The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (25 page)

*   *   *

We drove south on hilly back roads full of apple orchards. The trees were picked clean and looked like talons reaching out from birds buried upside down in the cold earth. Our stereo played a book on tape my mom had borrowed from the library. It was something the entire family was supposed to enjoy, a tale of giants and dwarfs and elves. I couldn’t concentrate on it. All I could think about were Fiona’s tales of Aquavania.
Aquavania is where stories are born.
That’s what she had said. But what did it mean?

For lunch we stopped at a diner, a shiny-shelled converted railcar with mirrored walls on the inside that made it seem infinitely big when there were really only a handful of booths and counter seats. I ordered a turkey club and an iced tea, and as Keri chattered on about the latest drama dictating the terms of her friendship with Mandy, I watched our fellow customers. I started making up stories about them in my head.

An obese man sat at the counter, pouring salt from a shaker into his glass of cola. I imagined that he was skinny once, back when he was a teenager, but on prom night he was driving his date home and the car spun out of control, hit a drainage ditch, and flipped. His date died, and in a way, he died too. His soul was reincarnated as a vessel for guilt, and he began feeding the guilt with junk food. Although a promising student, he never showed up for college and had been living at home ever since, occasionally making money by selling ephemera at flea markets. After years of sucking down sweets, his taste buds had changed until nothing but salt could deliver flavor. So he put it on everything he ate and drank. Even his cola.

A woman in a flannel shirt and jeans ate at a booth with a man in a basketball jersey and sweatpants. I imagined she was a disciplined and courteous trainer of sheepdogs and he was her irresponsible younger brother, still recovering from a night of partying. She was pregnant, but hadn’t told their parents yet on account of the fact that she wasn’t married to the father. For the first time in their lives, roles were reversed. She was the one with the secret, the mistake, and she was asking him how he handled difficult things. How did he deal with constantly disappointing their parents?

A little girl sipped a milk shake as her dad got up to go to the restroom. The girl stared at the mirrors, marveling at how the layers of reflections went on forever. Like the mirrors, this girl would go on forever. Even though she didn’t know it yet, she was the first immortal ever born. Her blood contained DNA that could repair any part of her body that was failing. If she lost an arm, a new one would simply grow back. Scientists would study her. The world would celebrate her, and that world would die all around her. As she lived on.

So Aquavania was where the stories were born, but was it an actual place? I was making up stories right then, in my head. That’s where stories were born, which meant Aquavania was really just another word for Fiona’s imagination. There was only one question left, the question I kept asking myself, the question I kept getting wrong. Where did she get the details, the inspiration?

I got my inspiration from the things in life that I feared to be true and the things in life that I hoped to be true. I didn’t know anything about the people in the diner, but my hopes and fears flavored my stories about them. I couldn’t see why Fiona’s hopes and fears didn’t flavor her stories as well.

“You know what I think happened to Fiona?” I said to my family after I took the last bite of my sandwich. “I think she ran away. I think the reason she read newspaper articles about missing kids is that she wanted to be a missing kid. Her parents didn’t love her. Her brother and sister, her uncle, her grandma … Fiona didn’t want to end up like them. She must not have liked how her future looked here. So she decided to start over somewhere else. Maybe somewhere warm. Palm trees. Colorful birds. Near the ocean. She’s there right now with all the other kids who got away.”

My mom took a deep breath and folded her hands together like she was saying a prayer. “Is that what you talked about when the two of you were together?”

“Not about running away, but we talked about creating new worlds, about saving people, about starting over from scratch,” I said. “We talked about how your thoughts and imagination are your soul, and how you gotta make sure no one ever steals your soul.”

“She’s twelve years old, Alistair.” My dad sighed. “I don’t doubt she has an amazing imagination, but if she ran away, then they would have found her by now. She’s too young to know how to disappear.”

“Just because she’s twelve doesn’t mean she’s not as smart and capable as anyone else,” I said. “
This
is what happened to her.
This
is Fiona’s story.”

Keri slurped at the end of her milk shake and flashed me a thumbs-up. “I like that story, little bro,” she said. “It’s better than anyone else’s.”

*   *   *

As we drove home, my mind was occupied by that nagging refrain:
Charlie is the Riverman. Charlie is the Riverman. Charlie is the Riverman.

Charlie stole my story. The Riverman stole stories. Fiona’s dislike of Charlie was no secret, so maybe her tales of the Riverman were also elaborate warnings. We were weirdos, Fiona and I. Creative minds like ours were the minds of aliens. And the soul-suckers, the plagiarists, the malicious people like Charlie? They were sapping us. It was our mission to get away from them. So that’s what Fiona did. And she was inviting me to do the same thing.

Yet the thing was, I wasn’t ready to get away, not from Thessaly, not even from Charlie. I had been angry with him, but what he had done was so minor in the grand scheme of things. I didn’t see him as malicious. I saw him as weak, and weakness was something I could forgive. With Fiona gone, I was essentially alone. Forgiveness was the only option I had.

So when we returned home that evening, after I had thought for a while about why we tell the stories we tell, I picked up the phone and dialed a number my fingers had memorized years ago.

“Hey, Charlie,” I said. “Let’s hang out together tomorrow.”

S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
19

The rain started early, pummeling my window and reminding me I had somewhere to be. Even with an umbrella, I was soaked by the time I reached Charlie’s house. He answered the door with a towel draped over his shoulder. Handing it to me, he said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

The video game was cued up to the point where we had last left off. One final level to defeat, an absurdly difficult maze through a dungeon to the big boss, an armored ogre who was both brutish and magical.

“It’s been a few weeks,” I told Charlie. “I’ll be rusty. I’m not sure I’m up to it.”

“You’re up to it,” he assured me. “If it takes all day, it takes all day.”

That it did. I played through the morning and into the afternoon, only grabbing a quick break for lunch. Charlie was patient, never chiding me for my mistakes or resorting to
I told you so
when I failed to follow his advice. He had said
sorry
so many times over the previous two weeks that the word didn’t really mean it anymore. So now he was making an effort to show it by tolerating my deficiencies. For Charlie, this was a big step, and I wondered if he had actually grown up a bit.

By evening, I had mastered the dungeon, but I still couldn’t defeat the big boss. Even using the sharpest sword and all the potions and enchanted objects, I could only get his energy levels down halfway. It was Sunday, and Sunday dinner at my house was the most important one of the week. My mom always spent hours cooking something special. I knew she would want me home, but I felt like I had to stay and finish what I had started. At least something in my life had to be solved.

I called my mom and told her I’d be home in a few hours. “If that’s what you need,” she told me.

Charlie’s dad fetched some Chinese takeout, and he and Charlie’s mom ate their dinner in front of a TV in the basement while Charlie and I ate ours on the couch in the back room with the video game on pause. Chopsticks weren’t an option for Charlie, but he was already adept at holding a spoon pressed to his palm with his pinky and thumb and shoveling the food into his mouth.

“Shouldn’t we save some for Kyle?” I asked.

“Nah,” Charlie responded as he lifted another pile of sweet-and-sour chicken. “Don’t even know if he’s coming home or not.”

Outside, the rain continued its onslaught and the clouds were so thick that nighttime didn’t wait for sunset. Darkness swallowed everything beyond the glow of the game. I finished my dinner and dove back in.

It was shortly after nine o’clock, and I had gotten no further at defeating the big boss. It was time to go, as much as it pained me to admit it.

“Let’s take a breather,” Charlie suggested. “Try a few more times. All you need is one perfect round.”

“Okay. But only one more. Then I have to leave.”

Charlie nodded in agreement. “I’m going outside to feed the cats. Should be a few minutes. Mom got an electric can opener, so I’m all set on that front. You take a moment, walk around the house, do whatever you gotta do to clear your head.” He patted me on the shoulder with his gloved hand and headed for the kitchen to find some tuna.

I made a quick trip to the bathroom and then lingered in the hallway to look at photos on the wall. There were framed shots of Charlie and Kyle from when they were babies and toddlers. They both looked so happy and young, but true to Fiona’s theory, there were twice as many pictures of Kyle.

My gaze eventually wandered from the pictures, down the hall, and through the open door to Charlie’s bedroom. I hardly ever spent any time in there. It was always too messy, so we usually hung out near the TV or in the basement. In fact, it had been years since I’d even entered his room, and yet something caught my eye and compelled me to step inside. Sitting on Charlie’s dresser, underneath his mirror, was an object I recognized.

A fishbowl. Full of water, but no fish inside.

The image of Thessaly’s first missing child, of the boy named Luke Drake—splotchy and purple and staring back at me through the microfiche screen—was the only thing that compared, the only other thing in my life that tore my eyes out and put them back in upside down. Something familiar was suddenly something completely new.

A distinctive chip in its rim told me that this was Humbert’s fishbowl, the fishbowl that haunted my dream when I was six years old, the one that disappeared from my dresser and left a floating orb of water in its place. But it was also something else. It was a gateway. An object beneath it confirmed the fact.

The fishbowl sat upon a thick notebook, which I pulled out to examine its cover.

GODS OF NOWHERE

The title didn’t mean much to me, so I opened it to the first page.

The Whisper

Once upon a time at Alistair’s house I heard a whisper in a fishbowl. I went inside the bowl and met the whisper. We fought in the land of icicles and I won. I am the Whisper now.

The handwriting was barely more than a scribble. Next to the words was a crayon drawing of two boys, one lying on the ground, the other standing and holding a pen in the air. In the background was something that looked like a rainbow-colored snake.

I turned to the next page.

The Tale of Trina Cook

Trina Cook lived in a world made of zebra fur and I found her by mistake. She laughed at me and I defeated her like I defeated the Whisper. Zebra fur only looks black and white. Deep down it has all the colors.

The handwriting was better, but there was no picture with this story. I flipped to the next page: “The Song of Simon Abrams.”

Then the next: “The Adventure of Purvi Patel.”

Then the next: “The Chronicle of Gaby Noonan.”

It went on like that, page after page, story after story, kid after kid. I didn’t read most of them, but as I skimmed, I noticed that the handwriting got better and the stories became more sophisticated.

Near the end of the notebook, I had to stop.

The Tragedy of Werner Schroeder

Werner Schroeder was a silly boy with a silly heart that was forever bound to a chick named Chua Ling …

I closed my eyes and the notebook. That was enough. In fact, that was too much. I pounded the dresser with my fist, and the water in the fishbowl splashed over the rim and onto my knuckles. Opening my eyes, I snatched the bowl and poised it on my shoulder like a shot put. To hurl it into the mirror, to smash all the glass to bits—that was what I really wanted to do. My reflection wouldn’t let me, though. It urged me to turn away.

In the middle of his bed, Charlie’s silk comforter was a tussled mess, its folds forming a series of valleys. With no reflection to scold me, I gave in to my next temptation. I poured the water all over the silk, where it found the crags and crevices and followed the paths it was given.

For myself, I saw only one path. With the empty fishbowl in hand and the notebook tucked under my arm, I bolted through the house to the back door.

The rain was still heavy when I stepped out to the backyard. A light mounted above the door cut through only so much of it, and I couldn’t see Charlie until I was halfway to the clubhouse. He was crouching next to the entrance, a polka-dotted umbrella shielding him from the worst of the downpour. Under his chin he held a flashlight that pointed at the ground and illuminated the seven or eight cats that circled him and ate from the cans of tuna distributed in the grass.

Peering up at me, he smiled and said, “Well, looky here…”

I was already soaked to the guts. Wind was pulling the rain sideways, and the cold air was crisping it up. When the water hit my skin, it stung and incited blood to my cheeks. My face ran hot and cold. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

“What are you holding, buddy?” Charlie asked, rising up and straightening his back. He took the flashlight from his chin, balanced it in his gloved hand, and aimed its beam at the fishbowl.