My Mother Believed in Water Nymphs

I was eight that winter. It was the week after Christmas and we had just come back from visiting my mother’s parents in Minnesota. Mom had spent that entire vacation making snow angels with me and telling me about the tree nymphs that were sleeping through the snow.

She always talked about things like that. Water spirits and tree spirits, muses and goddesses. Those were the bedtime stories I heard. My father hated it. I didn’t understand then, but I did later.

My mother was hiding in that world. When you’re a kid, you don’t understand words like depression and unhealthy coping mechanism. But I knew that her eyes were always shiny and that we didn’t have a cat to make those red marks on her wrists.

My mom only seemed happy when she was with me, playing games or telling stories. Her eyes always got shiny if I asked to go over to Spencer’s.

That day, though, Spencer was still in Colorado visiting family. Dad was at work. Mom had spent all day letting me brush her hair and telling fairy stories. I always loved brushing her hair. It was so soft, like a kitten’s fur or duckling feathers, and it shined like the moon on a black night.

Then she kissed my eyes and my cheeks. “I want you to promise me that you’ll never forget my stories, Ryan. They will protect you if you remember them.”

“From what?” I asked in a child’s voice.

She didn’t answer, just stared at me with shiny eyes. “Promise, Ryan.”

I promised, not really understanding. Then she kissed me one more time and went to take a bath.

It was a long bath. I knocked on the door a few hours later. I was hungry. When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door open. The water was red and her wrists were bleeding. I started screaming. I grabbed her face and tried to shake her awake. “Momma? Mommy?!”

Then I ran out and picked up the phone, dialing 9-1-1 like I’d been taught in school.

When Daddy came to the hospital, he didn’t say anything to me. I was sitting in a chair in the hallway, my legs swinging, too short to touch the floor. We left an hour later without my mother.

No one told me she was dead. I found out the day of the funeral, when I saw her sleeping in the casket, unsmiling. My father had to carry me out, screaming and crying.

My dad started drinking. I had to go to therapy once a week. My dad threw all of Mommy’s things in the trash. Spencer and I rescued them and hid them in my closet. I read her books at night, letting my fingers run over the pictures of the nymphs and the goddesses. I tried to read her journals, but her handwriting was too messy.

That lasted for a year or so. By the time I was thirteen and we got the assignment, I had forgotten the stories. I was on an anti-depressant and I still went to therapy once a week. My father was an alcoholic and he yelled at me when my eyes shined like my mother’s.

It was an English assignment. ”Write a paper about one of your parents.” I should have written about my father, but there was nothing to say, really. ‘My dad is a drunk who hates me.’ Not exactly a great paper.

I didn’t really want to write about Mom, or maybe I did. That day when I got home from school, I went into my closet and reread one of her books, then I opened one of the journals. It scared me at first when I saw that our handwriting was identical.

What I read scared me more.

’They’re back again, the night demons, I saw their red eyes in the dark last night. At first, I was paralyzed, but then I ran through the darkness to make sure Ryan was safe. I’m not going to let the demons take my baby. Not again.’

Again? Then I remembered. A miscarriage, months before she got pregnant with me. They were going to name her Katarina. An aunt had told me last year.

’Last night a river nymph came to me in her celestial power and blessed me in her native tongue. Her breath was cold like a shiver and her kiss was like morning dew on a rose. I inhaled her essence and this morning I blessed Ryan with the same spell she used on me. He laughed like a siren’s song.’

Maybe she was crazy. I mean, obviously. I got mine from her. But she was beautiful. What she wrote was beautiful.

My teacher didn’t mention that we had to read our papers in front of the class. I listened to over a dozen people drone on and on about their parents’ jobs and whatnot. I almost decided to say I’d left mine at home, but something made me read it.

"My mother saw beauty in everything except the darkness. She was always afraid of the dark, of what might be hiding in it, waiting to hurt her or the people she loved.

"But in the daytime she saw nymphs in trees and poetry in everything. If she wasn’t writing it down, she was telling it to me. She always told me stories, about sprites and goddesses. She told me it gets cold during winter because the tree nymphs are sleeping.

“She made necklaces with symbols she saw in her dreams. She blessed me with spells of protection when I woke up and when I went to bed. Not witchcraft, just what she heard the nymphs say in her dreams. She believed dreams were the only times they could communicate with us.

“When I was eight, she spent all day with me. She made me promise to always remember her stories. Then she went to take a bath and killed herself. She was only twenty-seven.”

I didn’t look up when I was finished and the silence was like a lion’s roar. I could feel all of their eyes on me. After class, a girl chased me down the hallway and kissed me on the cheek. “I think you’re brave.” she whispered before running off.

That day, as I was walking home from the bus stop, I swear, this orange girl-thing blew me a kiss from behind a tree. It felt like morning dew on a rose.

It smelled like my mother.