Chapter 3 The Water

Three nights later, the basement flooded. Tom woke to the sound of running water. Not a pipe burst, not the violent gush of something broken, but a steady, deliberate flow, the sound a tap makes when it has been left open and forgotten. He lay in the dark for a moment, listening, and the sound did not stop. It did not change. It continued with the flat, unhurried persistence of a thing that had all the time in the world. He pulled on his jeans and went downstairs. The basement floor was covered in an inch of water. It lapped at the legs of the workbench, it crept across the concrete in a thin silver sheet that caught the work light and threw it back in shards, and it was seeping up through a crack in the concrete that had not been there the day before. Tom was certain of this. He had looked at that floor a hundred times in the three days since they had arrived, tracing the trowel marks with his eyes while Nora unpacked, and there had been no crack. Now there was one, and it ran along the edge of the room, following the line of the symbols he had hidden behind the shelves. The crack was straight. That was what disturbed him most. A settling crack wanders. A freezing crack branches. This crack ran in a clean, precise line, as if it had been cut, as if something beneath the floor had drawn a ruler across the concrete and pressed until the surface gave way. He pumped the water out with a rented submersible, working in the cold until the floor was bare and the pump sucked only air. He sealed the crack with a two-part epoxy, spreading it into the line with a putty knife, smoothing it over, telling himself that the house was old and the ground was wet and this was simply what owning a house meant. He went back to bed at four in the morning with water in his shoes and the smell of epoxy in his nose. The next morning, the crack was open again. The water was back. Not an inch this time. Two. It had found its way up through the epoxy as if the seal had never been there, and the line was wider, the edges of it curled back like a healing wound that had decided not to heal. Tom sealed it again. He used more epoxy. He pressed harder. He told Nora it was nothing, a drainage problem, the kind of thing they sold sump pumps for. It opened again. By the third week, Tom had stopped fighting it and started managing it. He installed a sump pump in the corner, ran the discharge line out through the foundation wall, and tried not to think about the fact that the water was coming up, not down, that nothing in the plumbing of the house could account for a flood that originated below the floor. He tried not to think about the crack following the symbols. He tried not to listen, at night, lying in bed, to the water moving beneath the house. But he heard it. It was not the sound of a leak. A leak is random, gurgling, indifferent. This was a slow, rhythmic sound, like breathing, like the intake and release of something large that had settled itself into the earth and learned to be patient there. Tom would lie awake with the covers pulled to his chin and the wind moving in the birches outside, and beneath all of it, beneath the floor and the foundation and the cold November ground, he would hear the water rise and fall in a tide that matched no moon he could name. Nora heard it too, though she never said so. He knew because some nights he woke and found the bed beside him empty, and he would go down to the kitchen and find her at the window, staring out at the black line of the trees, and she would say she couldn't sleep, and she would not say why. On the worst night, the water rose to four inches and the pump ran continuously and still could not keep pace. Tom went down with a flashlight and stood in the flooding basement and shone the beam along the crack, and for just a moment, between one breath and the next, he thought he saw something move in the water. Not a reflection. Not a shadow. A shape, pale and slow, turning beneath the surface the way a root turns in soil, the way a thing that has been still for a very long time finally begins to stir. He blinked, and it was gone. The water kept rising. The pump kept running. And somewhere below, the house took another slow breath and held it. He told Nora it was a plumbing problem, and she did not argue, because arguing would have meant admitting that the plumbing of a house they had owned for three weeks should not produce water that rose from below. She simply began sleeping with a lamp on, and Tom began sleeping not at all. The sump pump ran until the electric bill arrived and tripled, and he paid it without comment, telling himself that a house was an expense and this was simply the cost of owning one. He grew thin. His jeans loosened at the waist. The great-uncle's workbench became his station, the place he returned to at four in the morning with the pump coughing in the corner and the crack breathing its slow tide beneath the floor. He thought, more than once, of calling someone, a contractor, a geologist, a priest, but the county was too far and the words to explain what was happening would not come, and in the end he only watched the water rise and fall and told himself it was normal, the way a person drowning tells himself the water is only a little cold. Isolation did the rest. There were no neighbors to ask, no one within a mile to notice the lights burning at odd hours or the man who stood in his cellar at dawn talking to a crack in the concrete. The forest held the house in its green quiet, and the quiet became a kind of consent, a permission to pretend. Tom pretended. He went to the hardware store and bought more epoxy and more sealant and more things that did not work, and he came home and applied them, and the water rose anyway, patient as the thing below it, which had all the time in the world and meant to spend it. ---