The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner Page A

someone had screwed the planks to the wooden framing of the mine. The screws were new, shiny silver. I put my foot along the side and really yanked. It came off, and I fell heavily onto the rocks and creek behind me.
    She ducked down and went in. I scrambled up out of the water and went with her. “Watch your” became the opening of her every sentence inside that mountain. “Watch your head” and “Watch your step” and “Watch your right.” I just stayed close to her, following her deeper into the dark. I tried to keep my hand on her back. I tried to thread my finger through the hole of her shorts belt loop, but she was so fast. It’s a good thing I have such a nice body, I thought to myself, though I was hunched over and shuffling forward like a witch.
    â€œTell me your thoughts on dark, damp holes,” my therapist said. “You’re clearly drawn to holes. You love to talk about them. You have some sort of obsession with them. I’m interested in the type of holes that most fascinate you, call to you, sometimes maybe come to you in your dreams. Because we all have holes, don’t we, that we want others toexplore? And we know that, as we have holes, so too do others. And we like to look and explore holes to make sure theirs are like our own.”
    Indeed the mine was dark, and it was wet. But it was cool bordering on cold. It became very dark very rapidly, swallowing any of the late-day’s light that had earlier been chasing us. I turned around a few times and saw nothing—literally the portrait of nothing. My daughter used a small keychain flashlight to guide us through the passageways. Its power against this darkness was astonishing. I said nothing.
    Then she stopped and shone her flashlight into a stretch of water that appeared clouded by lime and alluvial tailings where the mine had been flooded and simply pooled. She turned to me and put a hand on my chest. “This is where things get a little weird,” she said.
    I nodded.
    â€œBe ready. I just met her a few weeks ago. She’s in some trouble, O.K .? So am I. I’m going to show her to you now. You’ll get it when you see her.”
    I expected a dead child. I don’t know why. It might have made more sense, in retrospect, to have imagined an animal or underworld science-fictioncreature. But that’s what I pictured. I thought of a dead child. “Are you going to kill me?” I said.
    She shushed me. “Just think about what we’re going to do with this information. Don’t worry about what it means. O.K .? And don’t talk.”
    She then turned the flashlight farther up the pool of water, deeper into the mine. I had to squint, but I could see, in the dim and pasty light, a woman looking back at me.
    â€œHi, Hannah,” my daughter said. “It’s me.”
    The woman I could see in the pool, in a bikini, was at once familiar and yet very, very strange to me. She was smoking a cigarette, though I could not smell the smoke. She was sitting on the far edge of the pool of water, her legs submerged to her knees. Her bikini looked to be red and floral. She wore her blond hair long and back, in a bun, and she looked ruddy, with high rosy cheeks, but there was no mistaking that this woman was my daughter, older. I was seeing the specter of my daughter as an adult. She was waving. “Hannah doesn’t speak to me either,” my daughter said to me, loud enough that it seemed she wanted the woman to hear her.
    â€œHow do you know her name is Hannah?”
    â€œShhh,” she said.
    â€œIt’s you,” I said.
    She shushed me again, this time with some force. “I know who it is, Dad .”
    Then we stood there in silence. I really didn’t know what to say. The woman remained on the other side of the water. We would have to get into the water to go toward her. I presumed that was where this was headed. Or I imagined this woman, this