Kaweah’s Lake

I arrived at my great-grandmother’s house at three in the morning, her mutt nipping at my heels as I closed my car door and shouldered my duffel bag.

The only reason I was back home was for a funeral.

“Can’t believe it takes the death of your best friend for you to come visit,” my great-grandmother said as I stood on her porch sheepishly.

“She hadn’t been my best friend since high school,” I said.

“But she was,” my great-grandmother said, kissing my cheek and ushering me inside the house that encompassed my childhood and forever loomed silently in the back of my mind like the stubborn last drop of booze in a bottle.

Three Rivers is the kind of town where everyone is up in everyone else’s business, and a secret was as good as a forest fire. It’s the kind of town where people get married at nineteen and have children at twenty. A quicksand town where it’s easy to get stuck, and die struggling to leave. It’s the kind of town that I wanted to put behind me, but it clings to a person like Velcro.

Three Rivers is about a six hour drive north from where I attended college, with a steadily declining population of just under three thousand people. Despite its name, Three Rivers only has a single river carving its way through the mountains that surround a pristine lake with a glassy surface to put mirrors to shame. It’s known as Lake Kaweah. The river, naturally, is called the Kaweah River, the General Store is called the Kaweah General Store, the only elementary school is known as Kaweah Union Elementary School, and, like several other women in the town, I, too, have been dubbed Kaweah. My great-grandmother said Kaweah means “crow” or “raven cry” in Yokutsan, a Native American language.

“C’mere. Let’s get you inside. I’ve got your favourite cake in the oven. Smell it?”

I did. It was a familiar smell, warm and sweet and fluffy. It smelled exactly the same as it had the last time I was in Three Rivers ages ago. In fact, nothing in the entire town had changed one bit.

“Why are you baking at three in the morning, Nana?”

“Waitin’ for you, that’s what. And I couldn’t sleep I guess. Go and set your stuff in your brother’s room and grab yourself a glass of milk.”

I did so without quarrel.

“Do you have any wine?” I asked as I returned to the kitchen, where she was checking on the cake.

“You know I don’t drink, dear,” she said, closing the oven. We spoke softly in voices just above a whisper despite being the only two in the house. “Besides, I don’t condone alcohol as a way to deal with your problems. You should know better.”

I sighed and poured myself a glass of milk as she had originally suggested while she pulled out a chair from the dining table. She grabbed a half smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it up.

“Since when did you start smoking again?”

“Since just now,” she lied blatantly as she tapped her cigarette over the mountain of ash in the tray. “Doesn’t bother you, does it?”

I shook my head and pulled out a chair across from her. The night’s breeze wafted the aroma from the flowers in the three glass vases on the table towards me. I’d always liked the smell of cigarettes anyways. “Where’s Mason?” I asked.

“Sleepin’ over at his new girlfriend’s place,” she said after a long drag.

“Nana, he’s eleven.”

“So?” she said. “You know how kids are these days. ‘Sides, they’re too innocent to get into any sorts o’ trouble.”

We sat in silence for a couple minutes. She let the cigarette burn between her fingers as I sipped at my milk. Finally she put the cigarette to her leathery lips again.

“Ain’t you gonna ask about your mother?” she said.

“I’d rather not.”

“Well, you should. She’s working down at the restaurant now. She’s been getting better, you know. Asked to work more hours this week, so I let her. It keeps her mind off things. She even came to visit Mason a couple days ago.”

I looked down at my hands curled loosely around the tall glass of milk.

“I’m actually thinking of selling the restaurant. Did I tell you?”

“What?” I looked up in alarm. I don’t know why, but after all this time and even after I’d left for San Diego, I had assumed the restaurant would be in our family forever. “Why?”

“I know I don’t look it, hun,” she said, tapping the cigarette against the lip of the ashtray. “But I’m gettin’ old.”

We shared a morbid half smile each because Nana’s hair was as white as they came. She was plump, her joints swollen with arthritis, and her features were hidden in crevasses of wrinkled skin that stretched and collapsed with every facial tick and expression. Her wrinkles looked especially tired today. I wanted to say more on the subject of selling the restaurant but decided to bite my tongue. At least for tonight.

“When’s the funeral?” she asked.

“Tomorrow at three,” I said. “Is she the first or second?”

“Second.”

“Well, at least there’s only one left.”

“That ain’t no way to be talking about a human life, Kaweah Marie.”

I gave her a look she knew well: chin lowered, eyebrows raised, lips pursed into a thin line. She sighed.

“You should sleep,” she said. “Don’t want you nodding off through the funeral.”

I nodded, suddenly aware of just how tired I was from the long drive. Slowly, as if I was the one who was nearing ninety years old, I stood up.

“Leave the milk,” she said.

I did. “Good night, Nana,” I said.

“Night, sweetheart,” she said, and then dragged on the cigarette until her lips almost kissed the cherry tip of her dying cigarette.

***

The funeral was short and smelled like the orange blossoms lining the roads for the last fifty miles of the drive to Three Rivers from San Diego. After the reception, some of my other high school mates invited me to go to a bar the next town over to drink and to remember. I was hesitant at first, but then politely accepted. I drank timidly and then stupidly, but found that, despite everything, I actually enjoyed myself. I never realized how much I missed my high school friends.

“What was that story your Nana always used to tell, Kaweah?” I remember someone prompting. “The one about the town? You know the one.”

My great-grandmother, who liked to say that I was named after her and not the river or the lake or the General Store, told me that long ago, before the town was founded in 1886, there actually were three rivers in Three Rivers. There was no proof as far as I’ve looked into it, but I believed her on some level, mainly because she looked old enough to have been alive in that time period, and because she had never been wrong before.

“There’s a tale the Indians of this part – ‘scuse me, I mean Native Americans. That’s what it is now, right? – used to tell. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest, and most of it has been popularized by the white folk livin’ here like me, but it involves three river spirits and a little boy,” Nana would say.

It went something like this:

Long, long ago, there was a small village at the edge of Kaweah Lake. Three powerful rivers surged into the lake in this time, causing the lake to be as tumultuous and vicious as the sea. The rivers and the lake were fiercely independent, and refused to let anyone partake of their water, though it was said theirs was the sweetest tasting water anyone could drink.

In this village lived a young boy. When one day, his mother grew ill, went down to the mouths of each of the rivers and beseeched the spirits for their aid. Moved by his plea, the river spirits allowed him to dip his bucket in each of their waters.

The next day and the next day, the young boy approached the rivers and drew from their water, and the river spirits began to grow fond of him. But the lake into which the rivers slowed began to grow jealous of the boy. On the third day the boy approached the rivers, the lake swelled up, and devoured him.

Wracked with grief and anger, the river spirits began to cry. Their waters swelled with their tears. They wept so much that their rivers merged into one, filling the lake with their grief, making it stormier and stormier. The boy’s mother knew something had happened, and despite her illness, she rushed to the riverside.

“We’re sorry, we’re sorry,” the river spirits cried. The boy’s mother saw the bucket by the edge of the river, and she fell to her knees and began to weep too. Tears streamed down her face like rivers themselves, and fell to the water. The stormy lake looked as if it was about to devour her too, but just as the first tear melded with the lake, the tumultuous waters stilled. The boy’s mother felt an odd sense of peace wash over her because she knew, somehow, that it was the boy’s spirit who calmed the lake.

To this day, the lake has been as still and unmoving as death, and the three river spirits remained as one river. However, the river still remembers being three separate entities.

“That’s why death happens in threes in Three Rivers. Though there’s only one spirit in the river now, it desires three,” Nana had concluded, and I knew she was thinking about my grandmother.

***

It was only nine o’clock at night when I went to visit my great-grandmother’s restaurant, the River View, named so because it was perched right at the edge of the Kaweah River. It was popular because people enjoyed listening to the sound of the rushing river while they ate, and the cheesecake was the best in town. The ownership of the restaurant had gone from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother, to my grandmother and back to my great-grandmother again. It should have gone to my mother, but after my grandmother’s death, she had proved incapable of taking care of herself or her daughter let alone a business, so Nana took over the establishment again.

The thing was, my mother and her mother never got along very well either, so I never understood why my mom was as torn up as she was. All I understood was that the circumstances of my grandmother’s death had been traumatic. In the span of two months, her husband died, and, following the rule of three, her sister, and her brother passed as well. Not only that, but the following week her favourite cousin and her other brother got into a fatal boating accident out on Kaweah Lake. My grandmother, drunk as she always was in that time period, crashed her car into a telephone pole not long after. Some of the locals speculated that it was suicide to prevent another death. Sure enough, Three Rivers saw no more deaths for a fair amount of time. I was three years old when it happened.

To this day, I’m not sure why I went to the restaurant that night. I knew my mother would be there. I blame most of it on the alcohol I had consumed earlier, and years of reflection also tell me that it was probably because I was looking to release some of my pent up emotions from the funeral. I hadn’t shed a single tear that day.

She had to do a double take when she saw me sitting at a table on the patio, watching the rapids glaze the rocks poking through the current. I had to admit she did look better. She had gained a little weight, her brown hair was less brittle and her skin looked healthier, but her eyes still shone with a tinge of yellow that I suspected would never go away.

“Kaweah,” she said, and I could see her holding her breath as if she was afraid the slightest movement of the air would make me disappear.

“Mom,” I said stiffly.

“How… How have you been?”

“Good.”

“I’m so sorry about your friend.”

I said nothing. Her eyes flickered across my face.

“I… What… Is there…” Her shoulders sagged. “Can I get you anything?”

“A beer,” I said, challenging her with my eyes to refuse me.

She hesitated at first and I thought I had won, but then she said, “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you’ve had enough, Kaweah,” she said more firmly, setting her jaw. I fixed her with an incredulous stare. She averted here gaze uncomfortably, and I forced an icy laugh.

“You’re cutting me off?” I laughed. “Now that’s a joke if I ever heard one.”

“Kaweah, please keep your voice down,” she said, looking around the restaurant.

“Why should I?”

“For once in your life, can you please do what I ask?”

I repeated myself, slower, more intimidating this time. “Why, should, I?”

Her eyes darted around the restaurant again, taking note of the eyes watching us. She set her jaw, grabbed me by the upper arm, and dragged me inside and into the thankfully empty women’s bathroom.

“Ow!” I said, yanking my arm out of her grip when we got there. “That hurt. Who do you think you are?”

She met my eyes at that point. “I’m your mother,” she said firmly, but I shook my head.

“You haven’t been my mother in years,” I said.

“Because you wouldn’t let me!” she shouted.

“Because there’s such a thing as too little too late.”

Her mouth opened and closed dumbly for a few moments before she blew air out of her nose and threw her arms in the air, turning her back to me. “I really don’t need this right now,” she said, trying to recompose herself.

“Yeah, well neither do I.”

She turned back to face me. “Then leave. I will not argue with you in this state. Get out,” she said, voice trembling, mouth trembling. Her entire body was shaking. “Get. Out.”

I wanted to say more, but anger was in my throat and there was really nothing left to say anyways. I pushed past her and fled the restaurant.

***

The door slammed behind me.

“Kaweah?” my great-grandmother said, shuffling out of the kitchen, wrinkles arranged in a display of concern.

I grunted, and collapsed onto a sofa in the living room.

“You’re drunk,” Nana realized, the smell of alcohol hitting her like a wave.

“Yeah?” I said loudly. “So what?”

“Did you drive here?”

“How else was a supposed to get back?”

Her wrinkles quivered. “You stupid girl. You stupid, stupid girl.”

“Don’t start with me too,” I said. “I received enough grief from my mom today.”

A look of understanding dawned on her face. She straightened and hobbled over to the couch “Do you see what you’re doin’, child?” Nana said, retaining her composure, though she was visibly tenser, even to my drunken eyes. “Do you see it? Look at yourself and tell me that this is not exactly what you said you wouldn’t become.”

I felt my cheeks burn with a flash of hot anger. “I am not becoming my mother. Or your daughter for that matter,” I said. “I don’t even drink that often. I’m different from them. I got out of this damn town. I am not a reflection of either of them. I am not. I’m not.”

It was a mantra I realized that I had been telling myself for a while now. My great-grandmother shifted in her seat as she let me say it out.

“I know you’re not,” she said calmly. “You know I’m so, so proud of you for what you’ve done.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. You’re the first in our family to graduate – hell, go to college in decades, you don’t have massive amounts of student debt, you support yourself easily in a lovely apartment in a lovely city with lovely friends… Kaweah…” she said, placing a withering hand on my shoulder. I swatted it away angrily.

“Don’t,” I snapped, draping my arm over my eyes. I could feel the pressure behind my eyes building up. “Don’t touch me.”

I could almost hear her wrinkles crinkle sadly around her eyes as if they were made of paper. She inhaled softly.

“Kaweah,” she said. “I’m going to be number three.”

To this day, I don’t know what compelled her to say that there and then, and I resent her a little for saying it at the time because I had a lot of rage I wanted to vent, but her words were effective. My anger shattered with such abruptness that, had I been standing, my knees would have buckled. I sat up slowly, feeling more sober than I’d ever been. And also a little sick.

“Nana, don’t say that,” I said, feeling a pressure behind my eyes that I had been trying to keep at bay all day return. Nana was always right. If she said she was going to be number three then…

She wrapped her arms around me, and began to rock back and forth. I could feel my mentality regressing back to that of a six-year-old girl, shaken by nightmares and unable to seek her own mother’s comfort because she was passed out on the couch with a bottle in hand, or her father’s comfort because he was half way across the country with his second wife. Nana stroked my hair soothingly.

“Remember how we used to go to the lake, and you used to put a little leaf on a stick and plant it in the mud like a flag? ‘This is my lake!’ you said. ‘It’s named after me.’”

I allowed myself a small smile. “I was actually telling my friends earlier about that old story you used to tell Mason and me all the time.”

“The one with the river spirits and the boy?”

“Yeah. I never liked that story,” I admitted. “All the women do is cry and cry.”

“I know, dear,” she said. “But sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.”

“Still,” I said.

“Promise me you won’t be so angry with your mother. She’s tryin’. Really.”

I took a deep, shuddering breath. I promised, and cried while she held me.