The Voice on the Water

In the fog, someone was calling my name. From somewhere out on the water. In my brother Mateo’s voice.

It was 1997, in Chiloé. The islands of southern Chile. My brother and I fished off a small wooden boat. Our father never came back from the sea when I was fifteen, and from then on I was the one who raised Mateo. That day there were three of us aboard — me, Mateo, and an old hand named Don Hernán. Mateo was nineteen, and he worked the deck. We’d set the nets at dusk when the fog rolled in. Chiloé fog is like a wall. Thick enough that you couldn’t see the bow from the stern. We cut the engine and drifted, waiting for it to lift.

That was when I heard it. Out on the water.

“Brother. Brother!”

It was Mateo’s voice. No question about it. Out beyond the dark white fog, maybe forty or fifty meters off.

I shot to my feet. Mateo’s gone overboard. My mind went blank. The deck’s slick, he slipped watching the nets. The sea had already taken one of us. Not again. I ran to the gunwale. I grabbed the lifeline and got one foot up on the rail. I opened my mouth to answer, to jump.

Don Hernán wrapped his arms around me from behind. Strong, for an old man. “Don’t answer,” low and hard. “Don’t go. Keep your mouth shut.”

“Mateo’s in the water — let go of me!” I thrashed. We nearly went over together.

“Mateo’s on the boat,” Don Hernán said into my ear. But I’d heard that voice. It was Mateo, plainly.

“Brother, I’m cold. Come hold on to me.” It came again out of the fog. Pleading.

I was shaking. That voice — it wasn’t just similar. It was Mateo. I’d held that boy since he was an infant. There was no way I wouldn’t know his voice.

And then it called me by the name from when I was small. The one only the two of us knew, the name our mother used only for Mateo. My knees almost buckled. How could that thing know it?

A little later, it said, “Brother, you remember that red boat?” Something only Mateo and I knew. From when we were ten, twelve years old.

Each time, it grew a little more like Mateo. As if — it were listening, and learning.

That was when I saw it. Right where the deck light died out on the water, at the very edge of it, a figure was standing. Mateo’s yellow oilskin. Mateo’s build. Still, in the fog. Facing us. It slowly raised one arm and beckoned me, the way Mateo always did.

It was standing on the water. The depth there was twenty times a man’s height. And yet it just stood there, as though the water only came up to its ankles.

Don Hernán turned me by the shoulders. Toward the inside of the boat.

Mateo was there. Crawling out of the cabin with a half-asleep face. “Brother, what’s wrong? What is it?” Alive. Perfectly fine. With the face of someone who’d heard nothing at all.

I looked back at the water. The figure was still there, and out of the fog it called me again. In Mateo’s voice. While my brother stood right beside me.

We didn’t answer until dawn. We sent Mateo back into the cabin and had him shut the door, and Don Hernán and I sat with our backs to the water. Mateo was scared that his brother wouldn’t look at him, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain. It went on calling for hours. Brother, brother. Come. I’m cold. It went from pleading to something that almost sounded like anger. Then once, near dawn, it called my name — and the inflection was just slightly off. One syllable Mateo would never have pronounced that way. It was that single wrong note that let me keep sitting there to the end. The voice stopped as the fog began to thin, and when day broke there was nothing on the water.

Don Hernán never brought up that night again. Only once, on the way back to port, he said this much: “If a voice you know calls you from the water, that person is either with you, or dead. They’re not in the water. Never answer.”

For the longest time, I thought I’d been lucky that night. That I survived because I didn’t answer.

But as the years pass, that isn’t the part I can’t bear. Out of every voice in the world, it chose the one I could never refuse.

And to do that, it would have had to be listening to me for a very long time.