Two Rivers (19 page)

“How’s your dad? Who took care of the shop?” I asked, feeling hurt and nasty, wanting only to get Betsy out of the apple orchard of my mind. Somewhere away from Howie Burke and his grandparents’ fruit trees.

“He’s okay,” she said, and I felt my grip on the phone loosen. “Howie and I brought him a bushel of apples.” And now, because I just had to ask, Howie Burke, captain of the cross country running team, the leader of the Glee Club, Duke of the goddamn prom, was following Betsy down that long hallway to the kitchen, where Mrs. Parker used to make lemon bars and cocoa for
me
. I could smell the apples, feel the autumn breeze coming in through the window.

“We made a pie,” she said softly. Apologetically, I thought.

And now, Betsy and Howie were laughing in that kitchen: Betsy elbow-deep in flour and sugar and butter, Howie rolling the dough, sleeves pushed up to reveal the thin muscular arms of a runner, veins rising to the surface like thick rivers.

“Great,” I said. “That’s just great.”

“You sound mad,” Betsy said.

“Mad?”

“Yeah. Like I did something wrong.”

“Hmph.”

“Don’t ‘hmph’ me, Harper,” she said.

“I was thinking about coming home next weekend,” I said.

“I thought you had midterms coming up.”

I did. It was all I’d been talking about for weeks. I gripped the phone tighter. “You and Howie have plans already? You can tell me, you know.”

She was quiet for a long time. Too long.

God, I hated myself. “Well, I guess I’ve got my answer,” I said.

I knew I had to see her. If I didn’t, I would lose my mind. I must have been a fool to think that conversation alone could sustain us. I needed to see her, touch her, hold her. I was lying on my bed, trying to figure out how I could possibly manage to get to Two Rivers without flunking my midterms when Eddie Lieberman knocked on my door. “Hey, Phone Man, phone’s for you.
Again
,” he said. I figured it was Betsy, and I was relieved. I could make up for being such an ass on the phone. I would tell her I was coming home.

“Harper?” my father said. My father almost never called me at school.

“I’m not sure how to tell you this, exactly, but your mother…she’s in the hospital.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a lot of the details, but apparently there was some sort of conflict at the school. The police were called, and there were some arrests. I couldn’t get much information from the hospital. I’m still waiting to hear back, but from what I can gather she’s been beaten up really badly.”

“Beaten up?”
I asked.

“By the police,” he said. “They say she was resisting arrest.”

“What?”

“She’s got a broken jaw. Broken ribs. A concussion.” There was a strange tremble in his throat I’d never heard before.

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. “We have to go get her,” I said.

“We can’t,” he said. “She’s in police custody.”

My father was in the basement when I arrived. I walked down the creaky wooden steps, lowering my head to avoid hitting it against the overhang. The first thing I noticed was the kitchen computer in the corner by the hot water heater. I have no idea how he managed to get it down there by himself. Seeing it there made me feel sorry for him.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

He looked up from something he was soldering. His eyes hidden behind a pair of safety goggles, which he wore over his glasses. He had on a canvas apron, like a butcher, and his hair was disheveled. He raised the goggles up on top of his head and smiled at me weakly. “Hi there.”

“What are you making?”

His eyes lit up. “Why don’t you come up and see?” Suddenly he was taking the stairs two at a time. We both ducked our heads as we reached the top of the stairs. I followed him down the hallway to my mother’s study. The door was wide open, something I still had not grown accustomed to. Inside, everything had been rearranged. The desk was now in the bay window. The bookshelves had been moved to the far wall. And where her desk used to be was an elaborate machine.

“It’s a printing press,” he said. “This way she can continue with her newsletter from home. I’ve got a deal with the mill for paper. The only thing we need to worry about is the ink and the distribution.” In the light, I could see that my father’s hands were stained blue. His face was also smudged with indigo.

“This is amazing, Dad,” I said. “This is the best yet.”

That night I spoke on the phone to my mother for the first time in months. She was at the hospital, where she was going to be held until the following Monday morning when she would be arraigned. Because her jaw was broken, she could say little more than a warbled, “I’m okay.” From her coworker who had been at the school when the “conflict” took place, I learned that the SNCC (“Snick”) had a volunteer lawyer who had managed to get the others who were arrested out of jail. But the charge against my mother was battery. He hoped to be able to plea down to a lesser charge.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “When is she coming home?”

“If all goes well, by the end of the week we should know whether or not the prosecution will accept the plea.”

The world felt tipped somehow, the same but skewed. The fact that my mother, a woman who puttered around in house slippers and a ratty sweater, glasses slipping and hair frazzled, was being accused of battering a police officer was so ludicrous, so inane, it made everything else I knew to be true seem somehow precarious. I felt like I couldn’t trust anything anymore.

Needless to say, I had forgotten almost completely about Howie Burke by then. I realized as I hung up the phone with my mother that I was so distracted I’d even forgotten about Betsy. She had no idea I was home. But just as I was getting ready to go over to her house, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Howie’s car coming down the street. He drove a 1963 convertible Galaxie 500. His father owned the only car dealership in Two Rivers. My own father had bought at least two of our family’s vehicles from Mr. Burke. Though I’d have known the car anywhere, I was still in disbelief when it pulled into the Parkers’ driveway, and Howie threw open the door, running around the car to open the passenger door for Betsy.

From my window, with the pair of binoculars I won in the seventh-grade science fair (for a wind machine my father both devised and expertly constructed), I had a vivid and unobstructed view of Betsy’s house. Through my ill-gotten binoculars, I watched Howie open the screen door of the Parkers’ house, holding it open as Betsy unlocked the front door. I watched the flickering lights of the TV through the filmy curtains of the living room, and Betsy and Howie’s silhouettes moving behind them. I imagined Betsy’s father asleep in front of the TV. My hands were sweaty, but I was afraid that if I put down the binoculars, I might miss something terrible. A light went on in the kitchen, and then a light went on in Betsy’s room.

Focusing in on her canopied bed (on the place where she lay her head at night), I felt ashamed of myself; I had promised Betsy a long time ago never to use the binoculars to spy on her. I’d thought about it, of course, but up until now, I’d kept my promise. Tonight I studied every inch of Betsy’s room: from the photos on her bureau to the books on the shelf over her bed, to the clothes that lay in dirty heaps on the floor. Everything was as I remembered it, save for a couple of new records (
Rubber Soul
and a live Joan Baez album) and a red sweater I’d never seen before. It looked small and soft. I thought about how it would look hugging Betsy’s chest. I wondered if she’d worn it apple picking.

Howie sat down on the edge of the bed, watching Betsy, who was thumbing through her records. He lay back, resting his head on her pillow, and I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. I watched Betsy select a Bob Dylan album from the pile
(Bob Dylan of all things
), watched her as she lowered it onto the spindle, could almost hear the record drop, and the needle lift. When I closed my eyes, I saw Betsy dancing on the hood of the DeSoto. Felt her in my arms. When I opened my eyes, Howie Burke was sitting up again, patting his hand on the bed, beckoning her to join him, and I was bounding down the stairs and out the door.

I didn’t ring the Parkers’ doorbell. I didn’t even knock. I just threw open the front door and made my way down the hallway to Betsy’s room. I only had to see the back of Howie’s head leaning tilted and purposeful toward Betsy’s surprised face, to know that what I was about to do was justified.

I had never punched anyone in my entire life. I wasn’t even sure how to go about it. But rage has a way of informing a body, and despite my lack of pugilistic expertise, my fingers curled into an effective fist, which struck Howie square in the jaw before I had time to think. Howie stumbled backward and looked at me from the foot of Betsy’s bed. Betsy stood stunned at his side. And I stood similarly stunned, my hand and head completely numb.

“I think you better leave,” Betsy said, her voice breathy and calm.

“I’m sorry,” I stumbled, shaking my hand as the numbness was suddenly replaced by excruciating pain.

“Not you, you idiot,” she said to me.
“You.”
She looked at Howie, who still looked bewildered.

Howie moved quietly toward the open door, rubbing at his jaw.

“Well, that was genius,” she said after he was gone.

I sat down on her bed, where Howie and she had been only moments before. I was pretty sure my thumb was broken.

“You know I can fend for myself, you jealous bastard,” she said.

“You were going to kiss him,” I said, with disbelief.

“
No. He
was going to kiss
me
. And I was going to crack him one myself. What the hell are you doing here? You used the binoculars, didn’t you?”

The heat of my broken thumb spread up my arm, across my shoulder, up my neck and into my ears.

She probably would have thrown me out next, but somehow I managed to explain everything to her (about my mother, about the kitchen computer gathering dust in the basement, about the midterm I was now pretty sure I would fail) in a way that made my insanity a reasonable defense.

“If you do anything that stupid again, we’re done,” she said, even as she held my wounded hand in her own. “The
last
thing I need is some sort of keeper.”

She held me then, so close I could feel her heart beating through her shirt. And even though she had said otherwise, I knew she needed me. That she was glad I’d done what I did.

When my mother finally came home the following week, the first thing I noticed was that she was softer. Whatever she’d been eating in Mississippi had caused her to lose the familiar sharp angles of collarbone and ribs. When she hugged me at the train station, it felt like I was being held by a stranger. She hadn’t held me that tightly since I was a little kid. I was overwhelmed with relief. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her.

My thumb was broken in two places, and my mother was unable to speak because of the wires binding her broken jaw. We were a pair of walking wounded. But she was
home
, and I was home, and, for the time being, I knew that was all that really mattered.

T
he weekend ticket agent was a semiretired guy who was hard of hearing. “Round-trip you say?” he asked, leaning close and turning his ear to the glass that separated us. I could see the white hairs curling inside his ear.

“One-way,”
I said for the third time. “Two Rivers to Tuscaloosa.”

And I put the ticket in my pocket, just in case Ray was right and it might, indeed, be as easy as this.

I went to my office, thinking I should really try to get some work done. Luckily Lenny didn’t come in on the weekends, and I was spared his incessant interruptions, but by lunchtime, I knew I couldn’t get anything else done until I had something to eat.

Rosco’s was open, and busy. I had to wait ten minutes to even get a single seat at the greasy counter. I sat down next to a couple of guys who I knew worked in the yard. I nodded at them, and they ignored me. I picked up a menu and studied it. When the waitress finally got to me, I ordered a half-pound burger and a Coke.

“Hear ’bout that man over to Hardwick? The one ’at got shot?” the guy next to me asked.

“Ayuh,” the other one answered.

“That’s what you get.” He nodded, taking a swig of his noon beer. “Can’t just go to sleep in somebody’s barn. That James fellow just protectin’ his property.” He looked at me as the ketchup bottle I had been holding suddenly spilled ketchup all over my fries. He kept looking at me as if he were speaking to me instead of his buddy. “Course the bleeding hearts are all sayin’ it’s ’cause he was a black.” He lowered his voice then and hissed, “Truth is, nigger was
trespassin
’.”

My plate was covered in ketchup, a bloodbath. My appetite was gone. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I counted out what I owed and a dollar more. I put the money down and looked at the man who was sitting next to me. He’d picked up a newspaper and was reading. I wanted to say something but couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what.

On the ride home from the station, I mulled over everything Ray had said. Every fear
I
had. As the sun sank behind the trees, filtering bright and relentless through the leaves, which were now in their full autumnal glory, I pedaled furiously, my mind reeling. Why did Maggie get on that train? If she were here simply to escape from her past, I’d do like Ray said and send her home.
End of story
. But it couldn’t be that simple. Two Rivers is just a speck of dust on a map. Just a speck of dust on a speck of dust. Why on earth would she come
here
? She said she was looking for her brother, but if that were true, she certainly wasn’t looking very hard. She had to know something. Something about that night. And if she was here because of that, because of twelve years of silence, then the story would end another way entirely. As I rode home, the sky turned violet and quiet, and the only sound was the hush of wind in my ears and the shrillness of my own fear.

I decided to look for Shelly at Luigi’s before I went home and was forced to deal with Maggie. The restaurant smelled strongly of yeast and spices. I didn’t see her right away, but then, as I made my way toward the back of the room, I saw her crammed into a booth with three other kids: another girl and two boys. I stopped before they could see me. Shelly was laughing, whispering and giggling into one of the boy’s ears, and something took a hold of me.

“Shelly, it’s time to go home,” I said, marching up to the booth.

“Dad.”
She laughed, but her eyes were scared as they darted from me to the boy.

“Now,”
I said, and reached for her arm, pulling her out of the booth. I held on to her elbow as we made our way toward the front door.

Outside, Shelly waited until we’d turned the corner to Depot Street before she shook her arm out of my grasp. “Why did you do that? You’re so embarrassing!”

“I told you, you were not to see that boy again.”

It was dark now, and the streetlights flickered on, illuminating us.

“I hate you!” Shelly screamed, and started to run down the street, her sneakers slapping the pavement as she fled. She was fast, the fastest kid in her whole class as a matter of fact. I was out of breath by the time I caught up with her. She was sitting on the curb in front of the A & P, her head in her hands. I sat down next to her, close but careful not to touch her. Tears were running down her cheeks. I resisted the impulse to wipe them away. She smelled like the Heaven Scent perfume Hanna bought for her from Avon every year at Christmas.

“Why did you
do
that?” she asked.

But I didn’t
know
why I’d done what I did. I couldn’t explain it even now except that I felt, like I always felt, like a man holding onto a slippery rope, dangling over an awful precipice. So much of my life, it seemed, was spent just trying to hold on.

“Shelly, honey, I’m sorry,” I started.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was at the stupid library all day, on a
Saturday
, and I just went out for pizza with my friends. You treat me like I’m a baby. Like I’m still six.”

I looked down the street toward our apartment building. The light was on in my window. I thought about Maggie, about the possibility that my time was up. I knew there was no such thing as forgetting. Maybe there was no such thing as forgiveness either.

When I turned back to Shelly, she said softly, her bottom lip trembling, “I want to go back to Hanna’s house.”

“What?” I asked. I breathed deeply, looked away from her.

“Hanna and Paul’s. I want to go
home
.”

I threw up my hands. “Fine. Go to Hanna’s.”

Shelly’s eyes welled up. She looked at me with disbelief.

“Well, she obviously is better at this than I am,” I said. “
She
thinks so.
You
think so.
Everybody
thinks so.”

Tears started to run down Shelly’s cheeks. I felt terrible. When I took her hand, it was cold. A soft breeze blew; the smell of Shelly’s perfume was the smell of her childhood. A childhood that was fleeting, disappearing. I breathed her in, inhaled her. After a while, I felt the small but certain squeeze of her hand.

“Let’s just go home,” she said, defeated.

Back at the apartment, Maggie was still in her room. I asked Shelly to go in and check on her.

“She doesn’t feel good,” Shelly said as she closed the bedroom door behind her. “I told her I could make her some soup, but she doesn’t want it.”

“Has she got the flu?”

“I don’t know. She just said she didn’t feel good.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I said.

“
You
hungry?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded.

I went to the cupboard, but Shelly pushed me away. “I’ll do it. Just sit down.”

I obeyed, sitting down at the kitchen table, as she busied herself at the stove. She still wouldn’t look at me. “Did you get your paper finished?” I asked.

She nodded, pointing to the table. There, next to her books, was her essay, complete with a yellow construction paper cover. A silhouette of Lincoln’s profile in black. “May I?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess.”

I picked it up and opened it, reading the first few sentences and then scanning the rest. It was riddled with spelling errors. None of the paragraphs were indented. There were no topic sentences. No thesis. What on earth were they teaching her at school? Hanna had always helped her with her schoolwork. I stepped in for long division, but that’s where my tutoring had ended. I couldn’t remember reading a single paper she’d written before; it made me feel like a rotten dad.

Shelly ladled the Chicken and Stars soup, heavy on the stars, into two bowls and set them down at the table. She handed me a spoon. “I worked really hard,” she said.

My heart sank. “It’s a good start, honey, but I think we should maybe go over it a little bit more before you hand it in. Can we do that tonight?”

Shelly shrugged and slurped from her soup bowl. “Daddy?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t really want to go back to Hanna’s. I was just saying that to be mean.”

I looked at her, at the sorrow in her eyes. “I know,” I said. “And I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

As we ate dinner, it almost felt the way it used to. The weeks before the wreck, before Maggie, felt distant and unreal now. And watching Shelly sip the broth from her bowl, I imagined for a minute what it would be like to have my old life back. If only I could start over, I’d do everything different. I’d be involved. Pay attention. Hell, I’d be
Father of the Year
. I’d quit my stupid job, move us someplace new. Someplace where the schools were more concerned with education than basketball games and bake sales. Where people didn’t say “nigger” in public (or private for that matter). Where we could get a fresh start. Where my past, our past, wasn’t lurking around every corner. But the truth was that the train wasn’t the only thing that derailed that day. My whole life had as well, and now I was pretty sure there
was
no going back. And the fear that had been gripping me by the shoulders all day suddenly turned into a tremendous sadness. The idea of losing this (this old table, the pale yellow wallpapered kitchen, the lulling sounds of the bowling alley beneath us) filled me with regret. And the idea of losing Shelly was unbearable. “It’s time for Maggie to go home. To her family,” I said.

Shelly looked up at me. “You can’t!”

I was like a bull in a china shop tonight, smashing everything in my reckless path. “She needs to be with the people who love her,” I pleaded.

“
I
love her, Dad,” Shelly said loudly, her eyes filled with tears.

“Her baby will be coming soon,” I said. “She can’t exactly have the baby
here
.”

Shelly took the paper napkin she had laid in her lap, wiped her eyes and was all business again. She looked at me and clenched her jaw. “Daddy, tell me about the night I was born,” she said.

I shook my head. “Honey, that has nothing to do with Maggie. That was something else entirely….”

“It was
exactly
the same,” she said, her jaw set.
Here
was Betsy, right here in this determination of tiny bones. “You had a baby, and you were all alone. The only difference is that Paul and Hanna took you in.”

“We’re not her family,” I said.

“Tell me,”
she said, “about the night I was born.”