What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

what the world will look like when all the water leaves us

Madagascar was not the first expedition on which I had accompanied my mother. We’d started traveling together the year I turned seventeen, after my father called from Alaska to say he wouldn’t be returning from his ice-fishing trip and my mother, a biologist who specialized in rainforest primates, told me it was time I saw the world.

As we landed in Fort Dauphin, south of Madagascar’s capital, the morning sun blazing copper through the small windows, my mother told me to stop calling her Mother and to start calling her June, adjusting her oversized black sunglasses as she explained Mother made her feel old and undesirable. In the year without my father, the same year she turned forty-five, her age had appeared on her face like a terrible secret. The delicate half-moons underneath her eyes hardened and crinkled, lines emerged on her forehead. Her hair grayed, though she’d dyed it blonde to cover the evidence. It was even startling to me, the person who saw her day after day. Sometimes I wondered if she wasn’t in Madagascar to research deforestation and lemur populations for her latest book, but to charge through the vines and bushes in hope of finding some fountain of youth, to splash river water on her face and paste mud against her skin; to look for a cure.

My mother was a leading expert on primate habitats and a tenured professor at Cornell, although she’d been on sabbatical since my father left. Antananarivo University’s biology department, concerned about the drop in lemur populations, was funding her Madagascar expedition. She had a theory that the lemurs, who consumed much of the fruit in the rainforests and buried the seeds after eating, were trying to re-plant their damaged habitats, but since lemur populations were lower in deforested areas, the rainforests would never regenerate without the lemurs there to plant the seeds. This theory, she had told me, would be the centerpiece of her next book.

After landing, we entered a black taxi and my mother directed the driver to Hotel Le Dauphin, where we would be staying for the next twelve weeks, on the island’s eastern tip. D’accord, the driver answered. Nearly everyone in Madagascar spoke French, though my mother had taught me some basic Malagasy on the plane. Outside the airport, the taxi lurched down a pot-holed road, jostling us in the backseat. Such was the nature of travel in these remote corners, but my mother loved it all, the frantic car rides, getting off the plane and going right out onto the tarmac, the sky opening before her, dangerous and romantic.

By the time we embarked on the Madagascar trip, I’d been on sabbatical from high school for nearly a year and had given a lot of thought to what I wanted to do with my life. Somewhere between our first trip together — in the past year, we’d been all over South America and to New Guinea — and arriving in Madagascar, I’d decided to become a long-distance swimmer. I first saw the ocean in my tenth year, when I visited Montauk with my parents, who dressed me in flippers and goggles before sending me into the Atlantic. I remembered turning around, the water closing over my shoulders, and waving to my parents, their distant silhouettes blending together on the shore. It was the only time I recalled them standing so close. After Montauk, I started taking lessons at the YMCA and, in high school, joined the swimming team. By the time I started traveling with my mother, I’d accumulated a bedroom full of trophies.

I didn’t see open water again until I spent a month in Uruguay, near the southern Atlantic. After my father announced his plans to stay in Alaska, my mother collected me from the high school I attended in upstate New York on a December afternoon, my hair still wet from swimming practice, and instructed me to pack a suitcase for Uruguay. Travel light, she’d said, and bring some bug spray. It was the first trip I took alone with my mother, who was there to study marmosets with a South American scientist named Alfonso. We stayed in a village inn outside the port city of Montevideo. I had my own room and only a few nights passed before I heard Alfonso’s voice next door and my mother’s laugh rising and falling like an echo. I spent my days on the village outskirts, staring at the marmosets she and Alfonso trapped in the rainforest for observation, small creatures that thrived on leaves and insects and had plumes of fur for tails. I ate eggs and sweetbreads and let the boy who sold empanadas slip his hands underneath my shirt. Some nights, I sat outside for hours and watched the river rush behind the inn.

During those days, there was so much I didn’t know. I hadn’t yet traveled to Argentina in a small airplane that shuddered as it swept over emerald-colored fields. Or returned to South America after only a few days of being back in upstate New York, of sleeping in my own bed and pocketing eyeliner from the neighborhood drugstore, because my mother’s contact had called to tell her that after a logging company deforested a primate habitat, the marmosets started pushing each other from trees, and she wanted to see it for herself. I didn’t yet know what it felt like to be too jet lagged to sleep or eat, to get bitten by a jumping viper and have a medicine woman suck the poison from my arm, to have boys throw empty beer cans at my bare legs because I was young and foreign and wouldn’t let them lead me into a windowless room with a door that locked. Or to watch my mother disappear into the dark canopy of a rainforest and wonder if she would ever come back. Whenever I had confessed my worries, she told me that if you can keep brushing against death, little by little, fear will become a memory and you’ll be able to face anything.

In the taxi, my mother pointed at a tall, crusty tree. “That’s a triangulated palm. They’re endangered, Celia, like everything else on this island.” Then she described the lemurs I would see in the rainforests outside Fort Dupain: Black-and-Whites, Makis, Sifakas, Indris. “And in a few days, we’ll meet Daud, a zoologist from Antananarivo University,” she continued. “He’s coming all the way from the capital to work with me.”

The space inside the taxi felt too small, the air heavy and sour, so I rolled down the window. I was hanging my head outside, gulping down the breeze, when I heard the most terrible noise, shrill and gloomy, like an off-key trumpet. The sound came again and again, until I finally sank into the car and closed the window.

“That’s the mating call of the Indri lemurs,” my mother said. “Ancient tribes in Madagascar believed that if you listened to the Indris long enough, your body would turn to stone from the inside out.”

I leaned back in my seat, wondering what my father would say if he could see me here. Things between my parents had been tense for years before he decided to stay in Alaska. Even with my door closed, I would hear them arguing about my mother’s incessant traveling, “incessant” being a word my father used to describe many of the things she did.

An hour later, the taxi dropped us at Hotel Le Dauphin, a fancy name for a two-story stucco building the color of putty. Before I could unpack, my mother was at my door, ready to go exploring. We wandered through a market, the drumbeats and hissing fires drowning out the Indris, which had been even more audible from my hotel room. I asked about swimming, how far we were from water, but my mother wasn’t paying attention. She ordered us red rice with grasshoppers from a food stand. No knives or forks were used in Madagascar, only large spoons. I started flicking the grasshoppers onto the ground with the lip of my spoon and my mother said, after all the traveling I’d done in the last year, that I should be more accepting of local customs, though I could tell she was dismayed by the food stand’s use of paper plates. At home, she would, for conservation, wring the water from paper towels and hang them to dry. Once, when I had over friends from school, they made the mistake of commenting on the paper towels. My mother lectured them about the earth’s dwindling reserves and, after dinner, she made us watch a documentary on the gibbons population in the Congo.

I poked the charred grasshoppers until they disappeared into the mound of red rice, then stared at my mother, trying to see her eyes through her sunglasses, a constant shield between herself and the world (she’d started wearing them all the time, even at night and indoors). We were physical opposites: my mother bronzy and tall, all sinew and bone, while I was dark-haired and small. It wasn’t until I began eating that I realized the earth, the dust, was red too — deep and dark like an open wound. It had already stuck to the legs of my mother’s jeans and stained the toes of my sneakers. I told her I couldn’t eat any more rice, soothing her protests by remembering to call her June.

Daud arrived from the Capital on a Sunday. He was in his mid-thirties, handsome and broad-shouldered. When I first saw him, I was coming down the stairs. There was no running water that morning and I was going to see what could be done. Daud stood in the small space between the stairs and the hotel entrance. Many of the ceilings in Madagascar had square holes that were only covered when it rained, and the sun beating through the skylight gave his skin a deep sheen. His nose was slightly crooked, as though it might have been broken once, and there was an unexpected delicacy to his ears. Their shape reminded me of seashells. A large patch from Antananarivo University was stitched onto his backpack. I stopped moving down the stairs. He turned towards me, his eyes narrowed in the light. I could hear the Indris; the heat was pressing against me. I had already gotten terrible sunburns, my shoulders flushed and peeling. My mother had joked that it looked like I was molting.

Before I could say anything, I saw my mother in the hotel entrance. If she noticed me standing at the top of the staircase, she didn’t let me know it. She swept into the room, dressed in khaki pants and a loose white blouse and her sunglasses.

“I just watched two Sifaka lemurs nearly kill each other over a mate,” she told Daud. “Don’t they have an amazing way of fighting, the way they spin across the dirt like dancers?”

“Their kind of love makes ours look easy,” he said.

“Did you know I was one of the first to photograph Golden-Crowned Sifakas?” my mother asked. “They were so rare, it took us weeks of trekking in the rainforest to find them. You’ve probably seen some of my footage.” I watched her take Daud’s arm and lead him outside, struck by how the light that made his skin glow only turned hers dull and gray. I knew she’d been rising before dawn to observe the lemurs — I’d often wake as she was bathing and dressing in the other room, as though our bodies were synchronized — and the malaria medicine had probably been giving her bad dreams. Her hair had looked brittle in that hotel lobby, her cheeks shadowed and sunken, although she’d also somehow never looked so beautiful, wearing her exhaustion with a regalness that seemed new to me. If I’d passed her quickly or been watching from another angle, if she’d turned her head towards the light a little more, I might have mistaken her for a stranger.

At the end of his days in the field, Daud returned to the hotel with red dirt streaked across his white T-shirt, usually humming a familiar-sounding song, which I eventually recognized as The Impossible Dream. He spoke English fluently, and I loved the way he could make my own language sound alluring. He told me about life in Antananarivo, teal and red motorbikes weaving around pedestrians, street vendors selling batik tunics and Zebu meat. About tribes in Madagascar that believed spirits dwelled in trees and planted one at each village entrance to keep away evil, about how the spirits abandoned the trees at nightfall and no one left their house after dark.

Daud spent his days with my mother, observing lemurs in the rainforest and trapping and tagging specimens, so they could analyze how deforestation had changed their patterns of eating and mating and nesting. Afterwards, we would have dinner together on the concrete terrace that extended out the back of the hotel. At these dinners, I became a kind of pet for my mother and Daud. During the day, they had lemurs in common and at night, they had me.

“Celia has the most astonishing memory,” my mother said one evening, after we’d finished our bowls of lichee and mango. She asked me to recite one of the lists she’d taught me since my father left, like European cities with the highest crime rates or the most polluted places on earth.

“Come on,” my mother urged. “Don’t be modest. How about pollution this time?”

I would have preferred to list the names of everyone who’d swum the English Channel, like Lynne Cox, who’d done it when she was only fifteen, or talk about Lewis Gordon Pugh, who broke the record for the coldest long-distance swim in Antarctica.

“Ranipe, India,” I began. “Then La Oroya, Peru, and Linfen, China.” From there, I moved to Dzerzhinsk in Russia and Haina in the Dominican Republic and Kabwe in Zambia.

“And of course,” I finished. “There’s Chernobyl.” My mother had always been fascinated by the ruined landscape of Chernobyl. Anyone who keeps a nuclear power plant in business, she liked to say, should have to eat their own plutonium.

“Peru?” Daud said in response to my list. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“It’s because of the metal processing plant in La Oroya,” I replied. “And the toxic emissions of lead.”

“What else have you got?” he asked, ladling lichee juice into his spoon.

“A list of all the famous scientists who’ve committed suicide,” I said. “And how they did it.”

“I didn’t know that many had,” he replied, then sat back in his chair and waved his hand, as if to say but prove me wrong.

I cited Adolphe d’Archiac, who threw himself into the Seine River, and Percy Williams Bridgman, who shot himself, and James Leonard Brierley Smith, who took cyanide, and Viktor Meyer, who also took cyanide. When my mother taught me this list, she said I needed to understand the toll answering important scientific questions could take on a person. After Viktor Meyer, I noticed Daud was staring at me, holding his spoon in midair, and I grew shy from his attention.

“Seems cyanide was the way to go,” he said after I’d stopped talking.

“It does kill you pretty quickly,” I said.

“June.” He turned to my mother. “You certainly have given your daughter quite the education.”

“Most parents shield their children from reality,” she said. “But I wanted Celia to learn about hardship early on.”

My mother started going on about pain being the root of knowledge, a Simone Weil quote she never attributed, but I had stopped listening. Instead, I looked at Daud, who was gazing at my mother, entranced, no doubt, by the way she spoke. The lilt in her voice still got my attention, even though I’d been hearing it all my life.

I kept in touch with my father after he settled in Alaska. He wrote me long letters about the endless dark of winter and the way the ice glowed silver during twilight and Lana, the woman who had been his ice-fishing guide. He was living in her cabin outside Fairbanks. I never told my mother how much I looked forward to his letters. Sometimes, if we’d been traveling for a few months, I’d find two or three waiting for me in New York. I was careful to not let her know when I started writing back.

My father was concerned that I wasn’t going to school. I assured him that while I wasn’t in the classroom, I was still getting an education of sorts. I had, for example, become fluent in Spanish and French and, in a letter sent from Hotel Le Dauphin, I wrote him some words in Malagasy—Tsy azoko for I don’t understand, veloma for goodbye. I knew rainforests once covered fourteen percent of the earth, but now it was down to six. I could identify the medicinal sedges used to treat dysentery and fevers, explain how carnivorous plants digested insects. As soon as she finishes her lemur research, I’ ll be studying right angles and Beowulf in New York again, I kept promising my father in my letters, adding on more than one occasion that my mother had worked something out with my head master, which was a lie. I didn’t know where my mother and I were headed after Madagascar, although I had a feeling it wasn’t upstate New York. She’d always been a light traveler, but when she finished packing for this trip, her closet was nearly empty. Something had changed. I just didn’t know what.

There were several times when I considered asking my father if I could live with him, but I never did — somehow sensing, without him ever saying as much, that Alaska wasn’t an option for me. I did visit him once at Lana’s cabin, three months before my mother and I left for Madagascar. Lana turned out to be a lanky, dark-haired woman, elegant in a quiet, vaguely sad sort of way. She had lived in Alaska all her life and had no desire to travel elsewhere. My father and I never talked about his leaving: we seemed to have a mutual understanding that what was in the past should stay there. He took me bird-watching every morning, and we observed great gray owls and American dippers through binoculars. In the afternoons, we went to a lake near Lana’s cabin — a pond really, small and sunken and rimmed with brown grass — and listened to the arctic loons howl in the distance.

At night, Lana would fry fish and after dinner, we sat on the porch and drank beer until the stars pulsed. Our time together was pleasant, but cautious, like a trio of acquaintances leery of attempting more than small talk. One night, Lana told us the Inuits believed death dwelled in the sky and pointed out the aurora borealis, where you were supposed to see images of loved ones dancing in the next life. I searched for my mother, but didn’t see anything that reminded me of her and was relieved. At the time, she was finishing a river expedition in the Amazon and if something had happened, I probably wouldn’t have known about it yet. I stayed in Alaska for eight nights and during every one, I dreamt of Amazonian snakes: silvery blindsnakes and banded pipesakes, giant vipers and anacondas. I would wake in the early morning, kicking away the sheets in a panic, to make sure nothing was coiled at the bottom of the bed.

One evening, while my father and Lana were out on a walk, I searched a chest drawer for matches to light the kindling I’d arranged in the fireplace and found a bundle of letters. They were the letters I’d sent my father during my travels. As I unfolded them one by one, I was struck, despite less than a year having passed, by how young the handwriting looked: loopy letters that couldn’t hold a straight line on the page. A child’s handwriting, I’d thought when I finished reading them, the house dark and the fireplace still cold. A child’s promises.

Every morning, my mother and Daud went into the field and didn’t return until dusk. Once my mother, wanting me to do some exploring of my own, arranged for a villager to take me down the river in a pirogue, a canoe made from a hollowed log. At first, I thought the stretch of water that divided the rainforest might be a good place for practicing my butterfly, but every time I saw a crocodile basking on the banks, something in my chest clutched.

I tried passing the time by reading. It was cooler in my hotel room and I’d snuck some fashion magazines into my suitcase (my mother disapproved of magazines unless they had to do with science). After reading each one twice, I grew bored and moved onto the books my mother had packed for me, books about women having adventures: Out of Africa, Jane Eyre, Delta of Venus. But I couldn’t concentrate with the Indris and the stories didn’t really appeal to me, the mess of love and longing, women adrift. I would have preferred to read about swimming techniques, breathing control and resistance training. Some afternoons, I spent the whole day counting and re-counting the money I’d been hoarding since I began traveling with my mother: the pesos leftover from what she’d handed me to buy chajá cakes for her and Alfonso in Uruguay, the fifty-peso note she’d given me for a camera in Argentina, the stack of ariarys she’d allotted me when we arrived in Madagascar. Eventually I began leaving the hotel, but without the excitement I had earlier in the year, when life with my mother was still enticing. Instead there was a heaviness, a feeling of premature exhaustion and age.

I started taking long walks, stopping to examine pitcher plants and scorpions and huge Malagasy tombs — stone compounds decorated with bright geometric paintings and animal skulls. I said prayers outside the tombs, my folded hands smudged with red, and asked whoever was supposed to be listening to not let my organs morph into stone, for I kept dreaming everything inside me was oblong and gray. I took pictures until my film ran out. The last photo was of a passing bus. The hubcaps were dented and rusted, the windows rolled down. Everyone on the bus was singing. Sometimes, for no reason at all, I broke out running and kept going until my knees gave and I was gasping for air.

I found a little bar on the village outskirts, a dusty tin-roofed shack with wobbly chairs and an old radio that played dance music. On my first visit, the bartender filled my glass with a clear liquor that burned my throat. I returned every day for two weeks. I never saw another customer, but I didn’t mind. I thought the solitude, the time away from the hotel, would help me sort out my life. I liked to think about what I would do once I returned to New York. Re-enroll in high school, get back on the swim team, practice with more dedication than anyone else. Sometimes I wondered what Daud would think if he saw me sitting in the bar, my sweat-soaked tank top clinging to my skin; I had seen the way my mother touched his forearm when she laughed, detected the smoothness in his voice when he called her June. One afternoon, after leaving the bar, I got dizzy and vomited on a plant with pointed leaves. I didn’t go back again. During my time there, the only words the bartender and I ever exchanged were when I thanked him—misaotra—for the drinks.

It wasn’t much longer before I heard Daud’s voice in my mother’s room for the first time. I listened carefully, but the sound of the Indris increased at night, and I just caught whispers and laughter and then Daud’s humming. At dinner the next evening, my mother kept throwing significant glances in his direction, and he reached across the table to brush strands of hair from her face. It soon became their habit to only discuss fieldwork, rarely speaking to me directly. I sometimes caught my mother looking at Daud with a kind of possessiveness as she closed me out of conversations by talking science. I was left to drift in my imagination, to picture what my life would look like if I was away from here.

“Did you hear about the spider monkeys that attacked a tourist in Manja?” I asked them one night, just to see if I could get their attention. They had been talking about the nesting patterns of Pygmy Mouse lemurs for an hour. “I heard they scratched out an Italian woman’s eye.”

“Spider monkeys aren’t naturally aggressive,” Daud said. “They must have been provoked.”

“And there aren’t spider monkeys in Manja.” For the first time that evening, my mother turned to me. “It seems your source was wrong, Celia.”

She and Daud resumed their conversation about Pygmy Mouse lemurs. I went upstairs and took out the shoebox that held my money. I fanned the foreign bills across the floor and made uneven stacks with the coins. I spent the rest of the evening using my stash to create little towers and bridges and moats, a city of paper and metal, an escape.

My walks started getting longer, bringing me all the way to the coast. It took over an hour, but being near the water made me feel less restless. By the shoreline, the foliage was paler and drier, the hills lower, and then the landscape broadened into a wide curve of sand, speckled with gray rock and sea foam. I would wade up to my knees, nervous of going too far, of riptides and sharks. Each time, I promised myself I’d go far enough to feel the sandy floor disappear beneath me, the chill of deeper waters, but I never did. I was always looking for a point I could swim towards — a little clump of land or a large rock — but there was nothing: no land, just the sea, beaming like the sun had cracked open and seeped into the waves.

One afternoon, as I walked down the path that led to the sea, I heard a rumbling noise and turned to see a Jeep slowing beside me, Daud in the driver’s seat, alone and waving. He offered me a ride. When I got in, I asked why he wasn’t in the field with my mother, and he said they’d been working nonstop for weeks and he was taking a break.

“Thought I’d go for a drive,” he said. “Maybe see the ocean.”

“I go there all the time.” I took my hair, stiff from sun and seawater, down and shook my head.

“Long walk,” he said.

“It’s worth it.”

When we arrived, he parked on the edge of the beach. The ocean was blue and quiet. Daud removed his hiking boots, then peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it onto the hood of the jeep. I touched the point of his shoulder and, trying to channel the confidence of my mother’s voice, asked if he wanted to swim with me.

“You should be careful,” he said. “There are strong currents if you go out too far.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said.

“Then you lead the way.”

I jogged across the hot sand and into the ocean, hesitating when the water crossed my knees, but I heard Daud’s footsteps behind me and kept going. After the water covered my shoulders, I swung my arms and kicked my legs, trying to look practiced and at ease. When I finally stilled, the muscles in my thighs quivering, I turned in the water. The coast was about half a mile away, shimmering like cut glass. Daud moved towards me in a leisurely freestyle.

“You’ve got good speed,” Daud said when he reached me, his face wet and gleaming.

“I won three division swimming championships in high school.” I thought of the trophies in my bedroom, the marble columns with little plastic swimmers affixed to the top. “I was runner-up in a state championship too. I would have gone to regionals if I hadn’t left school to travel.”

“Your mother must be proud,” he said.

I looked across the water, not telling him my father was the only one who ever attended my meets or photographed me holding my trophies. I asked Daud about what surrounded Madagascar; he said the Mozambique Channel was six hundred miles to the west, the Mascarene Islands five hundred miles to the east.

“The record for long-distance swimming is just over two thousand miles, set by Martin Strel when he swam the

Mississippi,” I said. “So it would be possible to swim the Mozambique Channel or reach the Mascarene Islands.”

“Open water swimming is different,” Daud said. “They’re no lanes, no one to blow the whistle.”

“I know.” I pictured us going even farther, the low roar of the ocean filling my ears. “That’s why I want it.”

We didn’t say anything more for a while. We bobbed in the water, the sun bright against our faces. The longer we stayed, the more distant the shore seemed. I found the openness both terrifying and intoxicating — a part of myself fighting the impulse to swim back to solid land, another part wanting to plunge myself into this kind of vastness again and again. I was afraid of so many things, I had come to realize during my traveling year. My mother seemed to have an immunity to fear, the way she hurled herself into foreign lands and the arms of men, while I was always entangled in ideas about penalties and peril.

I was about to ask Daud if we could swim farther when he disappeared, leaving only a blanket of ripples where his head had once been. I spun around, looking for him, waiting to feel his hands graze my knees. I stared across the water, one hand cupped over my eyes, and shouted his name. When he didn’t surface, my body grew heavy with dread, with thoughts of sea creatures and underwater black holes. Then, without warning, he appeared in the distance, grinning and flapping his arms. Before I could call to him, he vanished again, this time staying under even longer, until I felt vibrations around my legs and he reappeared right in front of me, bursting through the water with the force of a sea god.

“How did you learn to do that?” I asked. “To hold your breath for so long?”

He told me that when he was young, he’d go swimming in the ocean with his brothers after school. “Some afternoons we’d race,” he said. “You need to be strong. And to be able to hold your breath for a long time. We’d take turns pushing each other underwater.”

“Can you show me?” I drifted closer to Daud, wondering if it was possible to cure someone of fear. “Teach me the way you learned?”

He rested his hands on my shoulders, our noses nearly touching. Water had beaded in his eyelashes, making them darker and longer. He stared at me for a long time. Then he thrust me underwater and held me there until I felt like my heart was going to explode. He released long enough for me to take a single breath, then pushed me down again. I opened my eyes the second time, saw dense shadows in the water and Daud’s legs, and by the time he pulled me up, my lungs were aching. His hands slipped down my chest, his fingers momentarily clinging to my breasts, before he took me underwater again. Each time, he kept me there longer, his palms like stones against my shoulders. I twisted and squirmed, getting wild with panic, my fists thumping his chest and stomach. The last time he took me under, the back of my brain went fuzzy and I imagined death swooping down from the sky like a great black bird and just as a weightlessness started to wash over me, he let me rise for air.

“It’s good for you to struggle against the water,” he said when it was all over. We swam back to shore slowly, Daud’s hand on the center of my back. “In case you ever get sucked down by a strong tide. You have to know how to fight.”

When we reached land, I lay in the sand, exhausted. It was late in the afternoon. The sky was darkening. Daud sat next to me, asked if I was okay, and I nodded. My shorts and tank top were soaked, my white bra straps exposed. I looked down and saw the small ridges of my nipples. I didn’t try to cover myself, feeling too tired and too brave. Daud’s body was lean, his forearms and calves roped with muscle. He had a pale scar in the shape of a horseshoe on his chest. I wanted to press my hand over it, but sensed I should not. I told him about the lists I’d started keeping on my own, different from the ones my mother encouraged me to memorize. The one I thought about the most was famous disappearances: Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce. I wondered if the mysteries of their lives would ever be solved, how long someone would look for me before my name was added to such a list. He didn’t ask me questions, just let me talk. We stayed there — close but never touching — until it was nearly dark.

We returned to the hotel an hour late for dinner. My mother was waiting for us on the terrace, her plate empty. As Daud and I took our seats, I noticed our plates were heaped with food. My hair, still wet, stuck to the back of my neck; my clothes were dusted in sand. Before I started eating, I tucked my bra straps back underneath my tank top. I was relieved Daud had put his shirt on before we arrived at the hotel.

“Turnips with garlic and ginger tonight,” my mother said. “I’m sure it tasted better when it was hot.”

“How did it go this afternoon?” Daud asked.

“I got amazing footage of the Red-Ruffed lemurs,” my mother said. “When you see the clips, you’ll wish you’d been there.”

“It sounds like you managed well enough without me,” he said.

“I always manage well on my own.” My mother sat a little straighter in her chair before telling us meaningful scientific research was best done in solitude, that collective thought only diluted the strongest ideas. “Did Walter Buller have research teams?” she asked us. “Did William Swainson?

“June,”Daud said. “They were working at the turn of the century.”

“That’s not the point,” she said.

In the dusk, I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes through her sunglasses, though I suspected she was looking at me. I focused on scooping turnips with my spoon.

“Celia took me swimming today,” Daud said. “I didn’t realize she had such talent.”

“You do have a few trophies at home, don’t you?” My mother tapped her upper lip with her index finger for a moment, pretending to not remember.

She stood and dropped her napkin. “I already checked with the cook, and there’s no dessert tonight.” The sky was dark, the terrace lit only by the dim glow of lightbulbs hanging from a wire. She walked away from the hotel, towards the tall grass and trees. Daud looked at me, started to say something, then followed her.

I called my father once from Madagascar, a month into our stay. The hotel owner let me use the phone in his office. Lana answered and passed the phone to my father without saying anything. He asked after my mother and I told him that I didn’t think she’d be returning to New York after all. I had been longing to tell someone about the way she was changing, how much she seemed to have aged in the last year and how hard she was pushing against it.

“She’s not changing,” my father said. “She’s just laying her cards on the table.”

“But why now?”

“Because she doesn’t have to pretend she wants to live the same life that I do anymore.”

“She’s making me call her by her first name.”

“When your mother turned thirty, she took off to Mexico for two weeks. She’s never taken aging well,” he said. “And I never understood why she was so interested in those lemurs. I always thought they looked like deformed cats.”

“It’s because they’re starting to die. Too many trees are being cut down.”

“It’s just like your mother to pick something like that,” he said. “It’s not the lemurs she really cares about. It’s being able to alter something bigger than she is.”

“But couldn’t she find another purpose? Something closer to home?”

“That’s the problem,” my father said. “She only has one. And it’s not you or me, either.”

I pressed the receiver against my forehead. Even in the hotel owner’s office, the windows and door closed, I could still hear the Indris faintly. “I’ve decided to become a professional swimmer,” I told my father.

“You mean like the competitions you did in high school?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean long-distance, open water.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“To go as far as I can.”

“Celia,” my father said. “Couldn’t you pick something a little less dangerous?”

I wondered if he thought distance swimming was the kind of thing my mother would do, grueling and lawless. I told my father I had been swimming every day and was learning to not be afraid. I told him that I always imagined some world famous coach trailing me in a motorboat and shouting commands through a megaphone: straighten your legs, keep breathing, reach like you’re grabbing onto the person you love most. I didn’t tell him that when I was frightened by powerful tides or strange shadows, I thought of Daud holding me under, of the way he made me struggle, and kept swimming. Or that when I paused to catch my breath, I sometimes turned in the water and saw my parents on the shoreline, as I had as a child, two ghosts in my memory.

Not long after my swim with Daud, I heard shouting in my mother’s room. It was late in the night. I had wrapped myself in a white sheet and was trying to read enough Delta of Venus to fall asleep. I pressed my ear against the wall, but I only caught foot-stomping and door-slamming, which made my room shudder.

It occurred to me then that I should go to my mother. When I opened the door, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away, head in her hands. She was naked, her clothes heaped in the corner. Her sunglasses and the postcards she usually traveled with — pictures of the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River and the desert where the Aral Sea had once been — were scattered across the floor. Some of the cards had unfinished messages on the back, notes to friends and colleagues that were never sent. Her hair sat stiffly on her shoulders; her back was dotted with freckles. She’d lost weight since coming to Madagascar, and I could see her spine, curved and stretching her pale skin into translucence. She looked small and frightened, a huddled child. The sheets were tangled; the unshaded lightbulb hung from the ceiling at an odd angle. She was not crying, just sitting there, unmoving, and I did not know what to say. I closed the door, gently as possible, and went back to my room.

The next morning, my mother woke me early and said she was taking me to the rainforest. When I asked about Daud, she told me the lens on their spotting scope had cracked and he’d gone to a nearby village to have it repaired. We drove down a grooved dirt road for about a mile and parked in front of the rainforest’s dense treeline, fat with spade-shaped leaves and vines. She sat in the driver’s seat, pale and sweating, and I thought of the way her naked back had looked like it could have belonged to some primitive animal.

“Celia,” she said. “Why have you been avoiding the forest?”

“I didn’t know I had been.”

“You’re always thinking about water,” she said. “We’ve been here for six weeks and you’ve never once asked to come into the field with me. Don’t you care about what’s happening to the lemurs? Don’t you want to see them?”

“I hear enough of them.” Closer to the rainforest, the Indris were louder than ever, cawing in a way that made me want to scratch my ears. “I really don’t think I’d mind if they went extinct.”

“Which would leave me with nothing,” my mother said, getting out of the car. I sat in the passenger seat for a moment longer, waiting for the ache to fade, before joining her.

We carried backpacks; binoculars hung from my mother’s neck. As we moved deeper into the forest, the light darkened. She was already a few feet ahead and I had to hurry to catch up. We walked an overgrown path, thick with tree roots, and while the Indris must have been unbearably loud by then, the noise was not what I remembered. I remembered walking behind my mother, the sweat seeping through the back of her T-shirt, the sway of her blonde ponytail. Her telling me about lemurs having symbiotic relationships with tiny birds and the five layers of the rainforest: the overstory, the canopy, the understory, the shrub layer, and the forest floor. She said each part had its own little ecosystem, its own little universe. And weren’t people like that too, she continued, worlds unto their own. I began to wonder if I had been avoiding the rainforest after all, wanting so badly to carve out a purpose that I’d had to find my own landscape. Or maybe I had been frightened of what existed here, scared that whatever had intoxicated my mother would reach me too, that my own desires would disappear into the mist and heat and ceiling of green.

My mother stopped to peer at two ringtails through her binoculars. She told me it was unusual to see a pair, since they typically traveled in groups. I was glad we didn’t spot any of the lemurs she and Daud had trapped and tagged. It pained me to imagine these ringtails being captured and sedated, my mother clipping little plastic bracelets around their spindly ankles and staring at them through the bars of a cage.

When my mother’s right leg began cramping, we rested underneath a tree. I asked if she’d gotten leg cramps before and she nodded, adding that Daud got annoyed if she slowed them down. “Which is why you can’t slow down,” she said. “If you do, no one will wait for you.”

“You’ve been working in jungles too long,” I said. “People don’t think like that everywhere.”

“That’s what you say now.”

“Maybe we should go back to New York for a few months,” I said. “I’d like to give school another try.”

“You don’t need high school,” my mother said. “Algebra, sentence diagramming, spelling quizzes. None of that matters.”

“You have a doctorate,” I said. “You couldn’t be here if it weren’t for your education.”

“Nothing I learned in the classroom is helping me.”

“I miss our house.” I picked up a handful of dirt, then let the black earth fall through my fingers.

“There’s nothing for us in New York,” my mother said.

“But what will you do?” I looked away when I realized I’d said you and not we.

“We should head back to South America,” she said. Her sunglasses were crooked on her face. “More primate habitats are going to be deforested. A group of scientists are planning to protest outside logging companies, to stand in front of machines. We could be part of a resistance.”

But what was there for me in South America? I wanted to ask. My mother must have seen something in my expression because she pointed out a Crested Ibis swooping between the trees. She always drew my attention to birds when she wanted to change the subject.

In thirty minutes, she was paler and sweatier and the cramp in her leg still hadn’t passed.

“I think we should go back,” I told her.

“I promised to get images of the Black-and-White lemurs today,” she said. “They’re at least a mile deeper into the forest.”

So we got up and we walked. My mother didn’t tell me the names of plants or tree frogs or anything else we passed. I knew she was unwell. She photographed the Black-and-Whites, who had a peculiar way of balancing atop bushes, and then we returned to the Jeep and drove to the hotel. Daud was still not back. In her room, she lay down on the bed without undressing. I took off my shoes and lay next to her. Open water swimming had changed my body; the muscles in my legs were harder, the skin on my stomach darker and tighter. I looked at my mother’s arms. Her wrists seemed fragile, the points of her elbows too angular.

“Maybe I should call the hotel owner,” I said, my voice nearly a whisper. “If you’re not feeling well.”

She shook her head, her sunglasses slipping down a little. “So you really want to be a swimmer?”

“I think so.”

“When did this start?”

“While we’ve been traveling,” I said, though I knew it had really begun long before.

“You have too much fear right now,” she told me. “The man who took you canoeing said you wanted to turn back after passing the first crocodile.” She rested her hands on her stomach. “When you commit yourself to swimming across a river or an ocean channel, you’re committing yourself to the possibility of death. Your team, the people you train with, won’t care if you drown or die of exhaustion. They’ll only care if you break the record. And so that’s all you can care about too.”

“I’ve been practicing,” I said.

“Do you swim until your legs are so tired that you can’t kick anymore? Until you begin to sink?”

“No.”

“See?” she said. “Still too much fear.”

“That doesn’t sound reasonable.”

“Reason is overrated,” she said. “Caution and beauty too.”

We were quiet for a while, lying close enough for me to feel the heat of her skin, to smell the dirt and sweat. For a brief time, it was as calm as floating in a waveless body of water, someplace still and boundless.

“Celia,” she finally said, her voice low and hoarse. “Do you think of me as June?”

“I’ve been calling you that, haven’t I?”

“But in your mind. Am I June to you there?”

“Thinking of you as my mother is a pretty hard habit to break.”

She sighed. And then she fell asleep. I stayed with her a little longer, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, spidery lines that reminded me of split earth. The room was hot. I was hearing the lemurs again, a blanket of noise like falling rain.

Daud returned late in the night and by the time I heard him climbing the stairs, my mother had been vomiting for hours. It had started soon after I returned to my room, when I heard retching through the walls and found her hunched over her small, rusted bathroom sink. Her sunglasses had fallen off and when she looked at me, I saw dark pockets underneath her eyes.

“Cholera,” Daud said from the doorway. “She’s been showing signs for a few days. Leg cramping, drowsiness. She’s been filling her canteen with river water. I told her that wasn’t a good idea, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“Why would you do that?” I shouted into the bathroom.

“I’ve been traveling for years and I’ve never been sick once.” My mother was still leaning over the sink. “I’m supposed to be immune.”

Daud said he needed to get an ORS packet, an electrolyte powder that would be mixed with boiling water. The cholera would pass in a few days, but in the meantime, dehydration was a danger.

“I have some packets in my room,” Daud said. I noticed he was still standing in the doorway, that he hadn’t gone to my mother.

While he was away, my mother became delirious. She said the lemurs were dead and the forests were burning, that a flood was going to sweep away the hotel and crocodiles would rule the island. The tops of her hands were beaded with sweat and I was almost afraid to touch her. I was relieved when Daud returned, carrying a canteen filled with a mixture of hot water and the ORS powder. He handed me the canteen and I kneeled on the bathroom floor and cupped the back of my mother’s head in my hand. She drank without protest.

We moved her to the bed and I took off her shoes. I was surprised by the narrowness of her feet, the little clusters of blue and purple veins bunched on her skin like constellations. I smoothed her hair and noticed gray roots coming in, as though someone had painted the peak of her head with ash.

Just as I was drawing my hand away, my mother wrapped her long fingers around my wrist. “This is why I need you here,” she said before turning from me and drifting off.

Daud and I went into the hallway and sat on the floor, next to each other, our backs against the wall. He gave me another ORS packet for the morning.

“I’m going back to Antananarivo,” he said.

I asked Daud what my mother had done. Things hadn’t ended well in South America when Alfonso saw her passport and discovered she’d shaved a decade off her age.

“Her theory is wrong,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been fighting about. Or that’s part of it, anyway. Lemurs don’t impact rainforest re-growth the way she thought. The deforested areas don’t do better or worse without the lemurs and their seed-burying. The trees still start regenerating.”

“Does she know she’s wrong?”

“Knowing and believing are two different things.”

“Maybe when she gets better, she’ll come around.”

“We both know that’s not going to happen.” Daud drummed his fingers against the scuffed floorboards. “Have you given any thought to getting out of here?”

“A little.” I knew those moments of closeness, when we talked in the rainforest and in her room, when I poured the hydration mix into her sick body, would be forgotten once she’d recovered and was back to acting like all those human concerns, even love, didn’t touch her.

“You could come back to Antananarivo with me. Stay in the city for a while, see if we can’t find you someone to train with.” Daud touched my elbow. His fingertips felt warm and smooth.

“I can’t leave my mother like this,” I told him.

Daud shrugged. “Would she stay for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m not her.”

He rested his head against the wall, his throat curved and muscular, and started humming. I wondered what it would feel like to be in the company of a man who didn’t know my mother, who saw me without the shadow of my origins. I would be free to offer a self I had selected and shaped, to pretend I knew nothing of science, that I’d never traveled beyond the New York state lines, that I only understood water and openness and quiet.

“You can’t hear the Indris as much from here,” I said. “If only I’d known that sooner. I might have slept in the hallway.”

“The lemurs have gotten used to people over the years, gotten lazy,” he said. “But some think they drove the first British colonists who attempted to settle the island mad.” He told me the Latin root of lemur meant ghost because of the way they blended noiselessly into the rainforest and darted from tree to tree so swiftly, they were nearly invisible. He’d read travel journals from British sailors that described being awakened at night by screams, but never finding the culprits, and entering forests with the sensation of being followed, but never knowing what was tracking them, if something was there at all.

“Hard to believe they were actually feared,” I said. “They just look like sad little monkeys now.” I recalled the way some of them clung to the trunks and branches, as though their homes might topple at any moment.

“I wanted to give you these before I left.” Daud took an envelope from his back pocket and handed it to me. “I shot them a few weeks ago.”

I opened the envelope and found two pictures inside: one of an Indri, the creature that had been tormenting me so, crouched in the crook of a tree, timid and pitiful under the glare of Daud’s camera. The other was of my mother kneeling on the rainforest floor, elbow-deep in black mud, as though she had hooked her fingers around a treasure and was dragging it to the surface.

Once my mother had fully recovered and Daud had been gone for a few days, I announced my plans to leave. I told her in the evening, while we had dinner on the patio. I had been swimming that afternoon — for the last time in those waters — and let myself bob in the sea like a buoy. My hair was still damp and smelled of brine.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I need to go someplace familiar.”

“You mean New York.”

“I mean home.”

“What will you do there?”

“Daud said your theory about the lemurs is wrong.” We’d had a special dinner of curried fish, and I stared at the fine white bones on my plate. “What if he’s right? Do you have other theories you could write about?”

“Important ideas are often discouraged by lesser people.” She picked at her fingernails, which were rimmed with red dirt. She had started going back into the field, but still looked pale and tired. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m going to swim,” I said. “I’m going to find a trainer and practice and become great.”

“You won’t make it far, Celia.” My mother straightened her sunglasses. “You don’t have it in you.”

“You have no idea what I have.”

“Strangeness is everywhere and everything makes you tired in the end,” she said. “When you figure this out, you’ll be back.”

I asked the hotel owner to arrange a taxi for the morning and then packed my bags. In my room, I counted my money, making sure I had enough for a car and a plane ticket. I planned to show up and wait until I could get a flight to the States, eventually ending up back in New York, where I would look for a job and an apartment near the Atlantic. I couldn’t imagine ever making my way through the lanes of a swimming pool again; I had grown used to the expanse of the ocean, the sensation that I could, at any moment, vanish within it.

When I came out of my room the next day, I found one of my mother’s postcards by the door. A desert was on the front and on the back she had written: what the world will look like when all the water leaves us, along with some statistics on the evaporation of the Aral Sea, formerly the world’s fourth largest lake and once a popular training ground for distance swimmers. I tucked the card into the side pocket of my backpack, next to Daud’s pictures. I did not know what my mother would do after Madagascar — travel to another foreign place and join a different research team or extend her stay in Fort Dauphin, though I was sure she wouldn’t return to New York. She reminded me of a skydiver who’d cut the strings of her own parachute, volatile and doomed.

The taxi was waiting for me outside. The driver was a small man with a white beard. The top of his head barely reached the headrest. I was climbing into the backseat when I saw, in the far distance, a figure moving towards the rainforest. I asked the driver to wait and followed my mother down the road. I wanted a chance to say goodbye, to say the things we might not ever be able to say again. I stayed just close enough to keep her in sight. The sprawl of trees ahead looked bright and endless, an ocean of green. She had to know I was there, had to hear my feet tapping the red dirt, but she never turned around, never spoke a word.

When the driver honked, I stopped walking, as though I had been yanked by an invisible string. I watched until she became dark and slanted, imagining the cries of the Indris swelling, the vines bending underneath her boots; a moment that, over time, became like a scar on my brain — my mother moving down that crimson path, the ancient, knotted trees parting for her like a secret, the tall grass bowing like waves breaking on a beach, before her shadow disappeared into the sea.