Meet Me at the River (12 page)

Sometimes in winter, during the day, Rabbitbrush seems very stark and bleak. The light goes flat and still, and if no snow has fallen for several days, the sky becomes gray and weary with the absence of moisture. Apart from the conifers, bare branches abound, everything sleeping too soundly beneath the soil.

Oddly, the night never feels bleak but—like Carlo—full of dark, pretty movement. I love this delicious air, the possibility that lurks around every corner. It’s so much better than the two of us sitting up in my room. It feels less safe, more like life. Perhaps, despite Mr. Zack’s efforts, the ice could crack beneath my skates. I imagine looking up from the frozen water, Luke kneeling above me, his hand placed flat on the ice, peering through.

But the ice stays firm. After a long while we skate to the edge of the lake. We both change into boots. I hadn’t noticed his Sorels, waiting with mine by the makeshift
bench. We both tie our skates together and drape them over our shoulders.

“I guess I have to go,” he says, his voice deep and wistful.

“I wonder what would happen,” I say, “if I tried to come with you.”

He stares at me a long moment, as if what I said has not computed. Then he takes my wrist, and we both stand. We walk through the woods together, Carlo at our side. I recognize the path where we’re headed—the river—and I know I will find myself alone at that shore. That there will be one definite way to follow him, and it won’t be simply walking by his side. I try to imagine what that transition would look like, how long it would take for me to travel—like my dog—from damaged to dead to perfect, wandering this mountain range not only with Luke and Carlo but as one of them. I can’t picture it, though, without picturing Luke—his floating body, his funeral, the sorrow left in his wake and then my own. I shake my head sharply, and we both stop at the same time, Luke and I, still managing to operate as one person, the same instincts, the same reactions. Still holding on to me, Luke says, “I wish I could keep you safe.”

We both know I will have to walk home through the snow—by myself, in the dark, among too many nocturnal creatures to name. I say, “I don’t care about being safe.” Luke looks troubled by this. My eyes close for the barest second—just a blink, I could swear. When I open them, he and Carlo are gone.

The long trudge toward the place I’m supposed to call home takes a good, long while. My complete lack of fear makes me feel eerily close to the end of this place, this world. It’s the kind of feeling Dr. Reisner would call a warning sign, and I try to remind myself how I made a promise with the best and sincerest intentions.

But I can’t stop the voice in my head.
Come out, come out
, it calls—to the mountain lion that prowls these hundred acres. To the black bear that overturns my grandparents’ garbage.
Come and find me
. I imagine my own white bones, the remnants of this body finally left behind so that the rest of me can go where it belongs—where I belong, with Luke.

*   *   *

Last year, when Mom and Paul decided Luke would corrupt my purity and ruin my future, they installed an alarm system. This was ridiculous and embarrassing in a town where nobody even bothered to lock front doors. At night, when the alarm system was engaged, if any door or window opened, it would sound a siren that connected directly to the police department. During the day, when the sirens were turned off, the alarm spoke in a tinny mechanical voice whenever we opened a door. “Front. Door,” the alarm would announce through speakers on the first and second floors, and most notably in Mom and Paul’s bedroom. A sultry but urgent female voice alerting us. “Kitchen. Door.” “Garage. Door.” It annoyed even my mother and Paul. After Luke died, they had it disconnected.

The afternoon after skating with Luke at Silver Lake, the security system truck is in our driveway when I get off the bus. I have to step around the uniformed alarm guy to walk into the kitchen. Mom stands at the refrigerator, staring into its contents like there’s some code she needs to break. When I say “Hi,” she jumps a little.

“Oh, hi,” she says, and then gestures a little too dramatically at the refrigerator. “I’m starving, but there’s nothing I can stand to eat.”

She closes the door slowly, like maybe something will jump out and catch her eye at the last second. Then she turns toward me. Her belly seems to get bigger on a daily basis, and sometimes it shifts. Today it looks weirdly pointed toward the left, and she’ll probably have to do another round of maternity clothes shopping. Her popped-out belly button is visible through the strained front of her turtleneck sweater.

“What’s with the alarm?” I say.

She crosses her arms over her stomach and says, “What do you think?” She’s been a little less careful with me since the incident with Officer Sincero. Dr. Reisner would probably call this a healthy sign. Maybe she’s not quite so scared I’ll jump ship. I worry for a second that she knows I went out last night. But then, the alarm guy has to come all the way from Durango, so it probably took a few days to get the appointment.

“Well,” I say, trying to sound lightly sarcastic. “It’ll
feel like old times having that lady back. Telling us which door is open.”

“I chose a male voice this time,” Mom says, the sternness completely shed from her voice. She’s always had that quality, the ability to abandon discomfit and become cheerful in an instant. “He gave me a whole list of options, and I picked a male voice with an Australian accent.”

I narrow my eyes. It’s the kind of joke she would have made in the old days, and I wonder if my escape the other night somehow jolted her back to the person she used to be.

“I’m totally serious,” Mom says. The alarm guy, hearing our conversation, types a code into the panel, closes and opens the kitchen door. A male voice says, “Kitchen door is
open
,” with a nice Australian accent, like after we close it, he’ll invite us over for shrimp on the barbie. Mom and I crack up. The alarm guy tells her everything is set, and she signs a work order form so he can leave.

“Listen,” she says when he’s gone, making a sweeping gesture with her arm as if pushing the laughter aside. “This was Paul’s idea, hooking the alarm back up.”

This kind of statement—passing the buck to Paul—also seems very pre-them-getting-back-together. From out of nowhere I get this memory of the two of us, Mom and me, riding in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of other people, new friends she’d just acquired. One of the warmer states, probably in the West. The dirt road was very steep. I must have been pretty young, because
I sat in Mom’s lap, her arms tight around my middle. Every time we hit a bump, the two of us flew up a little and screamed, her breath right beside my ear. I knew it was dangerous, but I also knew she wouldn’t let go. If we flew out of the truck, we’d go together.

A part of me wants to tell Mom there’s no point in reinstalling the alarm system, because I’m a total expert in circumventing it. When Luke was alive, all I had to do was unlock Carlo’s dog door and shimmy through on my belly. I may not be quite down to my original weight, but I’m close, and I don’t think I’ll have any problem getting out as much as I need to—which proves as much as anything that I’m my mother’s daughter.

“Hey,” I say, suddenly wanting to do something for her. “Is there anything you do feel like eating? I could go out and get it for you.”

Mom glances over to the hook beside the door where she keeps her car keys. I see her thinking, weighing how she feels about me behind the wheel of a car.

“Let’s go together,” she says. I dump my backpack onto a kitchen chair, and we head out. “Kitchen door is
open
,” the mechanical Aussie tells us, and we’re still laughing as we buckle up. Except for the heated leather seats, my mom’s pregnant belly, and the fact that we’re bothering with seat belts, it feels like old times—the two of us laughing, driving away together. I tell myself that in this instance it’s all right to feel happy, away from Luke, because I’m doing it for Mom.

After everything blew up with Dad and Hannah, Mom and I moved into a two-bedroom house not far from the high school. At first she rented it and then when she got her divorce settlement she bought it. The two of us ripped up the carpet and installed white oak floors she ordered from Lumber Liquidators. We did our best, but I was just a kid and she was no kind of handyman. Walking across that floor in bare feet you could feel how the boards were uneven. Every crumb and mud flake settled between the cracks.

Jill and Katie went to college pretty much right after Mom and I left. I guess they wouldn’t have lived with us anyway. But the way things timed out they didn’t have to take sides. We went from a family of five to just Mom and me. Our entire house could’ve fit into Dad’s first floor.

Dad didn’t bother to act sorry that Mom and I’d left. All he cared about was Hannah, and guess why she was gone? Because of me. That’s what his warped mind figured, anyway. When the time came for lawyers I said I didn’t want any kind of visitation, not even once-a-week dinners. Mom tried to talk me out of it. “He’s your father,” she said. But Dad said fine. No problem. I imagined him walking around his empty house. Daughters, gone. Son, gone. Wife, gone. Worst of all, True Love. Gone, gone, gone.

Sometimes I’d see him around town. He looked sad, and not because he missed Mom and me. His shoulders slumped. He didn’t have to pretend not to see me because he wasn’t looking around at anyone—just down at the sidewalk, scowling.

*   *   *

Screw them all, I decided, the summer I turned thirteen. My mother said that I fell in with the wrong crowd and she was half joking, but I guess I kind of did. I went to parties where I drank beer and smoked some pot. Nothing major or extreme, nothing that didn’t get boring very fast. Like I said before, sometimes I think about life, I watch it all happen, and I get very tired. It
looks
tiring.

After my parents got divorced I went ahead and woke up every morning. Mom and I got along fine, we ate breakfast and walked to school. When she caught me drunk, she grounded me. When she found pot in my drawer, she believed me when I told her it was a
friend’s, but grounded me anyway. Mom never made things feel like the end of the world, not even the divorce. Sometimes it didn’t feel like we’d lost anything. It felt more like we’d moved on.

*   *   *

Roaming around old moments of my life, I stumble into tenth-grade Earth Science. Mr. Camacho is talking about the big bang theory. I wouldn’t have thought this at the time, but now—listening to him—I get this picture in my head of Tressa and me standing at the edge of the universe, watching it all take shape.

But fifteen-year-old me doesn’t think that. I’m probably not even listening to Mr. Camacho. Instead I’m thinking about Kelly Boynton, who’s sitting next to me. She just moved to Rabbitbrush from a little town in New Mexico. She’s repeating ninth grade but she’s my age and in a couple of my classes. Kelly looks boyish, skinny with short hair. But pretty. She’s wearing a skirt, her bare legs look pretty great, and I’m wishing I could touch them. I remember that it bothered me how Kelly fit in around here so quick when Tressa had such a hard time. She grew up by Angel Fire so she knows how to ski, skate, etcetera, etcetera. The things that end up making a difference can seem pretty stupid. Around here if you don’t know how to ski, you might as well be in a wheelchair.

But I guess it didn’t bother me that much, because I catch Kelly looking at me. I see her back then, and also now, watching it happen again. What I do next makes
me cringe a little because it seems like stealing from Tressa. I draw a map of the classroom. It’s a very lame drawing, all stick figures and squares. The only faces I draw are for Kelly and me, and I give us big smiles. The fact that the picture looks like something a five-year-old would draw doesn’t stop me. I crumple it up and toss it onto Kelly’s desk. She uncrumples it and irons it out with her hand. Then she turns beet red. After a couple seconds she smiles and looks over at me, biting her lip a little.

*   *   *

Another summer rolls around and I turn sixteen. So does Kelly. I should go back and watch. Remember how I said I used to hold back with Tressa? Well, I didn’t do that with Kelly, and it all blew up pretty bad. Her parents found out, and they hit the roof, they wanted to have me charged with statutory rape. The one thing my dad did for me between the time I was twelve and that day at the river was talk them out of it.

Kelly’s parents told her she couldn’t see me anymore. You wouldn’t think she’d be so obedient but that was the end of it. We saw each other at school and nowhere else. In my head we’d pretty much broken up by the time Tressa came back, but Kelly told me that seeing me and Tressa together broke her heart. She said she always thought we’d get back together once everything settled down. I didn’t want to be my dad. So I told Kelly the truth—we would never get back together. I wanted to be with Tressa. That didn’t go over too well.

I want to watch what happened next, but here’s what I see instead: Tressa. She’s twelve years old, standing in a field. Maybe Rabbitbrush but it could be anywhere. She picks up a dandelion spore and blows the seeds and watches the fluff float away. I don’t have to guess what she wished for because I already know. Those years when I tried to forget about Tressa, she remembered me every day. She remembered, and waited, until we could be together again.

*   *   *

If Tressa hadn’t been living with him and Hannah, Dad probably wouldn’t have known about us. It’s not like he bothered keeping tabs on me. In fact, the day I walked out of my house and found him standing on the sidewalk, I was surprised he knew where I lived.

“Hey, Paul,” I said, mostly to piss him off. In my head I still thought of him as Dad. It must have been December because I remember exactly where I was going, to buy crayons for Mom to donate to Toys for Tots. Every year she put together a bag for them, and because of Tressa I always threw in some crayons and pencils and paper.

“I need to talk to you,” Dad said. We were both pretty bundled up, with our breath swirling in the air around us. I knew right away what this was about. Dad had finally got the thing he wanted most. This time he wasn’t going to risk anything scaring Hannah off. Like, for example, me sleeping with Tressa.