The House of Deep Water - Jeni McFarland

COMINGS AND GOINGS

In a fertile corner of Michigan, perched just above the state line in the soft crook of the St. Gerard River, lies the village of River Bend. The highway bypasses town to the west, in a curve mirroring the eastern sweep of the river. The town’s romantics describe this pattern as a heart, including Mrs. Tabitha Schwartz, who teaches a section on River Bend in her seventh grade history class. When she puts the town map on the screen, some of the boys in her class invariably snicker and exchange knowing looks: It is commonly agreed upon among teenagers that, when viewed together, the town, its river, and the highway resemble a vulva and the labial folds surrounding it.

The bluffs to the north of town shelter that tender spot where teenagers go when they wish to be alone with each other. This pleasure center goes unnamed—River Bend has no “Make Out Point” as such—because nobody talks about the bluffs. Yet many teens know instinctively, like salmon intuit their own spawning ground, and every spring and all summer long the teenagers trickle in, two by two in their cars, assuming this place is theirs alone. They are shocked, always, when they arrive to find another car parked there, another couple. Or when they’re already at the bluffs, screened by a steamy windshield, and hear another vehicle approach. The girls might perk up, listen, try to determine its trajectory. They have a knack for buttoning up just before another car arrives.

In many families, multiple generations share a direct link to this location, for without the cover of the bluffs, and the covert fumblings they enable, the lineage would not have endured.

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Sitting anywhere in their houses, the women of River Bend can feel a car running in their driveways, so preternaturally attuned are they to the comings and goings of family, friends, solicitors, neighbors. They feel these arrivals as vibrations in their chests, a skill they developed not for gossip’s sake—or, at least, not solely. Instead, they are primed by an old evolutionary need. Women, especially those of limited means, must learn to read the signs. A lingering rumble of a familiar engine in the driveway at day’s end means her husband is home, that he is held up in his car collecting something, perhaps his temper, before entering the house. An unfamiliar vibration at an unusual hour means a surprise visit—from an ex maybe, or a long-lost relative, a salesperson or the repo man.

In her two-bedroom house, which squats in the V of land between Main Street and Schoolhouse Road, Deborah Brody hears an engine idle in the driveway. It’s the first Saturday in June, and her girls—Kelli, Mandy, and Hannah—are with their grandmother. Her husband, Steve, is working. Deborah peeks through a chink in the blinds to see a car she does not know, an old beat-up Buick. She has to squint to identify the driver, Gilmer Thurber, a man who has lived in town his whole life. She isn’t sure what he’s doing here. She lives next to the pet store, so she suspects he’s headed there, though the longer she watches him, the longer he sits, his car facing the grade school across the street. How sad he must be. He never married. He lives with his sister in a house he inherited from his parents. Deborah has seen him before, watching the children playing, and the longing she sees in his face makes her body go cold. She tries to think what her life would be like if she’d never had kids. She used to dream of moving to a city, of having a job where she could wear high heels and blazers. But here she is, almost forty, living in the same cramped house her husband had when they met. Gilmer looks up and sees her, and his expression is a little sheepish as he puts his car in gear and drives away.

On the outskirts of town, a police car races down the dirt road past Dinah Williams’s farm. She hears it approach from her barn, and looks out in time to catch a glimpse. She’s pretty sure it was Sheriff Hudson she saw behind the wheel, and wonders where he’s going with such urgency. She turns back to her task; today, she’s teaching her granddaughters how to milk cows. The