2007 Soft Skull Press Waterbaby a novel by Cris Mazza

A story of conquest over learned helplessness, over self-determined disability...

As children, Tam and her older brother were swimming when she suffered her first epileptic seizure. He pulled her from the water and was crowned a hero. Tam was labeled “disabled” and never swam again. And so began 30 years of vigilance, never allowing her body to betray her, never allowing her brother or her family or anyone else to influence her path.

Now, in middle age, a lifetime’s worth of control has taken its toll. Exhausted, she heads to Maine where, while working on a genealogy project, she falls under the spell of two dead women: an ancestor, Mary Catherine, who died at 33; the other, the town ghost. Through their cloistered, tragic lives Tam relives her own life over and over — until a distant cousin forces her to see herself in a new light. Tam and her distant cousin fabricate a fantasy version of their ancestors’ experience in the remote lighthouse, where it’s possible a shipwrecked baby washed to shore and irrevocably changed generations of lives.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Tam has “rescued” a baby who has been taken from his teenage mother, by sneaking it out from the small seaside hospital. She hides both mother and child with herself at the privately owned lighthouse where her ancestors once lived. There Tam goes on with her romantic quest to experience her ancestors’ tragedies and heartbreaks, until her alternate life is invaded, the events in her recreation of family history distorted, by the reappearance of her brother, a rescue-hero at the World Trade Center, now suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. And Tam, in a commanding re-entry into the water, chooses to close the book on her life of self-imposed susceptibility.