But Rita kept lists.
That night, Rita dreamed of a flood that rose without sound. She stood at her window and watched her furniture float past: the blue armchair, the kitchen table, the bed where she’d once slept beside a man who now lived three states away. She didn’t try to save anything. When she woke, the river was still there, low and dark and humming a tune she almost recognized. rita lo que el agua se llevó
At seventeen, a flash flood dragged away the footbridge where she’d had her first kiss. The boy’s name went with it — something with a J, she thinks, or maybe a soft ch — and she didn’t mind that loss. What she minded was the way the river remembered things she wanted to forget. Every spring, the melted snow from mountains she’d never seen would bring back a rusted toy, a photograph, a single child’s shoe. The water gave and gave, but never what she asked for. But Rita kept lists
She closed the box and put it on her shelf. Then she went back to the river and wrote one more line in her notebook: She didn’t try to save anything
The water never returns what it takes. But sometimes it returns the shape of taking itself — and that, too, is a kind of gift.
And at the top, she wrote: Rita, lo que el agua se llevó — y lo que aún no.
The first time the river rose, Rita was seven. She watched from the porch as the brown current swallowed her mother’s rose bushes, then the tire swing, then the fence that had never been straight. Her father said, Don’t cry for what the water takes. It only borrows.
