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.”