River Road (9 page)

The chill from the window made me cold but rather than close the curtains I put on my coat. I started reading with a red pen in my hand to mark spelling and grammar errors but after a while I put it down and just read. I always told my students to dig deep. There was a quote from Margaret Atwood that I liked to read to them: “All writing is motivated deep down by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring someone or something back from the dead.” Many of them
had
made their journeys to their own personal hells in their stories. It felt callous to point out that a student had misspelled OxyContin in a story about how her father's addiction had wrecked her family and left her homeless at fifteen. Even the structural comments that came to mind—did we need to read about every night the author's father had come home drunk? Could he pick out one night to stand for them all?—felt beside the point.

When I'd made comments like that in class the student would usually say, “But that's how it happened!” I would try to explain, as my teachers had explained to me in my MFA workshops, that reality was not the final arbiter. The story had to work on the page. I was beginning to wonder, though, if my students didn't have it right. What did story structure have over the truth?

So I read their stories, crying at details I would have once marked as clichéd or overly sentimental. A ghost story about the local campus legend, Charlotte Blackwell, that I'd seen a dozen times before was made oddly poignant when the writer confessed that the ghost reminded her of her baby sister who had died of SIDS. A story about a family dog dying that I began with trepidation reduced me to tears when my student wrote that his dog was the first one he told he was gay. Maybe it was because standing in front of all those people at the vigil had flayed a layer of skin from my bones and I felt raw and exposed. Maybe it was the bourbon—which I had almost finished—or maybe it was that sitting here watching the dark rise from the road below I felt as if all the sadness, in my life and in the lives of my students, was flowing through my house tonight.

The last story I read was Aleesha's story about her cousin Shawna's heroin addiction. “ ‘The first time I shot up I felt like I swallowed the sky,' Shawna told me. But the last time I saw her the bruises on her arms looked like clouds before a storm.” I read the story gripping my own elbows, my fingers digging into the crooks of my arms as if hiding my own track marks.

When I picked up my pen—a black Flair, not the red one—it was to tell them that I admired their bravery and thank them for sharing their stories.

I gave them all As.
Why the hell not?
I thought. It would be my parting gift to them.

When I got to the end of Aleesha's story I saw that another paper was stuck to it, the staples of each paper clinging together. I pried the bottom paper off, hoping it was Troy's (he still hadn't emailed me his late paper), but it wasn't. The name handwritten in the top right corner was
Leia Dawson
.

I felt suddenly cold, as if someone had opened a window and let in the winter wind. I stared at the paper—at Leia's name—trying to understand how a dead girl's paper had wound up in my house. She
didn't owe me a late paper. She'd handed all her work in on time and this wasn't the fantasy story she had written for the class.

Then I remembered. She had come by to see me before the faculty party but I'd been too busy to see her. No, I'd only pretended to be too busy. I hadn't wanted to listen to her bright, happy chatter. But she hadn't come for that. She'd come to show me something she'd written.

Prof
, she'd written across the top of the paper,
I know you're beyond busy but would you take a quick look at this? It's something I wrote last year that I have a question about. Could we talk about it before break? Thanks! Leia.

She'd left it in my mailbox—and then Aleesha had left her paper on top of it. A simple explanation for a missive from the dead. Not a mystery like the daffodils, barrette, and bottle left on Leia's shrine.

I poured myself the last of the bourbon and stared at the paper—ten to fifteen pages of double-spaced typescript stapled together staring back at me reproachfully. Then I picked up Leia's paper and began reading her story.

It's quiet in here but not quiet enough to hear a pin drop, which is too bad because if a pin does drop we all have to stay until it is found and accounted for. Such are the perils of running a quilting circle in a prison.

I laughed out loud and reached for my pen, about to scrawl
What a great opening line!
across the page until I remembered that it was too late to tell Leia what a good opening it was. I read the rest of the story through tear-blurred eyes. It was clearly based on her experiences teaching at the prison, running a writing class and a quilting circle.

I find that the women are more likely to tell their stories during the quilting circle when their hands are busy and their eyes are bent down to the scraps of cloth we are piecing together.

The stories of the women emerged with the patches of cloth—
joined together with the sashing as if by a river running through all our lives.

Some of the things they've done are bad, but here those bad things are only more torn patches stitched together to make something beautiful. When
I look up from my sewing I don't see a criminal, an addict, a killer—I see myself.

My eyes blurred on this last line. I looked up from the page—into my own reflection in the window. I stared back at a wasted, spectral version of myself, hair tangled and lank, face white, eyes shadowed—a revenant come back from the land of the dead. Then the figure moved. It wasn't my reflection. It was a person standing outside my house staring at me. A person I recognized from my nightmares. It was Hannah Mulder.

*  *  *

I'm not sure how long we stayed like that, our eyes locked across the barrier of glass. The first thought I had was that she wasn't real, that I'd drunk so much that I'd begun to have hallucinations. But then I thought about the things I had found on the wall—the daffodils, the barrette, the bottle—and it suddenly made sense that Hannah was here. She was sending me messages, trying to tell me something—but what? I had to let her know I understood, that I was willing to talk to her, that I wouldn't chase her away like I had in the past. The only way I could think of doing that was to show her the bottle of Four Roses she had left. It was still in the pocket of the coat I was wearing. I started to reach for it, but the moment unlocked a spring in her. She bolted—faster than I would have thought she could move. I sprung to my feet without thinking and ran to the door, flinging it open and shouting for her to stop.

I could see her lurching through the snow heading toward the road. I followed, a shadow of her, stumbling through the deep snow in my slippers. It wasn't the first time Hannah had left things for me. When she first got out of prison I'd started finding daffodils on my doorstep, tied together with twine and notes scrawled in a childlike script. “I'm sorry” and “I want to make ammends.”

Fuck amends, I'd thought. I'd been about to get a restraining order
against her when the daffodils and notes had suddenly stopped. Why had they started up now? Was it because she had something new to make amends for? Had Sue Bennet been right that the police should be looking at her? Had
she
run over Leia?

You can make amends by clearing my name
, I thought, as I got closer to her at the bottom of the hill. She was having trouble getting over the stone wall. She had the distended belly and twiggy legs of a drunk—plus she was probably loaded. How many fifths of Four Roses had she had to drink to steel herself to face me? Certainly more than I'd had tonight. I only hoped she stayed conscious long enough to make a statement to the police when I dragged her sorry ass there.

I caught up with her just as she was clearing the wall. I lunged and grabbed for her, but my hands were clumsy from the cold and I only got a handful of her denim and fake-sheepskin jacket. Her spindly arms slipped free of the sleeves and she toppled backward into the snow on the other side of the wall. I shook the jacket at her.

“Did you think leaving flowers would make up for what you did?”

Her face crumpled as she struggled to her feet. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?” I screamed. “Is that why you left this?”

I reached inside my coat pocket and took out the fifth of Four Roses. She threw up her hands to cover her face as if she thought I would throw the bottle at her and stepped backward, shaking her head, her eyes wide and startled in the sudden wash of light as a car came around the corner. I had only time to see her expression turn from confused to terrified before the car, going too fast to stop, hit her.

“S
he was standing in the middle of the road! I didn't have time to stop!”

I looked up from Hannah's inert body to the man who had gotten out of the car. Silhouetted against the headlights he loomed like the black cutout shape of a monster, but when he crouched down beside me I recognized him.

“Ross! What are you doing here?”

“I was coming to see you—to tell you I was sorry for what happened at the vigil—and then she ran out in front of me! Is she . . . ?”

“I don't know.” My hand was on Hannah's neck. How had it gotten there? I couldn't remember the seconds between the car hitting her and my crossing the road, just as I never remembered running down the hill to Emmy. I felt a faint tick under my hand—Hannah Mulder's blood running through her veins.

“She's alive,” I said, surprised at the sound of relief in my voice. I should be angry. Why should
she
live when Emmy and Leia hadn't? “We need to call an ambulance.”

Ross fumbled in his pocket for his phone, cursed, and turned, mumbling that it was in his car. He left me alone, crouching beside Hannah. She was turned away from me, her face covered by loose, stringy hair,
her knees drawn up to her chest as if she'd tried to roll into a ball to protect herself from the impact.
Or from me
, I thought, remembering the way she'd cowered from me. How she'd stared at the bottle in my hand as if I'd meant to throw it at her. Her ankles above her thin canvas sneakers were bare and scabbed, obscene-looking in the yellow glare of Ross's headlights. The same yellow headlights I'd watched light up those lonely mountain roads with Ross six years ago—he'd been driving the little Peugeot, not the Volvo, which was probably why Hannah was still alive. But what was he doing here? What had he just said? To tell me he was sorry for how he acted at the vigil? He hadn't looked sorry. There was something strange about his being here—as strange as Hannah's showing up outside my window—but when I tried to sort it out my mind balked. I brushed back Hannah's hair from her face and caught the scent of cheap bourbon and menthol cigarettes.

“The ambulance is on the way,” Ross said, crouching down beside me. “Is she still—”

“Yes,” I said, “although I'm not sure why. She must have enough alcohol in her bloodstream to kill a person.”

“Is that why she ran into the road—Jesus! She came out of nowhere!—because she was drunk? But what were you doing with her?”

“I saw her standing outside my house. I called to her and she ran. I followed her—I thought she'd come to tell me that she was the one who hit Leia.”

“But then why would she run?” He shook his head. “Oh, Nan, I can see how it might have happened. That curve—if Leia ran out in front of you . . . that's something Leia might do. She was impulsive—brilliant, yes, beautiful, talented—but there was something in her that sometimes just had to
burst
out and she didn't always care who was in her way or who got hurt. If she ran in front of you like that . . . well, it wouldn't really be your fault.”

I stared at Ross. In the glare of the headlights his eyes looked like gouges carved into his face. Unreadable. Why was he talking about Leia
now? Was he trying to excuse himself for hitting Hannah? Did he think that if I admitted hitting Leia it would somehow excuse him for hitting Hannah? But it wasn't the same.

“Whoever hit Leia left her for dead in the road,” I said, “and I would never do that.” I tried to hold his gaze but it was like trying to grab hold of something in the dark. His eyes slid away from mine.

“I believe you. That's what I was coming to tell you—that and something Leia told me that night before you came into the kitchen—”

The wail of sirens drowned out whatever Leia had told Ross in the kitchen. Then we were surrounded by flashing lights, pinned down by them, as if Ross and I were criminals tracked down by the police. The lights blanched his face and I saw it was wet with tears.
From hitting Hannah?
I wondered.
Or from remembering Leia?
There wasn't time to find out. We were separated by the rush of paramedics and then a police officer was asking whose car it was that had hit Hannah. I heard Ross telling him that he'd been driving—no, Ms. Lewis hadn't been in the car. She'd heard the accident and come down from her house.

“Was that right?” someone asked me.

Dimly I realized that Ross was giving me the chance to recast the events of the night. I didn't have to be the crazy lady who chased Hannah Mulder onto the road straight into the path of an oncoming car. I felt a pang of gratitude toward him, but I couldn't let him take the blame for hitting Hannah by himself.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I saw Hannah outside my house and I followed her down to the road.”
Chased her
would have been more accurate. “She was standing in the road when the car came around the curve. . . .”
Backing away from me because she thought I was going to throw a bottle at her
. I wasn't being all that honest after all. “Ross couldn't have seen her.”