We came to Wordsworth to forget. Our house back in Brookside still bore the taint of happiness—the garden where Caroline taught the girls to dig black dirt and from it draw colorful blooms, the pretty arabesque bath where Caroline loved to soak, the little library with its pillowy chair and thin backed books. A.A. Milne and Beatrix Potter were Margret’s favorites. Caroline called her an old soul for one so young. Alice liked to wander in fantasy—Narnia and Harry Potter and the Hobbit.
The girls would have liked Wordsworth Pond, I think.
It was at the pond—on a bench beneath a stooped old willow that I’d asked Caroline to marry me. Back then, our love felt like something sharp and giddy, boundless and ungainly. She said yes, and as she gave me her finger to try on the ring I’d bought, I at once understood that relentless draw that some houses have to a tendril of Ivy.
I love her still, you know. Not as sharply; the worn down edge of us has become something comfortable rather than something brazen. And though I still catch a stray giddy flutter in seeing Caroline enter a room, she never glides now. The medications make her shuffle.
That is the why of the where. Caroline remembers too much, too acutely. Our walks around the pond are meant to bring us back to that last time when the two of us were happy on our own. Before the girls. Before what happened.
Caroline watches her feet as we walk, listless eyes searching nothing but the dirt path ahead. Sometimes at night, she startled awake, raving and sobbing, “I remember the blood! I remember!” I kept a syringe on the nightstand. She never remembered the needle as she hugged me in her grief.
I understand that grief, I do. They were my girls just as much as hers. But I also understand that love—real love—is made of stronger stuff than tragedy.
The night it happened, I’d come home late to our house in Brookside and caught Caroline in my headlights, wandering the street. I stopped and she barely seemed to notice.
“Caroline?”
“So quickly, quietly. Now there’s not a whisper. It can’t be undone.”
She was splattered with blood. It clung to her eyebrow, her nose, soaked her dress.
“Sweetheart, what—“ She was alone. “Where are Alice and Maggie?”
She wept at that. “I just thought it. That’s all. I didn’t mean to. Why’d I do it?”
When she wiped her eyes I saw the hammer in her hand, And I knew what she’d done.
My Caroline suffered from a blue itch that sometimes tore her from lucidity. She would rove the house, bright eyed and energetic, making grand plans for tree houses with Victorian flourishes or living room productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Everything she did was for our girls. Until the plans became too obsessive, too crowded for anyone but her. The laughter and childish squeals would ebb and then there would be silence for a while.
Maggie and Alice could always feel the weight of Caroline’s declines—I felt them too—a helpless, anxious pall that crept around our bedroom door like some grim sentry.
But that night—or the day before it—nothing had seemed amiss.
“Why’d I do it? Why’d I do it?” She whispered to the dashboard of my car. “Help them, won’t you?”
I knew I couldn’t when I saw their little bodies. They almost looked like they were sleeping, side-by-side in their beds, covers pulled up high. Caroline looked lost as she paced the hall outside their room, muttering and chewing at her cuticles. The woman I loved. A shattered creature. The only family I had left to save.
And so I tried to do just that. I dug the black dirt of our garden in Brookside and into it, I planted the red remnants of our girls.
We came to Wordsworth to forget. And after a month of chemical ease and cloistered serenity, I thought she’d forgotten the worst of it. She even began to smile. Just before she disappeared.
I’d awoken on a Sunday and found her nowhere. She’d left her phone, her pills, her everything behind. For three days I searched the woody thickets and the briar laden paths. I called her name—Caroline—and heard those three syllables amble through the oblivious acres of our hideaway. For three days, I was alone. And for three days I wandered as she had, shuffling round the endless loop that skirted Wordsworth Pond, trudging the paths that wound through reaching vines and clawing thorns.
I wonder if there is some unthinking ecstasy when a finger of ivy finally finds a brick where it can settle. I felt that, I think, when I found her on the fourth morning of my search. She was sitting on our bench beneath the willow, smiling easily at the ripples of that sun-drenched pond.
“Doesn’t it remind you of VanGogh? The way the world above is painted on its surface in little strokes of blue and green and gold?”
“You’ve always had a pretty way of seeing things, Caroline. Where did you go?” As I sat beside her, she lay her head on my shoulder and poured her hair down my back.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. As long as you stay.”
“I don’t ever think I’ll leave.” She sighed. “Where are the girls?”
“The—“
“Oh, it’s such a hot day, isn’t it? Swim with me?”
She was staring at the pond and nudging a stone underfoot as she stretched her shining legs. It was a hot day.
“I’m not quite dressed for it, Caroline. Neither are you.”
“There was a time you wouldn’t have cared,” she said. “Come.”
She stood and shivered off her dress. It pooled at her feet and I watched for far too long. She didn’t blush like she might have once. She smiled—mischievous and indiscreet. “Well?”
The water of Wordsworth Pond was always warm in summer. The rocky floor of it shed its shallows quickly, and between the rains, the water was clear of murk. As I left my clothes behind and followed her in, I remembered the first day we’d come and swam and loved so simply. She dove down beneath the surface and I treaded water. I waited for her to return. Just as I had so many times before when her moods went black and the world became so tight and colorless.
I wanted her back—that woman that I loved. My Caroline.
But that woman was gone. Wasn’t she?
I had watched her three days before as she stood by our bench and stared into the pond. Hadn’t I? She’d tied a rope around a stone, and looped it around her waist. I watched her knees shake as she waded out, as she disappeared. The bubbles rose, large, then small, and I watched. And I let her go.
Searching was easier than mourning, so I circled the water and traced the footsteps of our bygone youth. When she returned, I think I’d forgotten well enough. Wordsworth Pond had delivered and I had followed her into the water because it’s what I would have done back then.
As I floated, a lock of hair grazed my leg from underneath. A hand drifted, nudged. The water was much cooler than it had been years before. Almost frigid, placid, clear as glass. I dared not look below. I knew what I would see there. But a voice bled through my mind as a clutch of fingers seemed to twist gently round my ankle.
“Where are the girls, my love?” I winced, shuddered at the sound of her. As the fingers grasped, I flailed and stirred the silt. The water clouded quickly. “Where are the girls?” The cold drank away my strength, the water slowed my feeble kicks. Panic rose. “Where are the girls? WHERE ARE THE G—“
“Sweetheart? Come dry off on the shore.”
I thrashed around and saw her sitting there upon our bench. Smiling sweetly as our girls climbed in the tree. Margret braided branches as Alice hung and whistled like a lark. Caroline simply watched.
“Be right there.”
I know it isn’t real. But it’s real enough for a weekend away.
Now I come to Wordsworth Pond to remember, to find them happy, to watch the sky make paintings on the surface of the water I know to never, ever stir