Suspicious River (32 page)

“L
EILA
?”

“Leila?”

When they aren’t calling my name, they are whispering to each other.

Sticks snap under their feet.

On the other side of the river, something flashes, metal. A wristwatch, or a ring—something silver catching moonlight like a razor. Even the sharp little slivers of the river’s fish glint under the shallow edges of water.

That’s how bright the night sky is.

I move out of its white dust, then, and the river’s mirror fills with stars.

I move into the trees, the shadows of trees, where the moon hangs over me with nothing on its butcher hook—only a few leaves still clinging to the very top of the trees, high up, waving down at me like the little hands of children from the sky—snagged in branches, trapped there until the first snow drags them down. “Hello?”

“Leila?”

“Are you there?”

“Leila?”

“Leila, wait.”

I hear footsteps in the water, crossing or wading with or without shoes, and I think I hear a car ease its solid weight over soft mud, no headlights, then the whispers again.

I get down on the earth, kneeling at first, looking up at the sky as I do. If you saw me now, you might think I was a woman praying, a woman knocked to her knees by the love of a god, but I’m not. I’m hiding from everything, especially God. I put my hands in the dirt, press my stomach to it, my chest, my bloody dress.

And, wearing another woman’s sweater, I cross my arms over my head—wet wool to protect it—and I press my face into the mulch, close my eyes.

“Where is she?”

I try not to breathe, but when I do, I smell deep sleep down there. Ruined sheets left on a laundry line all summer in the rain—brought back in and spread across the bed: Sleep in those sheets and you will dream you are the weather itself. In your dream, you are all four corners of the flat land tucked under the world with wind.

The blood on my dress has gone stiff across my breasts, and it feels like a new, tougher skin.

An animal’s hide.

I hear my heart knock dull against the ground.

Small gasps through a damp slash, and pale red clay against my mouth.

Until suddenly I’m dropped, bloody and crying, by white wings into the world.

There is the glare of forsythia against a purple sky and the early, miniature unfolding of leaves like green baby hands in the trees. They reach, screaming with life, toward the hot gas and atoms they came from—star food, photosynthesis—until the earth and everything in it is dusted with sun—branches, bird feathers, imagination, and dishes.

Creatures crawl out of the thawed river. They die or survive, give birth to new creatures whose moist eyes flutter open in the light. Languages are forgotten or invented. Fires die. And a million random events begin to make sense in what is no longer the void. All the while, the deafening roar of steam engines or jets, and a tinny piano pounding out
Happy Birthday
down the block.

I’m born, a girl without wings, and when I look up at my mother’s face through a new prism of tears, she is the world without end, amen, and the sky beyond her is only a white backdrop of flimsy cloth—day stars, feathers, something wriggling, now, on the moon’s hook in the bright air, breathing with new gills.

My life spins forward after that, only faster:

I am standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom, and it’s bright. The white pine headboard is a blank screen behind them. A pink towel is flung like a glove on the floor. A small, smooth bottle of violet water on the dresser. The sound of something that’s been boiling, slowing now, rolling but still warm.

My uncle stands then, picks up the knife, which looks no different than any knife—smooth and steel, a black handle. The blood on it is slippery and technicolor red. He opens the top drawer of my mother’s dresser and drops it into a bed of slips and hose, then he slides the drawer closed again and looks at me. He puts his hands over his face. Breathing hard, it seems his face has melted in such brilliant light in the middle of the night. His face turns to water in his hands as he sobs.

Then he swallows. He takes his hands from his face, and I see that it is ruined. He turns his palms toward the ceiling, as if to show me they are clean. Washed in her blood, two handfuls of absolutely nothing. Behind him, light blazes white on my mother.

My own hands are small, white leaves. I put them near my mouth before I scream, but there’s only silence inside me. Bright as the steam off a block of ice.

I look at my hands again. They are brittle as broken white wings in the cold hand of a man on his knees in the slick-wet clinic parking lot:

Don’t kill your baby
, he says.

A rubber glove of blood: I am at the Golden Dragon, spooning up blood soup. And then I am in a hot room at the Swan Motel. Dust stuffs my throat. On my knees. He leans with his whole weight into my face to slap me, but it knocks me even further forward, into him.

He knew, when he slapped me, that my body would defy gravity.

His arms were already open to catch it.

He knew it when he saw me standing behind the counter, opening the guest book, looking for his name. Before he even heard me speak.

I look up.

Here she is
, he says.

Shadows pass over me. Breathing, I press my ear closer to the ground, and finally, after all this time, my mother speaks to me, in a voice of water. She says:

He’ll have a gun, Leila, and he’ll push you down on your knees, stand behind you, and he’ll fire it once into the back of your head. The sun will just be coming up, and a pink fog will rise off the river. You’ll think you can smell that fog, like smoke from a cherry bomb, but it will just be gun. Then, he’ll put your body in the trunk of your car. He’ll drive it to the Leelanau Peninsula while the blond one follows in the silver Thunderbird. They’ll drive to the end of a dirt road, and they’ll set your car on fire
.

Somewhere, already, a headline is being typed.

O
NE OF THEM CROUCHES
down next to me, touching the wet sleeve of my sweater with a light hand, and the other one stands behind me, face outside the shadows. He is the one I see most clearly when I look up.

“We were afraid you’d bleed to death,” he says.

I roll to my side, and the night feels cold in the black nest of this other woman’s sweater over my chest—cold now with my fresh blood.

Gary strikes a match under that one’s face, and the blond beard and the cigarette glow orange, suspended for a moment in the dark, making a jack-o’-lantern of his skull.

There is movement all around us. Paws, claws, the cold slap of a fish in the river, beer bottles buoying, knocking empty against the stones as they wash away from town—wash down to bigger water.

I try to sit up, but can’t. There is a rush of wind in my ears. A speeding train. I see myself for a moment as a passenger on it.
Chicago
, it says on my ticket. I might be wearing a raincoat. Beige. It is the future, charging ahead with clattering wheels with or without me. I ease back into the ground, slow motion. Settling.

“We didn’t want you to die out here by yourself,” he says.

I close my eyes.

The air smells like iron, and I roll onto my back and look up at the sky. Clouds of dust-light blow back and forth across it like chiffon.

Dance of a thousand scarves.

White sailboats, diffused as feathers—the Northern Lights: I recognize those. I remember dreaming those. I remember sitting at the edge of my bed, that jewelry box open—handfuls and handfuls of cash.

Maybe
this
is what I’d wanted.

I close my eyes again. The sound of lungs above me. I smell their smoke, their sweat, the way something smolders before it explodes. I remember the smell of meat roasting over coals in Vets Park on the Fourth of July. Animal sacrifice, it seemed. Bombs exploding beautiful and more elaborate than death in the sky, while the old soldiers in the cemetery slept under small, snapping flags—the grass above their dreams as short and burned back as crew-cut boys, as the fur on a pit bull’s back.

When I open my eyes again, those lights blink and weave around the trees. The sky is a flat sheet—a huge white rug shaken into wind, dust and ashes flying. I whisper, “What are you going to do?”

Gary laughs, or coughs.

“We’re going to kill you,” the blond one says.

I open my mouth and feel the solar ash of those exploded stars fall onto my teeth from the sky. This is enough, I think: I’ve tasted space.

If you want to live, you should run
, she whispers.

If you don’t, close your eyes, and it’s over
.

Time passes.

Whole lives.

But then, unlikely as it seems, I stand up, slow. The sun in front of me has begun to push up into the distance like a thin curl of bleached hair. I stare at that for a moment, but I can hear their teeth—small circles grinding smaller circles. Gary says, “Kneel down.”

I could kneel now, I know.

I could return my hands and knees to the mud, without hope—a woman drawing the forest around her like a grave, utterly lost, the East in every direction. Trees moving in around me. But, instead, something rises up, suddenly and in total silence, over a line of trees in front of me. It seems to rise
from
me. A tangible scream. All feathers. I don’t even have to look to know what’s there:

On the ground, their shadows could be children, or planes, monkeys, angels, dogs, crossing the sky with wings. They are rising, flustering, beating the air, ready to leave the only home they have. Hovercraft—the whir of those birds like celestial machines, and I know what this means. I have watched them every October for years from the office of the Swan Motel—this gathering of motion, migration. These hundreds of sweet beasts churning the air to ocean. I know, now, where I am—how close I am again to where I’m from.

So, I run.

Those massive birds. Bulky angels. I run in the opposite direction.

Behind me, their breathing, their feet hitting the ground hard, like mine, but I don’t look back. The future, like the past, is only a few steps ahead of me, and when I stumble through the archway of trees into a clearing near the river, I see it. Sunrise. In it, three huge swans are waiting, pink-feathered in this new light, wading and shuddering at the edge of the river, making low, reedy sounds in their throats. When they see me, they honk, hunker, then all three beat their feathers together and fly into the sky, following the others. The three crucifixes of their shadows waver across the ground, then disappear.

In front of me, a thin fog rises off the water, and through it I can see the pastel sign of the Swan Motel as it brands the bright morning weakly with neon on the river’s other side.

“Leila?”

A woman shouts. I see the arc of a cigarette tossed through air into water.

“Leila?”

I open my arms to her, and then I hold them above my head as I wade into the river.

It’s deep here.

The black water rises over my waist, oily, and then my body goes numb with the cold. The mud at the bottom of the river sucks at my bare heels, but it can’t hold me back. I’m stronger than the mud.

And at the edge of the water, wading toward me, Millie glows, rose-flushed in the sun coming up. Her hair is wild around her face. She has her hands cupped around her heart as if to keep it in her chest, and her eyes are wide with colored light. I stumble up.

“Leila. My god. You’re bleeding to death,” she says. She is sobbing then, “They’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Again, I am on my knees.

This time, I put my face down at Millie’s feet, and I can smell the rubber soles of her shoes, the grass and mud under those. I can hear the buttons on her jean jacket rattle as she trembles over me, and then she bends down to touch my hair. I remember hands. I remember being touched, turned, in blinding light with rubber gloves. My eyes opening for the first time. The sound of my own first scream, my mother choking on still wind and her own sobs. Millie’s fingers are warm and bony on the back of my neck.