In the River Darkness (3 page)

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” one of the boys finally asked, interrupting the awkward silence. For better or worse, I had to turn around.

Aha! So this was the top dog among the natives. He didn’t look half bad, actually: wiry, athletic build, and brown curls. I guessed he was about eighteen. He looked familiar somehow, there was something about his eyes . . . light blue eyes that suddenly twinkled in the sunlight. The same eyes as the old woman in the garden! Was that his grandmother?

“I think we’re neighbors,” he said. “My brother, Jay,” he continued, nodding his chin in the direction of a lanky guy with light, shoulder-length hair who looked like he was about to fall off the railing, “and I saw you unloading the moving van this morning.”

In the stillness that followed, we sized each other up. This was probably the part where I was supposed to introduce myself in a friendly way, tell them where I came from, and so forth. But I kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t counted on his persistence.

“My name is Alex, by the way. Alex Stonebrook,” he said, extending his hand toward me. I was so astonished by this old-fashioned gesture that I automatically responded in kind. His handshake was warm and firm. I let go of his hand quickly.

“And what’s your name?”

This guy had way too much confidence. I blew cigarette smoke in his face but even that didn’t faze him.

“Mmmm . . .” he hummed, sniffing, “Vanilla?”

When he smiled at me, tiny dimples appeared in his cheeks, the kind that make you want to touch them with your little finger. He was surely aware of that—a regular backwater Casanova. He probably expected all the girls to just fall into his arms when he pulled that stunt with the dimples. But if he thought I would fall for it, he was mistaken.

All of a sudden, rage welled up in me. I wanted to show him, the self-appointed king of the village, oh, yeah! I wanted to get a rise out of that calm face, wipe away that satisfaction with himself and his little world.

“Oh, so you know what that is around here? Vanilla?” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded too sharp, too sarcastic. He just laughed.

“Yeah, imagine that. There’s more here than you probably think. If you like, I could show you a few things. You know where I live.”

That was either the dumbest pick-up line I had ever heard, or the guy was just plain friendly. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“We’ll see,” I mumbled, shrugging my shoulders, turning to go. I tried not to sway, but I was still dizzy. That must have been from the sun.

“Hey, I still don’t know your name!” Alex called after me.

“Mia!” I called back over my shoulder. “I’m Mia.” A light breeze lifted my hair, making my shell earrings jingle quietly. At the end of the bridge sat the stray dog, waiting for me. And suddenly it seemed to smell a little like spring, after all.

“Jay, we have to go! Where are you, you bum?” The wooden steps creaked in protest as I stormed down the stairs. No Jay in the entryway, no Jay in the kitchen. . . . I grabbed two apples from the fruit bowl in passing before I ran out into the yard.

I finally found him in back on our dock. I should have known, actually. The early fog still hung above the water as the sky slowly became lighter. And right in the middle of it, my brother. He crouched there with his head tilted to one side and rocked slightly on the balls of his feet. I have no idea what that’s all about.

“Hey,” I said. It seemed wrong that I was here, as if I had interrupted him while he was praying or something.

He finally seemed to notice me. He managed to stand up, stretched. “Hey, Skip,” he said and smiled at me. Skip, my pirate name. Jay was the only one who still called me that. Only then did I notice that he had his voice recorder in his hand.

“Did you record something?”

“Yeah, do you want to hear it?” Eagerly he rewound and then pressed play. Amidst the white noise, if you listened carefully, you could just make out the twittering of birds.

“Birdspring, spring birds,” Jay said with satisfaction.

He loved to play with words like that, turning them around, stretching them out, as if he had raspberry gum in his mouth that he was pushing around with his tongue. Like the sound of the words was more important to him than their meaning.

“Ah,” I mumbled, pretending that I understood. In fact, the only thing I understood right then was that I should never have given him that stupid tape recorder for Christmas. Hopefully, it would never occur to him to play his spring birds recording to anyone at school. Because I had absolutely no desire to beat up Wolf or some other idiot just because he said aloud what everyone thought: my little brother was a nutcase.

“Come on, we’re running late,” I urged. “Here’s your breakfast.” Clumsily, Jay caught the apples I tossed to him.

“I’ve already eaten,” he said but bit eagerly into one of the apples. “I’ve been up since six already. Not like you, sleepyhead!”

I punched him lightly in the side. “Yeah, well then hopefully you’re in good shape for the Spanish test today. Did you look over the thing with the “if” sentences again?” No reply. He stubbornly fixed his gaze on the tennis shoes that compliantly carried him to school. I sighed. I thought so. He had probably just whiled away the time somewhere along the river again, maybe on the island where we always used to play in our tree house.

Between two bites of apple Jay finally mumbled, “You know I’m not interested in that stuff, Skip.” Yeah, I knew that for sure. In fact, I believe that was the main difference between my brother and the rest of the world. Most people spend half of their day doing things that have to be done, even if they don’t actually feel like doing them at all: going to the dentist, mowing the lawn, growing up . . . the things that are necessary to make your way through life.

Jay didn’t do that. He didn’t boycott to be defiant (although our father always insisted he did). That would never have occurred to him. It was just that those kinds of things weren’t important to him.

“Grandma will kill you if you bring home another bad test grade! And me, too, because I didn’t make sure you did better. So don’t mess it up, Jay. Just try to pretend it’s biology or something else that you like, okay? For me?”

Jay grinned his typical grin, with one eye, the blue one, laughing. But the other eye, the green-brown one, remained serious. His faraway, foreign eye.

Some people found Jay unsettling. In moments like this, I could understand that somehow, though I had seen his bi-colored eyes all my life and was used to them. “Look, there goes the new girl!” I said quickly.

Even from a hundred feet away you could see that this Mia was from the city. She shuffled along the road without looking to the left or the right. I felt compelled to stare at her all the time. I couldn’t help myself. She wasn’t even particularly sexy or anything. I had seen much prettier girls. I had already slept with much prettier girls.

But in spite of that, or maybe because of it, maybe it was this exotic . . . different-ness that captivated me. There was something about her that made her seem utterly out of place. It wasn’t the black Goth clothes or the dyed-black hair, which made her face look sickly. It was something else . . .

I was only half listening to Jay, who was just saying “. . . in my class think Mia is an arrogant bitch because she doesn’t really talk to anyone. And she’s been here three weeks already!”

“And what do you think?” I asked.

“I think she’s crazy!” Jay said, grinning. By then we had reached school. Just in time, because the bell was already ringing. Wolf, Matt, and the other guys were waiting for us.

“Hey, boys, having a little recording session again were you?” Wolf grinned, punching Jay a little too hard on the shoulder. “What was it this time, ducks quacking?”

“Shut up, idiot,” I said in a dangerously quiet voice, and he did.

Only when I looked up again did I see that Mia had been watching us. She stood all by herself in the middle of the schoolyard and looked over at us, while she chewed on her fingernails. And then I suddenly figured out what I found so strange about her. Other people wore black because it was stylish or made them look thinner or because they just liked it, but Mia wore it like a widow, like someone in mourning. Who or what was she mourning?

When I nodded at her, she quickly looked away. What I really wanted to do was to go over to her and hold her jittery, raw hands in mine.

After the long, torturous hours of the school day, Jay and I finally sat at Grandma’s dining room table again.

Above the table hung a singing fish. It was plastic and wore a Santa’s hat. Dad found it last year at a Christmas market in the city, and the board from which it hung was nailed into the wall above the table. It was probably compensation for the fact that he still hadn’t been able to snag Old George, a devious pike that lived under our dock. Twice already he had managed to get Old George on the hook, and twice he had seen nothing more than George’s dorsal fin as he dove back down into the brown-green depths of the river.

Sometimes, when our father was in a good mood, he let the fish sing for us before we ate: “Jingle bells, jingle bells . . .” The plastic fish clapped its mouth open and shut and swung its tail rhythmically in time to the canned microphone voice. My brother, our father, and I thought this was hilarious.

My grandmother less so; she saw the singing fish as a kind of blasphemy. In a respectable household, people should say a prayer before eating. Our grandmother was a strict Catholic. While my father sat on the dock fishing at 9:30 Sunday morning, trying one more time to reel in Old George, she was off to church. She would have liked to drag me and Jay with her, since she thought a little Christian guidance would be good for us. There were not many things we had managed to establish against Grandma’s will, but the church boycott and the singing fish were among them.

But today the singing fish remained quiet. Grandma said a prayer, with a slight suggestion of triumph in her voice, as she had the last word this time: “Come Lord Jesus and be our guest . . .”

“Amen,” we murmured and then started eating. We could tell Dad was in a bad mood, not only because of the fish’s silence, but also the way he ate. Usually he shoved his food thoughtfully onto his fork, chewed thoroughly, and rinsed it down with a sip of beer . . . everything at his own pace. Today, he just shoveled potatoes into his mouth without paying any attention.

Grandma noticed this, too, of course. “Trouble at work?”

“Hmmm,” grumbled my father. “Not enough orders.” Dully, he stared at the delicate fork in his large hand. He squeezed his fingers around it, and then loosened his grip again. You could seldom read anything from his facial expression, but his hands gave him away. This time I couldn’t quite interpret the gesture. Maybe it was fear.

No wonder. If he lost his job in the carpentry workshop, he probably wouldn’t find another job here, and then we’d have to move away. I couldn’t imagine that. Grandma always said that our family had lived here so long that we had river water in our veins instead of blood. When it came to my father, she was right.

It was quiet at the table, just the sound of silverware clinking. The vegetables swelled in my mouth. They were overcooked and there was hardly any salt on the potatoes. Something like that would never have happened to Grandma before, but recently . . . Of course, I didn’t say anything to anyone; we didn’t want to offend her. I could just imagine how she would get huffy: “If my cooking doesn’t suit you anymore, you can just cook for yourselves from now on!”

Grandma put another lightly burnt bratwurst on my father’s plate, as if she wanted to cheer him up with it. “And how was your Spanish test? Did it go well?” Grandma asked in a forced cheerful voice, fixing her penetrating blue gaze on Jay.

If that was supposed to be an attempt to steer conversation toward a less touchy subject, it was definitely the wrong question. “Hmmm,” Jay replied, quickly stuffing another potato in his mouth.

“Your grandmother asked you a question, young man,” Dad said, giving Jay a shove. He, in turn, hit his water glass with his fork. Pling! The sound made Jay forget Grandma’s question entirely. I could see it in the way he tilted his head to the side. He tapped his fork against the glass again, but very softly, and listened intently.

He drank a gulp and tried it again. This time the tone was brighter, clearer. We stared at him. Jay didn’t notice. His eyes glistened with excitement as he continued the water concert.

I considered whether I should kick him hard in the shin to bring him to his senses again. “Stop that, boy.” Dad didn’t speak any louder than usual, but I could hear the tension of an impending storm in his voice. My glass was fuller, and the sound more of a clang: drrr . . . and again drrr . . .

Then Dad slammed his fist on the table so hard that water spilled onto the table. “Stop that!” he roared. It didn’t happen often that he totally lost his cool. But when he did, it almost always had to do with my brother. My father had never understood him. Even I didn’t always understand Jay, although I probably knew him better than anyone else in the world. But our father didn’t even try.