Riverine (4 page)

I put Corey’s watch on my wrist, and it slipped down to my hand, even on the smallest setting. But I was determined to wear it. It smelled like him, and, what was more, it softened the distance between us. I wore my dad’s oversized cement boots to get to the van, which was parked in the garage, where it had stayed relatively protected from the water due to the slight incline. As I waited for my mother to come out of the house, I stabbed my pocketknife into a sandbag. I wanted the sand to spill out like blood, like air from a punctured lung or helium from a popped balloon. I wanted to do harm to this bag. Inflict my ire quietly upon it. I’d make a sinkhole in the barrier, a slow leak that would float me away from this place forever. But it didn’t work. The whitish-gray material that secured the sand within was dense and fibrous, and it resisted the dull blade. I worked it through with a few more jabs and wiggles, dragging it lengthwise until a small gash formed. The sand inside was packed so tightly that nothing happened at all.

When my mother walked into the garage, I stashed the knife between two of the sandbags, and we set off for school. My brother sat in the bench row seat behind me, none the wiser about the hole in the kitchen wall or about the hole I’d made in our arsenal of sand. I envied his disinclination to question the world around us, to grow weary of it. His mind didn’t wake up with “Why?” in it like mine did.

My mother drove slowly along the river road, easing the front end of the blue and silver van into the water, and I watched the water filling in behind us where the vehicle had briefly parted it. I watched her face want to cry and then stop itself. Seeing this was too much for me to bear. I knew my anger would one day grow large enough to battle my father’s, even if my mother’s would not. I could not help her out of this, but how I wanted to try. Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. “You look pretty,” I said. Prettier than the girl on the hat with the tight butt. Pretty enough not to settle for being someone’s old lady, perpetually subservient and wearing sweatpants in the kitchen. When I thought I might cry, I called up my poker face. I shifted my gaze to the mailboxes that popped from the water like spring flowers. To chain-link fences half-covered in water. The roads beyond ours weren’t flooded, only the parts where the river had once been. I thought of our little house plunked down right in the middle of one of those ghost bends, and the way the bottom two feet of siding were rotting away after too many floods. From the window of the van, I saw a farmer standing in thigh-deep water in the middle of his bean field. He seemed to be having a long think about what to do. I watched him as long as I could, waiting for him to raise his fist to all that water, but he never did.

I

T
he year after a flood wiped out half the crops in the nearby fields, it was not uncommon for drought to have its way. From our front yard, the world was small and immediate, humid and hazy. One summer of intense heat, new fixtures within the boundaries of my range moved the days along: a dog, my father’s new job, biking on the road for the length of a few neighbors’ yards. On any given day, our new dog, a collie named Fido, would sleep on the porch. Her long toenails clacked against the deck when she rearranged herself in the sun, and a gigantic, cancerous tumor hung from her belly when she stood. I could peer into the living room window, where, if my father was working close to home, the television would be on and he would be napping in front of it after a long day of hoisting wooden planks and metal piping and of arranging them into towering structures. I would hear Offspring or Pearl Jam or Metallica blaring from Corey’s bedroom window. When I climbed onto the roof, I would hear Wild Bill singing “Rolling Down to Old Maui” in an Irish brogue, a deep tenor, as he fiddled with an engine that wasn’t likely ever to start. Across the street, cars came and went from the restaurant, holding families who gathered to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. I watched them carry wrapped gifts inside. Later, they would come out carrying doggy bags. Aunt Carleen’s house, two houses down the road from ours, was usually quiet, and from my perch I would see its long, rectangular roof glinting sunlight back at me.

My father had begun traveling for work to New York and Delaware and Pennsylvania, building scaffolding around some of the country’s oldest buildings so that they could be restored and repaired. He was gone for weeks at a time throughout a six-year stint, and we saw him less. He sent us photographs of himself a few hundred feet up in the air, a blurred father. I would kiss my index finger and press it onto the snapshot or newspaper clipping about the project. I wrote him letters on my mother’s legal pads:
Dear Dad, I wish we could come visit you at work, but Mom says we don’t have enough money. I love you. When are you coming home?
“Put a smile on,” my mother would say. “It could be worse.”

She meant he could be dead, like her dad was. We were lucky we had a father at all. There were always a few minutes when he returned home from work trips when everything was right—we rushed to hug him, and he seemed genuinely happy to see us. He’d give us T-shirts from the states he’d visited. He would play a card game with us for half an hour. He would speak to us at dinner. But it only lasted a little while. Soon, he would be brooding and fiery again. One wrong word at supper would devolve into an hour of screaming. Soon, he would eat supper in front of the television instead of facing us at the table, or he would spend his time working on another home improvement project. Soon, I would cower in my room again with my books, certain I was adopted. I suppose we were all surviving.

At the same time, though, our lives were improving. I went to a horseback riding camp for a week. We got an above-ground swimming pool and a new archery set, and we inherited Fido from an estate. My mother met all kinds of sad people at her job as a probate paralegal. Everyone she worked with had recently lost a loved one and was coming into some money or fighting over the settlement of an estate—who got the carriage house, who got the horses, who got the doilies, who got the oil lamp that didn’t work. She said it got so bad sometimes that some of them would have fought over garbage. If it weren’t for her, some of the grief-stricken might still have been standing there, keys in hand, surrounded by aftermath, mouths agape. She was good at helping them figure out what to do with it all. She was good at holding their hands and crying with them. Good at reminding the ones who argued of what was important. I think it was a role she liked filling. She liked to handle the big estates and say the words
millions of dollars
. Sometimes clients gave her one of their newly acquired possessions as thanks for helping them decide what to do with housefuls of inherited things. She helped them understand their new tax situation and lent a hand as they cleared through the clutter and shuffled through the ordeal of loss. Often they gave antiques or pieces of china. The dog was the only living creature she ever received. Per our inheritance, Fido came with a lifetime supply of premium dog food, paid health care, and a doghouse the size of a lawn shed. I could tell how well this dog had been loved by the way she expected love from us. On the day she came home to us, she extended her paw to me and smiled, teaching me how to love her before I’d had a chance to decide for myself whether I wanted to. I tried to give her a better name, something I could warm up to more easily than
Fido;
she pointed her snout to the sky and looked away until I came to my senses.

I also had a new cousin named Dawn, who had come to us that summer in the manner of the collie. Dawn and her father, Tully, had moved in with Aunt Carleen. The new family of three now lived in the nearby brown-and-white trailer, which was lucky for me because now I had another place to escape to. Their home sat in the center of a vast corner lot, a good place for racing or playing red rover. From our roof, I saw their entire property. The plastic Big Wheels tricycle that used to be mine rested on its side in the middle of the gravel driveway. A howling mutt chained out back slowly wrapped himself around a tree, then unwrapped and ran as far as his tether would let him. Red and yellow flowers sprouted in bright clumps, lighting up a gingerbread lawn. If I squinted, the trailer could have been a milk carton, coated with frosting and lined with graham crackers. Its scraggy shrubs, green gumdrops.

At school, I was learning about the parts of a cell. I obsessed over the idea of the perfect miniature within the perfect miniature: the idea of an atom, for example. Atoms atop atoms, eventually human. Or petal. Or tree. Or dog. The perfection of design within each thing I touched was a well of wonder that I couldn’t help plunging into. From the roof, I imagined myself round and suspended in the thick liquid of my atomic world, electrically charged, ready to connect to like atoms. Water to water. Open hand to open hand. I sat on the roof, burning my bare feet on the tarry shingles, and I saw the whole of my world—everything within the cell membrane. I made myself dizzy looking round and round, tracing the circuit of this tiny kingdom until I was sick. I would have liked to go much farther than its borders. I would have liked to visit the kids farther down the road or spend all day with kids from school. I would have liked to visit anyone at all who would let me. My legs could run forever, but there was nowhere to go.

One day, Corey, my brother, and I went fishing at the creek that fed the river, scooping up crawdads with our bare hands and coaxing minnows into the soft traps of our palms. We caught a bluegill with a piece of corn on a hook. As we began the walk home with our catch, my heart stopped. There was pressure in my chest and I couldn’t breathe or walk. Corey carried me home like a tiny bride, immobile in his arms, while my brother carried our fish back in a coffee can. By the time we reached the house, I was okay. We added the fish and the crawdad to our tank, which already held two black-and-white-striped angelfish—one male, one female. I told my mother about my heart, but she didn’t believe me. “You’re fine,” she said. “It’s growing pains.” But when it kept happening, she took me to a doctor. He used a sonogram machine to show me nothing whatsoever was wrong. But I remembered: everything in me had frozen.

II

Aunt Carleen managed a Cracker Barrel, and Uncle Tully worked at Pizza Hut. Aunt Carleen would tell us the story about the time she met Tom Cruise when she was working at a restaurant in Miami. Uncle Tully brought us kids whatever extras he could manage—the pepperoni savior of our too-long afternoons, a god among children who ate from Green Giant cans and packages of ramen noodles. Sometimes their car ran and sometimes it didn’t. One of Tully’s dark brown eyes shot sideways, which made me try extra hard to look him in the eyes when we talked. He was comical—our very own cartoon character come to life. He wore cut-off, sleeveless T-shirts and did Tasmanian Devil impersonations, his tongue flaying the air wildly, lapping up our laughter—mine, my brother’s, and Mandi’s, when she visited. Dawn was harder to coax a smile out of. Tully would get down on the floor to play Sorry! or old maid with us, on his hands and knees, not like most adults, who waited for kids to get bored with them and go find something else to do. Not like my father, who only rarely engaged us in play. We laughed and Dawn sulked, skittish and turned almost entirely inward.

Dawn was Tully’s daughter from another relationship. Three years old and she did not yet speak. The girl was like a new kitten. Startled, wet eyes and small mouth noises. No violence to speak of, just the smack of early maternal abandonment. Shy to enjoy play, a tentative batting at the thing called
ball
. I’d been paired with her as a role model. A supposedly natural situation: the older cousin who might inspire progress through the language known only by children. I had no idea what to do with her.

Behind Aunt Carleen’s house was a wide, stout pine tree that I liked to climb. I liked to lie down on its thick branches, grip the boughs with my hands, then pull them away slowly to feel the stick of sap. It gave me a magnetic, spidery feeling. Touching the rest of the world with hands that held parts of it fast to my body. I’d rather do this than play with Dawn. I understood her silence as a sign that she didn’t like me, selfishly denying that her silence was a reaction to her own troubled life.

Once, Tully surprised me with a jar of sand. It could have been anyone who received it, but it was I who walked in that day. It was summer and I had been hauling myself back and forth on my bike along the little stretch of road where we were allowed to play, hoping for something interesting to happen. I wandered over to bum a push-up pop, but instead he handed me the jar of sand. “There’s a rock inside. Find it without taking the lid off.”

I knew this trick—it kept kids busy. Our Papa Lou, my grandmother’s fifth husband, had occupied us with 52 Pickup, a game of distraction. No strategy at all. I held the jar with both hands, tipped it upside down, and peered in as I’d done with my morning cereal in search of the prize. “What color is the stone?”
Let’s make it a game
, I thought.
More than a trick
. I wanted to know what to look for, wanted to visually categorize it.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said.

But it mattered to me.
Stone
sounded more elegant than
rock. Pebble
was more fragile. I wanted to know its dimensions and qualities. What to compare it to. What I might begin to feel about it. What it might come to represent. I spun the jar clockwise, then counterclockwise. It took almost ten minutes to find it: a smooth, white stone. It was definitely not a rock, which would have been jagged and irregularly shaped. Then it disappeared, as quickly as it had surfaced. When it was gone again, merely a jar of sand again, I quickly forgot the stone’s size: a failure of memory or of seeing. Gigantic or small? Marble-sized or gumball? How white the white? Egg white or paper white? Whiteout white or whitewash white? Smoke or clouds?

“Meditation is the same thing: a stone in a jar of sand.”