Into This River I Drown (6 page)

Chills flash down my spine. “What’s soon, Nina? What will I see?”

She smiles and it’s kind. She thinks for a moment, as if trying to carefully decide what to say. Finally, she decides on a single word and says it aloud before she turns back and opens the door to Big House, then closes it behind her, leaving me in the dark, the sounds of crickets and the wind through the pine needles fading, as the one word echoes back to me, the only thing I hear.

Everything
.

Little House
is empty. Nina spooked me more than I care to admit, and I go room to room, turning on the lights, checking under beds, in cabinets. Closets. Drawers. Nothing. There’s nothing here. No one. Little House is empty.

And at the same time, it’s not.

I can’t help but feel someone behind me everywhere I turn, like I’m being followed. I catch myself in the mirror, my skin white, my eyes blown out, black overtaking green. I look detached. I look like I haven’t slept in days. Weeks. I look insane. I look unreal.

“It’s empty,” I mutter to myself. “This whole place is empty.”

I’m lying to myself.

Without letting myself think about why, I leave the hallway light on and my bedroom door cracked, so a little sliver of light lands on my bed. I’m exhausted. My head hits the pillow and I think I’ll drop off immediately. I’m ready for today to be over.

Twenty minutes later, I’m still awake.

Blue. There is so much blue.

You’re drowning.

Into this river—

You are my son.

Cause of death: asphyxia due to suffocation caused by water—

It isn’t true! He can’t be dead! He’s not gone, you bas—

Do you know who I am?

You’re my
dad—

I sigh and roll on my side, trying to shut my brain off.

I open my eyes.

A river runs next to my bed.

As soon as I see it, the roar of it hits me, assaulting my senses. Water crashes against rocks, rapids carrying chunks of debris onward. Mist hits my face. I lift the blanket from my body and put my feet on the ground. Grass beneath my toes. Stones. Dirt. Mud.

I stand.

Little House collapses around me with a groan and suddenly it’s an early gray summer morning, weak light shining through the thickening clouds. Rain starts to fall, and fat drops splash on my shoulders and head.
Dream
, I think as I stick out my tongue, catching a raindrop, clean and fresh, free of grit.
This is a dream
. I turn on the riverbank. My bed is gone. The embankment stretches up behind me at a steep incline, and at the top, just over the rise, a rectangular green sign peeks out. A mile marker. I can see the tops of two numbers, two horizontal lines. Seventy-seven.

“Benji,” a voice says quietly, deep and rough. It should startle me, but it doesn’t. I feel warm. Alive. The voice makes me feel alive. More than I’ve felt in years.

I turn and there’s a flash of blue, and a great noise, like the flutter of something huge. I look up, rain falling into my eyes. A single feather, a foot in length, falls toward me. I raise my hand out in front of me, palm skyward. The feather lands on my hand, brushing against my fingers. It’s a deep navy blue that causes my bones to ache. It feels like the softest silk against my fingertips. I lift the feather to my nose and inhale. It smells like the rain around me, wet and wild. Full earth. Pungent. Strong.

“Benji,” a different voice says, and the warmth I’m feeling vanishes. This voice is dark and wet. My name is gargled on its tongue. I clutch the feather in my hand as I look up.

“Benji,” the river says again.

I take a step toward it, the feather hardening in my hand.

Then, above the rushing water, above the rain, above the voices calling out my name, comes a different noise. It is low, guttural. An engine roars. I hear brakes squealing, the crash of metal against metal. I spin around, my feet sliding on mud and grass. There’s another crash, this sound greater than anything around me.

A red truck sails over the embankment, rolling to the left in midair, its engine racing. It lands seven feet from me on its left tires, before it crashes down onto all four. But the momentum is too great for it to stop and it bounces toward the river. A great boulder rests on the river’s edge. The truck starts to veer right, as if trying to avoid the impact, but it catches the left front tire. There’s a loud crack as the axle breaks apart. The truck flips and lands in the river, water splashing high over the banks. The tires continue to spin seconds later, until they slow to a stop, the truck on its back and nose down in the water, the tail end sticking up at a sharp angle against the gray sky, the brake lights at odds with the fading light.

The feather is burning in my hand.

Without thinking, I run toward the river’s edge. The water is fiercely cold when I jump from the bank, knee deep. The second my feet hit the soft riverbed, mud rises up around my ankles and begins to pull me down. I fight it, wrenching my left leg up, feeling pain as the muscles in my legs shriek from the strain. My right leg follows. But every time I bring my foot down again, the mud wraps around me.

“Dad!” I shout through the rain.

The engine floods and cuts out. The truck shifts within the current and scrapes against rock. The sound causes my jaw to clench, my ears to ring. I stumble when my foot becomes stuck, splashing my face down into the water, the cold a numbing thing, immediately forcing its way down my throat. I scrabble into the riverbed with my left hand, but it too becomes entrenched in mud. I gag and start to choke. I force my eyes open, blinking away the sting, but I can’t see, the water is moving too swiftly. The more I fight, the more tired I get. Lights begin to flash behind my eyes as the water enters my lungs.

My right hand floats up near my face. The feather is still there, clutched tightly. The silky blue flutters slowly. It brushes my face.
Oh, please
, I think.
I’m drowning. Oh, please. Help me.

A big hand clamps down on my shoulder, the grip tight and biting, and all I can see is
blue
and all I think is
blue
and all I can hear is
blue
. My head breaches the surface, water spraying in all directions. I vomit a thick stream of river and begin to gasp for air. I open my eyes and the sky around me is
filled
with feathers, all dark, all blue, all raining down from the sky.

The hand slips from my shoulder and wraps around my chest, pulling me back until I’m pressed against something large and warm. I look down at the arm around me, thick and strong, a fine layer of auburn hair running up to the back of the gigantic hand. I’m lifted up with this one arm, pulled up the body behind me, through a shower of blue feathers that continues to fall. I struggle, but the strength around me is too great, and I catch a last glimpse of the truck upside down in the river before my vision is blocked by a moving wall of dark blue from either side of me that carries a rustling that sounds like wind over bones. I’m wrapped into this cocoon and I breathe it in.
Earth
, I think.

“You shouldn’t be here,” a voice says in my ear, the arm around me clenching tighter. “This is not a place for you. You are not ready to cross. You will drown. I cannot allow that to happen.” As he speaks, his lips scrape against my neck and I shiver, droplets of water falling from my hair.

“But—”

The two sides of the cocoon flash open in front of me, and even as I recognize them for what they are, there is a bright flash of blue and I am flung upward, toward the gray clouds above me, the sky bending inward, to a point, as if being pulled from the other side. I fly up through this apex and feel a flash of extreme vertigo as my world flips upside down and I fall from the ceiling of Little House and land in my bed with a crash, the frame groaning beneath me.

I sit up, gasping, my eyes flashing open, kicking the covers away from me, pushing up against the backboard.

A dream
.
It was just a dream.

My skin is slick with sweat, not wet with river water.

My legs are not covered in mud.

I did not almost drown.

I did not just witness my father’s accident as if it just happened.

I was not pulled from the water and wrapped in a cocoon.

But even though I know this, know
all
of this, even though I am a rational person living in the real world where nothing extraordinary ever happens, even with
all
of this, I am at a loss to explain what is in my right hand.

A large feather, of the deepest blue.

Not a cocoon.

No.

Wings
.

the man who fell from the sky

“Are
you coming down with something?” my mother asks me the next morning in the kitchen of Big House as she puts a cup of coffee in front of me. “You look really pale.” The Trio stop their chatter and lean in closer to me, trying to determine themselves if I am sick.

“Oh,” Mary says, glancing at her twin. “You do look ill.”

“Ill,” Nina parrots with a giggle. “So deathly ill. Sickly.”

“He just needs to take a day off,” Christie decides. “How many days have you worked in a row now?”

“Not that many,” I grumble. “I’m not sick. I just didn’t sleep well last night.”
And apparently I was saved by a bird-man that I took a feather from and it became real. So…
that’s
a thing too.

“Thirty-two,” my mother says as she rifles through the desk calendar. “You’ve worked thirty-two straight days. No wonder you’re getting sick.”

“I’m not sick!”

“You need to take a break,” Christie says.

“Take a break and get laid,” Mary says as she sips her coffee.

“Totally get laid,” Nina agrees.

“Do we know any homosexuals? To help him out?” Christie asks her sisters, much to my horror.

“Like, on TV? Or in real life?” Mary asks.

“Real life,” Christie says. “I think we should attempt to start local before trying to go after celebrities. Maybe by the time he’s ready, Tom Cruise will have come out.”

“He’s too old,” Mary says with a frown. “Benji needs someone younger. And far more hip.”

“I don’t know any gays,” Nina says sadly. “I must not be very hip.”

“You are very hip,” Christie reassures her. “And you do too know some gays! You know Benji here. He’s obviously a gay. And what about that lovely he-she that used to do your nails back in Seafare? What was his-her name?”

“It depended on what day it was,” Mary says. “Sometimes he was Joe Workman. Other times she was Quartina Backhand, the most dangerous woman in captivity.”

“What a lovely name that is,” Christie says. “She-males are so amazing.”

“I don’t think Benji wants a lady-man,” Nina says.

“You’re probably right,” Mary says thoughtfully. “He probably wouldn’t know what to do with him-her.”

I groan and lay my head down on my arms. “Please, just shoot me now.”

The Trio laughs.

Mom rubs her hand over the back of my head. “Girls, you’re embarrassing him. You know Benji’s a bit of a prude.”

“A bit?” Mary snorts. “He’s the biggest prude we know.”

“I am
not
a prude,” I snap at them, still hiding my face, knowing I’m blushing.

“How come your neck is turning red?” Nina asks. “Are you hot?”

“What about Carl!” Mary says excitedly. “He’s strapping
and
available
and
only one town over.”

“We tried that already, remember?” Christie asks. “It turned out he was into some very kinky things.”

Understatement. Over dinner, Carl told me that he was into fisting and wanted me to wear his arm and be his puppet.

“A prude,” my mother says lovingly. “You are taking the day off today. One of us can take the store today.”

I shake my head as I yawn. “I can’t. I’ve got two oil changes and Abe is convinced that there’s a rattling sound under the hood of the Honda, even though there never is. Today is busy.”

My mom sighs. “Then tomorrow.”

“I’ve got—”

“Benji,” all four women scold at once.

I throw my hands up in the air. “Fine. Tomorrow.”

Mom grins at me as she takes my cup from my hand and pours the coffee into a travel mug. All four women then stand in a line and I kiss their cheeks, the Trio telling me not to worry, that they will find a homosexual or two, even if they have to think on it all day.

I shake my head as my mom hands me my mug and motions for me to turn around. I do, and she lifts my backpack up and sets it on my back. They treat me like I’m twelve, but I like to think it’s more for their benefit than mine. Mom’s fussing with the zipper on the back of my bag when alarms start ringing in my head. I’m about to turn when she opens the bag to see what the zipper is caught on.

A feather falls to the floor.

I bend to scoop it up, but Mary beats me to it. “Where in the crap did you find this?” she asks, holding it close to her face.

Christie plucks it from her fingers. “This has got to be the biggest bird
ever
.”

My mother grabs it. “Benji, where did this come from?”

I make a move to take it back, but she holds it away from me. “Near Little House,” I say defensively. “I just like it, okay? Give it back.” I can’t tell them the thought of anyone other than me touching the feather makes me want to snarl and lash out. I can’t tell them I spent the remainder of last night sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, my knees curled up against my chest, watching the feather as it lay on my bed. I can’t tell them where it came from, but somehow I know it is
mine
, that it is for
me
.

“Can I see it?” Nina asks quietly.

My mother looks to me. I shrug, every fiber of my being screaming for me to take it back, that no one else should touch it, but I don’t want to be forced to explain these ridiculous feelings, seeing as how I don’t understand them myself.