A Hand to Hold in Deep Water is a deeply felt narrative about mothers and daughters, the legacy of secrets, the way we make a family, and the love of those who walk us through our deepest pain. It is about the way we are tethered to one another and how we choose to wear those bindings. These are characters you won’t soon forget and, more so, won’t want to leave behind when you turn the last page.
We chat with author Shawn Nocher about A Hand to Hold in Deep Water, which released on June 22nd from Blackstone Publishing, as well as share an excerpt from her debut novel!
What are your favorite books? What authors inspire you? What made you want to become a writer?
My favorite books are too numerous to name and fall into many different genres. Once I start naming favorites, the list will go on endlessly, and then, when I think I’m finished, I’ll recall with regret the ones I didn’t list. But a few that have stuck with me for many years include Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (book burning appalled me from a young age), Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides, Anne Tyler’s Dinner at The Homesick Restaurant, Denis Johnsons’ Jesus’ Son–and I’m just going to stop here as I could go on for a very long time. As for favorite authors, I am definitely drawn to southern writers–Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and so many others. My contemporary author list is also endless: Amy Tan, Anna Quindlen, Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Alison, Elizabeth Berg, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Kent Haruff, Lorrie Moore, Tayari Jones, Richard Bausch–again, endless. Whenever any of these authors has a new book or collection out, I lock myself away for two days and devour it. Two new voices I have fallen in love with include Ocean Vuong and Elizabeth Wetmore. I think it is safe to say that reading voraciously made me want to be a writer. I wanted to build intimate worlds the way my favorite authors did. I wanted, I suppose, to join the club.
You have been a freelance copywriter, a bookstore clerk and a florist. How did writing fit into your life during this time?
I learned to write by way of an experimental phonetic alphabet and so I was able to write anything I wanted by the time I was six years old. Writing was just something I did–but that doesn’t mean I was any good at it. And storytelling is a lot more than putting words on paper. Learning the craft itself, learning to make demands of myself on the paper, understanding why a passage did or didn’t move the reader, was all something that pushed me to go back to school in my 50s. That was the best decision I ever made and when the writing life began to flood into everything else in my life, I knew I had to make a choice. I chose to immerse myself in the writing and let a lot of other stuff go. But back when I was a mother to young children, that wouldn’t have been an option–for me. The many late nights I spent sitting up writing made for very bad parenting the next day. At a workshop decades ago a well-known author told me I had to make the writing a priority–had to make the call between sitting down to write or making the cupcakes for the preschool class party. And I guess I chose the cupcakes (and often resented it). I felt bad about that for years, thinking my priorities were wrong, that I just wasn’t committed enough to this writing thing to prioritize it the way a “real writer” would. But as my children grew and spread their wings, so did I. I’ve always been a working mother both because I needed to work for my own mental health and because we needed the paychecks. But writing a novel requires a consistent creative immersion (with no guaranteed financial payout in the end) and that was hard for me to maintain when I had financial obligations and the random needs of children and teens distracting me.
Your novel, A HAND TO HOLD, is set in the countryside and marsh lands of Maryland. How did your upbringing in Maryland inspire the setting for the book?
Maryland is in my bones. It’s almost its own character in this book and that pleases me. If I’ve succeeded in any way, it’s thanks to the many southern writers I admire and who have set the bar in that regard. When you know a place, really know it, it tends to come alive on the page and bleeds into your characters.
Which character did you feel most connected to when you wrote the novel? Have you ever based a character on someone in your life, or even yourself?
Some readers think they see a bit of me in Lacey, and I suppose that’s possible in that I’m stubborn, a fashion disaster, and deeply in love with my children. And, much like Lacey, I’m sometimes tripped up by my insistence that I know it all while at the same time I am floundering because I have no idea what I’m doing. But I think I am most connected to Willy. He is a blend of all the best men in my life. My farmer uncles, my wise and quiet grandfather, and the paternal instincts of my husband. I feel such warmth towards Willy and he’s so very real to me that sometimes I find myself wondering just what he’s up to. As for Tasha, she is my daughter, through and through, and was certainly the easiest character to conjure on the page.
PROLOGUE
Lacey and Tasha
June 2004
She and I are lying on the dock, peering through the planks at an especially large jellyfish, the breadth of a dinner plate, thick and milky, drifting beneath us in the brackish water. They’re common in the river this time of year, something to do with the salinity, but these larger ones with their ruffled pink insides are more unusual, and we watch in rare silence.
This river, this lovely, lazy, undulating St. Mary’s River, is full of surprises—some scaldingly beautiful, like the feeding frenzy of blues we saw last week. The dorsal fins of the massive blues, black blades swirling in the roiling water, stirred the river into an ethe[1]real brew, boiling and flashing, glinting with desperate leaping minnows.
Other surprises, like the jellyfish, are mesmerizing and disconcerting if only in that they remind me to be careful should I risk a swim. You never know what lies beneath the surface.
“Can I touch it just a little bit?” she asks. “If I’m very, very nice to it?”
She asks as though she doesn’t quite believe me that its tentacles would sting her if she were to wade too close.
“Tasha, honey, it will sting you and it will hurt. It can’t help it. That’s just what jellyfish do.”
“Is it a boy jellyfish or a girl jellyfish?” she wants to know. She is four. This is the question du jour. She asks the same thing about the dog she sees trotting up Route 235, the crow that caws from the telephone wires, the squirrel that chits at us from the back porch, demanding the surrender of her popcorn. Even the honeybee—the one that stung her tiny foot yesterday and squirmed on the ball of it until it pulled free of its own stinger and died a wretched little death while she howled into my neck—even the bee prompted the same question.
“Was it a boy bee or a girl bee what stung me?” she had asked in between sobs.
“I think it was a boy,” I told her, cradling a small pink foot with one hand and holding her against me with the other. I thought to tell her they were all boys, that the queen, the only female among them, was sitting fat and pretty on her throne while the males, the boy bees, spent their life’s energy finding ways to keep the queen happy and amused so she wouldn’t abandon them. I thought to tell her this, but instead I made a paste of baking soda and salt and slathered it on the sting until her breath was less ragged and her tears had dried to reveal clean pink streaks down her dirty cheeks.
But now we are watching the jellyfish puff and billow and ripple below us and I can’t tell her if it’s a boy or a girl.
“I don’t know,” is all I can say, because I try to always tell the truth.
“It’s a girl,” she says, with such certainty. “It has pink in it.”
“Yes,” I say, “probably a girl.” She is on her belly and, like an otter, she pushes up with her tiny forearms and rolls to her bottom to look at me. She wears a pint-size yellow bikini that is, frankly, quite ludicrous in its effort to conceal. The top is made of two yellow triangles, no bigger than the triangles of peanut butter and jelly sandwich I make for her every afternoon, and because the top ties at the back of her neck, and because she is a squirmy child, the triangles have fallen to reveal nothing more than two copper-pink nipples, flat as pennies on her chest. Between the top and the bottom is a small round ball of a belly bearing a tiny twist of a belly button. Her belly button is something that, even at four, continues to fascinate her. She curls over her own body in order to peer into it. “Why do I got a belly button?” she asks me again.
I turn over to my back and pull my T-shirt up to feel the sun on my ribs. “Your belly button once had a long tube coming out of it that connected you to me when you were in my tummy. Remember? I told you this?”
“And we were like one person—right?”
“Right.”
“And all the stuff I needed to be born came from you in my belly button—right?”
“That’s right.” I roll down the top of my running shorts and feel the sun’s warmth spread to my hip bones, pat my stomach and remember the mound of her that once rose in it. A small motorboat goes by, and the wake sets the water to slapping against the piling. There is a whiff of diesel in the air and I open one eye to a small dissipating billow of dark smoke.
“And all little kids get a belly button from their mommy, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But not from their daddy, right?”
“Right,” I say, but we are treading dangerous territory here, so I remind her that her daddy took care of me so I could take care of her.
“Then Daddy left, right?”
“No, honey.” And this is where it gets tricky. “Daddy just lives somewhere else. He just doesn’t live with us.”
“Right,” she says, with a kind of conviction that makes me certain she is filing this under Things to Remember.
Suddenly, she gasps and I feel her finger poke into my stomach. My eyes fly open and I sit up. “Quit it, Tasha—you’re tickling me!”
“You have a belly button, too!” she says.
“Well, of course, silly, everyone has a belly button. You’ve seen my belly button. It’s just like yours.”
Her little brows furrow and then rise in surprise. “Then you have a mommy, too!” she says. “Did you get your belly button from when your mommy took care of you and got you ready to be borned?” But she’s too excited to wait for an answer. She is on her knees peering deep into my stomach and trying to push my upper body back so that she can find it again in the fold of my waist. Her hands are sticky on my skin and I grab one and kiss it to distract her as I am pulling my shirt down. “That tickles, stop!”
“Let me see, Mommy.”
“Tasha, everyone has a belly button. Everyone has to have a belly button to be born.”
“But I didn’t think you had a belly button, Mommy. I didn’t remember you did!”
“Why on earth not?”
“’Cause I didn’t know you had a mommy. Where’s your mommy?”
I look at her now, her eyes searching mine.
“Where’s your mommy?” She is still. The boat has moved farther down the river and its motor is just a soft hum, expectant, waiting. There is a shift in the air and a faint breeze shimmies off the river, lifting strands of her hair so that they twist and fall along her face. I push her hair back from her eyes and she tilts her head, juts out her chin, takes in a tiny patient breath that she will hold until I answer her.
I take a breath of my own and, as much as I try not to, I cannot help but imagine. I imagine her standing stock-still and blinking into the sunlight where only a moment before I had been standing. Where one moment she was a mother’s daughter, and in the next she is alone with only terror rising in her throat and a button of a scar to remind her of me.
“I don’t know,” I manage to say. “I just don’t know.”
