Part 2Drowned to Save Her Sins

Richard dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the gravel and ground it out beneath the heel of his work boot.

"I told you not to bring her to the actual river," he grumbled, ambling casually toward the sedan parked up on the shoulder. "The bathtub at home was working just fine."

Eleanor crossed her arms over her chest, assuming the posture of a righteous judge.

"The bathtub?" she called out after his retreating back. "How could a bathtub possibly replicate the violent sheer force of a current? Cora was lost in wild water. If Iris doesn’t swallow a mouthful of river water, how could she ever truly understand the desperation her sister felt?"

I drifted just above Eleanor’s head, watching her righteous fury.

Even though I was dead, a phantom shiver traveled through what remained of my soul.

A sharp gust of November wind whipped past, scattering dead leaves across the muddy bank.

Ten minutes had passed since I was pushed over the ledge.

The brown, rushing river gave up nothing. Not even a stray bubble broke the surface.

A few elderly locals on their morning stroll along the levee stopped in their tracks, leaning over the wooden guardrail to peer down at the bank.

"Excuse me, ma'am!" an older woman wearing a bright yellow safety vest called out, her face knit with worry. "Did you just throw something into the river?"

She hurried down the gravel path, her eyes scanning the violent water. "It looked like a whole person just fell in!"

Eleanor turned around, her expression dripping with disgust, looking at the woman as if she were an annoying insect.

"Mind your own business. I'm disciplining my own daughter. I don't need neighborhood busybodies telling me what to do."

The woman froze, her eyes widening in sheer disbelief.

"Are you insane? This is the spillway section! The current here could drag a horse under! You pushed your own kid into that? That's attempted murder!"

An older man beside her panicked, instantly pulling an old flip phone from his jacket pocket. "We need to call 911 right now. The current’s too strong—this is madness!"

The second Eleanor heard the words "call 911", her face darkened.

She lunged forward and smacked the man’s hand down before he could dial.

"Don't you dare call the police! I told you, she’s my daughter! She’s throwing a tantrum!" Eleanor shouted, her voice shrill and unhinged. "She’s been doing breath-holding drills in freezing water since she was a toddler! She can hold her breath for seven, eight minutes easily! She’s hiding under some weeds right now just to mess with my head!"

The old man stumbled back, terrified by the feral madness in Eleanor’s eyes, but he held onto his phone. "You're out of your damn mind! No kid holds their breath in an eight-knot current for eight minutes! You need help!"

"Richard! Where the hell are you?" Eleanor shrieked toward the car. "Get over here and get rid of these lunatics!"

Richard finally strolled back down the slope, dragging a long, telescoping fishing gaff behind him. Seeing the commotion, he frowned in annoyance.

"What’s the shouting about? Move along, folks. It’s just a family matter." He waved his hand dismissively, as if shooing away stray dogs.

"A family matter?" the woman cried, pointing an accusing finger right at Richard’s nose. "What kind of father stands there while his kid drowns? Get in the water and pull her out!"

Richard’s face turned sour, but his voice remained flat, stubborn. "There's nothing to pull out. Her mother knows what she’s doing. The kid won't die. Besides, she’s doing this on purpose. If I go down there, she’ll just swim somewhere else."

Watching Richard’s utter detachment, a memory from my sixteenth year floated back to me.

By that winter, the years of freezing water and toxic silt had left me with severe rheumatoid arthritis. Whenever it rained, the inflammation in my knees felt like thousands of red-hot needles digging into the marrow.

One afternoon, Eleanor locked me in the unheated basement next to the deep freezer because my practice exam score was two points lower than Cora’s old mock score. She made me stand with my bare skin pressed against the metal siding.

"Cora never even got the chance to graduate middle school," Eleanor had hissed. "How dare you bring home anything less than a perfect score?"

The pain in my joints was so unbearable that while she went upstairs to take a phone call, I used an old emergency phone I had hidden under a floorboard to dial 911.

The moment the dispatcher answered, I sobbed into the receiver: "Please, help me... my mom is freezing me to death in the basement..."

Before I could finish the address, a heavy, calloused hand reached from behind and snatched the phone away.

Richard.

He looked down at the glowing screen, saw "911," and pressed the red button without hesitation.

I looked up at him in utter despair. "Dad... please. My joints hurt so bad. I think I'm going to lose my legs..."

Richard slipped the phone into his pocket, staring down at me with cold, dead eyes.

"Iris, your mother is sick. She carries a lot of pain. Can't you just indulge her a little?" He sighed, trying to sound like a weary peacemaker. "Do you really have to bring the police to our door and tear this family apart? Just endure it. When she calms down, she'll let you out."

Then, he turned around and locked the heavy basement door, leaving me in the pitch-black, biting cold.

That was the day I realized: Eleanor was the executioner wielding the blade, but Richard was the one who sharpened the steel and dug the shallow grave.

Neither of them was innocent.

"Gurgle."

A small cluster of muddy bubbles suddenly surfaced near a swirl of white foam.

A moment later, a single white canvas sneaker bobbed to the surface, caught in the spinning vortex before drifting lazily downstream.

It was the new pair I had laced up this morning.

"Lord have mercy! Look! That's a shoe!" the woman screamed. She shoved past Eleanor, grabbed the old man’s phone, and dialed emergency services.

"Send everyone! Send divers to the South Spillway bridge! A crazy woman just threw her daughter into the river, and she hasn't come up! Hurry!"

Eleanor stared at the floating sneaker, her composure cracking for a split second.

Only a split second.

Then, she let out an even louder, more manic laugh.

"Iris, you think you're clever, don't you? Leaving a shoe behind to fake an accident?"

She leaned over the bank and screamed into the roar of the water: "Officer! Don't waste your time! It's just a brat seeking attention! She’s an expert swimmer—she’s sitting on the riverbed trying to scare me! The second your sirens get here, she’ll crawl right out!"

I looked down at the lone white sneaker disappearing down the river.

"Mom... I was never a good swimmer."

"I just stopped struggling."