“What do you mean, gone?” Mama said.

“I tried to call someone to help me get him out.” Peter rubbed at his shoulder. “Some of the kids who live by the wharf, they dived into the water to try and find him. Dived in right after him, they did, but when one of the boys came back up, he only said Ben Daisy was gone, and then they all scrambled out of the water, as if they’d took a fright. That boy wouldn’t tell me what he saw down there, but none of them would go back in, even when I begged them to.”

Pete Back Back took something out from underneath his shirt. “Only this was still there, floating on top of the waves.”

It was Ben Daisy’s hat, the pink-and-white pansies I’d pressed for him still tucked into the band, the whole thing dry as bone.

“I can’t bring myself to tell Miss Hannah. So I stopped here first,” Pete Back Back said. He still would not meet Mama’s eye.

That night, after Peter left, Mama said three prayers: one for Ben Daisy and one for his sister, and the final one for Daisy herself. “May her spirit finally rest.” And then I watched as she took her ledger down, the one she’d been keeping her notes in about the experiment, and, with her pen, scratch something out, write something new on the page. Then she tore the whole page out of the book altogether and took it with her to her bedroom, and I never saw it again.

The proving was over. Mama wrote the conclusion for it herself, so I do not know how she explained it. She would not let me read it, and she never published anything about this study. In a few years’ time, this failure would be overshadowed by the hospital for women and children that would make her name, and the consulting room downtown, and my eventual life of ladyhood. But that particular night, she bundled up the last little bit of seahorses in a brown envelope and carefully placed it on the highest shelf.

Nobody in our village would say that Ben Daisy had died. Miss Hannah, in her grief would not allow it. She stayed on with us, her eyes hollow. Ben Daisy’s hat with the dried pansies she took to wearing on her own head. And when we spoke to her of him, if we ever spoke to her of him, we only said the river had him.

That first night when we’d learned of Ben Daisy, I asked Mama, “What happens to the dead?” We had cleaned the examination room, put everything in its rightful place, and we stood side by side, washing our faces and hands before bed.

“Why, they go to heaven with our Lord and Savior. You know this.”

“But what happens to their thoughts and minds?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where does their will go?”

Mama looked as if she was about to cry. “It has been a long day. Hush, please, Libertie.”

“But what happens? Where is Ben Daisy? Is he in the same place Father is and … and … everyone else?”

“Libertie, you ask too much of your mama sometimes.”

And so I understood. Mama did not have an answer. Mama did not know. That great big brain of hers could not tell me where Ben Daisy was. And because Mama didn’t know, the dead were not to be spoken of. They were all of them in another country.

Eventually, we learned, from whispers, what the boys said they saw when they jumped in the river to rescue him. That underneath the water, the boy swimmer had seen Ben, had tried to pull him up, but he was stopped. Ben was wrapped in the arms of a woman, her skin glowing golden in the waves, the pink of her dress flashing through the murk of the river, her hair long. She had looked at the boy as he swam close and reached for Ben Daisy’s hand. He said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and she’d beckoned to him, as if to welcome him into her arms, too. He said he was overcome with the desire to swim into them until she smiled at him—with a mouth full of thousands of pointed teeth. Then Ben had tugged his hand out of the swimmer’s, had waved softly and turned his whole body inward, like a baby’s, to be cradled in the arms of the woman in the water. And the boy kicked away, up to the surface, before he could be tempted to join them.

Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the river

Sleep in the river

Sleep in the river

Ben Daisy and his woman sleep in the river

Even past Judgment Day

That was the song, I am ashamed to say, that I made up after hearing this story, and the other children sang it, too. It became the anthem of our schoolyard for a year, and children still sing it today, I am told. I sang it because of all that I did not know and could not know about what happened. But even at that age, I knew curiosity could be heartless and I made sure not to sing it around Miss Hannah or my mother.

My heart hurt, and I was full of disgust, though for who or for what I did not know. I only knew I did not ever want to care for another if it made me act like Mr. Ben. If it made me wander the fields of Brooklyn, pressing flowers for someone who would never come. If it made me speak another’s name until it became my own, even when I was guaranteed no answer. If it made me try to heal my people and fail so disastrously. If it made me put my brother in a coffin to get him free and still have him die anyways.

Care, I decided, was monstrous.

It was as clear as Ben Daisy’s hat, floating on the waters. I would not be a doctor, no matter what Mama wished. I could not deceive others, and I could not deceive myself, as she did.

Sa ki bon avèk yon kè, sè ke li pa pote jijman

What’s good about the heart is that it does not reason

Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that? If you were still bound on this Earth by desire?

It was a blasphemous thing to think, and I could not speak it to anyone, except to the plants in Mama’s garden. I whispered it into the open blossoms’ faces in the mornings, and then I carefully ran my thumb over each velvety petal. I knew my words were poison, and I was certain they could kill whatever good lived there.

Who was the woman Ben Daisy loved enough to die for? I looked for her where we’d all last seen her—in the water. I looked at the bottom of our well, in the muddy pools that collected in the ditches by the path to downtown. I looked for her in the pond, just past our settlement, where we took our laundry to wash. I looked for her in the wetlands, where the turtles and frogs and dragonflies swept through, where the men sometimes fished on Saturday afternoons. I stood, the tongues of my leather boots stiffening with mud, my feet sinking into the ground, and breathed in that murky smell of lake beds, and knew, in an instant, she wasn’t there. Despite what Ben Daisy had said about her love of cakes and sugar, I did not think a woman who could drown a man in her arms lived in anything as sweet as fresh water. Her domain was brackish. She would live in salt.

The few times we went close to the waterfront, when Mama had to travel downtown and take the cart, I would lift my head to try and catch the smell of it over all the other scents—the rotted fruit in the gutters, the sweet blossoms of the trees planted in front of the nicer houses, the warm breath of horse manure, the sweat of all the bodies teeming around us. At the very top, maybe, when the wind was right, I could smell that other woman’s home. Mostly, though, I listened.

If you listen closely, water, when it laps against the sides of a bucket, when it mouths a riverbed, sounds like hands clapping. It sounds like a congregation when prayers are done. But what is its message? It is not deliverance, I don’t think. It is not salvation. It is something just underneath that, something that even Mama couldn’t reach with her mind. So what hope was there for me of finding it?

A few times, riding beside her in our cart or walking beside her through our town, the rhymes I’d started myself about women and water ringing in our ears, I asked Mama, “Is the woman in the water real?” but she would only say, “I’ve taught you too well to fall for nonsense.” It was a flash of her old assurance, which had gone somewhere underground, inside her, after Ben Daisy was gone.

After he left us, whenever new people came to us, whether by Madame Elizabeth’s coffins or, when that route became too dangerous, by secret means of their own, Mama looked at them with sadness. She did not try to feed them ground seahorses. Instead, when they came, when she encountered them at church, she touched their shoulders and told them to come speak to her about what ailed them.