Water on Travertine

The thing that bothered Benjamin most was that there was no way he would ever know. No way anyone would ever know.

Maybe it was quick; maybe his father never felt a thing: one moment he was lathering away in the shower, reveling in the steam-soaked reverberation of his best Neil Diamond, and the next he simply wasn’t there. Dead before he hit the travertine mosaic that his mother said gave the bathroom a more Mediterranean feel.

Benjamin was seven when his mother had fallen in love with travel, and with all things Mediterranean. The family had spent two weeks on a gulet, tracing the Turkish coast from Bodrum to Marmaris, and she went ashore at every chance in every backwater bay, intoxicated by the prospect of yet another unexcavated little ruin. She always returned, breathless with discovery, long after the rest of them had bored of their beach walks and water play and were impatient to move on. “Can you believe?” she’d say, “I think it used to be a Byzantine church!” And she’d show them a handful of penny-sized cut stones, onyx and turquoise. There had been traces of mosaic under the gravel, she said. Certainly beyond restoration, and it would have been a shame to let these strays be lost to the elements. The fragments now lived in a ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, mingled with other strays from her travels whose origins had been long forgotten.

Benjamin wondered, for the first time, what his father thought of the mosaic in the shower. He seemed to have gone along without complaint — or apparent enthusiasm — with most of his mother’s home improvement projects, acquiescing to the slow transformation of the unremarkable Eichler on South Court into a sort of consulate-at-large for half a dozen competing visions of Shangri-la.

But… But what if it hadn’t been quick? What if he’d lain there, knowing, bleeding against those tiles? What if he’d called out with the last of his strength, the last of his breath, and lay there waiting, hoping for the rescue that never came, until the water washed the last of his life away? Dr. Lazar had said you really couldn’t tell, not with this kind of heart failure.

It had been about ten o’clock that Benjamin noticed the shower still running, and probably close to eleven before he began to think something might have been amiss about it. There’d been no school that day — teacher resource meetings or something — but he woke up at seven anyway and plugged into his Playstation for a morning blissfully uninterrupted by responsibilities. Of course he had his headphones on — few things united his parents like an objection to the sounds of computerized carnage. But he got up at regular intervals: another bowl of Cap’n Crunch, another trip to the bathroom halfway down the batik-lined hallway.

It was almost noon when he called in through the open bedroom door: “Dad?” The shades were still down, and the Barong and Rangda woodcarvings that flanked his parents’ bed loomed in the murk. A bright line of yellow radiated from beneath the door to the bath. He took tentative steps in toward it, stopped and listened for anything beyond the sound of running water. “Dad?”

He knocked, too quietly the first time, and then again, too loudly he thought. Then retreated to the kitchen and poured a third bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Not because he was hungry this time, but because it was something to do with his hands while he tried to think. If his mother were there… Oh yes, if his mother were there — but his mother had been there less and less.

There had never been any real animosity between his parents; the closest they got was when he found them standing across the counter from each other, shoulders tensed, choosing their words carefully so as to not be misunderstood. His father always looked at the floor, or closed his eyes and swayed gently during these conversations, as if afraid that eye contact with his mother would undermine his ability to think clearly. Which it well might have — she had a gaze, a beautiful, intense gaze that Benjamin imagined in younger days could have knocked the breath out of any unwary man.

And their words were always measured, respectful: “I’m sorry, I realize now that I must have misinterpreted your question. But do you see how it was reasonable for me to expect that all three of us would be involved in that decision?” And when the matter was resolved, they would return to their books in their respective corners: his father to the Wayfair rocking chair in the family room, and his mother to the Sumatran teak breakfast table at the kitchen’s bay window. Benjamin understood that not all parents were so rational or considerate.

They spent more time apart as Benjamin grew older, his father retreating into his work at the lab, his mother venturing farther afield, to Bangladesh, to Burma, to Bhutan. She would be gone for a few weeks at a time, so by middle school, he was adept at most of the household tasks involved in getting himself up each day, fed and to school in clean clothes. Evenings, his father would join him on the couch, and they’d sit together wordlessly as one balanced spreadsheets and the other blasted monsters on an alien world. It wasn’t a game of catch out in the backyard, but it was their own kind of intimacy, and for Benjamin it was enough.

His mother’s return was always caught up in a whirlwind of excitement: new carvings, incense, silk scarves and breathless tales of sunrise at the roof of the world, or midnight rituals in a smoky village hut. “Oh, you would love Tarangire — the Maasai, the animals! I must take you some day,” she always said. But Benjamin noticed that she never seemed concerned with working out when that “some day” could be, and over time he came to accept her promises as something between an abstract declaration of love and a polite device for giving voice to her enthusiasm.

There was a deeper pattern of his mother’s comings and goings, too. In the first days she was back, her volubility seemed matched only by the counterpoint of his father’s silence. He would listen, and sometimes nod agreeably, but Benjamin observed that he rarely asked questions. And when he did, they were invariably for clarification rather than an attempt to delve any further into her story.

His father seemed to regain his own voice only after the storytelling days were expended and the family settled into a comfortable balance. It was, Benjamin thought, as though they only had one set of words between them, and the slow exchange formed a movement of the tides.

Benjamin’s father referred to this middle period as “project time,” and as the stories wound down, he and Benjamin would quietly begin betting which would re-emerge to physically manifest themselves on the household. Maybe a greenhouse, so she could grow salak? Or maybe a mandala? She had been obsessed with mandalas when she returned from Rajasthan. Benjamin guessed mandalas, and basked in silent triumph at the dinner table when his mother announced that she had found one, woven exquisitely in Himalayan wool, to replace the living room rug.

In another few weeks, after the projects were done, the tide invariably ebbed to its other extreme, leaving his mother sullen and distracted. She would gaze out the kitchen window somewhere above the horizon, her dog-eared Jane Goodall forgotten among scattered Post Its, and seemed to only half hear when his father suggested that perhaps they plan for a Sunday afternoon drive out to the coast. Maybe they could hike up the bluff at Pillar Point? His mother would nod distractedly, but Benjamin knew that when Sunday came she would make some weary excuse and suggest they go on without her; he’d long since learned that cajoling her was futile. By the time she began packing for her next trip, she moved almost as a ghost through the house.

Benjamin finished the bowl of cereal, stalling. He took his time chasing down the last of the bloated, floating orange blobs, cornering them individually with his spoon and straining their grainy, cloying remains through his teeth before raising the bowl to his lips like a ritual chalice and draining the sugar-soaked milk. His gaze drifted down the hallway again; he really ought to do something.

Morocco — that’s where his mother said she was going this time. “We’ll be in Marrakesh for only a couple of days,” she said. “Then we’ll start working our way north, to the coast, and east, to Fes. That’s where the real art is.” The way she said “real” art struck him as odd. Also the way she always said “we,” but never mentioned any traveling companions.

In any case, he couldn’t call her. He couldn’t call anyone, now that he thought about it. He had friends, and knew the neighbors well, but his mother was the only person on earth he could imagine stepping through the clutter of that darkened bedroom, rapping heavily on the door and announcing, “Hal? You there? I’m coming in,” before doing just that, with no self-conscious hesitation.

He laid the bowl in the sink, then retrieved it and found an empty spot on the top rack of the dishwasher. Down the hallway, through the darkened bedroom, the shower hissed insistently.

Somewhere blocks away the moan of a fire engine rose, thickened and fell. Maybe someone else, somewhere else, had known something was wrong and had called for help in the meantime. He dismissed the thought as ridiculous and listened, two steps down the hallway, as the siren faded, attending to some other, more certain calamity.

Two more steps; now he was past the hallway bathroom with its wall of Senegalese masks, long dour faces and jutting lips. Benjamin always felt they were watching him, disapproving of his perfunctory tooth-brushing. Or perhaps his mother had placed them there to discourage him from lingering on the toilet? Four more steps and he perched at the darkened threshold again. Then at the bathroom door; he placed his ear against it, listening, cursing silently to himself.

“Dad?” Only the muffled sound of water against stone. “Are you in there?” Nothing. “ARE YOU OKAY?” Nothing.

Jesus Christ. The air burbled at his lips — he couldn’t get it to go down and make a proper breath in his lungs. His heart was beating, pounding. He placed his ear against the door again, a hand on the knob, turning it, trying it.

And then it was free from the latch, swinging inward, and he was bathed in light and sound and fogged mirrors and blue tile through the cold rattling mist of water on travertine, alone and with a question whose answer he would never know.