Meet Me at the River (4 page)

What I can’t believe is that he’d tell me. I stand there, blinking at him, and then say inanely, “Mr. Zack said I could use this exit.”

H. J. doesn’t blink or shrug, just keeps his eyes on the pages of his book and says, “Feel free.”

I hustle out of the lounge. The door closes behind me with a suctioned whoosh, and I have barely let out my breath in relief when I hear a passing student’s voice, light as trickling water, announcing that I’ve walked directly into what I meant to avoid: “Hi, Mrs. Kingsbury.”

My heart sinks. Francine still uses Paul’s last name, so to my own mother’s annoyance, there will always be this additional confusion between them—the two Mrs. Kingsburys. And of course it’s not
my
mother coming down the hall but Luke’s, and it’s too late to pretend I haven’t seen her. To make matters worse, the girl walking beside her is Kelly Boynton, who used to go out with Luke. Kelly and I seldom run into each other; someone must have planned our schedules very carefully, one of the benefits of this small-town school, everyone knowing our histories.

Kelly Boynton has short blond hair and wears long sleeves pulled down to her palms, like mine. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and she has her arm hooked through Francine’s, who listens intently as she speaks. I can’t make out Kelly’s words, but I can hear that her voice is laced with tears. The truth is, even before Luke died, I felt guilty around Kelly. Now that I know what it feels like to lose him—lose him for good—that guilt is magnified about a hundred times.

Francine listens to Kelly so gently, exactly the way I
imagined her listening about Carlo. They haven’t seen me yet. For a moment I wish myself invisible; better yet, gone. Like the guy in that old Christmas movie who gets to see what his hometown would be like if he’d never been born at all. Only in my case, when I came back to see what became of Rabbitbrush without me, everything would be set right. Kelly would be walking down the hall with Luke’s arm around her, not crying but smiling. And Luke would be not a ghost at all, but equally happy beside her—
alive
.

All my life I thought of Luke as belonging to me. I always thought I was special because I’d known him so long. But now that I have the chance to think about it, I realize that Luke belonged to Rabbitbrush much more than he ever belonged to me. He went to preschool with these kids, and elementary school. They learned to ski together before Luke ever set eyes on me, when they were chubby little toddlers, bundled up and not using poles. While I was off with my mother, Luke was here. He belonged to everyone. More specifically than that, he belonged to Francine, and to Kelly, at least for a little while, before I showed up. Luke pretty much even stopped going to parties because I hated them, and I wanted him to myself. And now, beware of what you wish for. Nobody in the world can ever see him again, not even his mother, except for me.

Dr. Reisner used to tell me that guilt is a function of grief. “You’d feel guilty no matter how Luke died,” he
said. “If he’d died in a plane crash, or from an illness, you would feel guilty. It’s one of the things we feel when someone we love, someone close to us, dies.”

But Luke didn’t die in a plane crash, or from an illness. As Kelly and Francine make their way toward me, I remember a conversation Francine and I had the first spring I came back for good, after one of my mother’s miscarriages. “You have to be very gentle with her,” Francine said, which surprised me, because I knew that she loathed my mother. “There’s not a worse loss. It doesn’t matter at what stage the loss occurs. Children are the only people who can’t be replaced. You can replace a spouse, or a lover, or a friend. You can even replace a mother if you do it early enough. But a child,” Francine said. “There’s no replacing a child. There’s no hope of recovery from that.”

Now here she comes, with no hope of recovery, walking down the hall from the library beside Luke’s old girlfriend. Francine is not a native of Rabbitbrush. She grew up on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Birney, Montana, and came to Colorado when she won a scholarship to Fort Lewis College in Durango. Francine’s hair is thick and black like Luke’s, and today she wears it loose. It hangs straight, nearly to her waist. Since last spring the strands of gray have multiplied.

Francine sees me. I can tell by the way her neck stiffens. Should I speak? Smile? Certainly I shouldn’t smile; she needs to see that I’m miserable. It’s only fair
that she gets to think of me as incapable of experiencing any kind of happiness or peace ever again.

Kelly’s eyes flitter and land on me. She looks stricken. Francine tightens her grip on Kelly and positions herself more firmly between us, not looking my way even for a second. I can read the avoidance in every muscle of her body. Her eyes don’t move or even blink, they stay so intent on looking at Kelly instead of me. Francine’s eyes are Luke’s in their shape and their dark, dark color. If I hadn’t seen him so recently, if I didn’t feel sure I would see him again soon, those eyes alone would have struck me to the floor.

I lift up my hand and waggle my fingers in the barest, lamest wave. Francine must see it from the corner of her eye; I see her flinch at the shoulders, as if I have prodded her with something electric. I want to whisper,
I’m sorry
. I always want to whisper,
I’m sorry
. I wish I could do something for her, and the only thing I can think of is to not say anything, and obey the distance she imposes.

The air between her shoulder and mine is full and terrible as our bodies pass. Francine’s hand twitches, like she’s resisting the reflex to wave back to me, and somehow in that moment I realize she must know it’s me who’s been leaving the tansy asters. The picture in my mind changes. I see her arrive home every day to find those flowers and to her they’re like a bitter practical joke, asking for something she can’t possibly be expected to give.

*   *   *

When school lets out, the sun is shining, and I decide to walk to my grandparents’ house instead of taking the bus to Paul’s. It’s a long walk, but I have my hiking boots on. It’s been more depressing than ever, riding the bus, now that Carlo is too sick to wait for me at the bottom of the hill. Yesterday my mother and I took him to the vet to have the excess fluid drained again. Dr. Hill talked me into letting him stay the night. I hope that Grandma or Grandpa can drive me over there to get him—Mom and Paul are going for an ultrasound in Durango and won’t be home till late.

I head off down the side of the road, picking up my step as I cross the turnoff to Luke’s old house. Before long I’m walking past the Cummingses’, where I used to babysit their daughter, Genevieve. Through the kitchen window I can see a teenage girl—the new babysitter—at the sink. I picture Genevieve sitting at the table eating a snack, and I wonder if she remembers me. Three days a week I used to pick her up at preschool and bring her home. Probably these days nobody would trust me with their kid.

I turn onto Arapahoe, the steep, winding road that leads to my grandparents’ house. Above my head the sky looks blue the way it only ever does in Colorado. Crayola should make a crayon called Colorado Blue. The color is so vivid and deep but at the same time very pale; on some of these clearest days, it hovers on the brink of periwinkle.

In front of the Burdick house, which signals the approach of my grandparents’ driveway, I see the daughter—Evie—sitting alone on the front porch, a fat paperback open on her knee. Without thinking, I feel my footsteps slow. Evie waves politely. She’s a year or so younger than I am, and we don’t know each other very well.

I stop by their roadside mailbox, the name Burdick printed across it in faded blue letters. The year before I came back to Rabbitbrush, Evie’s mother died of breast cancer and her father—out of his mind with grief—committed suicide. Before everything happened with Luke, I was horrified by that suicide—leaving behind a fourteen-year-old girl who had already lost her mother.

When both the Burdicks were alive, this house was pretty. The mother used to plant window boxes in the spring, and Mr. Burdick used to paint the house a new color every few years. In fact, it was one of the measures I used to gauge my absences—if the Burdick house was the same color when I returned, then I hadn’t been gone too long. Now the house is not unpretty so much as wanting repairs. The window boxes are still there, just full of untended dirt and empty of flowers. Mr. Burdick’s last color choice—a bright, pale yellow—is peeling, and the gutters are full. A couple shutters hang off their hinges, a few months or one strong wind away from clattering to the ground. The place has the look of one of those formally grand Victorian houses in Boulder or Durango
that’s been taken over by students. My grandmother says that H. J. has enough on his hands taking care of Evie without worrying about upkeep. Sometimes in the spring and summer my grandfather sneaks over while they’re at school and mows the grass. Probably next week he’ll clean out their gutters. I don’t think H. J. and Evie even notice.

Evie surprises me by getting off the front stoop and trotting across the lawn. “Hi, Tressa,” she says. Her voice sounds airy and musical. She has darker hair than I remember—so dark that it’s probably not her natural color. Backing up this assumption is her face looking back at me—fair, translucent skin and very, very dark eyeliner. She has pale brown eyes flecked with green. Despite the makeup and dyed hair she looks about thirteen.

“Hi, Evie,” I say.

“I haven’t seen you much at school,” Evie says, as if this is unusual.

“I’m sticking mostly to class and the library,” I say.

“Bummer they made you do over the year,” she says. I can’t remember speaking to her during these last, terrible months, but her voice implies this is the continuation of an abandoned conversation. And it probably is, just not a conversation she had with me.

“It’s not so bad,” I say.

“Oh, good,” she says. “Where’s your dog?”

I pause, then flicker my eyes toward the hill. Maybe
she’ll think he ran up ahead of me. But no. If she knows enough to expect him, she’ll also know that he never ventured very far from my side.

“He’s sick,” I say. “He stayed at the vet last night.”

Evie does a little double take. She looks too upset by this news, too troubled. I find myself frowning. “It’s no big deal,” I say quickly, uneasy because the words feel like a lie. “Just old-dog stuff. He’ll be fine.”

“Oh,” Evie says, obviously not convinced. “That’s good.”

The front door of her house opens, and H. J. walks out wearing an apron and carrying a long wooden spoon that he waves in our general direction, squinting as if he can’t tell exactly who we are without his glasses. I can’t tell if he’s calling Evie inside or saying hello.

“H. J.’s making corn chowder for dinner,” Evie says. “He makes his own bread. You want to stay and eat with us?”

“Oh, no,” I say, too quickly. “I need to go pick up my dog. But thanks.”

“Sure,” Evie says. “Maybe you can come over another time.”

“Thanks.” I stand there for a moment while Evie jogs back across the yard. She and H. J. go inside and close the door behind them, and I think for a minute about everything the two Burdicks have been through, and everything they’ve recovered from. It’s impressive and sad at the same time, how life has gone on—nothing but
peeling paint and too-full rain gutters to reveal all that sorrow, and all that loss.

*   *   *

My grandmother stands on her farmer’s porch, holding up one hand to shade her eyes. I wave as I walk toward her.

“Tressa,” she says. “I knew you were on your way here. I could feel it in my bones. Should we go rescue Carlo?”

“Yes, please,” I say.

“But first come in and have a snack.” This has always been my grandmother’s greeting: “Come in and have a snack.” When I was little, the words sounded exactly like,
Welcome! I love you!
My mother tended to ration and then run out of food. I remember once, during a summer we spent camping at the San Francisco Hot Springs in New Mexico, I got in trouble for eating the last two granola bars from the cooler in her tent. She made me sit in time-out on a rock overlooking the springs. Vacationing college students soaked nearby, and I recited the food I would eat if I were at my grandparents’. “My grandma gives me peanut butter and jelly,” I said, “and she makes me eggs and gives me strawberry milk. I can always eat more if I want to, because my grandma loves me. She has Oreos. She makes chicken pot pie.”

In fact, I still have a hard time, whenever I cross my grandmother’s threshold, not devouring everything in sight—as if I can’t be sure my mother won’t appear and
steal me away, back into her on-the-run world of limited food. But of course now I need to lose weight, I need to look like myself for Luke, so I follow my grandmother into the house and say, “I just want a glass of water.”

Grandma frowns, as if I have rejected love itself. She compromises by pouring a glass of orange juice and pressing it into my hands. We sit together at the Formica kitchen table. She wears a loose forest-green cardigan and blue jeans. Her gray hair is cut short and is un-styled; it falls choppily just over her ears. Grandpa may have cut it for her. She has pale blue eyes like my mom, with lovely, intricate crinkles all around them. I don’t suppose she has ever had any interest in appearing younger than her chronological age.

“I saw Evie and H. J. Burdick on the way over here,” I tell her.

Grandma clucks her tongue, sympathetic. “The poor Burdicks,” she says. That’s what everyone has called them these past few years, and Grandma and I realize at the same time that’s probably how everyone refers to us now. The poor Kingsburys. The poor Earnshaws.

Grandma reaches out her hands and closes them around mine. I can’t feel the cool dryness of her palms through my sleeves, pulled up almost to my fingers, but Grandma squeezes insistently. “Would you like to bring Carlo back here, honey?” she asks. “You can both spend the night.”

I would like to stay here tonight and every night. But
Luke has never come to me at my grandparents’ house, so I shake my head.