temptation to drink from his new river. He removes a glove and scoops a hand in, both knees in the snow, brings the water to his lips. It tastes beautifully cold and fresh. He should think about connecting the river to their water supply.
When he lowers his hand again beneath the surface he finds he can’t withdraw it. His hand is suddenly held in the water, clasped, held tight. Not trapped under a rock, not caught somehow on a network of twigs—gripped by the water itself from the wrist down. It’s as though it’s encased in steel, not water. His fingers move pitifully against the stones on the riverbed. Maybe his wedding ring has caught on a bindweed. He clasps his right hand around his left wrist and pulls, but his hand doesn’t shift. It feels as though his wrist is lanced tightly by the surface, sucked down by an invisible force.
He wonders whether he should laugh or call out for help. Just then, something catches his eye—a reflection on the river’s surface, illuminated by the moon.
Someone is here to help.
A glance at the reflection reveals the dark shape of a woman, confirmed by the roundness of hips and slender shoulders, her head bowed down at him. He turns sharply to where she’s standing, three feet or so to his right, but there’s no one there. Just the trees towering above him and the cold eye of the moon. Was it an animal he saw? A bear? He is helpless, trapped, and something is with him. No. He’s sure it was a woman.
“Hello?” he calls. “Help, please!”
Just then, whatever caught his hand lets go, and with a yelp he falls backward, flat on his back into the snow, grasping his wet hand as though he expects it to have been severed at the wrist.
* * *
—
He approaches Maren whilst she’s still unpacking from her journey. Like Tom, Maren has traveled from London not by plane but by car and ferry, and is naturally exhausted. He should leave her to relax and settle in, but he’s deeply unnerved by his experience at the river.
He taps on the living room door, steps inside when she looks up. Closes it behind him.
“Maren, did anyone happen to call by today? A woman?”
She looks confused. “A woman? I don’t think so.” She starts to explain that she only arrived last night and may have been preoccupied. He cuts her off.
“It’s just . . . I saw someone up the hill. A woman. I wondered if perhaps she’d called to the house.”
Maren pulls a face that tells him no, a woman didn’t call. He already knew that. Something about the woman he saw—the strangeness of her appearance, and its timing, right as his hand was caught in the river—tells him she wasn’t a passerby or a visitor. He already knows that nobody just passes by this way, at least not on foot. It’s dangerous, liminal terrain—almost on the cusp of another world, the realm of the impossible. And even if someone did call at the house they would have no reason to be on the hill where he was.
But still, logic dictates that she was there, and therefore there has to be a reason.
“Come, sit down,” Maren says, moving a pile of folded laundry from the chair next to her. He sits down reluctantly, awkward at having to ask his housekeeper for advice. But somehow she’s the only one he trusts to answer the questions that pound his brain.
He sits down. He looks awkward, like a child who has done something wrong and is compelled to confess before punishment is meted; she searches for the cause of this. Perhaps the new baby isn’t sleeping. Or Aurelia isn’t coping out here. Well, Maren did think it was a bad idea, bringing a new baby out into this hostile wilderness, but nobody heeds her advice.
She waits, patiently, for him to find the words.
“I had an unusual encounter today,” he says slowly. He tells her in broken sentences the sequence of events—the creation of the new riverbed, the tea, his longing for lemon cake. He stammers when he describes what happened to his hand, offering possibilities for the water’s grip even as he explains it. Maren strains to read between the lines. She asks questions. What did it feel like? Did he find any weeds caught beneath his wedding ring? Had the water perhaps frozen solid? Did a fish seize his hand, or an eel?