Meet Me at the River (28 page)

“You know,” I say, “it’s so late. I think I’d better head home.”

“Head home?” Evie says, groggy, and not sure she’s heard right. “We’re in the middle of a blizzard.”

H. J. stands up too. “You can’t drive in this weather,” he says. He sounds confused, a little hurt. In a single second everything has changed.

“It’s so close,” I say. “I’ll just walk.”

“Walk?” H. J. says. “Are you insane? It’s, like, two degrees out there. Maybe even colder. Look at the snow. You won’t be able to see three inches past your face.”

A sort of panic rises in my chest. Luke outside the window, so close, and me not able to get to him. “Okay,” I say, wanting to set the night in motion as fast as possible. “Do you have a spare room, then? I’m feeling pretty tired.”

“Tired,” H. J. says. His face falls, he looks perplexed and a little crestfallen. I realize two things in that moment. I realize that his face has become handsome to me, and also that he has been picturing the two of us alone, together on the couch after Evie finally gives up and goes to bed. Thank goodness Luke showed up.

Evie gets up from her chair. “Come on, Tressa,” she says. “I’ll get you some blankets.” We head upstairs, leaving H. J. alone in the middle of the living room, staring after us.

*   *   *

The Burdick guest room must have been H. J.’s once. It has a pair of twin beds with matching blue quilts, and bare walls with scars from thumbtacks and Scotch tape. I lie underneath the covers, fully clothed and fully awake, staring at the ceiling. I know I could blow it by trying to leave too soon, but my whole body twitches. I can’t wait another second. I have listened to H. J. move around the house, rattling pots and putting out the fire. I listened to him bang around the bathroom and finally close his bedroom door.

I know it hasn’t been long enough, but I can’t help it. I push the covers aside and creep downstairs. The
steps are quiet beneath my feet. I take my parka from the bench in the hallway and pull on my gloves. I curse my mother for stealing my hat, and I take a striped navy scarf that probably belongs to H. J. and wrap it around my head. Catching a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, I change my mind and unwind the scarf with sharp, sudden movements. I don’t want to be wearing H. J.’s clothes when I see Luke.

If anything will wake H. J. and Evie, it’s opening the front door—the wind blasts inside with a loud cartoon howl. But all I have to do is get outside; as long as nobody stops me, I’ll be okay. I step into the wind and snow and pull the door shut behind me.

The snow stings my face. H. J. was right—I can barely see past my own nose. I reach out my hand and touch the side of the house, feeling my way around it. Occasionally my fingers glide from splintery wood to ice-crusted window. Finally I guess I have reached the living room window, and I turn toward what I think is the stretch of forest that leads to my grandparents’. I think of Sturm and Drang, safe and warm in their barn. Then I push away from the house and head into the night, the snow, the storm.

Already my ears feel frozen. I want to call out Luke’s name but don’t dare. The wind could carry the word back to Evie or H. J. And then I hear my own name:

Tressa. Tressa Gentle
.

I step forward, and Luke’s arms are around me. I see
him, of course, my face pressed against his shoulder. He’s wearing his red and black flannel shirt, and I try to decide whether that shirt also still exists, hanging in the hall closet back at Francine’s. I wish Francine and I still had a relationship, some kind of friendship, so that I could go to her house and ransack the closets, solve the mystery of whether his clothes exist in two places, on his body and where he left them.

I block out these thoughts and concentrate on Luke. In a way I do feel him. The memory of Luke holding me is so precise and so huge. It coincides with this moment so exactly that I almost feel him, his hair against my freezing cheek, his arms around me keeping me warm, cracking the small of my back.

“Luke,” I say. “Why did you stay away so long? I wanted to see you so much.”

“I know,” he says. “But I haven’t been away, I’ve been here. All around town. I saw my mom. I saw your mom too. I saw
now
. Tressa, I think you can tell me about now.”

I pull away a little and look at his face. He smiles. I have wanted, every day, to tell him about my world. I sift through everything that’s happened in the past months, the things I’ve longed to tell him—my mother’s restlessness, his father’s worry, my father’s invitation.

“The kitten,” I say. “I named her Emily.”

He nods, vehemently. “Cool,” he says. “Is she all right?”

“She’s perfect,” I tell him. “I love her.” A huge gust of
wind kicks down from the San Juans, and I find myself kneeling underneath its pressure. The skin on my face and ears screams in stinging protest. I know in a moment they will go numb. I don’t care. The only thing I want to do in the whole world is stay here with Luke, and tell him everything.

He kneels down in front of me so that we’re face-to-face. “You have a brother,” I yell over the gusting wind. “His name is Matthew.”

“Matthew,” Luke yells back, testing the word, this piece of the world that has continued without him. He pushes the sleeves of my coat up and closes his bare hands around my scars. His palms feel wonderfully warm.

“He doesn’t look like you,” I say, and Luke laughs.

I am about to tell him the rest, I am about to tell him everything, when from somewhere in the distance I hear my name. The voice in this moment sounds so foreign that I can barely place it. My hands through my gloves ache like needle pricks, so do the scars on my wrist. A strange look passes over Luke’s face, not sorrow exactly, just a kind of wordless
Oh
.

It feels so good to be with her, I do everything wrong. I make her come out in the blizzard. I watch her skin go from pink to red to white. I spent my whole life in this
part of the country. In middle school we took courses in mountaineering. I know what it means when a person’s skin goes white. Part of me wants to send her back indoors but another part wants to keep her with me.

A living voice snaps me out of it. I know I can’t do or have what I want. I fade backward before I have a chance to remember and tell her the most important thing, the reason I can reach her.

Tressa.

I feel myself fall away, backward, to someplace deeper. Damn. Damn! For the first time I’m scared I won’t be able to find my way back.

“No,” I yell. “Luke! Please don’t go. Please stay here with me!”

There’s still so much I need to tell you
.

But it’s too late. His face has changed, become vague and helpless. We try to hold on to each other, we cling and grasp, we get to our feet and struggle with all our might to hang on.

The wind blows. The snow assaults from every direction—east, north, west, south. The sky and the ground. I can’t see a thing. My eyes force themselves shut, I press my fists against them, and when I open them, Luke is gone, just as I knew he would be.

“Luke,” I scream. “Come back.”

A hand I can actually feel comes down on my shoulder. I turn to see H. J., bundled in a down coat and fleece hat, and the scarf I rejected wrapped around his neck.

I don’t want to go back to the house. I want to stay here with Luke. I have to find him again. So I try to kick H. J. away, but my stupid legs won’t move, my arms won’t move. H. J. is pulling me, and finally one leg kicks out—Luke! I wriggle away from H. J., and we both fall into the snow.

“Tressa!” H. J. yells. “Stop it! I’m going to lose my sense of direction. I won’t be able to find the house!”

His voice scares me. It sounds frightened, urgent. A flash of us freezing to death, lost in a blizzard just a few yards from his warm house, enters my head. If it were only me, disappearing to wherever Luke goes, I wouldn’t care. At all. But I think of Evie, waking up to find the last member of her family gone. I think of Assia Wevill, laying her little girl down on the blanket.
Turning on the oven. I get to my feet. H. J. hangs on to my waist, as much to support himself as me. It doesn’t seem possible for the wind to blow harder, but it does. We duck our heads and follow H. J.’s homing device for what seems like hours, toward the back door, and enter through the kitchen.

I don’t take off my coat, though it drips wet snow onto the floorboards. The kitchen feels like a hothouse, drenched with the aroma of mulled wine. I sink down onto the ancient sofa and try to pull off my boots, but my hands won’t work. H. J.’s not wearing his glasses. They would have only frozen over outside. He ladles a lukewarm mug for me and presses it into my hands, pulls off my boots, and quickly starts building a new fire. He still wears his hat and scarf. I can see him shaking as he rips up newspaper and tries to light it, squinting.

I gulp down the wine. Warmth enters my body with violent pain. It’s the pain of coming back to life. It sears down to the center of my bones, razor sharp, so that I almost want to scream. Instead I whisper. “H. J.,” I say. “H. J.”

He turns and looks at me. He’s had no luck with the fire; his hands are shaking too hard. My body shakes too, violently. My teeth do what they couldn’t do in the blizzard, they chatter. It sounds like wood knocking against wood. H. J. goes pale. I see him glance toward the living room, probably considering the phone. Does he want to call 911? My mother? My grandfather? Whoever it
is, I see him decide against it. There’s no hope for help without endangering our rescuers. We’re snowbound.

He walks across the floor on his knees, toward me. He takes off his hat, his scarf. He kneels in front of me, his hands gripping the belt loops of my jeans.

“Tressa,” he says. “Why did you do that? Why
would
you do that?”

I stare into his face. It blurs in front of my eyes, I shake so violently. He is the forest ranger, saving me against my will, and at the same time he’s someone else. I let him help me to my feet. If he hadn’t come out to get me, I would have frozen to death out in the storm. I know this now. Maybe I could have stepped right out of my body, a ghost, and walked away with Luke. But H. J.
did
come out to get me, and I lean against him as he pours more wine, then helps me up the stairs.

We go into his room, what must have once been his parents’ room. A wide bed, with iron head- and footboards, down comforter, and quilts piled high. H. J. lifts the mug to my lips. I drink. He puts the mug on the nightstand. It’s surprisingly neat in this room, the floors swept, the surfaces clear, the bureau drawers closed. Only the bed—where H. J. tried to sleep before my newest disaster woke him—has been disturbed.

He takes off my coat. He unzips it so carefully. He slides it off my shoulders. The same with my gloves. He pulls them off one finger at a time. Then he pulls
a down comforter off the bed and wraps it around me. “Can you take off your clothes?” he asks.

My hands fumble toward my jeans, but they’re shaking so hard, my fingers won’t uncurl. H. J. steps closer. He pulls the comforter closer around my shoulders, shielding my body. He keeps his eyes on my face as he kneels to unzip my jeans and pull them down around my ankles. I step out of them like an obedient child.

I know what H. J.’s doing. He wants to stave off my hypothermia. He will undress me, and then himself, and we will crawl under the blankets together and huddle, sharing our body warmth, returning us to 98.6, the temperature of the living.

H. J. takes off one of my soaking wool socks, then the other. He gets to his feet. I’m shivering so hard. He should get me into that bed, under all those blankets, but first he places one hand on either side of my face. I have to tilt my head all the way back to look at him. I can feel how cold my skin is against his palms. It’s like a layer of ice has formed underneath the top layer of my skin. Vague lines cross H. J.’s forehead above his hazel eyes. I see the stubble across his cheek, the tremor in his lips. He looks . . . I don’t know how else to say it. He looks like a man, a grown-up man. He looks, in this dim moment, against my freezing limbs, the storm raging outside, the heat inside pulsing noisily from a too-old furnace—he looks like the other choice. Like possibility. He looks like a person who wants to save me.

H. J. guides me over to the bed. I drop the comforter and climb under the covers. My body still trembles, my teeth still chatter, but I manage to get out of my sweater and T-shirt. H. J. puts the comforter back onto the bed, on top of me. Then he starts taking off his clothes. I close my eyes, my teeth still chattering. The mountain of blankets does nothing to warm me up. I can’t stop shaking. Every edge of my skin burns.

It’s survival,
I tell myself as H. J. joins me in bed. His chest feels broad and strong, pressed against mine. His lips press against my forehead. He doesn’t kiss me, exactly. He just pushes his lips there, another part of his body warming up mine. And it’s working. His hands press against my back, holding me even tighter. Gradually I can feel the blood returning to my body. The shivering subsides. I can breathe in.

H. J. holds me. He feels warm. He feels naked. And I hate to admit it, but he feels good. He feels close. Every few minutes he asks, “Why would you do this? Why?” The question seems clearly rhetorical, his lips moving against my forehead. And if I start to cry, lying with him the way I only have with one other person, it’s not just the difficulty of coming back to life. Which H. J. must understand.

“I will keep you alive,” he says anyway, with certainty and determination. I surprise myself by feeling grateful for that promise.

For a long, long time neither of us sleeps. We just
press close together, bringing our temperature back to normal, H. J.’s lips against my forehead. Outside, the wind keeps roaring. After a while he starts to nod off. I pull away ever so slightly and watch him fall asleep. He looks like Evie as his lids droop, struggle, and then finally close.

My eyes stay open. I sit up, leaning back against the pillows, H. J.’s arm draped heavily across my waist, his sleeping breath against my rib cage. His long johns shirt landed on the nightstand. I reach across him carefully and pull it over my head. I watch the snow slow down, fall straight, still a storm but no longer a blizzard. Light arrives, despite the still falling snow. At some point I hear Evie wake up and head to the bathroom. I hear her stop beside the guest room, the door wide open and the bed empty of me. I hear disquiet and maybe a little woundedness in her pause. Then she goes into the bathroom, clicking the door shut with palpable irritation. I can’t stand to know what she must be thinking.