Meet Me at the River (16 page)

It seems like such a paltry request, to go back minutes in time. But then the minutes turn to hours and days and weeks, all time that you have to live with this burning regret and sorrow and loss. How could I live with myself? How could I live without Luke? I needed to see him. It felt so urgent, so imperative. I had things to tell him. I had forgiveness to procure. I couldn’t stand the pain a second longer, without doing something to stop it. So I sat down at the kitchen table, the same place my mother had written her fateful farewell note, years before Luke or I was born. There were a million things I could have written. A million words for my sadness,
none of which even began to cover it. So I wrote down the simplest part, the most elemental truth:

I’m sorry. I have to see him.

The day Luke died the ground was soggy because the crust of ice had just melted. A few leaves and shoots tried to break through, but they didn’t stand a chance, not at this altitude. One last storm could still come along and cover them with snow. But on that day, for a few hours anyway, we had spring. Birds chirped all around us. The river crashed fast and hard from all the melt-off.

Luke took my hand. The two of us walked beside the river. I knew I should pick up Carlo’s leash but I didn’t. What could go wrong—an old, obedient dog. I want to go back and shake myself, hard.
Don’t you remember how he loses his footing? Stupid, stupid girl
.

Because after all the yelling and rules and the alarm system, here’s what finally managed to keep Luke and me apart—a rabbit. It burst out from behind a tree, and Carlo—forgetting his age and arthritis—gave chase. Luke and I laughed at the same time, the exact same noise, blending together so that it sounded like a single sound from a single person. Sometimes I think I made up what I said next, that I’ve created this memory as a way to make myself feel better. But at the same time I know for certain my exact words when the
laughter stopped. I said, “Oh, my God, Luke. I love you so much.”

Luke would have gathered me up and kissed me, except that as soon as the words were out of my mouth, we heard the splash. Neither of us saw the fall itself, Carlo tumbling down the bank. The next thing we saw was his sleek black head bobbing above the water, his paws in a frantic dog paddle, his body hurtling downstream the way we’d just come.

Luke and I ran along the bank of the river, calling to Carlo. I still can’t describe the panic I felt, watching my dog go. After a while he seemed to stop struggling. We couldn’t see his paws, just his head, occasionally—terrifyingly—sinking below the water, then bobbing back up.

“Hold on,” we both yelled to the dog. “We’re coming.”

Luke hurtled ahead of me, until after a while I couldn’t see him. He had escaped down the path, running like an action hero, his dark head rising and falling on shore the way Carlo’s rose and fell in the river current.

And then another slip. From my distance around the bend, I heard it, a foot sliding in the mulchy leaf litter. I heard the sound of a tumble, and a splash, and suddenly it was me running like an action hero, faster than I would ever have imagined possible.

The forest ranger and the EMTs said he must have struggled. The current was too fierce. If only he had given up, the way Carlo did—which is why the river finally released the dog, just around the next bend a quarter mile
or so down, as it came upon a beaver dam. The water pooled and almost stilled. When I reached that point, my chest heaved and my air emerged in honking gasps. Carlo managed to pull himself out of the river, soaked through to the bone. He shook himself off and sprayed me with water before he collapsed onto the bank in an exhausted heap. While Luke floated facedown, still traveling downriver but painfully slow.

I ran forward, splashing into the calmer water, all that ice-cold, melted snow. I turned Luke over so that his face pointed toward the sky. I pushed wet hair and leaves off his face and placed my lips on his, trying to breathe for him, but I couldn’t get enough traction. So I moved behind his head and looped my arms under his shoulders. I dragged him onto the bank and beat on his chest and blew air into his lungs, amazed at how exactly Hugo’s course in CPR came back to me.

But Luke. He did not come back to me. What I labored over, it was only his body. He himself, Luke, had already made his exit, somewhere upriver, while I had run after him with my useless, pounding feet.

*   *   *

In the hospital, before Francine arrived, they let me go into the room with his body. I opened the door and walked on tiptoes across sterile linoleum. The nurse stood next to him and lifted up the sheet. My heart swelled with the most illogical burst of relief, almost joy. Oh, I thought. It’s not him!

This reaction went beyond wishful thinking. Despite Luke’s beautiful face, his shiny black hair, the peace sign with the bit of pearl hanging from its leather thread. A body just doesn’t look like itself when a person no longer inhabits it. Luke without Luke no longer looked like Luke. He, Luke, had left the building. And if he wasn’t there, he must have been somewhere else. Right?

I tried to continue, to move forward, to stay alive. The devastated faces of Luke’s father, our sisters, his mother, showed me exactly what would be wrought if I did what I wanted and followed him.

“Let’s go away,” I said to my mother one night when she walked into the living room, a book under her arm. Paul was over at Francine’s collecting his share of Luke’s ashes. I couldn’t stand the thought of him walking through the door, carrying those split-in-two remains.

“Tressa,” Mom said, her voice appalled, as if she and I hadn’t run away together a million times.

“Why not?” I said. “There’s nothing keeping us here anymore.”

“There’s Paul,” Mom said. “My parents. This house. Our life.” We stood in the living room, next to the red velvet love seat. I pushed her hard on the shoulders, and she sat down. The heavy book fell to the floor.

“Mom,” I said. I didn’t yell. My voice sounded more furious than if I had yelled. It sounded strained and broken. How could she not get it? Who had taught me
that the best antidote to anything was getting into your car and pressing down on the gas?

“I have left for you again and again,” I said. “You’ve dragged me away for your own purposes, and now I am telling you, I need to get away. I need to get away now!”

“Tressa,” Mom whispered. Her face clouded, sad, and hopeless, and she picked the book up off the floor and held it up for me to see.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
.

I stared. My first thought—stupid, stupid!—was to tell Luke.
You won’t believe it. Another sibling that we half share
. But I couldn’t tell him anything, not ever again, and I sank to my knees and sobbed in my mother’s lap.

“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hand over my hair. “I wish I could. But I can’t. I just can’t.”

I have seen the regret in her face every day since. If only she had granted my wish and taken me away. Because on my own in Rabbitbrush—the town where Luke didn’t live anymore—I could only think of one place to go. One thing to do. Over the next week an urgency mounted. I had to escape, to get away from all these feelings. Never mind the mourning, grieving faces all around me. They’d be better off without my face to remind them of everything they’d lost. Only one person in the world could grant the forgiveness I needed to continue living. In the absence of that there was simply one thing to do, and nothing else:

I’m sorry,
I wrote.
I have to see him.

I can’t see it like it’s happening, and I can’t remember because I wasn’t there. I know what she did but I can’t talk about it. The words don’t come together. I only know it in the foggiest kind of way, like waking up from a dream where you remember the feeling but not what happened.

I want to take the whole thing off Tressa’s shoulders the same way I want to wave my hand over her wrists and make the scars disappear. But then I remember what’s bringing me back and letting me touch her (according to Tressa, anyway) and I get confused.

I get confused. I need to rest. It’s too much to think about, Tressa and me wanting different things. Before when we wanted different things they were pretty insignificant, like a party, or her going to summer camp. But
in the after-Luke there’s this. I want to live and she wants to die. Which sounds like the same, even though I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not.

That night I hung on to Carlo for the longest time, my face buried in his fur. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again and again. “I love you. I’m sorry.” I knew I couldn’t bring him with me, because he wouldn’t let it happen. He would bark and whine and howl for help. And then I’d be gone and he’d be deserted.

My mother had a bottle with five Vicodin left over from her last miscarriage. I had already stolen them from her medicine cabinet. I had also stolen an X-acto blade from Paul’s toolbox. Back then I still had my Jeep. I bundled up. Nights were cold. I didn’t want to be uncomfortable. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I wanted the pain to
end
. For everyone. I wanted to see Luke. I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened since he’d been gone.

At the funeral I had watched the different faces and the various reactions. There was Francine, front and center, unable to look my way. There was Kelly, weeping in the back pew. There were all Luke’s friends, buttoned into coats and ties, looking pale-faced and shell-shocked and tearful. The whole town was there, and I sat in the
front pew with Mom and Paul and my grandparents. My sisters sat across the aisle with Francine as if it were a wedding, one side bride, one side groom. And all the places I hadn’t belonged had nothing on that moment—me sitting in the front row, supposedly a star mourner, when all I wanted to do was spare everyone the miserable, guilty sight of me. I would rather have stood before a firing squad than in front of the entire town, acting as if I had any right to even grieve.

*   *   *

The night I left I carried a backpack with the knife, the Vicodin, and a bottle of Paul’s red wine. I chose the one that looked cheapest. I just wanted to make it possible, what I had to do. I locked the dog door and closed the kitchen door carefully behind me, pushing Carlo’s nose back inside, sliding my arm through the barest crack so he couldn’t wriggle through and follow me. In the rearview mirror I watched the windows to see if any lights came on, but none did. I was safe, driving out of Rabbitbrush, down the highway toward Ouray, and Alta—the abandoned mining town. I don’t know why I chose Alta except that the place always seemed so rife with ghosts. When I finally arrived, I sat for the longest time in my car, which I could drive all the way up to the buildings now that the snow had melted.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought I’d be able to see those ghosts, the people who used to live there, going about their business. The miners’ wives
would stop to chat with each other as they hauled water or chased children. Maybe I’d see the whole community, all of them, walking to the large common building for a town meeting. Maybe some of them would be wearing headlamps, shining toward me through midnight, letting me know what I could expect, just around the corner.

I didn’t know what to look for. I’d never seen a ghost before.

For hours I sat there, seeing nothing but the night, the moving trees, the falling-down buildings. Darkness masked all the years of graffiti by hikers and skiers and tourists, but the town didn’t look any more inhabited than usual, or anything more like its former self. Like Luke, Alta wasn’t in Alta anymore. Everything that mattered had gone.

I took a sip of the wine, wincing. I had never developed a taste for alcohol, especially since my one experience had ended so badly. Tonight I drank for purely medicinal reasons. After the first few sips it tasted fine, warming. My head began to spin a little, but the hole in my heart still gaped open.

Wisps of light rolled over the horizon, this mountaintop one of the first spots touched by sunrise. The gas gauge read almost empty. I turned off the car. I opened up the Vicodin bottle and swallowed the five pills one by one, sipping the wine to wash them down. I knew the combination wasn’t enough to kill me. I only wanted to
block the pain so that nothing would prevent me from doing what needed to be done.

I left the half-drunk bottle of wine on the road beside the car. I carried my pack, though I only needed one thing inside it. I chose the closest building, a family cabin probably, the old fireplace in its center ground down to nothing but a pile of bricks, the staircase crumbling, leading up to nowhere.

*   *   *

I had learned from the Internet that slicing vertically works best. Every single resident of Rabbitbrush knows what happened next. There’s barely any point in telling. How my strong young heart worked overtime, pumping more blood to compensate for the loss. I couldn’t stop it from doing so; I had passed out. I had forgotten to tell my body that I had no more use for properly functioning organs.

Still, my plan would have worked. My mother didn’t find the note inside the bread box until after I’d been brought to the hospital. Even if she had found it, chances are slim they’d have figured out in time where I’d gone. Naive method or not, I severed an artery. The blood was flowing, I lost consciousness, I was on my way out. But a park ranger decided to have his breakfast at Alta, sitting in his truck, watching the sun rise and the ghosts evaporate. He saw my car and the wine bottle beside it and set out searching. He found what should have been my body but was
still me, and he ripped apart his own shirt to stop the blood.

Life assaulted me by continuing. Instead of oblivion and possibly Luke, I got a blur of sirens and white coats and two days in the state mental hospital, followed by four weeks in the private one paid for by Paul. At the time I thought he’d spend any amount of money just to have me gone an extra month. Now I realize my lack of gratitude, considering. And all I can say is I’m sorry, truly sorry, for all the expense and worry, all the pain and grief that I caused, beginning with killing Luke and ending with trying to kill myself.