Today's Reading
By then I was running. I sprinted down the stone steps to the pier and past the woman who was standing exactly where we had left her, staring at nothing in particular. The dock was wide and stable and I had no trouble jogging the length that stretched along the shoreline and then over one of the arms that jutted out into the water. My heavy Columbia hiking boots pounded on the wooden planks and seemed to echo across the water beneath them. I was chanting Nina's name by the time I reached her.
"Nina, Nina."
"I'm okay, I'm okay," she chanted back.
I knelt next to her; my arm circled her shoulder.
"I'm okay. The woman, she told me—after you left she told me that she thought she saw her husband on the dock next to these boats." Nina shrugged a shoulder toward the cabin cruisers moored behind her on opposite sides of the dock from each other, one very near where we were sitting and one closer to the shore. "No one is on the boats, but McKenzie"—she raised a hand and pointed—"I went to the edge of the dock and looked down. I don't know why."
I followed Nina's pointing finger to the edge. There was a wooden ladder attached to the dock. I looked down, went to my knees, and looked some more. I wasn't sure what I was looking at; the water was clear, only the overcast sky wasn't giving me much help. As my eyes adjusted, I realized I was staring at the top of a man's head about a foot and a half beneath the water. He was fully clothed for winter, his gloved hands were tightly gripping each side of the ladder, and he was looking straight ahead as if there was something under the dock that demanded his complete and undivided attention. I removed my own glove and immediately felt the cold. I was about to dip my hand into the icy water, yet thought better of it.
What are you going to do, check for a pulse?
I spun on my knees toward Nina.
"I'm sorry," I said.
Her expression suggested that she had no idea what I was talking about. Probably because I had never told her that the thing I hated most when I was a cop was delivering bad news.
"I'm sorry, there was an accident... I'm sorry, there was a shooting... I'm sorry, we conducted a welfare check..." Now I was going to have to deliver some more bad news, even though I hadn't been a cop for a long time, and I was not looking forward to it. I stood and gazed across the marina.
The woman was still standing where we had left her, her weight shifting from one foot to the other. What I found remarkable, though, was that despite enlisting our aid to find her husband, Nina's scream, and my mad sprint to Nina's side, the woman wasn't looking anywhere near us but instead gazing across the river toward Wisconsin.
Don't you think that's a little off?
If I was still a cop, I would have questions to ask her, I told myself.
I looked down at Nina.
"He's dead, isn't he?" she said. "I mean, of course he is, but how? Did he drown?"
"I don't know."
Aren't you getting tired of saying that?
"Geez, McKenzie, I knew these things always happened to you but I didn't know when we got married that they would happen to me, too."
"I'm sorry."
The operator said, "911, what's your emergency?"
I told her where we were; I told her about finding the man in the water. I told her to contact the Stillwater Police Department, water rescue, and the medical examiner, in that order. She didn't seem interested in my advice and instead asked for my name. I gave it to her and she told me to remain where I was.
"Help is on the way," she told me.
She also told me to remain on the line until help arrived. I apologized, said I had things to do, and hung up.
By then Nina and I had reached the woman. She waited for us to speak.
"I'm sorry," I said.
She waited some more.
"I'm sorry, but we found a man in the water."
"He must have fallen in the river by accident and drowned," the woman said.
Nina opened her arms and stepped toward the woman. The woman stepped backward, avoiding the hug.
...
