In the River Darkness (13 page)

“Come on in, the water’s perfect!” Mia called impatiently, sending a splash in our direction. I threw the dog a resigned glance and then started to wade into the river.

Unlike my brother, who moved so gracefully in the water that he seemed to be more at home there than on land, I didn’t like to swim—at least not in the river. That murky soup was kind of creepy. But I didn’t want Mia to know about that.

By now, the water was up to my chest. With every step deeper, I felt the muck on the river bottom welling up between my toes. The smell of the river rose to my nose: the scent of stagnant water, fish and slightly sweet, like dead, decomposing plants . . . the smell of decay.

Something brushed against my leg, and I jumped. Reflexively, my hand felt for the small silver chain with a cross that hung around my neck. Jay had one just like it. Our grandmother insisted that we wear them all the time, for protection. Grandma’s scolding voice echoed in my thoughts: “It’s dangerous . . . dangerous.”

It’s dangerous to swim by a full moon!

Were those really the words she had said? I didn’t know for sure anymore.

But then Mia came swimming over to me, and I forgot everything else. Her lips were warm and soft as she kissed me. She was so light in my arms, like a child. But her eyes were those of a woman.

I felt her naked body, her breasts against my chest, and suddenly noticed how aroused I was. I pulled her even closer to me. Her earrings tinkled quietly.

“You know those times when you feel like a piece of driftwood?” Mia asked quietly, leaning her wet forehead against mine. “I feel like that a lot. It’s awful. But now, with you . . . it’s better.” She smiled, but as always, I sensed that vague sadness that was caught up in her smile.

Then I had an idea. “I want to show you something,” I said spontaneously. “Jay and I used to do this all the time, it’s a kind of game. Lie on your back.”

Mia glanced at me suspiciously, but then did what I had asked. I supported her lightly at the small of her back. She was as stiff as a board, totally cramped up.

“And, what do you feel?” I asked.

“The river. The current is so strong!” Mia shuddered, and as she did, swallowed a gush of water. She quickly tried to right herself again; it was clear that she found this game strange.

“Wait! You have to breathe very calmly, that’s the whole trick. Like that. . . . Now, can you feel that I’m holding on to you? Do you feel that you’re not driftwood?”

“Yes,” Mia whispered. Her entire body slackened in my arms as she finally relaxed. I don’t know how long we floated like that in the river; I just know that I gradually started to freeze. The places where our skin touched were the only sparks of warmth in the currents of cold and darkness.

Mia’s body was a hazy, milk-white silhouette. Her breasts shimmered in the water. I quickly averted my glance, but she had already noticed it. She flashed me a nervous smile, then escaped from my grip and flowed through my hands as if she were made of mercury.

“Let’s see if I can make it to the island!” she called, and took off swimming as if someone were chasing her. Half disappointed, half relieved to have firm ground under my feet again, I returned to the shore. There I dried myself off with the blanket that was supposed to be for our picnic and got dressed again. In the pocket of my pants, I found the voodoo doll. I hurled the disgusting thing out into the river.

The dog sat next to me and together we watched as Mia, with quick strokes, drew closer to the spot of land surrounded by water.

“Watch out, rumor has it that the island doesn’t like people!” I called out to her.

At that moment, the dog sitting next to me began to growl, a low rumble deep in its throat.

“Something just brushed against my leg!” Mia cried suddenly. “There’s . . . there’s something in the water, Alex!”

“It’s a river. There are fish here!”

“No, it felt like . . .
hands!”
The beam from my flashlight illuminated Mia’s contorted face; she was wide-eyed with fear. As fast as she could, she started to swim back toward the shore. Then I lost her again in the darkness. Had she gone under?

The dog ran back and forth along the bank, yapping like mad. Its hoarse barking sounded across the water. I wanted to jump into the river to help her, but my body didn’t respond. I could only stand there and scream her name: “Mia,
MIA!”

The dog discovered her first—with its tail wagging, it pounced on Mia, who was crawling onto the shore a few yards away from us. Panting, she dropped down in the sand, where she curled up into a ball. I draped the blanket over her shoulders and she wrapped herself up in it.

Tangled strands of hair plastered to her face. “That was not a fish, that was not a fish,” she kept repeating with white lips. “What the hell was that?”

“Whatever it was, it’s gone, Mia.” I talked to her soothingly, trying to convince us both that she was safe now. But through the blanket, I could feel that she was still shivering. “It tried to pull me underwater, Alex!” Mia whispered insistently. “You have to believe me!” She rested her head in her hands—and stopped.

“My earrings are gone,” she said in a flat voice.

“Oh. You must have lost them in the water.”

“Both of them? No, I’ve worn them lots of times when I was swimming!” She stared at me defiantly. “Your damned fish stole my earrings!”

A romantic picnic in the moonlight was out of the question. Silently, we gathered up our things and headed back.

We were still a ways below the dock to our house when Mia suddenly grabbed my arm. “Look, Alex. What
is
that?” She pointed toward the river. Out there on the black water flickered tiny lights. One of them had been propelled close to the shore and had gotten caught in the tangled roots of a weeping willow right near us.

“Wait a minute, I want to have a closer look at this!” Before I could stop her, Mia had already climbed down the bank.

“And?” I asked.

Mia didn’t say anything for a moment. When she finally did answer, her voice sounded astonished: “It’s a kind of raft . . . with a tea candle on it and a couple of . . . pancakes!”

“What? Pancakes?” But her description was exactly right. Mia climbed back up again and held the thing out toward me. Incredulous, I turned it this way and that in my hands. “It looks like a kind of sacrifice,” I muttered. “I’ve seen something like this in the pictures from my mother. People in Indonesia make offerings like this to their nature gods to win their favor.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed yet, we’re not exactly in Indonesia!” Mia exclaimed excitedly. “So where do these sacrificial things come from?”

That question, at least, wasn’t hard to answer. The closer we got to our dock, the more of these lights we discovered on the river. Without a sound, we continued on our way, as if stalking someone.

And there she was! On the dock, someone knelt and was carefully releasing another raft into the water. It was a figure in a flowing white dress, a nightgown. The hair that was usually tied back in a severe knot hung thinly over her shoulders, and her feet were bare. I had never seen her like this before . . .

It was my grandmother!

I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. Her hands moved as if she was praying the rosary, but I couldn’t understand her mumbled words. I didn’t understand anything anymore. While I saw Grandma pull out some metallic object and heard Mia give a muffled gasp next to me, everything seemed oddly surreal to me, as if we were caught in a nightmare.

The knife glittered in the moonlight as my grandmother cut herself in the finger and then let her blood drip into the water. “Protect this house and those who live in it,” she droned in her worn-out, old woman’s voice, a monotone singsong. “Accept my offering and remain in your territory, in the river!”

Grandma made the sign of the cross one last time and touched her hand to her lips. Then she turned away from the water and shuffled back up to the house with difficulty, without even looking around her.

Mia exhaled raggedly. “What on earth was that all about, Alex?” Where was my brave, calm, cool, and collected Mia? She seemed to be completely stunned. “I mean, that’s . . . that’s completely crazy! Why in the world is your grandmother letting her blood drip into the river by the full moon?”

I shrugged my shoulders and tried to evade her gaze.

“You know more about this than you’re letting on, am I right?” Mia’s voice grew louder, and she stamped the ground with a foot in a helpless rage. “Right?”

She might even have been right about that. I was afraid to think about it.

“There’s something in the river, isn’t there?” she whispered into my ear, as if she was afraid someone might overhear her otherwise. “What is going on here, Alex? You have to tell me!” In a subdued voice she added, “This is incredibly creepy.”

I didn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t. Instead, I took off my silver chain with the cross and put it on Mia. My neck felt strangely cold and unprotected without its familiar presence.

“What is that?” Mia asked, looking at me with wide eyes.

“It’s a substitute for your earrings. It will protect you, okay?”

She studied me for a long while. “Okay,” she said finally, and then added in a slightly teasing tone, “Now I feel so much better!”

I truly wished I could have felt the same way.

That night, I had bizarre dreams about water and white silhouettes. When I woke up the next morning, my pillow was damp, as if I had cried in my sleep. But I couldn’t remember anything.

“It’s strange—on these hot summer nights, everyone always pretends they’re sleeping when they’re actually doing something completely different,” I said thoughtfully.

We were sitting next to each other leaning on the railing of the bridge, Alina and I. We spit into the river and watched as our spit blended in with the dark water flowing sluggishly beneath us.

The midday sun beamed golden from the sky, and hot wind blew through the empty streets. Other than us, there wasn’t a soul outside. Even the dogs had retreated, panting into the shade.

Just one kingfisher sat an arm’s length away from Alina on the railing and preened its colorful feathers. The harsh sunlight reflecting off the brilliant turquoise made me see spots. The bird would have landed on Alina’s shoulder if she had wanted it to. All the animals along the river obeyed Alina.

My thoughts were still churning around the question of why people always pretended. “They’re so busy pretending for each other, they don’t even notice that other people have their secrets, too.”

The word pleased me, so I said it out loud several more times: “Secrets, secrets, secrets.” I was tickled as I thought about Grandma and Skip, both of them sitting at the breakfast table this morning with their eyes barely open, spooning up their cereal as if nothing had happened.

“I think Skip was out with Mia last night,” I told Alina. “That’s his girlfriend now, you know. She’s really nice and . . .” Then I noticed how the sound of Mia’s cello resonated in my voice, it couldn’t be disguised anymore. I abruptly stopped talking, but it was already too late.

Alina had also heard the cello in me.

“So Mia is her name?” Alina drew up her lips so I could see her pale gums. “What is she doing here, anyway? She doesn’t belong here!” she hissed, her voice vibrating like a string pulled too tight.

“She should get out of here, away from our river. Go back where she came from! Don’t you think so, Jay?” Alina looked me directly in the eyes.

I swallowed and felt my head nodding. That’s when I noticed the earrings she was wearing. “Are those . . . aren’t those Mia’s earrings?” I stammered. My vocal cords were tied in knots. My eyes were glued to the dangling strands of tiny shells. They jingled when Mia moved, a quiet music that always accompanied her. Seeing them on Alina now seemed wrong.

Alina smiled with satisfaction.

“You . . . you
stole
them from her!”

“She’s stolen much more than that from me!”

We looked at each other for a long time, while the poplars along the shore trembled in the breeze like blazing torches.