They call it Abbott’s Water. You recall as you stand there that the pond was named after a Jenny Abbott who, local legend has it, traded her child to the fairies for eternal youth. There is no greater sin for a mother than to sacrifice her own child for such selfish ends and God cursed her so that she could no longer see her own reflection. The story goes that Jenny was a vain woman who, driven mad by the beauty she could never see, drowned herself in this pond. You shudder to recall it and unconsciously take a few steps backwards. All nonsense, of course. There never was a Jenny Abbott and after this month you have your doubts over whether there is a God.
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You expected to feel afraid, standing here in your thin cotton dress, but all you feel instead is a kind of emptiness. Your own feelings have become as alien to you as the wild feelings of fox or bird or hare- strange, animal emotions that have no humanity in them anymore. Your heart is as cold as if all your blood had frozen in your veins- you wonder if it will shatter when you move. It is for that reason that you do not cry. All your tears have become ice.
It was not much of a life, in that time you are beginning to think of as before, and nostalgia is unlikely to ever set in. To being with there was you and Harold, and though you loved each other, these days you suspect that that love was the kind where there is only enough for two. When you became three that love started to stretch, and strain, and break. It took three years, this slow dissolving, where you both became strangers to each other again. The first year you both tried to fight it. For the second year you settled for fighting each other. At the end of the third year, when you came home from market one Wednesday afternoon and found Harold gone, all that you could do was wonder what had taken him so long.
Without him, some things became easier but most were harder. Overnight your life seemed to become public business and it was impossible to walk into any crowded place without eliciting stares and whispers. It was here that you developed your habits of silence and solitude. Far easier, when faced with uncomfortable questions, not to answer them at all. Easier still to avoid the questioners completely.
So you lived, if one can call it a life, a strange pair in a house at the edge of the woods, speaking little and shunning company. The optimist might hope that it would have brought mother and son together- in truth your silence drove you further apart. He picked up your closed-in nature for himself and you were happy to leave him in the back garden, gate locked. Inside, you worked hard at whatever small jobs you could find, usually mending clothes. Your stitches were small and neat and with every one you locked your tongue tighter and tighter.
Your son was not one for the childish chuntering that all children indulge in when they play, and when the garden outside fell silent one Saturday afternoon you did not notice at first. Intent on your mending, you only realized what had happened when the light started to fail and you looked up, out of the back door and onto the empty lawn. The tangled darkness of the wood seemed to beckon as you carefully set down your needle and walked out of the slack gate into the grey twilight. It was not difficult to guess where the boy had gone- he’d long had a fascination for the pond. When you reach the water’s edge your suspicions are confirmed.
You did not arrive too late to stop him drowning, but you stood and watched until the struggling ended.
You tell no one what had happened. At first it was hard, and you found every day was a test of your old vow of silence. But your tongue had had practice in keeping secrets and lay still as a stone while the village chattered around you. Nobody thought it strange that they did not see your son- you had always kept yourselves private, isolated from the comings and goings of everyday life. You bury your only child just beyond the garden, the unaccustomed exercise making you so tired that the next night you sleep soundly in spite of yourself. What you have done fills you with no grief or regret. It simply is, and will not be undone.
Alone in something that you cannot name, at first you did not realize that you were not the only mother who had lost her child. In the village, you started to hear snatches of gossip; three children had disappeared over the past month. You listened more carefully and you realized that all of them vanished since the drowning. Nobody else connected the two facts, because nobody else knew what you had done.
The next day an expert was called in from the city. To your great surprise, she came to visit you. She asked you a lot of questions that you did not like and then mentioned your son. You told her, your voice cracking from disuse, that he was playing with the other children. She gave you a look that made you feel worse than you had in a long time, and informed you that the village children had told her that they had seen him at Abbott’s Water every night for the past month. Your heart clenched. She told you that he asked those children brave enough to approach if they wished to play with him, and if they agreed, he took them by the hand and led them into the forest. What happened to them then is unknown, because nobody came back.
You could not answer her, and your silence betrayed you as it had never done before. There was no condemnation. She knew what you had done, and what you must do now, and you both understood that that was punishment enough. The lady from the city left you as the light failed.
The wind off the pond is cold, and you shiver. You have been waiting for quite some time, but you do not think that you will have to do so much longer. Soon enough, your son appears through the reeds at the far edge of Abbott’s Water. Your breath catches in your throat- you hardly recognize him. His hair is the dull green of pondweed, and his eyes grey as river-washed pebbles. You stay where you are as he approaches you around the edge of the bank. When he speaks, his voice is the rippling of water over stone.
“Will you come and play with me?”
You nod. You do not trust yourself to speak. He offers you his hand, cold and clammy like frog skin, and you only hesitate a little before you take it.
Hand in hand, you walk into the forest.