Meet Me at the River (23 page)

“I had just found out I was pregnant with you,” she continues, “and your father took me to see the Cliffs of Moher. There was a sign saying ‘Caution,’ but everybody went right to the edge. That’s what we were there for, right? To see the cliffs? So Sean and I go right up to the edge. We sit with our feet practically dangling over. It was so beautiful, Tressa, so green and wild, so different from Colorado but still so clearly the same Earth. You know? Anyway, this other couple comes up beside us, goofy and laughing. An American couple in jeans and their new hand-knit Aran sweaters. The wind was kind of fierce and cold. I remember saying to Sean that I wished I could buy one of those sweaters, and he said his mom would make one for me. Anyway, the guy poses so his girlfriend can take his picture. He’s young, younger than Sean and me, maybe still in college. He crosses his arms and smiles. The girlfriend snaps the
picture—one of those old thirty-five millimeters, they were very fancy back then—and in that exact second his heel slides on the precipice and he disappears. Sean and I and all the other tourists saw the fall, but for the girlfriend it must have been, one second he was in the frame of her picture, and after the camera snapped he was gone. Vanished.”

My water glass has gone clammy. Mom goes on. “I’ve thought about that moment my whole life, how you can never know what’s going to happen. One minute someone’s there, the next—poof. Gone. We can’t count on anything; it’s all fleeting. It’s all just this video on fast-forward, except we never know if someone’s going to press pause, or stop, or eject.”

“How about rewind?” I say.

My mother reaches across the table for my hand. I put my glass down and give it to her, my fingers slightly moist.

“That would be nice,” she says. “I used to think about that boy. How one second he was here and the next he was just gone. But ever since what happened to Luke, I’ve wondered about the girlfriend. Where did she go? How did she get home? How did she live the rest of her life, knowing anyone she loved could just disappear in a single instant?”

Mom lets go of my hand and covers her face. Back in his office Dr. Reisner had said I could do my English project as long as I promised to send him a copy of the
paper, and to make an appointment if I started to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps this permission has unleashed my mother’s strong propensity toward carelessness.

“I must be drunk,” she says. “I shouldn’t be saying this to you. But I’d like to track that girl down now. I’d like to find out how she is and how she got through it.”

“Me too,” I say.

Mom peers at me through her fingers. “Let’s stay in a hotel,” she says, her voice slightly muffled.

“Mom.”

“Seriously. I’m too drunk to drive back. You’re too tired. Right?” She pulls out her phone and starts texting.

“Mom,” I say. “You’re going to text him?”

“That way he can’t argue.” She punches out the text slowly, awkwardly, then turns off her phone and drops it into the diaper bag.

“Mom,” I say again.

“Oh, give me a break,” she says. She picks up her water glass. Before she sips, she says, “What’s he going to do? Divorce me?”

She takes a long, deep drink, looking more energized and more like herself than I have seen her in a long, long while.

*   *   *

On the way from the restaurant to the DoubleTree hotel, Mom pulls into the Safeway for formula. “Let’s just see if he’ll take it,” she says. “Then you can get up with him once or twice and I can get some rest.” She hasn’t asked
if this plan is okay with me, making the old assumption that I’ll go along with whatever she decides.

We stand together in the baby aisle, me swinging Matthew back and forth in his portable baby seat, Mom studying the different boxes of powder. I can’t believe that she would want to give the baby something packaged in a way alarmingly similar to Crystal Light.

“Oh, who cares,” she says when I mention this. I notice she has to hold the canister a little bit far away in order to read it, like Grandpa when he forgets his reading glasses. “I bottle-fed the twins, way back before the lactation Nazis took over the world.”

“What about me?” I ask.

“With you I couldn’t afford formula.”

I take a baby bottle off the shelf and read the back of the package. “Mom,” I say. “We have to sterilize everything with boiling water. How are we going to do that in a hotel room?”

“Crap.” Mom puts the canister back on the shelf. “It’ll be easier to just nurse.”

I follow her back into the parking lot. She gets into the front seat, allowing me to buckle Matthew in backward. He opens his mouth as if he’s about to wake up, but only makes a bleating noise, like a little sheep, and goes back to sleep.

“Great,” Mom says immediately as I settle into my seat. “He’ll probably wake up just in time to keep me awake all night.”

“Hey,” I say, “if he does, just nurse him when we get there, then hand him over to me. I’ll stay up with him. I don’t mind.”

“Good,” Mom says. “I was thinking we could get adjoining rooms.”

I know I should be freaking out at this shift in her personality, this shift toward the old, self-serving Mom. And I do feel exasperated, but it’s a familiar exasperation. I almost feel like for the past three years there has been some sort of stand-in—an alien being possessing her—and now all of a sudden I have my real mom back.

*   *   *

In the old days it would have been a splurge to stay at a Motel 6. We would have slept together under a polyester quilt, in a double bed whose springs made themselves all too apparent every time we rolled over. Now we have two rooms at one of the nicest hotels in the state, but for several hours I don’t get a chance to contemplate the change in our fortunes. Instead I frantically pace and jiggle and coo, dealing with this little baby who doesn’t understand why his mother has suddenly become unavailable. When I finally get him to sleep—lowering him back into his car seat—I tiptoe into Mom’s adjacent room to see if she’s getting any rest.

The lights are on, and she sits sideways in a wide easy chair, her gazed fixed out the window toward the luxurious view of the Animas River and the mountains—snowcapped and therefore shining through the darkness.
She sips a glass of wine she must have ordered from room service. Her leggings and cashmere sweater are cozy enough to sleep in, but she doesn’t sleep, just swings her legs and stares out at that expensive view.

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “I thought you wanted to sleep,” I say.

“I do. But this is nice too. Do you want a glass of wine?” I see she’s ordered a bottle. It sits on the table beside her next to an empty glass. She reaches for it, ready to pour.

“No, thanks,” I say. It annoys me that she keeps offering me alcohol when she got so mad at Luke for supposedly getting me drunk.

She takes her hand away from the bottle and says, “That’s right. You have no vices. Luke was your only vice.”

Something in my spine goes very cold. “He wasn’t a vice.” I remind myself to use the past tense and hope that my voice sounds foreboding enough to make her change the subject.

Instead she shrugs. “I guess that’s a matter of opinion.”

“I could just as easily say Paul is your vice.”

“But that wouldn’t be accurate,” she says. “It’s me. I’m his vice.”

I turn my head and stare out the window along with her. Maybe this conversation, this transformation, means she has stopped being afraid of my committing suicide again. I wonder what has precipitated this
change in her, and I only need to rack my brain for a moment to remember Hugo and Isabelle’s visit.

“Mom,” I say. “Did you see Hugo when he was here?”

“See him?” She lets out a short, self-pitying bark of a laugh. “How could I see anybody? I’m under house arrest, remember?”

“Mom,” I say, again with the cautioning tone I haven’t had to use in years.

“I did speak to him on the phone,” she admits. “I liked hearing his voice. It was fun,
n’est-ce pas
, living on that boat?
Sur la mer?
All wild and free?”

“You said the opposite when we left. You said it was confining, claustrophobic.”

“Isn’t that odd,” she says. She leans her head back, her voice going dreamy. “All that sky. All that water. Miles and miles. And still I felt hemmed in.”

She stops talking abruptly, and I know she’s pondering her own psychological makeup. We sit there quietly for a long time, staring into what wilderness gives itself back through the darkness. Maybe there’s something she can sense that I haven’t realized yet, like a part of me has shifted back, just as it has in her.

And then, as if they were on some kind of delay, my mother’s words sink in: “I’m his vice.” Even though I don’t like Paul, have never liked him, I think of all the damage my mother has done to his life and his family (poor Francine, my poor sisters, poor Luke), and I feel sorry for him.

“You won’t do it, will you?” I ask. “You won’t leave him again.”

I think at first when she doesn’t answer that she’s considering her reply. But when I look over, I see that she’s asleep, her head flopped back, her hand still resting on the table by the wineglasses. Her chest rises and falls slowly, steadily, and in this forgiving and luxurious light she looks just the way she always has, only briefly at rest, a person whose future has yet to be decided.

From the other room I hear a baby wake. It takes me a minute to remember that he’s ours, my responsibility, and I jump to my feet and rush in to him, hoping I can calm him without feeding, giving my mother a little more time to sleep.

Weird. Very weird. I can walk into town during the day and see things like a new sporting goods store, and a new clerk behind the counter at the Mercantile. Little things like that, telling me this could be the after-Luke. One afternoon I stand outside the Rabbitbrush Café and watch my father drink coffee. He sits at a table by the window. He’s got a sandwich and fruit in front of him, but he doesn’t eat it, just nods when the waitress comes by to fill his mug. I don’t know that waitress. Plus, something about Dad’s face makes it seem like after. He looks different. Probably I’ve been remembering him wrong for a long time. I always think of him the way he looked when I was a kid. Now he looks kind of old. Gray hair, lines, all that. On top of that it looks like he’s lost weight. I wonder why he’s
not eating. He must have wanted the food when he ordered it.

When I was a kid Dad would get home, pat me on the head, then go into his study and close the door. All the things I ever did, all the activities, I did with my mom. Never him. He never tried to see me after we moved out, he didn’t want any kind of custody. It pisses me off especially now that I’ll never have my own kid. Dad had something important, he had me, and he just tossed me out like I was nothing.

But the weirdest thing? I still want him to look up and see me standing here on the other side of the glass. So I knock on the window but even I can’t hear the sound it should make. On the other side of the glass my dad doesn’t do anything. He just looks crumpled.

What would happen if I walked into the café the normal way, through the front door? Maybe I could sit down at my dad’s table and he’d be able to see me.
Why not give it a try?
The bell jingles in my head before I have a chance to even open the door. Instead of being in the café, I’m walking through the front yard at my Dad’s house, the house where I grew up.

Out of nowhere, day turns into night. Snow crunches under my feet. I stare up at Tressa’s window and I can’t see anything. I can’t sense anything either, no thoughts or feelings. She must be at the Earnshaws’. From upstairs I hear a baby cry. My brother, I think, and I know I can’t stay here, not even for a minute.

*   *   *

So I head for the river. Tressa used to tell me about living on the ocean. What she liked best was walking along the shore. I’ve never lived anywhere near the beach. I like to think of the waves lapping over her bare feet.

I don’t know why the river still feels like my friend. Maybe by now I’ve learned my lesson. I remember the way the current forced me under when I tried to swim toward shore. I never knew the water would be so much stronger than me. I held my breath as long as I could. At first I didn’t breathe because I wanted to live. But then that same thing, wanting to live, forced me to breathe. That’s when water flooded my lungs. I tried to hack it out but I couldn’t, and by that time it was like I’d already left. I felt sort of shocked but not so much in pain. I was just leaving, whether I wanted to or not. For a while there my body was the river and me at the same time. And then my body wasn’t me at all because I’d left it. No going back, no matter how much I wanted.

Now I start walking again, to the Earnshaws’ house, but somehow I end up at mine. Mom’s house. The place is so familiar that I breathe in. I breathe in so deep I think I taste river water.

*   *   *

All the lights are on. I walk inside, down the narrow hallway, over the floorboards that splinter if Mom forgets to mop sideways.

She’s sitting in the living room watching TV. There’s
a blanket over her knees. The local news is on, something about the Rabbitbrush drive-in movie theater, how zoning has been approved and it might open this summer. To me it’s pretty incredible that I can hear this and know this. But Mom just snorts and says, “Of course it will. He always gets everything he wants.”

She’d never say that if she knew I was there. I always figured she hated him, but she never would’ve said it to me. Maybe I can touch her, I think, and put my hand on her shoulder. Mom’s body goes tight for a minute, like I startled her, but then she relaxes. I can’t feel her shoulder under my hand but I tighten my grip anyway.

“Hey, Mom,” I say. “Hey, Mom. It’s me. Luke.”

She picks up the remote and turns off the TV. For a second I think she’s going to talk to me. But she just pulls the blanket up to her neck and lies down. I wish she’d go into her room. She never used to sleep on the couch.

But I guess with me gone things are different. Mom closes her eyes. Her breathing gets slower but I can tell she’s not asleep yet. She used to have this habit of waking up in the middle of the night. The blanket slips a little and I pull it up and tuck it in around her. Then I stand up and go through the house, turning off lights. Mom looks like she needs rest. Maybe with the house dark she can sleep a little longer.