I saw my mom at the bottom of a river

My mom went missing in the summer of 2008. She disappeared one night. Vanished into thin air. I never voiced my fear that she was kidnapped. I didn’t want to speak it into existence in case she may ever come home.

The police talked to my whole neighborhood. Literally every single person in the eleven houses around mine. Apparently other people had gone missing in the area too. Eventually though, the police dropped it. The leads went cold and the only thing we could do was hang posters. I only learned later that my parents apparently had divorced just a month prior to her disappearance.

I grew up in a small mountain town that sweltered in the summer. It was in a touristy town along a highway that gained a lot of people passing through to go to nearby national parks. Unfortunately, many of the local homes- including mine- did not have air conditioning. The whole month of July was torturous. The summer after my mom disappeared, a heatwave passed through the town.

It was the first time my sister and I were alone for a majority of the summer. We were old enough according to my dad. We would’ve raised some eyebrows if the neighbor knew we were alone though.

I remember my sister and I filling plastic buckets with water and waddling out to the porch to dump them on our heads. Sometimes, I’d plug my nose with my fingers, close my eyes and dunk my head in for as long as I could. The bright orange of the bucket reflected in the water, and I would look at the orange walls until my lungs burned. My sister and I would have breath-holding contest, I always won since I was older.

We went up to Clover Falls one day. I don’t know how long the drive was, but it felt like we were in the car for hours. My arms stuck to the leather seats from sweat. My mom always used to say that she hated the leather in the car.

My dad usually brushes off the concept of danger, but he gave us a small talk about how the river could pull you in. Stay in the pools on the side. Tourists drowned because they didn’t know how to stay safe in the water. We were locals though, and we weren’t that stupid.

I was instantly invigorated in the way excitement rushes through a child’s whole body when we made it to the spot. I was excited to be sweating because I could picture the cool dip when I reached the bank.

My dad pulled over to a random shoulder. He always found random little spots to go to and could remember where they were without a map. I didn’t think about it then, but it’s pretty remarkable. He never remembered our birthdays, but if you ever want to find Clover Falls, he could probably give you exact verbal directions up to the walking path to get down there.

Walking down the hills was another battle. I was wearing my bright blue flip flops with pineapples on them. I had gotten them as a birthday gift from my mom a few months prior and I had been wearing them for the entire summer. They were flimsy, probably from the drugstore. I had to poke the plastic band back into the hold in the middle of them a million times. The dirt path was littered with sticks and leaves that poked in between my toes. I’d lean on my dad every other step to shake little stones off my feet.

My sister and I wailed nearly the whole way down, but my dad assured that the river would be worth it.

When it was finally within sight, my excitement got the better of me. I was at the age where I was confident enough to run off without my parents as long as I knew where they were.

“Maren, wait!” my dad yelled, he was jogging towards me.

There was a drop off that was about four feet tall right before the river. I grabbed onto a wilted bush and lowered myself down.

“Don’t go in too deep!” I barely heard my dad call.

By the time I made it to the river, my dad had just stepped down the drop off and was helping my sister down.

The river itself was a beautiful sapphire. The blue stood out dramatically against the red rocks that towered behind it. The light glinted off the waves which made it glimmer like the gem in the sweltering heat.

The main part of the river rushed in swirling ripples, crashing against the rocks. Small pools collected on the side where the water was still.

I stepped in and felt a wave of relief. I instantly threw my head in and ran the water through my hair. I savored every bead of water that dripped down. The apprehension that usually came from rushing into a body of water was nowhere to be found.

I lowered myself more and more into the water until I was squatting almost completely. It went up to my stomach, but I was hungry for more. I scuttled closer and closer towards the rapids.

My little blue flip flop suddenly started getting pulled. My toes gripped onto it instinctively, but the foam shoe was already halfway off my foot. My right arm grabbed it.

The river sucked me in instantly. I didn’t thrash instantly. The first thought that flashed in my mind was that my dad would kill me. I vaguely heard my sister scream.

My right arm flew down into the water. I gripped onto the flip flop like it was a life preserver. For some reason the protective part of my brain had an instinct to lock my grip instead of trying to steady myself.

The river grabbed hold of my right leg as well. Panic had finally started blaring the “you are dying” alarms in my head and my arms and legs started to flail.

My right arm stayed balled in a fist. I couldn’t bring it above water. My body writhed like a constrictor grabbing hold of a leopard. My arm grabbed desperately, trying to grip anything. The water slipped through my fingers.

For a split second, I stopped. Time suddenly slowed and I heard my heart pounding. Thump…. Thump…… Thuuummmp. My dad stood at the edge of the river with my sister, whose mouth was gaped open. He was reaching out with both arms, but I couldn’t make out his face.

Stronger than a current. Stronger than anything that could have been living in those waters. I must have been around 75 pounds, but something yanked my arm completely down. My head went down with it, leaving my legs flailing in the air.

Eyes. Two. Four. Six. Too many to count. No eyelids. Unblinking stares. Hostile. I skipped between them, my brain struggled to focus on one thing.

The teeth were black. They were filed down to a point. They looked like they were stained as a shower tile might be blooming with mold. The heads had no skin. All of the faces were hard and gray. The jaws were jagged.

The heads unhinged their jaws like snakes. They snapped shut when rocks tumbled in front of them. They seemed like they were forced open.

Then, the water warmed. Something soothed my body and my muscles relaxed. Familiarity. Like stepping into the smell of your favorite meal. Then, a voice I hadn’t heard for months.

Mom. She was here. Against all odds. Our eyes met and I was taken back to the last time I saw her.

Her voice was garbled as though she were speaking through a walkie talkie. She growled. I could hear it over the bubbles rushing past my face. Her jaws were as horrible as the other demons around her. In between her teeth was my blue pineapple printed flip flop.

Her face sat glued to the ground. Her head sat with dozens of others along the floor of the river. Brown, Blue, Green. All of their eyes, even those that were all the way on the other side were locked on mine.

But it was Mom. Her green eyes locked onto mine. They stood out against the blue water and looked yellow. When she saw I was making eye contact, her smile got wider and I could swear I heard a gargly laugh. The bubbles distorted her voice, but it was hers. She looked hungry.

The strap broke and I watched her chomp it between her teeth right before flipping back to the surface. Her teeth gnashed like metal scraping on concrete.

My head whipped back up to the surface. The adrenaline finally made the connection with the conscious part of my brain.

I swam to another pool on the side of the river. My memory completely cuts off between then and the car ride home, but apparently I threw up a ton of water before crying my eyes out.

The car ride home was quiet. I sat in the backseat tracing my fingers over the bite marks. My dad would go on to call me an idiot for following my shoe. He told me he’d be ashamed if he’d ever done anything so stupid.

So I never told anyone about what happened. Not outright anyway. I recounted the experience to my sister once, but I pretended it was a dream. She stared at me with wide eyes for the entire retelling and laughed at the end of it. Eventually it became a dream and the thought of it didn’t take up much space in my brain.

It became something that just happened to me. My family still brings up ‘that one time when Maren fell into the river.’

I’m not traumatized. I still go to pools and lakes.

I’m in college now and we talked about the 2008 recession in my political science class last week. I knew it was bad, but learning about it with a more developed frontal lobe helps me understand why my parents were so stressed during the time.

I’m typing this up because I don’t know what to think or what to do. More people have disappeared in and around my hometown than I thought. Tourists and locals alike.

All of them looked familiar. A blaring ‘you know this person’ familiar. I felt lightheaded every time I clicked on an article. Seeing all of their faces. I found articles for 8 people who disappeared in my hometown between 2004-2008. I have seen every single one of them before.