The River God’s Daughters

Written by Tabitha Lawrence
Photographed by Aaron Wagoner
Model: Rebecca Carlyle

Gifts from my mother: coarse tangles of hair in clumps and spirals, soft helmet of frizz, lavender tinged legs, big Italian snoz. Lots of sisters and, much later, lots of brothers. And something else, but I can’t put my finger on it. Sometimes she speaks of things as though I should know what she’s talking about and I wonder if I do, somewhere in the tide pools in the back of my mind.

And what was this supposed to be? A story about a boy who told me about places, about Dominican folk tales and rockier coasts, and then disappeared. A mythical creature just maddening enough that I have no choice but to be writing about him still, years later, when he tries to come back onto the page. I guess we all have our sirens. But by sirens, of course, I mean the blind spots we are willing to overlook time and time again. The dull buzz in our ears after the explosion. My sisters and I watch live streams of church services from our homes during the pandemic. The pastor tells us to ask ourselves, how many times will I have to learn this lesson? We shift in our seats.

And how does this relate? A memory, three girls in the back of a big white van, the windows painted black (their mother’s boyfriend’s, this isn’t that kind of story). There’s a mattress behind the driver’s seat and the youngest sits on it cross-legged, reading in the glimpse of streetlights through his window. “What’s genitalia?” she sounds out. Uncle laughs (they’re supposed to call him Uncle) and she reddens, closes the book. “What the hell kind of stuff they got you reading?”

I don’t remember when they stop pretending that the baby is a tumor, and wow is that sentence something to unpack. I just remember that by the time the baby arrives, the man we’re supposed to call Uncle is gone. Soon, she is too. You never can pinpoint when the story she’s telling you shifts and inevitably becomes about him. I’m just thinking of it because I’m thinking of that happy beach town apartment, one bedroom, bunk beds in the kitchen, driving in the van singing like a choir, “If I was green, I would die.” I’m thinking of the phone calls we must have missed when she said answer only if it rings twice, hangs up, and then rings again.

I don’t know how to write fantasy. I don’t know how to write anything that didn’t sort of happen, and once it’s on the page, I don’t know how to show people and explain that it’s just fiction, only sort of true, don’t read into what I had to do to make it into a story. Picture my mother high in her seashell crusted house, painting sunsets and palm trees on the living room wall at 2 AM, my sisters and I in our room, murmuring to each other in our sleep.

The next time, there was almost a wedding. She can’t make us call this one Uncle because he’s practically our age. For the wedding itself, she has a vision—the Tall Ships Festival, all of us dressed like pirates—still the measure against which we decide if a blouse is too piratey. Would you wear it to Mom’s pirate flash mob wedding? If so, put it back on the rack.

Whenever she’d leave, I’d need a full day to recover. I’d be inconsolable. Outwardly, of course, I’d be nothing. I’d get in trouble for an attitude I didn’t mean to have. I’d get grounded for sneaking around, making a Myspace to talk to boys whom I knew I could never speak to in person. I wrote on my fictitious profile “My life isn’t as perfect as it looks… but it’s pretty close” smiley-face heart. I sensed even then that this bereftness was not marketable.

But she gave things magic in her musings. Ordinary things glimmered under her touch. Of course, there were fairies. Of course, there was whole milk, white toast doused in butter.

We all have our sirens—mine is this: I was trying to write about Odysseus. I was trying to write about getting drunk and reading poems about mermaids to a boy, setting into motion years of trying to lay bait in Snapchat stories and equally trivial things, but instead, we got this. What I’m saying is I’m still not sure how to write about you. What I’m saying is I’m always writing about you.

Surely we can pull a story arc out of here, somewhere.