Constant Vigilance

By Tony Simmons

Constance sat at her window throughout that rainy winter, through gray days and starless nights, and watched the changing face of the lake.

On days when the sun was strong enough, almost, to penetrate the concrete slab of the sky, she considered the dim, angular shapes of leafless trees reflecting and rippling on the surface like skeletons trapped in the plane where water and air pressed flat upon one another. On days when the sky turned darker and rains fell, as they did most of that interminable wintertime — a staccato of droplets raising spikes of water and expanding rings, a line of muted wash spreading the surface wrinkles this way or that — the lake became a stippled glass without reflection or depth.

Constance sat at her window while the wintry cold crept into her bones, and the water rippled her skin like the lake, leaving her dark. She maintained her vigil, though, and clutched tightly the lock of hair that had belonged to a man — a boy? — her boyfriend, Danny, in summer days of warmth and sunshine, when her skin was not so pale and tight across her bones, bones that did not ache with cold, cold that could not withstand the hot beating of a heart regulated to youthful rhythms.

Constance pinched the golden hair between her bony left thumb and forefinger, and she pressed her other hand against the sunken grave of her womb, and she watched the lake and thought about time and dreams and life.

How long had it been since the lake had taken the car and she had last seen her lover’s face? How long since they had made the memories of heat and passion and fear, vivid still, of raking her nails along his skin? How long ago had her baby gone to another life, unwilling to wait with her here, by the window, a silent and long-suffering sentinel?

How long? How long since she had found herself thus reduced, relegated to this ghostly existence of waiting, of watching — this vigil unceasing?

As Constance watched, that winter, the surface of the lake rose under the spectral trees, touched their roots, enveloped their trunks. The bottom churned. The surface became muddy from runoff.

Fishermen came on days that the rain subsided for even a minute, and dropped their baits and lines into the murky water. Their luck was so bad that Constance wondered if the fish had drowned, or if she had fed them too well in the autumn, or if they were too shy to bite the fishermen’s bait while under her faithful gaze.

And when the rains of winter drizzled at last into spring and died, when the skeletal trees budded with new growth and sunlight burned away the slate sky so that the moon shone clear on the surface of the lake — an eye above and an eye below, staring back at one another from unknown depths — Constance sat vigil still.

She watched as summer arrived, with cloudless blue days and black nights so thick with humidity that even the crickets drowned in their sleep. Fishermen returned to the lake with no better luck than before. Boys swam in the cool water and lazed under the ample shade of lakeside trees. Weeks passed and still no rain fell, and though no visitors spoke to Constance of such things, she knew people had begun to use the word “drought.” The surface of her lake dropped lower and lower, and the soft green life budding from the trees turned yellow, brittle.

One July Saturday, as Constance watched by her window and the sun rose to zenith, the boys returned for a swim. Their tan forms elongated and wavered on the surface of the lake. Then the breeze idled and the dry leaves stilled, and the shallow water became a lens focusing the sun’s rays upon its bottom.

The boys returned Constance’s unflinching gaze before they fled.

Not long after came reflections of flashing red and blue lights, and men in black skins and round masks who sank under the surface of the lake to look through her window. Constance sensed an unaccustomed warmth when the car lurched and rose out of the lake, and now she saw the surface from its top side, and more men in uniforms and badges that sparkled in sunlight gathered round-about — and beyond them, the little boys and people who must have been the mothers and fathers of little boys, of children who remained at their sides and would survive them.

One of the uniformed men forced open Constance’s door, the passenger’s side door, and leaned close, looking into her face and the sockets that had held her open eyes before the fishes had come. He took photographs of her, of the place on her head where Danny had hit her with his football trophy, and of the trophy Danny had wedged under the dash to hold down the gas pedal.

Then other men, wearing rubber gloves and dust masks and hair nets, cut her safety belt and helped her out of the car, onto a gurney. One of them noticed the lock of hair she clutched so tightly in her left hand, and she knew they would find Danny’s blood and skin under her fingernails, Danny’s baby buried in the grave of her womb, and they would recognize the price she had paid for Danny’s freedom.

The End