The Brink

She had a fanciful way of recounting it, in later years, that he privately found cloying and cliched, even as he always put on a self-effacing smile whenever she retold the story. "I felt," she would say, "in the instant his arm went around me to pull me out, that I would be safe, that it would be all right. And I wasn't fool enough to let go, even once I was back on dry land!" Of course, he himself had invented an even more fantastic version of it, albeit one reserved solely for their children while still very young: "I once threw a gold coin into a wishing well," he would tell them, "and out sprang a beautiful nymph, straight into my arms!"

 

The truth was, of course, less romantic than either version. He had been in the process of trying to get the perfect picture of a rare type of Calopogon orchid that only grew in this sort of a bog. (She eventually would learn to live with his obsessions, how oblivious and short-tempered he could get when immersed.) She'd been curious, and meaning only to approach from behind to get a look at the flower over his shoulder, had tripped, flailed, and plunged nearly headlong into the the dark water to one side.

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