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dead but had never mentioned them to others and did not choose to now. We’ll find another way, he said, but that river has to lower some before I allow anyone else in there.
    The diver had trouble sleeping afterward. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s wide blue eyes, the flowing golden hair. His wife slept beside him, her body curled into his chest. They had no children and now he was glad for that. He had seen a picture of the parents in the local paper. They had been on the shore, within thirty feet of the undercut that held their daughter, the expressions on their faces beyond grief.
    On the third night, the diver fell into a deeper sleep and the girl came with him. They were in the undercut again but now the river was tepid and he could breathe. As he embraced her, she whispered that this world was better than the one above and she should never have been afraid. He emerged in his wife’s embrace. It’s just a bad dream, she kept saying until he quit gasping. His wife closed her eyes and was quickly asleep, but he could not so went into the kitchen and graded lab tests until dawn.
    The girl remained in the river. Volunteers cast grappling hooks from the banks and worked them like lures through the pool or stood in shallows or on rocks and jabbed with long metal poles. Some of the old-timers suggested dynamite but the girl’s parents would not hear of it. The sheriff said what they needed was a week without rain.
    The diver slept little the next few nights. In class he placed the students in small groups and had them discuss assigned chapters among themselves. He knew they talked about the prom instead of pupae and chrysalides, but he didn’t care. On the third afternoon, he skipped the teacher’s meeting and sat alone in his classroom. The school, emptied of students, was quiet, the only sound the gurgle of the aquarium. He would never speak to anyone, not even his wife, about what happened in the classroom’s stillness, but that evening he told the sheriff he’d dive for the girl again.
    Days passed. Rain came often, long rains that made every fold of ridge land a tributary and merged earth and water into a deep orange-yellow rush. Banks disappeared as the river reached out and dragged them under. But that was only surface. In the undercut all remained quiet and still, the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loosed threads.
    Then the rains stopped and the river ran clear again. Boulders vanished for weeks reappeared. Sandbars and stick jams regathered in new configurations. The water warmed and caddis flies broke through the river’s skin to make their brief flights before falling back into their element.
    The sheriff called the diver and told him the river was low enough to try again. The next day they walked the half mile down the path to the falls. There were five of them this time, the sheriff, his deputy, the two brothers, and the diver. The sheriff insisted on two ropes, making sure they stayed taut. The water was clearer than last time and offered less resistance. The diver entered the abeyance as though parting a curtain, the river suddenly muted.
    She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.
    When he returned to shore, he told them her body was gone, not even a scrap of clothing or bone. He told them the last hard rain must have swept her downstream. The younger brother said the diver should go back and search the left and right sides of the falls. He argued the body could still be there. The deputy suggested they lower an underwater camera into the pool.
    The sheriff shook his head and said to let her be. The men walked up the trail, back toward their vehicles, their lives. The midday sun leaned close and dazzling. Dogwoods bloomed small white stars. The diver