What the River Showed Him

Senna took him to the river in the afternoon.

The water up close was even more silver than it had looked from the hill, and clearer than any water Milo had ever seen. You could see the bottom perfectly, the smooth stones and the occasional fish moving in long slow sweeps, and the bottom was further down than it looked from the surface, much further, so that you got the feeling the river was deeper than it had any right to be.

People came to the river, Senna explained, when they needed to see things clearly. "Not the future," she said quickly, because she could see what he was thinking. "Not that. Just things that were already true but that you had been looking at from the wrong angle."

She sat on the bank and Milo sat beside her and they both looked into the water. The bank was soft with short pale grass and the sound the river made was not quite like any river sound Milo had heard before. It was quieter and more even, like something breathing very calmly.

At first Milo just saw the stones and the fish. Then the light shifted slightly, the way it does sometimes on an autumn afternoon, and he found himself looking at the water and thinking not about the door or the Inbetween or the magic in the village streets, but about his dad.

He thought about the Saturday mornings they went to the market together, just the two of them, and how his dad always let him choose one thing to cook for dinner and then spent the afternoon teaching him how to make it. He thought about the way his dad fell asleep on the sofa on Sunday evenings with a book on his chest. He thought about how his dad had sat on the edge of his bed two weeks ago and said I know this is hard, and Milo had said it is fine, because it was easier to say it was fine than to say what he actually felt.

He sat there for a long time looking at the clear water. A fish moved below the surface in a long unhurried arc and then was gone. The stones on the bottom were perfectly still.

"He is still going to be your dad," Senna said. She said it quietly and without any fuss, not looking at him, looking at the water.

Milo did not say anything.

"Things change shape," she said. "That is all. They do not go away. They just look different from different angles." She picked up a small flat stone from the bank and turned it over in her fingers. "My mother went away when I was small. Not like your father. She really went. And I thought for a long time that it meant something was broken. But it was not broken. It was just a different shape than I expected."

She put the stone back down carefully where she had found it.

Milo looked at the river. The water moved over the stones, clear and steady and unhurried. Things changed shape, he thought. Not broken. Different.

After a while he said: "I should probably go back."

Senna nodded. She stood up and dusted off her coat and all the things in her many pockets clinked quietly against each other. "Come on then."