Winter Loon

by Susan Donovan Bernhard

I would spend a good bit of time, years, trying to understand it myself, how I ended up out there, how we got to Bright Lake in the first place, what kind of people I’d sprung from, what kind of person I might be. In the moment, I had no answer.

She lifted my throbbing chin, then turned my face from side to side. She softened, allowed me to see her grief. Tears pooled in her eyes but didn’t fall. Instead they seemed to recede, like the cascade went down her throat and into her belly. The moment was deep and fleeting and gone.

My father had told me that if you put a frog in a pot of water and boil it, the frog won’t jump out. “It’ll sit in that pot and stare at you while you cook it alive,” he’d said. But if you tried to put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’d jump right out to save his own skin. I couldn’t save my mother. Could I save myself?