There’s a body in the river, shrouded in white, more bloody than bridal. Well, not so much the river as the bank, tangled up in the debris like a piece of knotty driftwood. 

The muddy water shushes against it, against the silt and sand, against the rocks. Shush, shush, shush, like she’s telling me to keep her secret. The body moves and sways, a shoddy performance of living. It is very clear it has not moved of its own accord in quite some time. I can’t tell what happened to it, not from this distance, and the morbid curiosity to find out has not infested my brain. It is enough that I know. 

I think about what it would take to report it. The phone calls, the investigative interviews. I think about if I’ve heard of any missing persons reports recently, and decide no, I have not, but it’s probably because I don’t really watch the news, not for lack of missing people. Not here, at least.

I head back up the levee, careful not to move too fast. The ferry boat isn’t far down river from here and I don’t want anyone to remember someone running away if the body decides to get caught in the current and take a jaunt to visit the deckhands on their smoke break.

I eat my lunch at the top of the levee instead, trying but failing to ignore the white blur in my periphery, calling out like a tattered surrender flag in a smoky naval battle. 

I go home. I sleep. I dream of the river, of drowning, of her brackish water filling my lungs, silencing me. 

It only takes a week to forget about the body. Another three days to remember it again. It comes in waves, like she does. Small ones sometimes. Other times it’s as violent as an undertow, and all it takes to spark the memory is a flap of fabric, a drop of water. 

Like the tide, the visions ebb. 

I marry. I move. I move on. 

I give birth. 

My newborn’s sound machine sends me into fits I blame on my hormones, yet she sleeps so well. Most nights I end up camping out in the living room, where the baby monitor can’t reach me. 

When Claudia is three, I go back. To see if the body is still there. To see if I can blab the secret to the world to get her off my mind. To make her someone else’s problem.  

A tugboat has just passed, and its wake catches up to the shore while it disappears around the bend, driving home her point more so than usual, slapping her reminder against jagged rocks: shush.

The river is high. There is no body. 

The water glints sunlight off itself in blinding white flashes, like she’s winking at me, saying, “Remember that time?”