Into This River I Drown (14 page)

“Even I can’t stop death,” the angel Calliel says hoarsely. “No matter how much I wish it so.”

The sun continues to rise on a new day so very different from the ones that have come before.

part ii: black

The man at the end of his life did not want to cross the river.

Others had come to the shore and crossed with smiles on their faces.

The River Crosser came back each time and held out his hand to the man, but the

 man always took a step back because the hand scared him.

Once, while the River Crosser was on the opposite side of the river, the man at the

 end of his life went to the edge to look at his reflection in the water.

He kneeled on the bank and leaned over as far as he dared, careful not to fall in.

He saw that he did not have a reflection. Everything was black.

the woven design

By the
time the sun is completely over the mountains, I can barely keep my eyes open. Cal has been quiet ever since I asked him about guarding my father, but the sunrise seems to soothe him, at least partially. He smiles at me as I yawn big, my jaw cracking. My eyes droop and my chin falls to my chest before I jerk awake.

“I gotta get some sleep,” I mumble at him. He nods and pulls me up. He makes me wait while he goes down the ladder first and then holds it as I step down each rung, staring up at me intently.
He’s guarding
, I tell myself sleepily, ignoring that twinge in my chest. We are in the house and down the hall before a thought occurs to me. “Are you tired?”
Do you even sleep?

He shrugs. “I may need to rest my eyes,” he says.

I resist the urge to have him explain further. I don’t think my brain can handle anything more than what I’ve already been told. Part of me is still convinced this is the world’s longest dream and that I’m going to wake up in my bed in an empty house, Cal already fading from my mind, forgotten in a week’s time. I show him the spare room across from mine, which has a large bed with clean sheets. I tell him to check the drawers because I’m pretty sure there are some of my dad’s old clothes in there. I tell him it’s probably a good idea for him to change out of his skirt/tunic thing until we can figure out something more appropriate. He nods, but doesn’t go into the room.

“You’re not going to leave, are you?” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

He watches me for a moment. “No, Benji. I won’t leave.”

I nod, my eyes starting to close on their own. “Just don’t leave the house yet,” I mumble to him as I turn. “And if someone knocks on the door, just ignore it. Don’t need you telling them everything about themselves and that you know God personally or some bullshit.”

“Then what should I tell them?” he asks, sounding confused.

“I’ll be up in a while,” I say. I close the door behind me.

“Good morning, Benji,” I think I hear him say quietly through the door, but I can’t be sure if I have imagined it.

My eyes
open and I’m standing at mile marker seventy-seven. Rain falls from a gray sky. Thunder rumbles in the distance. The river looks swollen against the banks, the water dark and choppy.

I look up to the sky and say, “I am not here.” Rain falls into my mouth and I choke.

There’s a flash and the rain has turned to feathers.

Flash. Feathers turn back to rain.

“I’m haunted,” I say, my voice flat.

And I am. I know this. I am haunted here at this river.

There’s another flash and I’m down by the riverbank, mud squishing up against my boots. There’s a cross, starkly white. Then there are a million of them. Then there are none. Another flash. Feathers on the river, covering the surface. Then there are none.

The river beckons. I take a step toward it.

A truck on the road, the engine roaring. The sound of metal striking metal, grating and sharp. The truck sails over the edge, bouncing on the bank behind me. It strikes a large boulder. It flips, landing upside down into the river, its back end angled up toward the sky. The rear tires spin lazily until they stop.

There’s a flash and I’m knee-deep in the water, the current pressing against my legs, my feet sinking in river mud.

I’ve been here before. I’ve been at this moment before.

An arm, a strong arm, will slip around my chest, and a voice will tell me I cannot cross, I cannot be allowed to drown. I turn my head swiftly, but there is no one behind me. Movement catches my eye up on the road.

A figure silhouetted against the gray-white clouds, staring down at me.

“Help me!” I scream as I wave my arms over my head. “My
dad
is in there!”

But the figure does nothing. They don’t call back. They don’t wave back. They just watch. They just watch as the cab of the truck behind me slowly fills with river water. They do nothing. They say nothing.

I turn back toward my father. I’m going to get him out. I’m going to change this. I’m going to fix this. The future will be changed because I am here. I am here. I am—

“No, Benji,” a strong voice says from behind me. An arm wraps around my chest, pulling me against a large body filled with so much warmth it’s like he’s burning from the inside out. “You’ll drown. You’ll drown here and I can’t watch that. I can’t let that happen. Not now. Not ever.”

I struggle against him, but it’s no use. I scream at him to let me go, but he doesn’t. He won’t. He’s too big. Too strong. I moan and sag against him, the fight draining as quickly as it has come.

“I will help you carry this burden,” he whispers in my ear. “I will carry you.”

There’s another flash and the roar of the river and I—

will carry you

—open my eyes to a sunlit room.
My
sunlit room. My heart thumps against my chest, my breathing is rapid.
A dream
, I think.
Everything was a dream.
I’m sure of this now. None of what I remember happening
did
happen. I know it didn’t. There was no storm. No light fell from the sky. I did not cross the river. I did not find an angel.

Calliel.
A name that causes a twinge in my chest.

I sit up and put my feet on the floor. I listen to Little House. It tells me nothing. But that
means
nothing. He—

could be on the roof again

—was nothing more than a figment of my attention-starved imagination, something my lonely mind created, someone big and solid who said he came here because I called him, because
I
drew him here. Things like that don’t happen, not in real life.

So why am I still listening for him?

I find my resolve buried deep. I stand, my knees popping. I glance at the clock. It’s almost noon. I reach for the doorknob, hesitating. Only the silence of Little House allows me to move forward. I open the door.

Calliel is splayed out on the floor in the hallway outside my bedroom door. He’s taken the comforter and a pillow off the bed in the spare room and dragged them into the hallway. The blanket has been kicked around in his slumber (
I guess angels
do
sleep,
I think). He’s found sweatpants to change into, from somewhere, and they’re a little too small for him, clinging tightly to his thighs. He’s not wearing a shirt, his biceps tight against the top of the comforter. He lies on his side, facing the door. I am mesmerized by the smattering of freckles scattered down his shoulders and his side, light brown and evenly spaced, as if they are forming a pattern. They disappear into the curls of his chest hair. I lose count of them once I reach thirty. I lift my gaze to his face and his dark eyes are open.

“Hello,” he says.

“Why are you on the floor?” I ask, though a billion other things are on my mind. “I told you that you could use the bed in there.”

He sits up and stretches, looking surprised when his back pops loudly. He stands, letting the blanket fall to the floor. I’m hyperaware of how close he is to me and take an involuntary step backward as I struggle to breathe. “I was doing my job,” he says, his voice pitched low, almost defiant.

“Guarding?” I ask.

He nods.

“I don’t need to be guarded.”

“You do,” Cal assures me.

“From what?”

He gives me that exasperated look I’m starting to recognize. It’s almost endearing now. “You know.”

The river.
“You can’t read my thoughts but you can go into my dreams?”

He says nothing.

“Why won’t you let me…?”

His eyes harden. “It’s dangerous, Benji. You don’t know what you’re looking at.”

Truer words were never spoken
, I think as I stare up at him. I need to change the subject. I can’t let him go on with this. It suddenly seems important, this dream. I’d gotten further into the river than I had last time, seen more—the tires spinning on the truck, the figure standing up on the road in the rain. I need to distract him somehow. An idea, something I’d considered as I fell asleep the night before. “What about the others?” I ask.

This confuses him. “What do you mean?”

“The other people of Roseland. You said you were the guardian angel to Roseland, right? How can you be protecting everyone if you’re here?”

He studies me before he speaks, as if gauging my sincerity. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve fooled him. He seems, at times, to have an almost simple demeanor. But other times, like now, the intelligence that flares behind his eyes is a breathtaking thing. He knows my game, but he’s letting it slide. For now.

“There are shapes,” he says. “Patterns to follow. Designs to read. It’s… hard to explain.”

I wait.

He sighs and steps back, leaning against the wall near the spare bedroom door. I try to focus on what he’s saying instead of looking at the muscles carved into his stomach, the lines of his hips, the white that is his skin. “I can’t tell the future,” he says, sounding almost frustrated, as if this fact is the bane of his existence. “I can’t speak to God’s plan. I don’t think anyone can, even the higher-ups, the archangels. Sometimes I wonder what exactly Michael knows, or what Raphael or Gabriel or David can see, but I don’t think even they know what the future will bring. Metatron may have known, but no one has seen him in generations, so I can’t say for sure.”

My head is starting to hurt again. “Metatron?” I mutter. “More than meets the eye?”

Apparently he doesn’t get my feeble attempt at a joke, the seriousness never leaving his face. “Metatron is the highest angel, supposedly the first. But he disappeared and no one knows where he went. He’s more legend now than fact.”

My weak understanding of any kind of religion is fairly evident. My dad and mom were never ones to go to church. About half of Roseland goes to Our Mother of Sorrows, the local Catholic church. Different faiths head to nearby towns to worship. I asked Big Eddie once why we didn’t go. He told me that a man should be free to choose to do as he pleases on Sundays, even if it meant watching the Seahawks. I never argued with the logic of my father.

The names are familiar (Raphael and Michael, Gabriel and David) but he might as well be speaking in Latin for all I understand. It might be too early for an angel hierarchy lesson. I shake my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “What does this have to do with Roseland?”

“It’s the pattern,” he explains. “I can see threads weaving out from Heaven and down toward Earth. They form shapes. An outline. A design for each human being on the planet. Think of it like… like a loom, and these threads are woven, a plan for an individual. While I can’t see them being woven, I pick up the ends of the threads and follow them. There are signs in them, signs that I have to watch for, of actions that I must take, or actions that I must
not
take. And they’re all connected, some way or another. You humans are more connected to each other than you could ever realize. You may not see it, but I do. I see it every day.”

“And this is God telling you to do this?” I ask, incredulous. “How can you know if you’ve never even seen him?”

“Faith, Benji,” Calliel says, like it’s that simple. And maybe to him it is. “I have faith that my Father knows what he is doing, that he knows what is right. That he has a plan for the way things will turn out.” His eyes darken and he frowns at this last, but the moment passes. I almost call him on it, but I don’t know what he’d do. He still scares the royal fuck out of me.

“And God does this for
everyone
on this planet?”

He laughs, and it’s a big sound. “Everyone here and everywhere else.”

“What do you mean ‘everywhere else’?”

“Questions,” he growls at me, but there’s a small smirk there. “Always with the questions. There are more…
places
… than this one.”

I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to know. I’ve already got too much going on inside my head to know that there are aliens.”

He grins at me. It’s almost feral.

“Can you see
my
thread?” I ask, feeling ridiculous.

His eyes light up. He nods. “Started again this morning. I can see them. Feel them.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s blue,” he says immediately. “It’s blue and strong. Far stronger than you could ever know. It’s so bright. So bright and strong.”

“Oh,” I’m unsure what to do with that.

It’s blue
.
Everything I have is blue.
I don’t know where the thought comes from.

The river,
my father’s voice whispers in my head.
It all comes back to the river.

“One last question,” I say, considering.

Calliel sighs, but waits.

“You said I called you and you came, right?”

He nods, his eyes starting to cloud over.

“Have others done that before? You know, other angels?”

At first there’s nothing, and I think I’m not going to get an answer, but then he shakes his head, just once.

“You’re the first?” My skin feels cold.