Meet Me at the River (7 page)

Paul tries to smile at me as he pulls a bottle of white
wine from the refrigerator and I pick up the wooden salad spoons. “This is a perfect winter dinner,” he says to my mother, or me, or both of us. The last, I think. Paul rarely says anything directly to me. It is not just since Luke and I fell in love that things have been awkward between us, and it is not just since Luke died. Ever since Paul first discovered my existence, I have been his chief competition and an unavoidable remnant of my mother’s escape. If it weren’t for me, he could pretend that she had always lived here with him, playing Barbie to his Ken in their mountain Dreamhouse.

It may seem like I hate Paul, but I don’t, not exactly. I respect the love that he and my mother have. Although I don’t see much of Luke in him (in looks and mannerisms Luke seems almost entirely Francine’s), I recognize pieces of Luke and me in Paul and my mother. There is something about their rapport that indicates a long, intense, and destined-to-be-repeated history.

My theory about Paul is that his good looks have ruined him. Born beautiful and athletic, he never had to develop much of a personality or make an effort to charm anyone. I guess the same could be said of my mother if it weren’t for all that nervous energy. Mom is too self-conscious to be believable as Barbie. She’s too fluttery and—in her heart at least—too much of a flake.

Paul, on the other hand, fits Ken perfectly. Like a plastic doll, he barely feels the need to speak at all. He just pulls his good-looking sweaters over his good-looking
head and lets them hang from his good-looking shoulders. His good-looking face has weathered in a good-looking way, and there is good-looking gray at his good-looking temples. He never needs to pick up the phone to call the world, because he knows the world will call him. The only thing in Paul’s entire life that ever eluded him now bustles around his kitchen, domestic and pregnant and basting chicken.

I carry the salad to the table as Paul fills his glass with wine, then pours spring water for both my mother and me. Of course. He is not the sort to give liquor to the pregnant or the underage. I have searched his eyes for some sort of twinkle, some sort of spark, and have never found any. The only things extraordinary about Paul are his bank balances and my mother. And of course Luke.

I take a sip of water and say, “I got invited to ski in Telluride on Saturday.”

“Oh, honey, that’s
great
,” my mother says immediately.

At the same time Paul asks, “Who with?” Their voices meld together, one bright and overexcited, the other suspicious and thrown off its game.

“Evie and H. J. Burdick,” I say, and both Paul and Mom stop their movements for a moment.

The first words out of my mother’s mouth are, “The poor Burdicks.” And then she says, “The boy, too?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Both of them.”

My mother scoots past Paul to take her seat. He shoots her a good-looking frown as he begins to carve
the chicken. “H. J.,” Paul says. “Wasn’t he in Jill and Katie’s class?”

Mom nods, but really, how would she know? Then she fesses up, saying, “I haven’t seen H. J. since he was a little boy. He used to look so much like Jenny. Remember, Paul?”

At Paul’s silence my mother looks toward me and tilts her head to one side and then the other, as if considering, as if this is something she needs to weigh before granting or denying permission. Probably they are both wishing I could go skiing with some normal kids, not people sullied by tragedy like me.

“Mom,” I say. “I don’t have to go, if you don’t want me to.”

She reaches out and touches my hand. “No,” she says. “Of course I want you to go. But it’s a mom’s job to worry, right?”

She tilts her head, and I tilt mine in the opposite direction. I like it when she asks this sort of question, her tone ironic enough to admit she knows her current persona is partly an act. Over the summer I had enough therapy to understand the unfairness of my disliking her attempts at Happy Homemaker, when while I was growing up, that was all I ever wanted from her. I know Mom wants me to rediscover the joy in life (thereby continuing to live). But she’s also visualizing me skiing into a tree, on purpose, at full speed.

For no particular reason I think of H. J. in the hall at
school with Mr. Tynan.
Massively inappropriate
. I feel as if I’ve heard that phrase before, possibly in connection with me and Luke. “Tressa,” Jill once complained. “He’s my
brother
.”

“But he’s not mine,” I told her—compliant in every other area of my life, but defiant in that one.

Paul passes out plates laden with chicken and potatoes. He takes a sip of wine. “Well,” he says, as if after briefly considering he has come to a decision. “I think that will be fine, for you to go skiing with the Burdick kids.”

My mother moves her hand from mine to touch Paul. They smile at each other, so pleased in their joint parenting that for a second I want to tell them that I’ve changed my mind and won’t go skiing after all.

*   *   *

After dinner I take my time. I clean up the kitchen while my mother gets off her feet and Paul answers e-mail in his study. Instead of going upstairs to my own desk, I spread my books across the dining room table and work there. I do my homework carefully, double-checking, studying much longer than I need to for tomorrow’s Human Behavior quiz.

When my finished work is stored in my backpack, I take out a fresh piece of paper and draw a map of the kitchen. Drawing maps is the one thing I haven’t been able to stop doing. Something about visualizing the place where I am, and not just drawing it but
charting
it—the process stops my brain from worrying. It calms
me down. You couldn’t use my maps to find your way anywhere. I’m no cartographer, and they’re not exactly to scale, or even anything like accurate. But drawing them makes me feel like I know where I am. When I was little, I used to love imitating those maps at malls, with the little arrow.
YOU ARE HERE
. Even in the hospital I couldn’t stop myself. I drew maps of my room, the courtyard, the cafeteria. The mountains that I could see through my window but never got to explore.

Now I let my pencil flutter over the page. It’s almost like I’m using a Ouija board, just letting the pencil guide me. My oil pastels are upstairs, so for now I content myself with this sketch. A chicken on the table. A spatula represents my mother, standing at the stove—I draw dollar signs for its burners.

About thirty minutes later I make myself a cup of tea and head upstairs to the “kids” room—where Jill and Katie used to play, and after that, Luke. Where the new baby will play. I sit down with my map at the old art table and run my hand over a black Sharpie mark. Maybe Luke is the one who left it there. This makes me picture him standing outside, staring through my window as if he’s the outsider. I wish, for the thousandth or millionth time, that we could trade places. Then I color in my map of the kitchen with chalky whites and steel gray.

As I work, I think about Evie, and after a while I put the map aside and turn on the computer. The only people who e-mail me are my old friend Isabelle and
my sisters—Jill from Denver and Katie from LA—so I don’t bother checking e-mail. Instead I do something I haven’t done in a million years, not since I first got home from the hospital. I log on to Facebook. It’s not exactly something that brings me back to glory days. It probably sounds crazy, but I never even had an e-mail account until I was sixteen, and I’ve never been in the running for a popularity contest. In fact, I have exactly three Facebook friends, the same people who send me e-mail. Mostly I used my account to store photos, as a backup to my computer files. Luke and I were never friends on Facebook, because our mothers monitored our accounts—a pretty easy task, in my case, though I imagine Luke had plenty of traffic on his page. I wonder how his wall must look now. I imagine all the notes people must have posted after he died.

I go to the search bar and type in “Evie Burdick.” When I find her, I hit Add Friend and then stare for a while at her profile picture, which was taken from a chairlift. She’s skiing down a very steep run, looking like a pro, and I suspect I won’t see much of her on Saturday.

For a moment I think about typing in Luke’s name. I wonder what would come up, what I’d be able to see. I remember the sad look on Kelly Boynton’s face today, walking down the hallway with Francine, and I find myself typing in her name instead. When I get to her page, her profile picture is just a shivering stand
of aspens. Considering how pretty she is, this modesty impresses me, even though I realize that, like me, her parents might not allow her to post a public picture of herself.

I navigate over to
Amazon.com
and look up Evie’s book,
Lover of Unreason
. It turns out to be about a woman I’ve never heard of named Assia Wevill, who was, according to the subtitle of the book, “Sylvia Plath’s rival and Ted Hughes’s doomed love.” I know about Sylvia Plath vaguely, from a couple poems in English class. I know she committed suicide. According to the synopsis on Amazon, this woman Assia Wevill committed suicide too. So of course Evie would try to hide that book from me. I wonder if that impulse stemmed from not wanting to remind me of my own suicide attempt, or from self-protection—not wanting to confess her own preoccupation, given her family history. Probably, I decide, a little bit of both. I click Add to Cart and charge the book to Paul’s account. Then I go into Jill’s room to search her bookshelves. There it is, right where I remember seeing it—an old, frayed copy of
The Bell Jar
. I open it and read the first few lines of the introduction.

It says that Sylvia Plath committed suicide a month after the book was published. It also says that she had two little kids and was separated from her husband, a poet named Ted Hughes. I read a little further, till I find out she was diagnosed with clinical depression.

At the hospital Dr. Reisner used those same words to describe me. He said that in addition to suffering from acute post-traumatic stress disorder, I was clinically depressed. I snap the book shut and tuck it under my arm.

Upstairs, getting ready for bed, I take care not to rush my preparations. There can’t be any hurrying the night. I know this because I used to try. After dinner I would hop to my feet and slam my dishes into the dishwasher, then plead a headache and rush up to my room. I would brush my teeth and pull on my nightgown, then crawl under the covers and wait, sitting up, hugging my knees to my chest.

Now I know my mind needs to be quiet. I need to move slowly, as if I don’t expect anything. I wash my face very carefully. I floss and rinse with Listerine. I sit up in bed reading awhile. Plath’s novel, I know, is autobiographical, and I search her words for something of myself. I like the differences between me and her protagonist, Esther Greenwood—the disdain for love, the disgust with her tubercular boyfriend. I keep reading until I reach a scene where Esther dances with a man who tells her, “Pretend you are drowning.”

I close the book abruptly, planning to collect myself and then go on reading. But a dreamy tiredness settles itself around me, and the next thing I know, at some nameless time of night—the sky completely dark and the trees rustling outside my window—my eyes flutter
open.
The Bell Jar
rises and falls on my chest, and I know Luke will appear at any moment.

But he doesn’t. I sit up in bed, wondering how I could be wrong. Not that I haven’t expected him and been disappointed before. But there’s a very specific feeling to his arrival, and I know this time that I’m not wrong. It’s like when you’re waiting for someone’s car in the driveway; you may think you hear it a million times, but the second those wheels actually hit the gravel, you know that this is it, now, finally that person has indisputably arrived.

I push the covers aside and go to the window. I push it open and lean outside. In the short time I slept, snow began to fall again. It gathers in my hair as I search the ground for signs of Luke. I have never looked for him outside before. I don’t even know if he would leave footprints.

And then I see it—written on my windowsill in the fresh snow. Clear, printed capital letters that must have been written moments ago—already the snow gathers in their grooves, obscuring the words:

MEET ME AT THE RIVER

Instantly, without thinking, I use the bare flat of my palm to sweep the snow and its message off the sill. As soon as it’s done, I bury my hands in my hair. “What
did you
do
?” I ask myself, too loud. There on the sill, a message from Luke, something he’d written. And now it’s gone, and I can never get it back.

But I’m not just talking to myself. Because Luke must know—how could he not—that even though I know the exact spot where he’ll be waiting, I can’t possibly meet him at the river.

Rabbitbrush has creeks and rivulets and streams by the tens. But whenever anyone says “the river,” there’s no need for explanation. The Sustantivo River wends its way through four hundred miles of Colorado, New Mexico, and one corner of Utah. Our piece of this waterway is one of the town’s few hopes for tourists, with fishing and kayaking and white-water rafting. The Sustantivo curves along rocky red banks; it bisects my grandparents’ land, winding through their property. The trek would require long underwear and snow pants, gloves and a scarf and hat, my Sorels, or maybe even cross-country skis. I would have to trudge through miles of snowy darkness, and then back again, past all sorts of nocturnal wildlife, through freezing temperatures.

None of which is the reason I slam the window shut and crawl back under the covers, my palm tingling with the melted frost, my shoulders shaking, my hair damp. It’s painful, physically painful, to crouch still in this way while Luke waits for me at the one place on earth where I simply cannot go. Because even though the river runs
slowly this time of year, even though at this moment its banks are covered with freshly fallen snow, its lazy pace preventing it from freezing into stillness—one sight of those frigid, running waters, and I cannot promise anyone that I could keep from hurling myself into its current.