In the River Darkness (19 page)

“Why not?” I asked hesitantly. Even as I asked the question, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to hear her answer.

“Well, the dog went for a little swim, you know?” Alina placed her forehead against mine, sending me her thoughts. For a heartbeat, I had a clear image of the dog. He would never eat chocolate-covered raisins again. His blue, swollen tongue hung out of his mouth; his eyes were empty and broken.

It was like a sucker punch. I jerked back from Alina, staggered, and fell in the mud. “You . . . you’re . . .” I whispered. I was so appalled I couldn’t find the words as I slid away from her backward on the seat of my pants. “Mean and . . . gruesome, that’s it! How could you do such a thing?”

“I do what I want! I’m the queen of the kingfishers,” Alina replied, tossing back her head. But her voice sounded uncertain this time. She had wanted to intimidate me, punish me for my disloyalty. But she hadn’t counted on such a strong reaction from me. I think it scared her.

“A dead stray, who cares about that? Come back to me, Jay. Come back to the river!”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to be like you!” With effort, I scrambled to my feet. “I’d rather be a crying human being with a heart than a kingfisher with a heart of ice,” I said quietly. Then I turned around and walked away. Away from her.

I had only gone a few steps when I heard her call: “Jay, wait! I’m sorry! Don’t go away, do you hear me?” Alina begged me. I closed my ears.

But I could still hear it: the raw heartbeat of her fear. Her pain, her rage, her astonishment that I dared to turn away from her. All of that echoed in my body.

“Please, don’t do this! Don’t leave me. You can’t do this! You promised me!” Alina screamed now. “I CAN’T EXIST WITHOUT YOU, JAY!”

I wasn’t entirely sure if I could live without her, but I yelled back, “I don’t ever want to see you again! Do you hear me, Alina? I’m forgetting you! I’m forgetting your name! You’re dead to me! Dead and forgotten!”

My feet were so heavy. Everything had become so heavy. But maybe that’s the way it has to be when you suddenly carry the weight of your life on your own shoulders.

When I got home, Grandma looked at me with a strange expression on her face. She insisted that I go lie down for a while.

“Your brother isn’t feeling well, Alexander. So leave him alone for a while.” Skip slinked around me like a cat around a dish of milk, but she firmly shooed him away. I could see the questions burning on the tip of his tongue as Grandma slammed my bedroom door in his face.

I let her cover me up. “What on earth happened?” she asked.

“Oh, Grandma, I feel so strange. As if something in me has died.” She muttered something I couldn’t understand and brought me a cup of hot milk with honey in bed, and her rosary. I didn’t touch either one of them.

Time passed. The time after Alina. I dozed with open eyes. Suddenly, a muffled bang made me sit bolt upright. It sounded as if someone had flung something against my window.

Slowly, I stood up and dragged myself over to the window to look out. Down on the ground I saw something blue shimmering.

I stormed down the stairs and outside. It was the kingfisher. Its neck was broken. The little body, still warm, hung lifeless in my hand. Already ashes, dirt.

I knew what that meant. The bird was a message to me: Alina was trying to get to me, even if she had to send her bleeding minions through panes of glass to do it. She was demanding me back like a lost object she had a fundamental right to.

You belong to me, you’ll always belong to me, whether you want to or not,
said the dead bird.
I’ll never let you go, never!

Yes, I knew what that meant: from now on, there would be war between Alina and me.

Later, I buried the kingfisher beneath the branches of Grandma’s lilac bush. I cried as the dirt fell on its wings and the black crumbs swallowed up its glistening blue.

That night, even the rushing of the river sounded like a sob.

My dog didn’t come back. I never saw him again.

At least the floodwaters receded in the following days, and the river returned to its usual boundaries. Except in the curve where the Stonebrooks’ house stood, where for some puzzling reason, the murky water seemed to accumulate. It swept away the fertile topsoil in Iris’s vegetable garden and—in spite of the frantic efforts of the family—finally sloshed sluggishly down the basement stairs. Twice they had to have their basement pumped out by the fire department.

The damage was enormous, but the thing that made Iris most bitter was that all her carefully canned foods were spoiled. There was nothing to do but throw them away. For days, Alex, Jay, and their father were busy clearing the downstairs rooms of the heavy sludge the river had left behind. I often helped for a few hours; we pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow filled with dirt outside, and scraped it off the walls.

After a while, the horrid smell was so omnipresent I hardly noticed it anymore. But when I stepped into the foyer that one afternoon, the biting stench overpowered me. It smelled like the house itself was on its deathbed, a living thing rotting away.

“Hello, is anybody home?” I called. I thought I heard a voice coming from the kitchen and peered in the doorway. There was no light on, so I thought I had been mistaken. But then I noticed the slumped figure at the table.

It was Iris. With her head propped on her hands, she rocked herself back and forth stiffly. I heard her quietly muttering to herself, but I couldn’t understand the words. She seemed to be deeply immersed in studying something that lay in front of her on the scratched surface of the table. I knew I should leave her alone, but I couldn’t control my curiosity. Just a quick peek . . .

Cautiously, I crept closer to peer over her shoulder. Now I could understand what she murmured repetitively: it was her daughter’s name! She strung the syllables together like the beads of a rosary until they formed a monotonous liturgy: “Oh, Katarina, Katarina . . .”

A floorboard creaked under my weight and her head immediately turned around. For an instant, a strange mixture of fear and joy shone in her eyes. Then she recognized me—and it was extinguished again. “Oh, it’s just you,” she said dully.

“Yes, it’s me. Who were you expecting?”

“Hmmm. For a minute there, dumb old woman that I am, I thought it would be my daughter,” Iris said with a sad little smile, running a hand across her face. It occurred to me that it might not have been age that had carved the folds into her skin but deep suffering. It was shocking, even frightening, to see how old and fragile she seemed today and how much I had come to care for her, my “adoptive grandmother.”

“Could I maybe make you a cup of tea?” I asked.

“Just sit with me for a minute, Mia. In this house full of men I’m happy for a little female company.” Obediently, I pulled up a chair. On the table lay a photograph—so that’s what she had been studying so carefully. I recognized the picture; it was the family portrait that had caught my attention the first time I visited the Stonebrooks’ house. Katarina’s smile was just as mysterious as it had been then.

“You never did tell me how your daughter’s story continued . . . why she finally went away,” I said, driven by sudden curiosity.

“Right you are,” the grandmother murmured. “Well. I did tell you how dissatisfied Katarina was with her life in this small town. There was no way to have a career, or travel to faraway places. At some point, she started to hold Eric responsible for all her broken dreams. She noticeably cut herself off from him, Katarina did, and spent more and more time with the children. They built that tree house over there on the island together. They created their own little world, and no one else could get in. Not even Eric.” With her index finger, Iris bored holes in the air in the kitchen. “Such craziness! Instead of taking care of her household, like a decent woman should. Often there wasn’t so much as a crust of bread in the house when I came to visit!” the old woman said with indignation. “I asked what she did with the money for the groceries and such. And my daughter ran off to proudly present some new lens for her camera. It didn’t take long before the neighbors started talking, saying that Katarina let her children run wild, that she wandered up and down the river with them and only did as she pleased—without paying any heed at all to her husband! She was a walking scandal, our Katarina!” Shaking her head, Iris looked down at her folded hands. As if praying would have been any use.

“Of course Eric heard the rumors, too. In the bar, the men gave him a hard time about not having his ‘wild woman’ under control and did he need help taming her? It wasn’t long before everyone in town had decided that the young lady was leading him by the nose—and that Eric was blinded by love and let it happen. It was clear who wore the pants in the Stonebrook household. Katarina made him a laughingstock. It must have been hard for a man as proud as Eric.”

I looked at the family photograph. Until now, Eric had always been something of a side note to Katarina’s story. But now I asked myself how he must have felt about all of this.

“The most painful part of it for him was probably that there was a bit of truth in the mockery,” Iris continued. “You have to know that Eric has always idolized his wife. It’s a terrible thing when one person loves more than the other, my dear. Because the one who loves more is always weaker, more easily hurt. Eric knew that. ‘I should have let her go back then,’ he once told me later, when everything was long over. ‘I should have let her go, but I couldn’t. Katarina was my life.’ Eric was distraught. He forbade her to swim naked in the river. But of course she did it anyway,” Iris added with a snort. “She did it more than ever! That’s how she was, our Katarina. The more Eric tried to hold on to her, the more fiercely she struggled against him. But all he wanted was for her to stay home and take care of her responsibilities, just like everyone else.”

She shrugged her shoulders in a small, resigned gesture. It was clear that she had never understood her daughter. But I wanted to understand this. Spellbound, I hung on the older woman’s every word, entirely wrapped up in Katarina’s story.

“Because their financial situation wasn’t exactly rosy, Eric started to check how Katarina was spending their money . . . and then there was no more expensive camera equipment. From then on, Katarina was supposed to keep records and account for what she spent. They had some terrible fights because of it. Their battles raged through the house and shook the walls.” A chill ran through her at the memory of it. “Katarina was a fearsome opponent! A terrible hothead. When she was in a rage, she fought with any means. She even threw dishes!

“The poor boys were completely upset, and I often took them to my house. Oh, I tried to talk some sense into Katarina. But it was pointless, absolutely pointless! It only made her more bitter. Sometimes, she didn’t even let me into the house. ‘I’m grounded,’ she said through the screen with no expression on her face. And once she had a black eye.”

“What? You mean Eric actually . . . he
hit
her?” I cried with shock. What an idiot to treat his wife that way. No wonder she ran away from him.

“I don’t know if that’s really true,” Iris replied. Her arthritic fingers reached for my hand to soothe me. “You never met her, but Katarina always knew how to make things appear the way she wanted them to . . .”

I freed my hand from her grasp. “That sounds as if you were on Eric’s side. I don’t understand. Katarina is your daughter! Why didn’t you help her?” My words sounded harsher than I had intended. Like an accusation. Iris sank her gaze.

“Well, my husband and I didn’t want to interfere,” she explained, more to the kitchen table and the family photo than to me. “We thought we had raised her too leniently, spoiled her too much—she was our only child, after all. We thought it was our fault that she had turned out so wild, so headstrong.” She touched the cold glass covering the photograph thoughtfully, as if she wanted to stroke her daughter’s face. Her stern features softened. “Maybe you’re right, dear. Maybe we were too hard on her. She was still so young, our Katarina.”