What the Water Keeps

The lake was the same murky green I remembered, though the dock had rotted considerably in fifteen years. I'd come here to scatter Jacob's ashes—he would have hated the ceremony, the fuss, the way everyone pretended they knew him. They didn't. They knew the friend he'd performed for them: loud, loyal, perpetually wearing that ridiculous cowboy hat like armor against the world.

Only I saw what happened when the hat came off.

We swum this lake together every July from age twelve to twenty-two. Those July swims were where we said everything we couldn't say the rest of the year. How his father beat him. How I was in love with his sister. How terrified we both were of becoming men. In the water, weightless and pale as fish, we could be honest.

"I'm not going to college," he'd said during our last swim, nineteen years old and treading water near the drop-off. "Dad's sick. Someone needs to work the farm."

His cowboy hat had sat on the dock like a dark omen.

"You could come back," I'd said, knowing he wouldn't. "Later. When things settle."

He'd laughed, water dripping from his lashes. "Things never settle, Mark. They just get buried."

He was right. We buried him two days ago—heart attack at thirty-four, the stress of that farm finally claiming him. And now I stood at the end of the crumbling dock, urn in one hand, his old hat in the other. I'd found it in his closet yesterday, still smelling of lake water and tobacco.

I thought about scattering him over the surface. Instead I waded in, jeans and all, until the water reached my chest. The shock of it—cold, silty, alive—knocked the air from me. This was our element. This was where we'd learned how to swim through grief, how to dive beneath pain and resurface breathing.

I placed the hat on the water and watched it float. Then I opened the urn, letting him sink into the depths he'd chosen years ago, the place where we'd been truest friends.

Some things belong in the deep.