Into This River I Drown (33 page)

A large wave hits the side of my head and I’m submerged again. For a moment, I stay there. The sounds are muffled underwater, the raindrops a soothing, drumming sound above me. I have enough air. I’m not choking. I’m not drowning. I’m alive.

I open my eyes.

Silt and grit sting. I squint and make out the faint outline of the truck ahead. I bring my arms up in front of me and kick off the river bottom, taking a slow, lunging leap toward the truck.

The front left side is smashed from its impact with the boulder near the river’s edge. There’s a metallic groan up the driver’s side of the vehicle, starting at the fender, going across the door and to the rear of the truck. It could be from the boulder as well, though—

it’s from whoever ran him off the road

—I can’t be sure. The red of the truck is like a bright beacon that calls to me. I take another lunging step. Do I need air? I can’t remember the last time I took a breath. I can’t remember how long I’ve been hiding in the river. It doesn’t matter. I feel okay. I don’t feel like I’m dying. I’m not drowning. I’m fine.

I’m fine until I see the driver’s window is broken. I’m fine until a flash of white floats out of it. I’m fine until I realize it’s an arm. I’m fine until I see it’s an arm and it—

is my dad oh god that is my father

—floats up and down gently, the fingers extending in the current like it’s waving me over, beckoning me to the truck. The skin is white, so white, much whiter than my father ever was. It’s—

dead he’s dead it’s all dead

—enough to make me open my mouth. I inhale to scream, but river water pours in and I begin to choke. I kick for the surface, but it’s too late. I’m stuck under the surface, stuck in the mud and silt and current, and I can’t move. I can’t
breathe
, and I am
drowning
in this river and I—

A strong arm wraps around my chest and pulls me away.

I awake as the bed shifts, pulling me from the dream. It’s still dark, far too soon for us to head to the roof to watch the sunrise. He is moving quietly, as if to avoid waking me. He pulls on his jeans over his naked form, his skin illuminated by dim blue flashes that begin to swirl around him. A chill strikes me that has nothing to do with the sudden loss of warmth next to me.

“Where are you going?” I ask, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

He stiffens for a moment, then turns to me, the top button of his jeans still undone, the auburn fur on his stomach disappearing into the denim. He reaches down and grabs me by the back of the neck, pulling me up to kiss me deeply. I wrap my arms around him, trying to pull him back down into the bed, to cover us both deep under the comforter where we can hide until sunrise.

But he won’t come, he won’t follow me down. He breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against mine. “A thread calls,” he says roughly. “I must find it.”

“You’re going to come back?” I ask, hating the way I sound, unsure and weak.

Calliel smiles at me so brightly I have to kiss him again. “Yes,” he says. “I will come back. And then we can watch the sun come up, and I will have some green marshmallows while you tell me I should eat other things because the marshmallows aren’t good for me.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” The blue lights began to flash brighter, and I can see the faint outline of wings. “They come easier now,” he tells me. “I think I might be able to call them without seeing threads first.”

I’m relieved, because I can tell myself it means he isn’t getting weaker, like the Strange Men said. Wings mean strength. Wings mean health. Wings mean vitality. He is an angel. He is not weakening.

He slides his shirt over his head and gives me one last look before he is out the bedroom and down the hall, then the door closes on Little House with a thud.

I consider following him, but I don’t. I try to sleep again, but I can’t. I’m still awake when he returns deep in the night. The hunger he comes at me with then is something wicked and bright. I don’t ask him where he went, if he has saved anyone or merely been a presence for someone who needed him. It doesn’t matter. He has returned and he wants me. That desire is evident on his face. It’s enough.

Cal’s
return spreads quickly through Roseland. The first day is relatively quiet, given that I’m not at the store. We walk up to Big House early that morning, shortly after coming down off the roof. Cal wraps an arm around my shoulder as we walk, and I relish the feel of him against me. He is chattering away, telling me about a squirrel he saw in the forest during his self-imposed exile. It seemed to follow him over the course of the five days. He is clearly excited about the animal, and I can’t help but grin at him as he imitates the sound it made, a high-pitched squeak that he performs by sucking in his cheeks and sticking out his lips. It’s not a sound a big guy like him should be able to make.

We are barely on the porch of Big House when the door flies open and Nina barrels out, knocking me out of the way in her rush to tackle Cal. He laughs as he picks her up, spinning her in a circle, her legs kicking out as they whirl. Under his laughter, I can hear her saying, “Blue, Blue, Blue,” over and over again. He finally sets her down, brushing the tears from her face.

“I am happy to see you, little one,” he says with a smile.

She smiles sweetly for a moment… then punches him in the arm. Nina is a lot stronger than she looks, and I wince at the meaty thud. Cal grunts, though I think more from surprise than pain. He stares down at her, eyes wide. “What was that for?”

“Leaving,” she says with a scowl. “You going to do that again?”

A low blush rises up the sides of his neck and into his cheeks, reddening the skin and making his facial hair appear even brighter. “No.”

She watches him for a moment, trying to figure out if he is telling her the truth. She finally sniffs once and looks him up and down. “Good,” she says. “People missed you here, Benji especially. I was sad. We were all sad. If you do that again, I am going to be very angry with you. This is your home now, you know. You can’t just leave your home.”

It’s my turn to flush. I’ve never really thought about that. About where this is going, what he and I could mean to each other in the future. Would he stay?
Could
he stay? The Strange Men whisper in my head, saying it isn’t possible, that he is getting weaker. I shove them away when he glances at me with a low smile before looking back at my little aunt. “I promise I won’t do it again,” he says with complete seriousness.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asks with curiosity.

He hesitates for a moment. “I think so, though not in the way I thought.”

“Is that okay, then?”

“It is,” he says simply. He looks at me again and my face feels like it’s on fire.

She grabs him by the arm and pulls him toward the house. He reaches out and snags my hand, pulling me with him.

Mom
is gone. Turns out she opened the store herself that morning instead of asking Mary or Christie. I should be surprised at this, but I’m not. We each have our own ways of dealing with things. My mother and I don’t know how to articulate our feelings very well. After Big Eddie died, there would be times that days would go by before we would see one another, each of us sequestered in separate parts of the house, or in separate parts of Roseland. The Trio tried to get us together, to eat meals, to watch TV, to have conversations neither of us felt like having. It was a good effort, but none of them could really understand the depths of our heartache. We were points of a triangle: her, me, Big Eddie. It had been the three of us. But then that triangle had been shattered, leaving us to drift aimlessly.

I know people think that she, as my mother, should have been the one to direct me, to point me toward the future.
She should be offering guidance
, I’m sure they said.
Yes, she lost her husband but he lost his
father
. There’s a difference.
Maybe there was. Maybe there is. I lost my best friend on that day, but my mother also lost the only man she’d ever loved, the man who had been by her side since they were kids. Her first, her only. We didn’t have him to hold us together. Even though the Trio tried, it wasn’t the same. If we ever passed by each other in those weeks and months that followed, there was usually only a shared glance, a matching look of pain etched across our faces. That was how we grieved. That was how we dealt with the inevitability of the unknown.

Eventually we got better, though not all the way. She recovered more quickly than I did. And more completely. I am ashamed to admit there were some dark days where I resented her for her ability to move on. Every smile was like a slap to my father’s memory, every laugh an affront to the loss of my father. How dare she be happy, I thought. How dare she act like everything is right as rain and nothing will ever bother her again. The Trio was instrumental in breaking her out of her bitter shell. Christie told my mother,
You can sleep now, finally. We’re going to stay here as long as you need us. You sleep and let us carry you for a while.
I remember thinking how hollow the words sounded, how smug I thought her voice was.

But still, I let them try their consoling ways on me, only because I knew it made them feel better. For years following his death, there were false confessions about my well-being, fabricated details about how I was feeling.
I’m fine
, I told them.
Time heals all wounds,
I said as I smiled, a bitter imitation of my mother.
He wouldn’t want me to be mourning him like this
.
Big Eddie would want me to live
.

And all I wanted was for Big Eddie to be alive. To be here, with me and my mom. To make the triangle complete again so we wouldn’t have to drift, so we wouldn’t be lost within ourselves. Sometimes, I thought we grieved only because we didn’t know what else to do. We’d never find a way out of the black hole we’d created for ourselves. After a time, it became normal, safe. No one could expect much from you if you were grieving. You could slide through life without making a splash because you didn’t care. It didn’t matter who saw you or what they said. It didn’t matter what you looked like, if you were able to get yourself out of bed the next morning, even if it was raining outside. My mom took me to a specialist once down in Eugene, maybe fourteen months after Big Eddie died. He poked and prodded and eventually told us I was suffering from depression. I had laughed a genuine laugh at his diagnosis, the first laugh since I could remember through that hazy fog.
Of course I’m depressed,
I told the doctor, wiping the tears from my eyes that I wasn’t sure had come from the laughter.
That was probably the easiest diagnosis you’ve ever had to give.

The doctor wanted me on antidepressants. He wanted me to talk to someone.
Your mother is recovering,
he told me quietly.
Your aunts have made sure she is not letting herself drown. Benji, it’s so easy to drown and you could become a danger to yourself.

Poor word choice there, Doc,
I’d said sarcastically.
Maybe read the file next time before you open your fucking mouth.

He’d looked alarmed, but I was already storming out of the room.

Needless to say, I didn’t take the drugs. I didn’t talk to anyone. I ignored friends and family. People stopped calling me, asking me to hang out. My senior year of high school was a dream I can barely remember.

I lived day by day, allowing my grief to drift out into the open.

There were days I went to mile marker seventy-seven and sat in the Ford, poring over the police reports, the photographs, trying to recreate the accident, but missing so much information it was impossible. Other days I sat silently under the stone angel for hours, staring at the fifteen words that meant nothing, that gave no measure of the man buried underneath. I was obsessed with his death and the questions I did not have answers to. The stone angel offered me nothing.

It was on one of these days, the harder days, that I came home, planning on heading up to my room to look at the scene photographs again, suddenly sure I had missed something, sure that I was going to find an answer that had eluded me and the police and anyone else who had investigated my father’s death. I was going to have proof positive that my father had been murdered, that he’d been run off the road and left there to die, to drown in the river. I was practically vibrating as I opened the door, ignoring a strange sensation that felt like a hand on my shoulder, a breath on my neck. It was nothing. Just my imagination.

Voices, in the kitchen. Mary and my mother. They had not heard me enter. I heard my name. I thought about ignoring it. I needed to get upstairs, to finally discover the truth.

But I crept toward the kitchen instead. I heard Mary:
You lost your husband, but he lost his father, the only one he will ever have.

My mother murmured something in return, her voice a whisper.

Mary:
I know you can see it, hon. Big Eddie tied all of you together, but he’s
gone
. He’s not coming back. You can’t allow your son to follow him, because that’s what’s happening. He’s lost weight; he barely says a single word to anyone. The school called again and left a message. He cut class. They’re talking about expulsion, Lola. Expelling him. Not graduating. He’s got to get his grades up and he’s got to start going back to class, otherwise he’ll be held back. And then what about college?

A sigh.

I left quietly.

The next day, I went to class.

I came home and did homework.

I offered fake smiles. False laughter.

I came downstairs for dinner, ignoring the looks of surprise.

Smells good,
I said. Brightly.

After a time:
Benji, can I talk to you a moment?

Can it wait, Mom? I’m kind of behind on homework and need to get caught up.
I flash her a smile, quiet and earnest.