Meet Me at the River (30 page)

“All my life,” I say to H. J., picking up a conversation we must have started at some point, “I felt like I could never be sure of anything. When the truth is, that’s how everybody lives. Nothing can be certain, ever, not for a single second. You could set out on a nice vacation and end up skiing into a tree. Or pose for a picture on a high cliff and fall before the shutter even snaps.”

“Or,” H. J. says, “you could go for a walk by the river and your dog could fall in. Your boyfriend could drown trying to save him.”

I stare out at the layers of sky and mountain. Then I say, “Your mother could get cancer and die. Your father
could get so sad that he drives into a wall and kills himself. He might even take your sister’s dog with him.”

“Bad things happen,” H. J. says.

“Terrible things. There’s no way to be sure about anything, ever.”

“No way at all,” H. J. agrees. He walks sideways, stepping his skis closer and leans toward me, pressing his shoulder against mine.

Nowhere on the planet can the sun be as bright as it is over our heads, the world continuing below us, barreling downward for nearly twelve thousand feet. At the top of See Forever the whole world stretches its wide, wide wings below us, and the future refuses to make a single promise. The only thing we have is the sunlit height of the present tense—immediate and fine and ever so fleetingly sure.

I don’t see Paul at all over the next few weeks, but Grandma goes over every day to help take care of Matthew. Grandpa stops grumbling about the drive-in movie theater. Suddenly that victory seems like the least thing he can give to Paul, after everything his daughter has taken from him.

That night Mom left, after I got home from skiing with H. J., Grandma and Grandpa sat me down in the living room. “Do you know where she is, Tressa?” Grandpa asked. His rugged, sunburned face looked stern.

“No,” I admitted. “But I know where she’s going.” Not wanting to aid or abet in any way, I told them everything I knew about her plans to go to California, but the information didn’t help much. And even if we knew where she was, what could Paul do? Go out to
Sausalito with a net and wrestle her back here? Mom had left, again. Paul’s only hope was to wait until the wish for her return subsided.

*   *   *

Finally Paul calls. The phone’s ringing as I walk in the door, home from school, and I pick it up blindly. My grandparents have no use for such modern inventions as caller ID.

“Tressa,” he says. I realize that I expected him to sound angry the first time I spoke with him, but he doesn’t, just sad, maybe defeated.

“Hi, Paul,” I say. “Just a second. I’ll get Grandma.”

“I’m calling for you, actually,” he says. I can hear Matthew crying in the background. “I hoped you could come over and help me out with something.”

The last thing I want to do is go back to Paul’s house and be alone with him. I know his primary goal is not help with the baby but information about my mother. Still, I hear Matthew wailing. Probably Paul wants to wail right along with him. I remember those brutal, terrible first days—the ones that followed losing the person I loved best in the world.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

*   *   *

The scene I find is more organized than I expected. There’s a girl taking care of Matthew. I recognize her as the new waitress from the Rabbitbrush Café, which surprises me, because I assumed Paul wanted me to
babysit. But when I walk into the kitchen, the girl picks up Matthew and gets ready to leave the room. Paul takes a bottle that has been warming in a pot of hot water on the stove and hands it to her. She carries the baby away.

“He’s taking formula now?” I say.

Paul looks at me without answering, then opens the freezer. I see it’s stuffed with bags of frozen breast milk, what looks like tens of them, all neatly dated with black ink.

“These were in here when she left,” he said. “I guess she’d been stockpiling them, maybe in the freezer in the garage. Then yesterday I got a package from FedEx, addressed to Matthew. More little packets of breast milk, packed on dry ice.”

“Wow,” I say.

“I guess she plans to keep sending them, who knows for how long.”

Paul must have stayed home from work today. He’s wearing jeans and a gray hoodie. He actually looks a little more relaxed than he did in the weeks leading up to Mom’s departure. As if reading my mind, he says, “It’s really almost a relief to have her gone. I thought I would go crazy that last month waiting to see what she’d do.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s not your fault.” He says this quickly, and his voice sounds hard, not quite convinced.

“I wasn’t apologizing,” I say. “I was sympathizing.”

Paul frowns. He has not softened toward me. In fact, I see that he has hardened in general, the one point of softness he retained—his weakness for my mother—finally freezing over, the middle of the lake. Mr. Zack could park a Mack truck on what used to be Paul’s devotion to my mother, now covered by a thick layer of ice, buried too deep for any spring thaw to ever reach it again.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Paul says, “about several things.” He walks into the living room, and I follow him, noticing as I pass the hall table that all photographs of my mother are gone, though he has left a couple of me, and of Carlo. In the spot where he kept a photograph from their original wedding, he now has a picture of Luke at around eight years old, sitting on somebody’s horse and smiling at the camera. I stop for a minute and touch the frame, then go and sit down on the red velvet love seat. Paul sits on the couch across from me.

“Do you want coffee, anything?” he asks.

“No, thanks.”

I place my hands in my lap and wait for him to speak. After a moment of awkward silence, Paul says, “I’m wondering if you’ve heard from any colleges yet.”

“No,” I say. I know I could check online but want to wait for the letters. “Any day now, I guess.”

Paul nods. “Well,” he says. “I just want you to know, I had a college account for Luke that I switched into your name after he died. I want you to use that for Boulder of
course, but also if you get into Stanford or CC or wherever. There’s enough money to cover whatever you decide to do.” He sounds slightly embarrassed at this generosity, but to his credit he doesn’t look at his hands, or the coffee table, but squarely at me. I find it harder to return this gaze, not sure at all how I feel, no longer a threat to him now that she has already gone.

“You had an account for Luke,” I say.

“Of course I did.” He sounds more emphatic than defensive.

“But why would you give it to me?” I ask. “You could switch the account again, couldn’t you, into Matthew’s name?”

“It’s in your name,” he says, suddenly gentle. “I want to pay for your college. I want to make sure you’re all right. Not for your mother, but for my son.” I frown in a moment of confusion, thinking he means Matthew, and then Paul clarifies. “I want to do it for Luke,” he says.

A small sob has collected itself in my throat, and I battle not to let it out. Paul presses on. “It’s not your fault your mother took off again,” he says. “And it’s certainly not your fault that I trusted her.”

I wait, but he doesn’t exonerate me for the most important crime. He can see that I’m waiting for that, but he can’t grant it. Instead he says, “I’m not going to pretend you and I have been close. We both know we’ve had issues, you and I. But whatever your mother does, wherever she goes, you and I are family. You’re
my daughters’ sister. And I’ve got plenty of guilt of my own, Tressa. You must know that.”

I lean forward and cover my face with my hands. For a minute I wait for tears to come, but they don’t. When I speak, still hiding behind my hands, my voice sounds laced with the same anger I directed at my mother. “Paul,” I say. “It almost sounds like you’re saying you’re sorry.” He blows out a thick stream of breath, and I take my hands away so I can look at him.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I was wrong. We should have let you two be. We should have respected your feelings. I’m sorry.”

Hearing the apology, after all this time, the tears make their way into my throat. I know I should say thank you, but I don’t want to cry. Not just now. Paul rubs his hands over his denim-covered knees, not nervous exactly, just emotional. “Since Hannah left,” he says, “I’ve been thinking that maybe what I couldn’t stand about seeing him, and about seeing the two of you together, was that it gave me a mirror of my own feelings, my own relationship, and what it would look like if it were actually reciprocal.”

“That can’t be easy to admit,” I say, finding my voice again.

“No,” he says. “It’s not. But I need to do it, because I feel terrible for what I stole from him.”

I lean toward Paul, hoping the weight of my words—the simple truth—will help him the way he’s trying
to help me. “But you didn’t steal anything,” I tell him. “You couldn’t.”

He stops the OCD movement of his hands and nods. “I’m not going to file for divorce,” he says, which somehow doesn’t seem like a non sequitur. “What’s the point? If she wants a divorce, she can file. This all serves me right for walking straight back into it.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I say. “You couldn’t help it. You loved her.”

“Loved her?” Paul says. “You know the crazy thing? The infuriating thing?”

“You still do.”

It’s his turn to cover his face with his hands. I do the only thing I can think of, which is reach across the coffee table and pat the top of his handsome, graying head. I wait for something to break the silence—the baby, a magpie, a car rumbling down the road. But the room stays preternaturally still and quiet, the weight of this unlikely truce hanging in the air around us.

*   *   *

Never one to leave well enough alone, when Paul walks me out to my truck, he says, “I hear you’ve been spending time with H. J. Burdick.” I don’t ask who he’s heard this from, or point out that it began before I left his house, when he had more pressing concerns to attend to. I don’t say anything, just wait for him to tell me that H. J.’s too old for me. But instead he says, “I’m glad. I hope you’re moving on with your life. That’s what I’m
going to do. Move on. Your mother has left so many times, I can hardly keep them straight.”

Something in his voice acknowledges the cycle, and the fact that she may end up back on his doorstep. But love her though he may, Paul has finished taking her back. I expect his resolve not to divorce her will last a good month or two.

“Listen, Tressa,” Paul says. He makes a gesture with his hand, waving it outward, away from his house, toward the world. “The thing to do is to move on. Alive or dead, you have to let it go. This thing we feel, however huge it seems. It’s madness. We have to leave it behind, once and for all, to save ourselves.”

I know Paul means well, and I recognize the truth in his words, the danger of keening toward the unattainable, the just-out-of-reach. But I would feel too much like a traitor agreeing with him. So I just say “Thank you” and do one of the most unlikely things of all. I hug him.

*   *   *

The wheels of my truck slosh through new snowmelt; the sun’s bright, cheerful glare has continued since that day H. J. and I spent on the slopes, and all around me spring finds ways to make itself apparent, in buds on trees and the increasingly green shimmer of aspen leaves as I drive down the road, this old familiar route. Part of me wants to turn around and head out of town. What would happen if I truly became my mother’s
daughter and hit the gas, heading down the highway, not leaving word, just disappearing?

You can’t really fault people for leaving. They do it, whether they want to or not. I may be angry at my mother right now, and she may have left, but I still love her and I always will.

Luke left, but his love stayed behind. It stayed behind so big and huge and permanent that after a while it brought him back. I know that no matter what, that love will never go anywhere, will never diminish, will never stop defining me.

Then why not let yourself get better?
a voice from somewhere says.

I nod as I drive and take the turn onto Arapahoe Road. My sleeves are pushed up to my elbows. I have stopped trying to cover up the scars. What’s the point, when everyone knows they’re there? They look less dramatic than they did in the fall, less red and raised.

Respectfully, we summoned a spirit
, Ted Hughes wrote.
It was easy as fishing for eels / In the warm summer darkness.

My chest is full of tears, my eyes blur so that I can barely see, and I remember my good luck, my good fortune, in knowing a place so well I can navigate my way without the benefit of sight.

*   *   *

I’m fading. Stepping back. Before. Now. The after-Luke. Everything blurs together. I can’t feel my feet on the ground. I know Tressa’s next to me but I can’t see her face. Sometimes I hear her voice but I don’t think she hears me when I answer. I know she’s there, exactly next to me, but I can’t make contact.

From someplace far away I hear a dog barking. It may be time. I know I’m on my way. But I haven’t left just yet.

The next day I skip homeroom; I can always go to the office later and let them know I’m here. Not that it matters at this point, if I cut class. Nobody worries about me failing, or taking drugs, or loitering my life away. A glimpse of me walking the halls, safe and sound, has become all that anyone—including myself—requires.

The sign on the faculty lounge door says
NO STUDENTS ALLOWED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. THIS MEANS YOU.
I ignore it and push the door open. The teachers just look up from their coffee and smile. Mr. Tynan sits at a round table, going over quizzes with red ink. “Tressa,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to schedule a meeting with you. How’s the paper going?”

I sit down across from him. “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” I say. “I’ve read all the biographies,
and the poems. I’ve got all the pertinent information.”

“Has that been okay for you?”

“It’s been hard,” I admit. “They’re sad stories.”