Someday_ADE by Lynne Tillman

Thomas humored himself imagining farmers at the pond tossing in coins, dimes and quarters probably—the cost of wishes must be inflated, too—and if he peered in, he knew he’d see his reflection.
    So, in the same, whimsical mood, he called up the myth of Narcissus. It seemed fitting, Narcissus’ attachment to himself, to a reflection, all surface, though Echo loved him anyway. Her fate doomed her to repeat his words, which Narcissus might have ambivalently appreciated, since some men like to hear themselves talk and hear themselves in subservient women. Thomas, somewhat uncomfortably and almost against his will, he’d say later, looked down, but he didn’t see his face. He saw the moss-covered still water, and soon, through the interstices of green slime, a woman’s face floating a foot beneath the surface. Distorted, old, rotten. Disbelieving, even alarmed, he turned again, but again there was no creature behind him, and all the while the birds continued to vocalize their complaints and desires in a euphonious chorus, interrupted by a few squawks.
    He stared at the rotten face, hoping to see something. It felt imperative now to realize something, to apprehend—“make it work” was his design credo. He felt, suddenly, less sure of himself than ever, but maybe there would come a sign to help him, though wishing for that made him feel more vulnerable. He stared, and occasionally a trace of his own reflection filtered through the muck, but only for a moment until the watery mirror exposed her face once more. The face changed, by the flow of water, he thought, its labile movements. And as he stared, meditating on her, or it, and this oddness, he noticed something, the thing behind him that wasn’t there and the thing in front that was and yet wasn’t. It wasn’t clear, it was more a sensation than an idea or image. But then it became an idea: the face was Grace’s dead mother’s. She had, like Virginia Woolf, drowned herself, a suicide, that was why Grace couldn’t love. And then: Grace’s mother had been murdered, that’s why her face looked hideous, she died in terror, thrown into a river. In either case, her mother was condemned to haunt the waterways of New Hampshire. So: Grace never stopped mourning her mother and hating her, too, her mother had left her, had not loved her, and how could unloved Grace love—that must be it. But Billy Webster had made Grace know her mother was gone, he let her go for Grace. No, he told her that her mother had been kidnapped, that’s what Webster insisted, and she had never wanted to leave Grace, and she believed him.
    Why couldn’t he have calmed her? Led her from doubt? Why couldn’t he have given her what she needed? Thomas couldn’t accept his fate, either, to have lost her. He wasn’t her knight in shining armor.
    It’s not your fault, a voice whispered.
    Thomas shifted around, and a form lay on the forest floor, like a woman’s, a shadow, or a ghost, then of a man, a child, a woman again, but there, absolutely, it was. It appeared to be wearing a hat, with a feather, as when an Indian stood in his doorway when he was a child, and, though Thomas awoke, the Indian stayed there for several minutes, he wore an elaborate feather headdress, his bare chest smooth and brown, luminous in the dark of the bedroom.
    Now she, he, or it sat up.
    The indecipherable shadow muttered: Thomas, Thomas, don’t be silly.
    That’s what it sounded like, he thought, he heard that, but do ghosts or sibyls call you silly? He was hearing things, of course, hearing what he wanted. Thomas believed the ghostlike shape was created by a weave of branches and leaves, the winds causing it to shift its shape. It was a shadow created by nature, the play of elements, and maybe of his desire, with an illusion of physicality, but even when he shut his eyes, then quickly opened them, it was there. He accepted his own explanations or interpretations and waited for more.
    Someone will love you, the