“They know us here,” I said.

“I come here nearly every day. I have bragged about you so often they know you by my words.” He laughed. “Before I left for America, I used to come here to study.”

“You would bring your books here?”

“Sometimes I was studying books. But mostly, I was studying the plants.”

“You will get used to this walk,” Emmanuel said, taking my hand in his. “You will make it every day with me, once my office is set up again. We will learn this mountain together.”

“You have a lot of faith in me.”

“It is not faith,” he said. “I know you.”

We then walked in silence, and I could pretend for a moment that I was the person he imagined. To get to the water, you had to climb uphill till the backs of your legs began to burn and your knees felt as if they would shake, and your skirts, as they moved around your ankles, felt like a burden. I tucked the ends into the waist of my dress, running them through my legs, which delighted Emmanuel. But I felt annoyance at the walk and the heat that he had not prepared me for. We had left in the afternoon, because he had wished to talk with his father first and we had wanted to miss the highest heat of the day. But the heat had lingered, and even the woods all around us felt oppressive.

I did not trust his admiration for me. The only person who had ever watched my movements as closely as he did was my mother. And she had watched not with pride, but with a kind of patient assessing. She was waiting for me to make a mistake, and he did not believe a mistake was possible. Yet.

My mother’s scrutiny was a burden. But this other way of looking, this besottedness, was just as damning. My mother expected great things and constant improvement. He seemed to believe in a perfection that existed apart from my actual self.

I watched my husband’s slim back as he moved up the mountain. His skin did not brown in the sun, only turned yellow and pink. For this trip, he wore a straw hat with a large brim and a veil of gauze. Ti Me had brought it to him, and they had both laughed about it, a shared joke. His back is muscled, but he is a little man, I thought as he walked ahead of me. It was easy to forget this as we wrestled in bed, as I watched him leave me so many mornings. I thought, I still do not know him, but I think about him at all times, so I suppose it makes no difference if I do or not. It is the same.

“This is where the women come to wash,” he said. Before us was a small pool, the water shallow. “This is where I learned to swim as a boy.”

“You swim?”

“You will, too.”

He stopped before the bank of the pool and began to take off the ridiculous hat, his shirt.

“Emmanuel—”

“The washing day is done. It will be dusk soon. No one will come.”

He rolled his trousers up and waded into the water. Then he turned to me and held out his hands.

“There are two other pools above us. The water for this one comes from a waterfall at the top of the mountain. The pool just above us is about seventy-five feet deep. We will move to that one when you are ready. The best pool is at the top, near the fall. It is maybe a hundred feet deep, but the water is so blue you can almost see to the bottom. We will move to that one together. You’ll see.”

“You are very confident.”

“Of course.”

“If I refuse?”

He smiled. “I will demand it.”

Following his commands seemed an easier way forward to whatever version of myself he imagined. So I put one foot into the water, then another. I stepped very carefully over to him. I could hear the water as it moved around my feet. If I was quiet, I could hear the clap of the waterfall above us. A deeper sound than the one I had listened for in the puddles and barrels of water back home, when I was a girl and believed in Ben Daisy’s lady. Emmanuel held out his hands for me. I put both of mine in his.

And then he threw me down.

The water was not deep enough for me to lose my ground. I went under, onto my knees, but when I raised my head, I broke the surface again.

He was laughing, truly laughing. I thought, I have misjudged him. I thought, I have made a mistake.

“This is how my father taught me,” he kept saying.

I tucked my legs underneath me, sat back in the water. I could feel my skirts filling with the damp, beginning to weigh me down. Emmanuel danced around me, whooping and laughing and splashing. When he got close enough, I held out my hand and pulled his arm, until he was in the water with me.

He rolled happily in the mud of the pool. But if I could have gotten ahold of him, if I had not been scared of the water myself, I would have held him under. If only for a moment, for him to feel what I felt. How could you be bound to someone, for life, to the grave, and fundamentally not feel the same things?

I pushed myself up out of the water, but I felt it still dragging at my skirts, nearly pulling me down again. Emmanuel was still sitting in the water, laughing. I slogged to the shore, one heavy step after another. When I got there, I tried to sit first on the ground, then lean against a tree. I could feel my skirts becoming clammy against my legs. I looked up at the sky. The sun was beginning to set somewhere. You could not see the horizon from this pool, just a pink streak across the sky above us. I was a thousand miles away from my mother because I was too much of a coward to tell her the truth.

In front of me, Emmanuel leaned until he floated on his back. He held his palms out. “This is the first step,” he called. “You must make friends with the water.”

Around us, it was getting darker. In the dimming light, the dirt road we’d taken to the pool glowed against the shadows of the trees, as if it was lit up from below. I could hear the sounds of birds from far away.

“Libertie, are you listening to me?”

“No,” I said. “I am listening to the jungle.”

“You are angry?”

“Shh,” I said. “I want to hear the trees.”

I heard a splash as he sat up. “You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s the way you learn. That’s how my father taught me.”

“Your father is always right?”

“In this he is.”

“You will ignore your father when he tells you how to be a doctor, but if it is about drowning your wife, he is correct.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“Half drowning your wife.”

“You’ve never wanted me to feel something in the same way you do?” he said quietly, to the water. “That’s all I wish for here.”

I thought then that maybe we could try to understand each other again. I stood up. I unbuttoned the blouse that stuck to me, stepped out of the skirts that clung to my legs. When I was bare, I walked back into the pool and sat down beside him.

“Like this?” I set my arms on the surface of the water.

“Now lean back.”

If you follow his commands, I told myself, you can become the woman he believes you are.

I felt the water creep up my spine, around my shoulders, and lick into my ears. Everything within me wanted to hold tight against it. My head dipped further below the surface, and all sound was gone now—except the sound of my own breath. My mouth and nose were still above the surface, and I took in one more bit of air, which felt warm now, when the rest of me was in cold water. And then I let go and trusted the water, and I was free. I opened my eyes a little bit. I could see the moon above us, and its light reflected, white and shimmering, on the water that surrounded me.

“Do you think,” I said to Emmanuel, “it’s the same moon over Mama right now? Do you think she is looking at it as I look at it, as I lie on top of water? Do you think she can know me right now?”

But he was tired of games by then. Or games that did not involve him. He sat up and crashed out of the water.

HE TOOK ME to the water every Sunday afternoon. But first, we had to endure the mornings. Those we spent in sweaty prayer with his father’s congregation: the bishop sitting behind the pulpit in his heavy robes, the priest standing up to lead the service, Ella’s sewing circle sitting in the front pews with some of the Haitians who had joined the church early on, and the newest converts always standing in the back of the church.

No one seemed to question this arrangement, not even Emmanuel, when I asked him about it. “It has always been that way,” he told me. But Ella was more blunt. “They are our brothers in Christ, but they aren’t of our sort,” she said. “The Haitians of our station are lovely, but they remain papists. The ambitious workers here join our church because they know we have schools and aid and help, and they want that for their families. We love them very much and they love us, and we worship together, but we like to be with our sort. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”