In the River Darkness
Read In the River Darkness Online
Authors: Marlene Röder
Will this be the day I die?
The question bolts through my mind as I hear the ice breaking beneath my ice skates, an odd sound, like the high-pitched whining and complaining of a living creature. I cannot move. I don't even have time to scream.
The very next instant the whole world seems to fall away: Our house, the riverbank, the pale winter sky . . . everything disappears with a loud splash. . . .
Did it have to happen like this? I ask myself, and my thoughts fly back to the day when everything began . . .
"Maybe it's better if some things are left in the dark and forgotten . . ."
Mia arrives at the small town by the river protecting a secret. Her new neighbors, the Stonebrooks, immediately draw her interest. Soon, she meets brothers Alex and Jay. Mia is attracted to Alex, the older handsome brother. They begin dating, but Mia remains guarded, hiding behind an invisible barrier. She also befriends Jay, the gentle dreamer, who spends most of his time at the river, with his mysterious friend, Alina. As the three teens spend more and more time together, strange things start to happen.
This brilliantly crafted story—told from the alternating perspectives of Mia, Alex, and Jay—creates a web of secrets. And secrets buried deep below the dark surface are the hardest to uncover.
Author Marlene Röder was awarded the Hans-im-Glück prize by the city of Limburg, Germany, for her debut novel,
Im Fluss
, the German edition of
In the River Darkness
. For her second critically acclaimed novel,
Zebraland
, she received two more awards, including the Hans-Jörg-Martin Award for Best Youth Crime Novel. She has also published a short story collection and currently lives in Limburg, Germany
Award-winning translator Tammi Reichel studied theology and women's studies before moving to Germany for ten years, where she got involved in the publishing world. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family. Her most recent literary translation,
My Family for the War
, received the 2013 Batchelder Award from the American Library Association.
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I listen to the river
as it tells me of its life.
As I move on I recognize:
it was my own story.
Michael Schlaadt
Will this be the day I die?
The question bolts through my mind as I hear the ice breaking beneath my ice skates, an odd sound, like the high-pitched whining and complaining of a living creature. I cannot move. I don’t even have time to scream.
The very next instant the whole world seems to fall away: our house, the riverbank, the pale winter sky . . . everything disappears with a loud splash.
The sudden cold hits me like a punch, presses the air out of my lungs. Wildly flailing my arms and legs, I fight my way to the surface. My clothing is soaked through within seconds, and the heavy skates drag my legs downward like lead weights. If I don’t get rid of them right away, I won’t be able to hold myself above water for very long.
Water in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. . . . I can’t breathe. I can’t think clearly. In a panic, I gasp for breath.
Finally! I don’t know how, but I manage to kick a skate off one foot. Now, with half of the heavy weight on my feet already gone, it will be easier to lose the second one.
I am not going to die today!
Greedily, I suck in deep breaths of the clear winter air. Now I just need a plan that will get me out of this damned hole in the ice.
With great difficulty, I paddle my way over to the jagged edge of the ice. It grins at me mockingly, like the zigzag teeth of a jack-o’-lantern. Hold on tight, pull yourself up, I order my body.
Come on, you can do it!
But my body doesn’t want to obey me. I scream at my arms, which are too weak to hold my weight, to press me upward and back into life. My numb fingers slide off the slippery broken edge. I curse as I look for a place to get a grip, in vain.
“I . . . will not . . . die . . . today,” I mutter to myself, gritting my teeth together tightly so they don’t start chattering.
I will not die today!
Again and again, I try until tiny black flecks flicker before my eyes. Again and again, I fail.
There is blood on the ice. My blood. My hands are cut, but I don’t feel it.
I hold tight to the edge of the ice. Staying above water is the only thing that matters right now. Just take a little rest before I try again. . . . What’s that noise? My teeth have started to chatter, I can’t stop. . . . I’m so terribly cold. Apathetically, I look at my blood, red, so red in all the white surrounding it.
For a fraction of a second, an image of our oath flashes through my mind, the oath we sealed with blood, yet each of the three of us still broke it in our own way.
For the thousandth time I ask myself if we could have done something differently, or whether everything was leading up to it all along. . . . Damn it, even here, even in this situation, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Maybe I’ve even earned it, to die here, because of what I did. Maybe I deserve to drown in the water of this river. I don’t know.
Did it have to happen like this?
I ask myself, and my thoughts fly back to the day when everything began . . .
SPRING
Chapter 1
Mia
“We’ll be there soon, sweetie,” my mother said in a cheerful voice, twisting herself around in the passenger’s seat up front to face me. I ignored her and continued to stare out the window at the landscape rushing by outside: yellow-brown fields, an occasional small town, a cluster of houses huddled too close together. The naked trees and bushes seemed to duck down under the gray March sky. Could you smell the coming of spring outside? Here in the car, it just smelled like car.
For a moment, it seemed like the posts alongside the road were racing past us, while our car actually stood still. I wished my father wouldn’t drive so fast.
I didn’t want to get there.
“You’ll see, you’ll like the house,” my mother said for at least the hundredth time. I was starting to wonder who she was trying to convince.
“It’s right near a river, surrounded by nature . . . didn’t you used to want to live in the country, Mia?”
This was true, although at the time I had been ten years old and wanted nothing more in the whole world than to have my own pony. I was just about to let her know that I could imagine something better now than rotting away in a miniscule town in the middle of nowhere, but I bit my tongue just in time. It wouldn’t change anything, anyway.
It was hopeless.
A few months ago, I had ranted and raved, trying to get my parents to abandon their plans to move. I remembered my mother’s tears, her plea: “Could you at least show some understanding for our situation?” And my father’s silent, worried looks. He was unhappy because he was making me unhappy.
I remembered my desperate, subconscious, helpless rage. That the two of them could completely dismantle my life, just like that, any way they liked, made me raging mad. But now, after the thing with Nicolas, I’d given up the fight.
I was driftwood.
At least now I won’t have to see him anymore
, I thought. I didn’t want to think or feel anymore. That was working really well.
My fingers played with the earplugs of my iPod. I wished we could just keep driving. Not from anywhere, not headed anywhere.
With each mile, I left my old life in the city farther behind—playing cello in the youth orchestra, meeting my friends and hanging out at the mall, or sneaking into parties thrown by cooler people that we weren’t even invited to. Okay, it might not have been fabulous, but it was my life!
But then one day, my father was offered this amazing job as head of an advertising agency. He wanted the job. My mother agreed, under one condition: we wouldn’t live in the city but in a small town outside it instead.
“A little house in the country, Mia,” she said with gleaming eyes. “I’ve always dreamed of it.”
My protests had no weight against my parents’ ideas. I was young, after all, and would get used to our new life in no time.
No one asked what I dreamed of.
Driftwood.
The clouds hung low in the sky, and soon it would start to rain. My father turned into a smaller street.
“Have I already told you that two boys around your age live in the house next door?” my mother asked, attempting to break the silence again. “I met them recently when your dad and I looked at the house one more time. They seemed nice, didn’t they?” She put her hand on my father’s shoulder.
He nodded obediently. “Hmmm.”