The Seduction of Water Read Free Page A

things still happened even though it had been years since she’d published her last book and the books she had written—the two of them—sold fewer and fewer copies until finally they went out of print.
    Still my mother had her fans. She’d written two books in a trilogy about a fantasy world called Tirra Glynn. The first book, written five years before I was born, was called
The Broken Pearl
. The second book, written while she was pregnant with me (she always told me that she’d conceived both me and the idea for that book at the same time and that we both took exactly nine months to bring forth), was called
The Net of Tears
. No one ever knew what the third book would have been called because it never appeared. I remember that it was around the time of my sixth birthday that my first-grade teacher asked me if I ever saw my mother writing. When I relayed that conversation to my mother she had me pulled out of the public school and put into a private school in Poughkeepsie. Two years later I was put back into the public school. Sales from my mother’s books had dropped precipitously. Who wanted to read the first two books in a trilogy if there wasn’t going to be a third book?
    Also the hotel had fallen on hard times. It was the 1960s and Americans had discovered air travel and Europe. One by one the big hotels to the south and west of us went out of business. If it hadn’t been for a core of faithful clientele—the families whose grandparents had stayed at the Hotel Equinox and the painters who came to paint the view—we would have closed as well. Who wanted to drive three hours to a resort to swim in an ice-cold lake? The Hotel Equinox, perched on a ledge above the Hudson, was too out-of-the-way and too old-fashioned and then, when my mother left, just too sad.
    She left for good when I was ten. She’d been invited to sit on a panel of women science fiction and fantasy writers at a two-day conference at NYU. She was supposed to leave for the city in the morning, but because she couldn’t sleep she asked Joseph to drive her across the river to catch the night train. I heard her arguing with my father in the hall outside my room. “But where will you stay?” he asked. “Your reservation isn’t until tomorrow.”
    “They’re bound to have a room for the night,” she told him, her voice light with laughter. I imagined her putting a hand on his forehead and stroking his hair back, something she always did to allay my fears. “You worry too much, Ben. I’ll be fine.”
    Then she came into my room to kiss me good night and I pressed my face into the dark plushy fur of her coat collar. Her coat was buttoned to her throat and she didn’t undo it or let it settle down around her waist as she usually did when she was going to tell me a story.
    “Tell me the selkie story,” I asked. She pressed her hand against my forehead, as if checking for fever, and brushed my hair away from my face, combing the tangles out with her fingers. I waited to hear her reply,
That old thing
? But instead she said, “Not tonight.” She told me to close my eyes and go to sleep and when I had kept my eyes closed for several minutes I heard the clicking of the pearls around her neck falling against the buttons of her coat as she leaned forward and kissed me good night. And then she was gone.
    When she got to New York she did not check into the Algonquin where her editor had made reservations for her even though we found out later that they did have rooms available for that night. My mother never went there at all. Instead she checked into the Dreamland Hotel—a run-down hotel in Coney Island near the site of the old Dreamland amusement park. It was the last weekend in September 1973, the weekend that the Dreamland burned to the ground. It was weeks before we knew for sure what had happened to my mother because she hadn’t registered under her married name, Kay Greenfeder, or her pen name, K. R. LaFleur, or even her maiden name,