’s name. Underneath the name was a single sentence: “I know that the water will return him.”

I’ve never seen this paper. I know it’s stored away somewhere. Through the years, I’ve thought of this paper and how, when my mother eventually dies, and I go through their boxes of remembrances I’ll come across this page. It will be worn yellow with time and possibly folded and crinkled from when my father put it in his pocket that day all those years ago, but I’ll have it. Proof that Mrs. Carter and my father were friends. Or if not friends, then my father was the only person that Mrs. Carter trusted her secret to.

***

I turn off the town’s street and onto the road that will take me by my father’s childhood home on the way to the abandoned Carter farm. I’ve never been there, but still, I feel as if I know the place from my father’s stories. As if it were part of my own childhood.

A few minutes of driving and I reach the place. The house is falling apart, the second story having nearly crumbled completely to the first level. It isn’t until I step out of the car and walk a few steps to the side of the house that I see it. Water stretching over the ground for what must be miles. My knees begin to tremble, and my chest hurts so that I have to bend down and try to catch my breath. I look up at the flooded field and realize only then that I’m sobbing. Relief, hope, terror, a combination of each. I know now that my father was telling the truth, and in this moment, I’ve never felt closer to him. I stand upright again and laugh, the sounds of it seeming to echo off the silent landscape around me, returning to me in a strange and somehow comforting chorus of my own making.

***

My father went directly home that day and told my grandmother that Mrs. Carter was gone. That she’d simply disappeared. Over the next several weeks, Mrs. Carter’s face was posted on flyers. A group of men along with the sheriff went out several times to search the flooded land, but they came back each time soaking wet and without any clue as to where she could have gone.

Within a month, no one spoke of Mrs. Carter except to say that she had finally left that farm behind along with all the memories of the place. Over the years, she was forgotten completely. So much so that years later, when my father mentioned the Carters to my grandparents, they simply nodded their heads as if remembering the name but nothing more.

When I asked my father what happened to Mrs. Carter, he smiled—the only time he truly smiled during any of the times he told of the Carters and his childhood—and he told me that she had gone and reunited with her husband. “The water, it was magic. It brought him back, just like she told me it would. It brings what you wish most for.”

***

Now, as I open the door and look down at Ethan, still sleeping so peacefully, I take a deep breath. Please, I whisper, but this is not a prayer. Please, I repeat, and then I take him in my arms and walk slowly around the side of the house. Ethan curls his body into mine, even though it’s warm outside.

Several steps around the side of the house, I stop. My ankles are covered by the cool water, and I feel the breath catch in my throat. I cough gently to clear it. Out there, all I can see is the marshland. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and think of my father, a young boy who once stood in this very same place. Then I open my eyes.

Ethan has woken up, and he looks up at me. “Where are we?” he asks. But I can’t answer. I don’t know what to say. I’m crying as I lay Ethan in the water. And though he should be afraid, confused, he isn’t. Instead, he smiles at me, and I kneel down so that I’m sitting beside him. I pull my son closer and hold him tightly to my body. Please, I repeat over and over, my lips silently forming the word.

Let the water fix him, let it return him. Let Kathy call it a miracle. Let the doctors, confused and unsure, order more scans, more tests to confirm that the cancer’s gone. Let Ethan grow old and live a good life. Let him never know what was or what could have been.

As I hold Ethan to me, I search the flooded field. I know it’s a trick of my mind, but it seems like the water isn’t as high as it was just a minute ago. As if the water, having fulfilled its strange purpose, is sinking back into the earth.

My gaze settles on the orchard.

In that instant, I feel myself transported. I can see George Carter walking through the waist-high grain and weeds out there. A smile on his face as he makes his way back to her. She’s standing at the back of the house, a mug of tea in her hands. But she drops the mug when she sees him. Maybe she runs to him, splashing her way through the water to throw her arms around him, and they stay that way for hours or days. Or maybe they stand there looking at one another, neither knowing what to say but both of them knowing that the right words will soon come.