In the River Darkness (21 page)

“Hey, Alex, you sleepyhead!” Wolf called cheerfully, waving to me. I ignored him and glanced around the courtyard, looking for them.

Mia stood over there, my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend. I stared her right in the face, my anger engulfing me like a pulsing protective shield. Even if she messed around with Jay right in front of me, it wouldn’t have mattered to me anymore. I was done with her.

I tried to tell her all that with my look, pouring my entire burning disdain into it. Apparently, Mia got it, because she looked at the ground with shame. Her face looked pale and miserable. It served her right! If she even had a conscience, she was discovering it awfully late! I did wonder, though, why her lover wasn’t with her. Who was this farce supposed to fool now?

I spied Jay over by the garbage cans, where he was recording the crackling of discarded aluminum foil with his tape recorder. With a heavy plop, a half-eaten apple landed in the bin. The shrimp, who had thrown away the apple, tapped his forehead behind Jay’s back to indicate he was crazy. “What a dimwit!”

Normally, I would have given the midget a pounding for that. Normally.

Still boiling with rage, I stepped up to Jay. He turned to me with a smile. “Morning, Skip!” When he saw my expression, he furrowed his brow questioningly. “What’s wrong?”

My traitorous brother. Still playing the innocent one.

“Do you have a thing for Mia?” I asked abruptly. Jay seemed surprised that I knew about it but nodded without hesitating. I balled my hands into fists in the pockets of my jacket, and then relaxed them again. Between clenched teeth I spat, “Mia said you two kissed each other.” I wanted him to explain what he’d done! I wanted to hear it from his mouth!

“Yeah. We kissed each other,” Jay replied calmly.

My whole life, my grandmother had hammered into me that I should look out for my little brother. And damn it, I’d done it! I had helped him with his homework. I’d towed the annoying nuisance around when my friends and I got together. I’d even gotten into fights for this idiot when people made fun of him!

Jay had never thanked me for anything. And I hadn’t expected him to. The only thing I had expected from him was loyalty. We’d even sworn it with a blood oath!

But how did this rat of a brother thank me for busting my butt for him for years and years? He stole my girlfriend, the only thing that was important to me!

And now, Jay even had the audacity to just say that to my face! Without the slightest trace of regret!

I think that’s what finally pushed me over the edge. “You . . . you goddamned punk!” I hissed and tore into him.

I couldn’t remember ever hitting my brother. He was a slacker as an opponent—didn’t really even defend himself.

“Fight, there’s a fight!” someone yelled in the background. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw several onlookers crowd around us and noted Mia’s horrified face among them.

I threw a solid hit to Jay’s nose, which immediately began to bleed. The blood made bizarre patterns on his face. I observed it with grim satisfaction.

Jay didn’t cry. Then I would have stopped. On his face was more an expression of bewilderment, as if I was treating him unfairly. But I was the one who had been betrayed here.

Filled with rage, I began to shake him. “How long has this been going on between you and Mia? How long have you been playing this game behind my back?” I hissed into his ear. I shook him as if I wanted to rattle the truth loose. His head bobbed back and forth helplessly. He didn’t have a chance to answer me.

The guys pulled me away from him. “Calm down, man! Have you totally lost your mind, or what?” Matt cried, staring at me. “He’s your brother!”

“He WAS!” I spat in Jay’s direction. “Get out of my sight.”

Jay looked like he wanted to say something, but then he just shook his head and trotted away.

Lunchtime passed in icy silence that day. “Can you please give me the salt?” I asked Grandma, even though the saltshaker was directly in front of Jay. She gave it to me, all the time scolding both of us with steely blue eyes as if we were two felons.

I asked myself if someone from school had called home because of the fight. And sure enough, a short while later Dad asked—while looking straight at me—“What happened to your nose, Jay?”

Jay wriggled uncomfortably on his chair and mumbled, “I banged into something . . . bloody nose . . . stupid clumsiness.”

“Ah. I heard you got into a fistfight with your brother,” our father countered, glaring at us both sternly.

“My grandsons, two uncivilized ruffians! What a scandal!” Grandma wailed. “What is the world coming to, that I have to experience this!” With that, she withdrew to the kitchen sink and started rattling pots and pans.

Apart from that, it was very quiet. Jay and I pushed around the food on our plates, which was cold by now. “I’m not hungry,” my brother finally murmured and fled from the room.

Just as I was about to make my escape, too, my father said sharply, “You stay put!” Against my will, I sat back down across from him at the other end of the table.

If I had only felt better after beating up Jay. But unfortunately, it hadn’t done any good, and now I was going to get a serious talking to as well.

“What were you fighting about, you and Jay?” Dad grumbled, restlessly twirling the tassels of the tablecloth between his thick fingers. “What on earth has gotten into you boys? You’ve always been a team!”

I shrugged my shoulders defiantly and stared at my fingers, which had also begun picking at the tablecloth. I had powerful hands with odd, square fingernails. My father’s hands. With a sudden start, I realized that I was much more like him than I had ever wanted to acknowledge.

I had never paid attention before, but when I looked up, I saw my straight, narrow nose on his face. My thick eyebrows. The way he ran his fingers through his graying curls, just like I did when I was at a loss for something to say.

It was creepy, as if I were looking into a distorted mirror that made me look years older. That’s exactly how I would look at forty: abandoned by the woman I loved. Trapped in a job I didn’t like, I’d still be sitting tight in this miserable town. By then I would have forgotten that I once had other dreams . . .

My father sighed; he probably thought I was keeping silent out of sheer stubbornness. “I have to get back to work, Alexander. The lunch break is almost over. We’ll talk later.” He stood up and moved toward the door. I watched as he wiped his clean shoes on the doormat out of habit and felt an extraordinary exhaustion overcome me.

The weeks passed, but the feeling of exhaustion had a tight grip on me. I went to school, did things with my buddies, and helped Grandma at home. But there seemed to be a dull film lying over everything.

“You look so pale and tired, Alexander,” Grandma said, patting my hand to express her concern. “You should get to bed earlier. And eat more apples. That will keep you healthy!”

When I didn’t say anything, Grandma leaned forward confidentially. “It’s because of Mia, isn’t it? I don’t know what happened between you, but she’s a good person. Maybe you two should talk to each other again? And by the Holy Mother of God,” she suddenly started scolding, “find a way to get along with your brother again! After all, it’s almost Christmas!”

Christmas or not, I couldn’t bring myself to forgive Jay. For Grandma’s sake, we at least kept a tense truce. At the table, I asked Jay for the salt, and he passed it to me. But we limited ourselves to talking with each other only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we kept out of each other’s way.

I hadn’t spoken to Mia since she made her confession. At least the lovebirds were discreet, so I never had to deal with the sight of them standing around making out at school.

Christmas, the festival of love and reconciliation, somehow came and went. What didn’t come, again, was a message from my mother. And I really could have used some sign of life from her right then. Using the globe and the old photographs, I tried to travel to her in my thoughts, but it didn’t work anymore. No matter how long I pressed her shell to my ear, instead of hearing the sound of the ocean, now I only heard the monotone thudding of my own pulse in my ears.

Through the pictures she had sent me over the years, I had at least had the feeling that my mother was still a part of my life—that we were still connected to each other in spite of the distance between us. Only now did I admit that I had lost her forever. Mama wasn’t just on a long, long trip. The truth was that she had abandoned and betrayed me, just like Mia and Jay had done.

Apparently, it didn’t mean anything to Katarina to be my mother. Otherwise, she would have come to get me. She would have visited me. She would have at least kept sending me pictures from all her travels. She wouldn’t have left me in the first place. My mother might as well have been dead.

Maybe that would have been easier.

I decided to be done with her, once and for all. So I put my globe marked with all Katarina’s destinations and the boxes with all the photos she had sent me in the next garbage collection.

I tried to feel a sense of satisfaction that I had finally buried that stupid, little boy fantasy. But when I looked out the window and saw the globe perched on a pile of garbage in the rain, all I felt was empty.

I started taking long walks along the river. A thin sheet of ice had already started to form along the shore. I drew the fresh air into my lungs and hoped it would chase away the nasty thoughts that circled around me like vultures, boring their pointed beaks into my soft innards.

My mother and my girlfriend both left me. My brother betrayed me. Maybe there was something wrong with me? Was I impossible to get along with? I pondered these things as the frozen grass splintered under my feet.

In spite of the cold spell toward the end of the month, it had snowed only sparingly. The white powder lay like a shabby, threadbare cloth over the frozen world. There was no one else to be seen far and wide, not someone walking a dog, or even a bird. It seemed like I was the last living creature on the planet. Utterly alone, lost somehow under the weight of the empty sky.

The clouds hung so low that the sky and the earth merged. I couldn’t recognize any horizon. Everything was gray.

I had the feeling this gray would eventually suffocate me. From all sides it pressed on me, as my world continued to shrink, reduced to the size of the discarded globe. It was as though there were nothing left of my life anymore, nothing left of Skip.

No, I would never leave this place. I knew that now.

I would die without ever seeing the ocean.

The hiss of the blades cut through the winter stillness. I didn’t need to look over at the river to know that it was Skip. Even though it was beginning to slowly thaw again, he went ice-skating every day. For hours, he drew circles on the ice, a lonely skater on the gray-white band of the river.

With a sigh, I picked up my shopping bag again and kept walking. My route home led me past Mia’s house. Her cello was silent. Only the cherry tree hummed softly, sunken in silver-blue winter dreams. Behind its bare branches, I could make out a pale oval—Mia’s face.

Recently, I had often seen her sitting up there at her window and how she looked over toward our house. Just like she had done earlier, before she started coming over to visit us. I think she missed us. Not just Skip, but Grandma, too. Maybe even me.

When Mia noticed that I was staring up at her, she raised her arm to wave to me—but then immediately let her hand fall again.

I had no idea why she had told Skip about our kiss. After all, that was strictly between her and me and didn’t have anything to do with my brother. Although he certainly thought it did.

For a while, I had been mad at Mia for that. At Skip, too. The dumb lug was more interested in swinging his fists than listening to me! His loss . . . that way I couldn’t explain it to him, and he had to go on being miserable.

The whole situation was so stupid! Back when we were all together, everything had been fine. Now all of us were alone. Skip. Jay.

Mia.