Story-A-Day #194: Still Water

STILL WATER

The lake is cool and calm, a sheet of glass unperturbed. It is not always like this, but today it seems fitting, a mirror like surface for my moment of reflection.

This is the spot where she died, a horrible tragedy that I still feel I could have prevented. But I was too busy, too distracted by the work at hand. The winter had just come to a close and as with every year, we were at the camp for the long weekend in May.

Every year we would come down here and get things ready for the summer. Putting out the water line, stretching the different sections of the dock together, restocking the cupboards. It was a quiet and simple time, one we all looked forward too.

I can still remember the year it happened, although I wish it wasn’t so. I wish I could block out all those vile memories. She had been playing in the water, an innocent young five-year-old.

It was no different than it always was, although we felt she was old enough to turn our attention away just for a moment. I was bust hammering the loose boards on the dock back in place, the ones that had shifted during a cold winter buried in snow. I was even whistling a tune from one of the shows I used to watch with her, a happy little ditty.

It wasn’t like I suddenly noticed that everything had gone quiet, it was more an instinctual feeling. I turned towards where she had been playing and found her floating face down.

I called out to my wife, told her to start the car, and ran over to the lifeless form of our baby girl. I gave her mouth-to-mouth, pushed the cool water from her lungs. I could feel a pulse, and she was breathing, slow shallow breaths.

I prayed that it wasn’t too late. The next few days are a blur, beeping monitors, concerned medical staff, and a strange shifting of light on the sterile walls as day turned to night, into day, into night.

And then she was gone. Those days were a blur, but that one moment in time still exists in my mind as clear and vivid as though it happened today.

It is a day I will never forgive; a moment I will never forget.