The Disciple

She’d suspected the past several hours it would happen at the river. Little pieces of it had been settling on top of her head all day till they formed something long and sharp and heavy so that she thought everyone must be able to see it. First thing Wednesday morning she found herself standing outside the CITGO with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and three-dollars-fifty-six-change clenched in the other, the paper wilting and the coins slipping in her sweat. She was staring at a man in a dark sweatshirt and dirty beard getting on a bike – a meth head like many of the county residents – with tears streaming down her face. I love you she wanted to say, I hope all your dreams come true she needed to tell him. It was the most important thing in the world, like she had been born for that exact moment in time. He did not see her and rode off on the main road but the elation did not cease.

When she walked home every face she passed loomed large and beautiful and painfully familiar before her. The traffic lights swung in perfect, delicate arcs above the poorly paved intersections where paint peeled from the sides of beat-up trucks in patterns both unknown and intimately knowing, spelling words in a secret language she’d once been able to understand. 

The face of the house her mother rented hung dog-heavy and brown, kitty-corner from the Methodist church. Her insides tightened to a peach pit. She could feel her blood beating in her intestines. This was not a happy place – this place where she’d felt hunger more often than not, where she’d been a stranger to the four walls and the floor her whole life. Where the welfare people had come and left and where they’d stolen her own child once she had one. No, the house did not belong to her. She did not belong to the house.

She sat on the plastic lawn chair and lit up. The screen door slammed but she did not turn around even when her mother started screaming. She kept her eyes across the street at the dilapidated food shack no one owned anymore. She couldn’t scream even if she had something to scream. He said he wants to see me she muttered, he’s waiting he wants to see me we’re going fishing I waited for him. The oak tree like an overgrown sheepdog seemed to shudder. When she reached the last of the pack she would leave. 

Her hands were trembling.

***

The trails her grandfather had taught her to follow appeared to thicken with growth. Her senses were dazed yet heightened. Each of the six petals on each of the stars-of-Bethlehem stood out starkly white against the walls of green and brown rising on either side. The trills of red-winged blackbirds shot through her. He’d taught her these names once, taken up her hand to cup the precious blossoms, held them to her face to smell; touched her hands to broken robin’s eggs to marvel at the impossible shade of blue. He knew everything. 

She caught her foot on a tree root and stumbled.

The lake came first. They liked to fish at the end of the dock but sometimes there was someone else already there. He taught her to spool a reel and cast bait right there with his big bare feet dangling just beneath the glittering surface. Bluegills were her favorite to catch. He showed her how to cut and fry filets. Their bones were barely thicker than human hair, and they had more bones than any self-respecting fish would ever need to get around. She’d told him that once and he’d laughed. 

She sat at the end of the dock and waited a while but he didn’t come.

She left the dock and moved unsteadily toward the beach. Sometimes too they’d sit on the grassy outcropping a couple feet above where the waves met the sand. She lay on her side and let the lake lap at her hand like a puppy. The undulation of the shallows gave the illusion that not the water but the earth was breathing, rapid shallow breaths like a newborn baby, with highways of minnows crisscrossing but never colliding.

Those divots are sunfish nests he’d say. They like the shallows. Just like most people. But not like me or you.

Not like me or you she’d echo. She’d thought it often since then. Me and you. Not like her mother who’d been giving her second-hand highs since she was born. Not like her mother’s boyfriends who’d bitch about how much she ate and the cost of raising a child. They’d beat her for wetting the bed; one of them laughed at her when she got her first period in the fifth grade, bawling her eyes out with nowhere to bleed. Me and you, Grandpa.

Slowly she rolled onto her back and gazed at the clouds moving across the sky like trout in their own blue sea. Cumulus she remembered. No rain. Be grateful for the days without rain.

She had to keep walking. 

She was crying as she followed the curve of the lake and re-entered the woods where they met the river. She was following it to a sacred place, the place where her grandfather was urging her. The sun caught at stray leaves and bestowed a strange significance on each blade and vein. How much further? 

Suddenly she saw him. He was in the middle of the river, up to his waist, beckoning to her.

***

HILLSDALE COUNTY, MI -- A Hillsdale woman drowned last Wednesday evening, police say.

Harper Leanne Mitchell, 26, was found at about 6:20 p.m. on May 10, 2023 in the St. Joseph River. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mitchell was known to suffer from both generalized and focal epilepsy and is suspected to have walked into the river where she had a seizure, resulting in her drowning. Mitchell’s mother Krystal Homer, 49, stated that Mitchell had stopped taking anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) and had recently become difficult to manage.

Homer claims Mitchell told her she was receiving communications from her late grandfather, Paul Homer, and had left their shared home that afternoon in an agitated state. Paul Homer drowned in 2008 near the same place in the river where Mitchell was found.

Though Mitchell was also known to suffer from unmedicated bipolar disorder she was not previously known to experience delusions. The case is still under investigation.