I only knew the version he gave me.
The slip. The current. The swimming. The body never found.
I was too shattered to question a grieving father.
That is the thing about a drowning with no body — there is nothing to examine, nothing to contradict, only a hole in the water where your daughter used to be.
It is the perfect accident.
And Jeremy, five years old, had stood on that bank and watched the perfect accident be assembled around him.
He saw his father pull Janice out of the water — coughing, alive, soaked, terrified.
He saw his father carry her, not toward help, but toward the car.
He saw the car drive away in the wrong direction.
And he saw his father come back an hour later, wet to the waist, with a story.
A five-year-old does not have the words for what he saw.
And when the one word he did have — alive, she’s alive, I saw her — collided with every adult insisting she was gone, something in him simply closed the door on language altogether.
