The Riverman (The Riverman Trilogy) (7 page)

They seemed an odd pair. My dad—clean-shaven, athletic, a polo shirt and khakis. Charlie’s dad—bearded and balding, paunchy, tinted glasses, a red nylon jacket and dark corduroys. Yet their conversation had a natural sweep to it.

“… and they both had about a billion wasp stings. Remember that?” Charlie’s dad mused.

“How could I not?” my dad replied. “We were putting calamine lotion on him for over a week. Man, those boys were so tiny back then.”

A gentle punch to my shoulder greeted my arrival, and I tried my best to sound chipper. “How goes it, old man?” I said to my dad. For some reason, he always got a kick out of me calling him
old man
.

“Mr. Dwyer and I are sharing some old memories of you guys,” he replied.

“Real nice of you to visit,” Mr. Dwyer told me. “You know, Charlie asked to see you almost immediately.”

“Well … thanks.” I wasn’t sure what I was thanking him for, but I didn’t know what else to say.

A blast of air from an oscillating fan on the desk sent the cat balloon into orbit, and the three of us watched it until my dad stuck out a hand. “Hal,” he said. “We’ll have that drink soon.”

Charlie’s dad joined him in a firm handshake. “You bet, Rich. Long overdue.”

*   *   *

“It’ll be tough,” my dad explained a few minutes later as we walked through the hospital parking lot. “He’ll need you to be sympathetic. You can invite him over for dinners if you want.”

“You don’t like Charlie,” I said. “I know that.”

“Charlie’s a nice kid. Sure, he can be exhausting—”

“I’ll go over to his house. Every day after school. He doesn’t have to come visit.”

“Whatever you can do. Show him you care.”

We walked past Kyle’s van. It was haphazardly parked, wheels over the lines. “Did you see Kyle in there?” I asked.

“Smoking lounge.”

“What are they gonna do to him?”

My dad shrugged and pulled out his keys. “What
can
you do to him? He didn’t give Charlie the fireworks. Kyle shouldn’t have had them, but he’s eighteen years old. I’m sure he’s got worse in his van.”

“He’s not a bad guy, deep down,” I said.

My dad slipped the key into the door. “Deep down, no one is. But you make choices.”

M
ONDAY
, O
CTOBER
23

I was back at school the next day, the events of the weekend informing everything. At lunch, I sat with Mike Cooney and Trevor Weeks, as I often did. They were a couple of guys who weren’t considered cool or lame or anything other than harmless. Trevor had an appetite for gossip, though, and he peppered me with questions about Charlie. I was quick to dispel rumors that Charlie had blown off his arms or that he’d been building a bomb to put under the bleachers in the gym.

Only once that day did I pass Fiona in the hall. Though I didn’t say anything to her, she whispered something to me: “Hang in there.”

I spent the afternoon overanalyzing those words. Were they a reference to worrying about Charlie? Or a promise that more of her story was to come? As wild as the story was, I was hoping it was the latter.

At the end of the day, Principal Braugher called an emergency assembly. We filled the auditorium, where a police officer droned through a lecture on the dangers of fireworks. When it was over, Braugher made an announcement.

“School policy for possession of fireworks is now an automatic suspension and a visit to the police station. I hope that’s clear. And I hope everyone keeps Charlie in their thoughts and prayers.”

Ken Wagner, never one to pass up an opportunity for attention, coughed out a “Captain Catpoop,” which was met with a smattering of giggles. We were dismissed.

*   *   *

“Did you get to see his nasty hands?” Keri asked me on the walk home.

“They were wrapped in bandages.”

“Think they’ll give him steel pincers?” Keri curled her fingers and gestured at me with an exaggerated sneer.

“I don’t know.”

“Ooo. Think he’ll dress up as a lobster for Halloween?”

Frankly, I was sick of talking about Charlie. I knew that he would be home soon and I’d probably be seeing more than enough of him. So I quickened the pace, hoping it would put an end to the banter.

“Are we taking the
long
cut now?” Keri huffed as we made a turn a few blocks from home. Yes, I had chosen the longer route, but I had also chosen the one past Fiona’s house.

The man I had seen in the backyard was now in Fiona’s garage. The crunch and growl of heavy metal provided a sound track as he bent over a machine that looked a lot like the motorized sander my dad kept mounted to a table in our basement. But instead of using it to smooth out a piece of wood, the man appeared to be pressing something metal against the spinning belt. As he worked the metal back and forth, it caught the glare of a shop light and I saw it clearly. He was sharpening a long, thin blade.

I stepped back and nearly tripped over my own feet. As a spy, I obviously failed.

“You’re a stalker!” Keri squealed.

“Am not!”

Before I could defend myself any further, I heard the whir of bike wheels. Fiona coasted past and looked back over her shoulder.

“Busted!” Keri cheered, pointing a finger at me.

Fiona jammed the brakes and skidded out. She waited until we caught up.

“Hey, I was about to—” I started to say, but Fiona cut me off, staring Keri down with an odd intensity.

“You saw me burying something one night?”

Keri turned her head to the side. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Yes you do,” Fiona said. “Do you want to know what it was?”

Keri turned back. “I. Don’t. Give. A. Crap.”

“It was love letters to Alistair,” Fiona said. “We’re dating now, in case you were wondering.”

The bluntness caused Keri to hold her hands up in surrender. “If you say so.”

“I … we … uh…” I stuttered myself into silence. The logical reaction was to call Fiona a liar or to laugh it all off as a joke, but I was ditching logic in favor of emotion. I kind of liked what she’d said.

“I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone,” Keri told us, and she was true to her word, double-timing it to our house like she was racing curfew.

“Who’s nosier, your sister or that Mandy girl she hangs out with?” Fiona asked, but I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily.

“Really? Dating?”

“Oh, come on.” Fiona rolled her eyes. “I’ve been to your room. Your mom found us behind that rock. It’s what everyone is thinking. The more you deny it, the more they’ll believe it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m older than you. Wiser.”

“Oh right, a wise old thirteen,” I said, forgetting the promise I’d made to myself to humor Fiona for the sake of uncovering the truth.

“Actually, I’m fourteen now,” she said.

“What?”

“Let’s go to the park. To the swing sets. No one will bother us there. You need to hear more. Things get complicated.”

THE LEGEND OF FIONA LOOMIS, PART II

Fiona Loomis returned to Aquavania many times throughout her childhood. Only at night, though, and only when everyone in her family was sleeping. The radiators would call to her, and she’d creep down to the liquid portal in her basement and enter a world she was growing to love.

Toby was always waiting, and so too were all the creatures and landscapes Fiona had dreamed up. Life went on without her, on its own time line. Fiona could be away from Aquavania for a week, only to return and find that ten years had passed. Or she could be away for a month and find that only ten minutes had passed. There was no way of predicting the time gap, but whenever she was gone, the palm trees and vines and ferns would climb and twist and grow. The animals would form couples and have babies and become families. When things got old, they wilted. Things passed away.

To say it was always harmonious would be a lie. Sometimes Fiona would introduce a new creature and anarchy would ensue. Take, for example, the levitating bandicoots. The problem with levitating bandicoots was that they could eat almost anything in Fiona’s world, but they preferred to eat the highest flowers of the orangeberry spruce. Those flowers were the staple of the paisley giraffes’ diet. Without them, the giraffes starved.

So once when Fiona returned after some time away, she found bandicoots so chubby that they could hardly levitate and paisley giraffe carcasses strewn everywhere. It horrified her, but it also taught her that her powers weren’t perfect. Sure, she could create more rules—she could make the bandicoots hate orangeberry spruce flowers or make the giraffes less finicky—but she also had to let this world figure itself out. It was as real a place as any.

“Am I God here?” Fiona once asked Toby.

“In a manner of speaking,” Toby told her.

“Everything else grows old here, but I don’t, do I?”

“Your body doesn’t,” Toby explained. “But your mind does. Your body only grows old in the Solid World.”

“The Solid World?”

“The place you come from. Home.”

By
home
, Toby meant Thessaly—Fiona’s house, her family. But to Fiona, Aquavania was starting to feel like home as well. Every time she visited, she made the island bigger. She gave it levels. Her mind conjured up enormous trees with intertwined limbs that served as walkways through the canopies. Smaller branches wove together like tangles of fingers and formed tunnels.

Below the canopies, Fiona created an aviary so thick with birds that it looked like layers of undulating feathery quilts. Whenever she jumped from the treetops, wings cushioned her. For fun, she would summon the rain and ride the feathers like a waterslide.

When she dug into the ground, she unearthed mint chocolate chip ice cream. When she called out into the wind, a giant flying squirrel would scoop Fiona up and let her ride on his neck and survey her creations.

Sometimes while soaring, Fiona would look into the distance, over the ocean as far as the light reached, and she would see a haze. At first, she thought little of it, assumed that when she built a bigger world, the haze would move farther away, like the skin of an expanding balloon.

But that didn’t happen. As her world got bigger, the haze got closer, and by the time Fiona was ten years old, she began to worry about these unknown hinterlands. One day, she called out for the squirrel, and it scooped her and Toby up. And as the squirrel dipped and barrel-rolled, Fiona pointed out past the ocean and commanded, “Fly us into that haze!”

The squirrel refused. It flew no farther than the coastline. This was beyond shocking, because it was the first time that the squirrel hadn’t followed her instructions. It was the first time that
anything
in Aquavania hadn’t followed her instructions.

Rightfully upset, Fiona decided to solve the problem the way she solved all her problems: by thinking the answer into existence.

The flying squirrel could speak, and it could tell Fiona why it refused to fly into the haze.

“I don’t know why I can’t fly there,” the squirrel said. “It’s simply beyond my abilities.”

The squirrel continued to glide along the coastline as Fiona pondered the mystery.

“Is it the edge of Aquavania?” she asked Toby.

“It is
an
edge,” Toby replied.

“I should have known better than to ask you. Why do you always speak in riddles?”

“I speak all that I know. I have never been there. I have only been here.”

“If you weren’t so darn cute, I’d throw you off this squirrel,” Fiona said, and then she had a thought that would open her world up in a way she could never have imagined.

There was a bridge that was as long as a bridge could be, and it reached from the island into the haze and to what lay beyond the haze.

A gleaming spout of water shot out from the island as if it were a fountain, and the spout stretched all the way into the haze. It froze in place, a gentle translucent arch with a pathway wide enough for a girl and her bush baby. Fiona asked the squirrel to set them down, and the two began their hike toward the haze.

Hours later, they weren’t even a fraction of the way there.

“Am I an idiot, Toby?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

The bridge had a conveyer belt so that Toby and Fiona didn’t have to walk anymore.

A conveyer belt made of milky quartz started churning and moving them forward, but the haze was still a long way off. Fiona knew that it didn’t matter how much time it took, how many days she stayed in Aquavania; she would always return home to the basement at the exact moment she left. She was ten years old and had already spent six weeks of her life in Aquavania, six weeks that didn’t exist back in the Solid World.

Still, the journey to the haze was taking far too long.

And the conveyer went faster, and faster, and faster …

The world blurred. The only thing she could see was Toby’s face, which shuddered from the g-force like a fighter jet pilot’s. Any faster and she would have made herself sick. For all the things she could create, Fiona could not change herself. That was one of the restrictions of Aquavania. She couldn’t make herself prettier or taller or more accustomed to Mach 2 speeds.

For three days Fiona and Toby zoomed along the conveyer belt, holding hands and surviving off of ice cream.

“You told me I can’t age here,” Fiona said to Toby. “But can I die here?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Can you … die here too, Toby?” Fiona could hardly get the question out.

“I will die only when you need me to die,” Toby explained. “I am your first creation. I am not like the others.”

Fiona turned away. She couldn’t bear to look at him. “What happens to us here?” she asked. “I mean, when we die?”

Toby’s voice was weak. It had a tremble to it. “I don’t know.”

When they weren’t definitive, Toby’s answers were usually playfully and frustratingly vague. He almost never said
I don’t know
. As soon as he did, the conveyer belt stopped, and they were confronted with the edge of the haze.