The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [117]
Then he hears a snap. The film has broken. The lights are turned on; the darkness vanishes.
She hears not a whirring but a rushing. It is a sound she heard when she was the closest she has ever come to death.
She was with Yonatan on a holiday in New Mexico. They had been warned by the owner of their bed-and-breakfast to pay attention if they saw a sign on the highway that said WARNING: DIP. The warning was about what could happen in the arroyos, which, he said, pedantically, you may or may not know is the Spanish word for ditch.
Perhaps it was his pedantry, perhaps it was the fact that Yonatan, who had come of age in the Israeli army, was constitutionally unable to take seriously the warnings of people he did not think of as “experts.” He was always sure that people were “overreacting,” “paranoid,” “afraid of their own shadows.” She, too, was suspicious of what she perceived as the excessive timidity of many of their friends, particularly in relation to their children. They talked about the American obsession to create for children what Yonatan called “a shockproof world.” When she relived that day, though, she was always grateful that the children had not been with them.
They’d been told that if they saw even a cupful of water in an arroyo near the sign WARNING: DIP, they should turn back immediately. You think there’s no problem because the sky is blue, no sign of rain, but it’s not about the rain you can see, it’s about the rain in the mountains. “Terrifying things can happen in a matter of seconds. I mean seconds,” the annoying bed-and-breakfast host had said. “So, you take my word you see even a cupful of water in one of those suckers, you turn back.”
It was a sunny day, and they saw the water. “Do you think it’s a cupful or half a cup?” Yonatan said. “No more than three-quarters,” Miranda responded. But suddenly, the arroyo was filling, and they couldn’t stop fast enough. They put on their brakes and skidded right into the middle of the dip. They were only there a few seconds when the wall of water hit them. They rolled up the windows. Just as they did, the car was picked up, turned around, carried down the arroyo for a quarter mile; they could hear large boulders bouncing in the water close to them; they thought they were going to be dumped into the Rio Grande, which was only another quarter of a mile away.
But somehow the car got stopped by a rock too large to have been moved by the water. And they sat in the car, pressed up against the boulder, the water going over the top of the roof. Then as always happens in an arroyo, the wave lasted only a moment or so. The water dropped; they were able to open the window. They sat there until the water was down to almost nothing, which it was in a few minutes, and they walked away. Trembling, they held each other and then laughed; they said they shouldn’t be allowed out in the world unsupervised, that they’d never tell the host that he’d been right, they should have listened.
As Adam was everything in the dark room, Miranda is everything in the arroyo: the dry ditch suddenly filling up, the car picked up and carried, her terror, her husband’s terror, her relief. She remembers something else about the water in an arroyo. What quickly becomes a gushing stream began by only little fingerlings of water. They collected and became something enormous, something dangerous and powerful. But if she had listened to