Meet Me at the River (32 page)

“We’re the ones who miss him most,” I say.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Katie and Jill miss him. His friends do. I know Paul misses him too. But nobody misses him the way you and I do.”

She closes her fist around a tuft of grass and rips it up out of the earth. I see the pain in her face, in her dark eyes that look so much like Luke’s, and I think how she has just carried the ashes of her only child to this point on top of the mountain. After performing such an immense task, so early in the day, she shouldn’t have to deal with me, too.

Francine doesn’t look at me as I try to assemble the right words in my head. She just continues staring out at the world, spread far and wide and glittering beneath us. Then she blows out a thin stream of air, her lips pursed, and I remember her telling me once that it’s impossible to feel stress while you’re exhaling.

“I want you to know,” Francine says when her breath is finished, “I’m not going to say I forgive you, because
there’s nothing to forgive. I understand it’s not your fault, what happened to Luke.”

“Francine,” I say. “That’s not why I’m here.”

She takes in another deep breath, meant to stop me from speaking, and then says it again: “It’s not your fault, Tressa. None of it. It was a freak accident, and it had nothing to do with anything any of us did. I want you to know that and go forward, into the world, and live a full life. Love. Work. Have children. Be safe and well. It’s what Luke would want.”

She reaches behind her neck to unclasp a necklace, and as she holds it out, I see it’s Luke’s—the peace sign with the pearl stone, dangling from its leather string. The one he still wears when he comes to visit me.

“Here,” Francine says. “I was going to give it to Paul, but you’re the one who’s here. You should have this. Luke would want that, too.”

I take it from her and clasp the leather thread around my neck. Cold silver that rested against Luke’s skin for so many years, now resting against mine. I will wear it until the leather crackles and splits, and then I will find a new thread. I will wear this pendant the rest of my life. “Thank you” seems like too pale a phrase.

Sunlight shifts a little, settling in for the day. The light around us mutes. I can feel it dappling on my bare arms as I sit here, staring down the trail, half expecting the next hiker who appears to be Luke himself.

“All the same,” Francine says, her face going hard again. “I don’t want you here now. I need to do this by myself, just Luke and me. You weren’t here when he came into this world. You don’t need to be here when he goes out.”

I nod. Francine is his mother. If she needs to do this alone, then so be it. I’m not the only one Luke left behind, so I get shakily to my feet. Before I duck down into the trees, Francine calls out.

“Tressa,” she says. “I want you to do something for me.”

My hurt at being excused evaporates. Finally—something I can do for Francine. The last thing I expected to feel today, joy, grips me as I turn and stand still, waiting.

“I’ve put it in my will,” Francine says. “But people don’t always follow those instructions. You know? So I want you to make sure that when I die, they scatter my ashes here. Okay?”

I understand her intention, to extract two promises—because making the one presumes my outliving her. I nod, then turn to head down the trail, not looking back to see Francine—sitting there, cross-legged, staring out at the view. A mile or so down the path I think I feel a tactile mist brushing against my cheek.

Luke’s mother has thrown his body to the wind, and—more than I can say—I hope this brings her peace. But as for me I know he hasn’t left. Not yet.

*   *   *

And still I don’t make any decisions, and I don’t go to
the river. May turns away, the waters rise without me, and I find myself wanting to milk this knowing—the approach of one last time—for at least a few more days. Nobody complains when I stop going to school. This town has wished me well despite everything, and for whatever reason it seems to consider the mission complete.

Paul opens the Drive-in on June second, a Friday, the night before our birthday. For almost my whole life that’s how I’ve thought of it,
our birthday
, and I know that will continue year after year. I haven’t asked Paul if he registered the significance of the date, even though I spoke to him a week ago, when I called to let him know I wouldn’t be starting college in the fall. He voiced the expected concerns about whether I’d ever get back to school. “You’re a smart girl,” he said. “You need an education.”

“There’s plenty of time for that,” I told him. “Big brick buildings. Difficult to move or destroy.” The words out of my mouth sounded instantly familiar, and I realized I had stolen them from H. J.

“Well,” Paul said. “If you want to go away, if you need money to travel . . . ” I held the receiver to my ear, thinking of the weight those words must carry for him, and I said thank you.

And then the next day, walking down Main Street, I saw something that took me by surprise. Francine and my sister Katie, walking together. Katie had an
ice cream cone, and for a moment they stopped, and Katie held out the cone to Francine so she could have a taste.

I ran across the street and ducked into the pharmacy. Paul hadn’t said a word about Katie visiting. She must be staying at Francine’s, I thought.

Through the store’s plate-glass window I watched them. They looked like a mother and daughter. Where Katie went, Jill would be soon to follow, and I felt great relief at the thought, of my sisters reclaiming the only mother they’d ever known. And of Francine welcoming back her living children.

The night before our birthday, Grandma fills brown paper bags with popcorn—popped on the stove, of course, dripping with butter and salty brewer’s yeast. H. J., Evie, Grandma, Grandpa, and I carry lawn chairs out to the east hill. Sturm and Drang follow. We settle in, waiting for the sun to set. For opening night Paul has invited the whole town free of charge, and we watch a steady stream of cars make their way to the grassy stretch of land. The smells of popcorn and hot dogs waft up the hill from the snack bar, and we know that, free admission or not, Paul will make a mint tonight.

The five of us watch cartoons in companionable silence, the huge horses grazing beside us. Above the screen the moon rises in the distance. When the movie starts, it announces itself as a harbinger of summer with its action-packed inanity. After an hour or so Grandma
falls asleep, her light snoring inspiring Grandpa to wake her and head back home.

“I’ll bring the chairs,” I whisper, as if there’s a theater full of people to disturb. I turn away from the movie, watching them walk back down the hill, their companionable shadows leaning into each other.

H. J. and I stay for the second feature, a crackly black-and-white movie starring Clark Gable and a small woman with great, dark eyes. Evie excuses herself, collecting the empty, greasy brown bags and heading back down the hill.

“You can take the car,” H. J. calls after his sister. “I’ll find my way back home.”

With Evie gone, H. J. and I get off our chairs and sit together on the grass. For an hour or so we watch the movie, our knees resting against each other. He does not put his arm around me or attempt to kiss me. In fact, if I don’t count that night he breathed me back to life, he has never kissed me. Though H. J. and I have never said a word about what’s between us, I imagine that if I take him up on his offer, of traveling, eventually there will be kissing. One more thing I can’t think about yet.

At some point, the two of us staring ahead at that screen, H. J. says, “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do?”

“I’ve thought,” I say. “But I haven’t decided.”

On the movie screen credits have begun to roll. Cars file out onto Main Street, an orderly stream of headlights,
probably the entire town of Rabbitbrush making its way home. I turn to look at H. J. His face in profile, clean-shaven tonight, looks young and very vulnerable.

He doesn’t look back at me, just reaches over blindly and closes his hands around my wrist, which he brings to his lips. My fingers bump the rim of his glasses. He kisses my scars, deeply and intently, and I can feel it—his hands and his lips, my own wronged flesh, this crime I committed against myself and everyone who loves me. And I realize that although H. J. might not love me yet, he could one day, especially if I decide to go away with him. Stranger than that, I could love him, if only I gave myself time, and permission.

I can’t make any promises, or plans. But there is something I can give him, for now, something I owe him, and I tap his temple, lightly, to make him turn and look at me.

“You make me want to live,” I say, making sure the words sound clear, not faltering, a definitive statement.

Looking at me now, H. J. doesn’t look distracted at all, but focused, and even happy. Then he stands up and offers me his hand. I take it, getting to my feet beside him. We gather up the lawn chairs and fold them under our arms—two for me and three for him. Then we clatter down the hill, lit by the moon and headlights, accompanied by Sturm and Drang, making our way, in the increasing darkness, toward home.

I have waited out the spring, letting the river rise without me. But I have not kept Luke waiting. He has been right here all along. Today, June third, the day we turn nineteen—I know I’ll see him when I reach the river.

This morning I sleep late enough that when I go downstairs, Grandma and Grandpa are gone. There’s a brightly wrapped box waiting for me on the kitchen table, along with a card, and I decide not to open it until they can be with me. Getting ready to go, I want to assure myself that scene will occur, but I can’t, not just yet.

Yesterday I got a package from my mother, a gray cotton cardigan and a black postal bag from a shop in San Francisco. I use the bag now, opening its unnatural stiffness to pack bread and apples, a bottle of water, and the cardigan, even though the day is warm already,
flirting with hot. Slung across my torso, the bag’s light weight presses against the small of my back as I walk to the banks of the Sustantivo River, a particular spot, the imprint of his lost foothold still impossibly visible to me. I take off the bag and sit down, cross-legged, on the red dirt. Luke won’t keep me waiting long.

I see her across the river. She looks calm. I know she’s waiting for me.

In another week the weather will become more reliable and the river will be—if not exactly crowded, busy with human life, kayakers and white-water rafters and fly fishermen and kids in fat inner tubes screaming their way down the rapids. But for now I have this stretch to myself. The sun works its way through treetops, but the river runs too fast to catch or reflect its rays. My face feels drops of water from that top layer, a chilly mist that makes the hair on my arms stand on end.

I know Luke is close, and I know I’m safe. Whatever happens, I will be all right. At first I don’t feel it, the hand on my shoulder, but after a while I see it, his fingers
there. I look up and see Luke, standing beside me, looking down, smiling. And the old reaction in my chest, erupting, eclipsing everything. Shouting,
Finally. Finally, finally, there you are.
Now I am truly and fully among the living.

I get to my feet and throw my arms around him. I can’t feel his arms, but I can feel my feet, lifting off the ground as he picks me up and swings me around. I can’t feel his lips as he kisses me. I close my eyes and block out that frustration, trying to summon the memory of all those thousands of kisses, and fuse them into this one moment.

“Happy birthday,” he says when we pull apart.

“Happy birthday,” I tell him.

We sit down, and I close my hand around her wrist. I can still feel the scars. I know they’re fading, but I also know they’ll never totally go away. Meanwhile, I can’t do this much longer. Time’s running out. I’ve got to tell her the whole reason I came back in the first place.

I can’t feel it anymore, his hand around my wrist. The realization hits me with a giant lump of sadness, forming in my chest, under my ribs.

“I can’t stay long,” he says. “But I’ve got to tell you three things.” He tilts his head and looks at me, not quite a smile, just a settled and contented expression, the two of us—twins, in synch.

Nineteen years ago today the two of us were born, the same day of the same month of the same year. Maybe even the same hour, the same minute, the same second. Luke—with his reliable and organized mother—knows the exact time: 9:32 a.m. at the Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango. My own birth certificate has long since been lost. There is a seven-hour time difference between Durango, Colorado, and Galway, Ireland. My mother remembers I was born in the afternoon but can be forgiven for not remembering the exact time. She was almost all alone, an unwed mother in a Catholic country, no one but an ex-lover’s mother to attend her. One day, if I really need to know, maybe I can write to the hospital in Galway and request a copy of my birth certificate. I wonder if she recorded my father’s name, or if, determined to keep me absolutely for herself, she had them write “unknown.”

“It’s a word we have to live with,” Luke says, still holding my wrist. If he has lost the ability to feel me, too, he doesn’t say so, but clearly he has retained the ability to read my mind.

I nod and wait for him to speak, to tell me what he needs. But he stays quiet.

*   *   *

I shouldn’t have said anything. I’ve stayed too long. I used up all my hours. All my words. I can steal these last minutes with Tressa because I have to. But I don’t think I can talk again.

I see the voice leave him, the ability to speak. But it’s okay. I think I know what he needs to tell me, and I can do this for him. “I know the first thing,” I say. “You want to tell me that I need to stay alive. That I can’t hurt myself again.”

He looks down at my wrist, and opens his fingers, releasing his grasp. His movements have wound down; I can’t exactly see through him, but part of me feels as though I can. To me he looks translucent, painfully temporary. He nods, his face very somber and also relieved, his head bobbing in a graceful kind of slow motion.