Riverine (9 page)

My brother appeared in front of us and we stepped away from each other, caught. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Game on.” I lurched toward him, hoping he’d run off.

Corey flicked his light back on and tagged him. “You’re out, little bro. It’s home base for you. That’s what you get for spying.”

Marcus was always half a beat behind, a little too young to know what was going on but old enough to want to be a part of whatever it was. Corey had stopped smoking cigarettes in front of him because Marcus was afraid that everyone around him was dying. He’d spend hours sobbing over our dad’s black lungs. “Don’t you know alcohol kills people, too?” I’d ask, and he’d cry more. Corey couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting Marcus, so he only smoked around me because I didn’t care.

In a few more months, a combine would plow through the dried stalks and eat up our playground, flattening the field into nothing over the course of a few days. After the combines, winter would come. After that, spring, when the forest along the perimeter of the field would thicken and green and the deer would bed down in it with their young. Another machine would turn the soil over afresh, opening it to receive the next crop’s seed. Spring would heal the land’s wounds. It would heal us.

Corey’s older sister, Rhianna, had died when he was twelve. After that, he entered a period of stunned quietude. I had barely known her. She had gone to college on a basketball scholarship when I was eight, a rare academic exit from our neighborhood, where only half of the kids would finish high school. A few months later, she was gone. I had watched Corey get locked out of his house after she died, the loss of one child too great for his mother to give a damn about another. His father was a trucker and on the road most of the time. For years, his mother worked the night shift at a twenty-four-hour restaurant near the interstate and slept during the day, only waking to holler at us to quiet down from her second-story window. When he wasn’t home in time for supper, Corey tried the door and found it wouldn’t open. He’d wait a minute, give it one more try, then jump off the stairs—a six-foot leap, landing squarely on his feet. He would wander over to our place to eat and sleep, as if nothing were wrong. He would tell me later that he thought his sister died because she got smart. He thought that if he did well in school, like her, he’d die, too. To stay alive, he rejected school and authority. A child’s logic that stuck.

Back then, when my mom asked if he’d like to go to his sister’s grave, he’d nod and we’d all get into the car. We’d park on the gravel road near the cemetery, and he’d get out without saying a word. I saw the headstone up close once, a tiny picture of her wearing a pink shirt, framed and mounted in the slab of granite. I couldn’t imagine it, losing a sibling, and so I didn’t even ask him about it.

When Corey was fourteen and I was eleven, we would sit on top of the swing set my father had built for us and all the other neighborhood kids, long after we were too big and too old to enjoy its primary function. Once a place for hanging by the backs of our knees and looking at the world upside down, it had become a retreat as we grew older. A higher-up place to sit and feel away from the world. Our feet dangling below us, Corey told me he’d been taken to a psychiatrist. “I see things, then I have to do them,” he said. “Compulsion. That’s what it’s called. Or compulsive behavior.” He spoke softly, as if saying it out loud confirmed something.

I was never comfortable with serious talks about death or love or what was inside another person’s mind. “That must be tough.”

We swung our feet, and our ankles collided gently. I thought of my own behaviors—watching him in his window on nights when he slept at home, lit up like a drive-in movie, until I fell asleep; tapping my fingers in patterns on my thigh; repeating something someone had said over and over in my mind until I’d found a rhythm that made my skin stop crawling.
Maybe
, I thought,
I have compulsive behavior too
.

Later, I misremembered what he’d told me. I told my mom he’d gone to the doctor for a heart condition. “Something’s wrong with his heart. It’s compulsive.” It felt true enough. I worried about it. I thought his heart would forget to pump his blood. I would wake up in the middle of the night, look across the grass at his dark window, and wonder if he was still breathing.

Things had started to go really wrong for Corey when he got in trouble for taking a gun to school and stashing it in his locker. He’d taken it to give to someone else, on loan. Guns were allowed in our school’s parking lot and plenty of teenagers owned their own guns, so it wasn’t outlandish. Before we were ten, my brother and I each had our own .410 shotguns for messing around out back. Target practice. The unspoken rule was that guns could be kept in kids’ cars if the kids had been hunting in the hours before school started. The mere mention of a gun was not, at that time, cause for the local news station to arrive. The important thing was that the kids came to school, not that guns didn’t. But Corey was the first kid to get caught with one inside the school. Now the school would have to rethink whether guns in kids’ cars would still be all right. At the same time, gang violence had reached frightening heights in nearby Chicago, and rural outcasts idolized gang life. Fear was on the rise, and knee-jerk reactions to the potential for violence rapidly became common. Almost overnight, rules and regulations seemed to increase in severity tenfold.

The school made an example of him. Corey was expelled and put on probation. His next infractions—stealing his mother’s car, marijuana possession, and running away from home—would earn him time in juvie. When he ran away from there, he’d be sent to a special boys’ school, where he would eventually get a GED. His crimes were not entirely out of the ordinary for teenagers with troubled home lives, teenagers in general, even. But it seemed that only the ones from the “wrong side of the tracks” were punished for it. I’d known several kids who regularly carried knives in their socks or kept them in their lockers, and kids who kept brass knuckles in their back pockets and wore swastikas or anarchy symbols on chains that hung beneath their T-shirts. I’d seen both boys and girls beat each other bloody. The pulse of violence was nothing new.

After the expulsion, Corey came over less and less. As I boarded the school bus in the morning, he’d show up looking sleepy and disheveled, smoking a cigarette. We’d look at each other until we were out of sight. Strangers passing. I had no idea where he’d been sleeping, but I missed him. Once in a while he would call from wherever he was, and it would make my day.

The next time we sat on top of the swing set, Corey, then seventeen, told me he’d found out the father he’d known his whole life wasn’t his father at all. That he had another family in Arkansas. His brothers had taunted him for years, telling him he wasn’t their real brother, forcing him to do things that they themselves would never do—fight his own friends even though he didn’t want to, stand still while they pegged him with baseballs. Now he had no choice but to believe it—he really was adopted. He decided he wanted to meet his real father, whom he didn’t remember at all. He planned to find his new family, get a job down there, and live with them. I hoped he would, though I hated to see him leave again. I hoped the new family would love him and make him whole and feed him and let him in at night. But he had only been gone two weeks when he returned to the river. He never talked about his father again.

I had watched Corey come and go, missing him, so much in envy of his freedom and wishing he would take me with him, while I stayed, confined to whatever terms my parents set for me. Usually,
home
and
yard
, for my own good. Restraining me nearby, in the vicinity of the place they perceived as safe, was the only way they knew to protect me. It was successful on some fronts—I had never seen a drug more serious than weed, and I had only once been to a party where alcohol was available to me.

After the game of corn tag, I spent three hours choosing the perfect CD from Walgreens for Corey’s birthday: Guns n’ Roses,
Use Your Illusion I
and
II
. Emboldened by that first kiss, I called him on the phone and asked him to come over. I told him I wanted him to be my first. We would be moving soon and time was running out. He’d do one more stretch of time at the juvenile center and then he’d be moving out and getting a job, and we’d be living three miles down the road in the cornfields. He came over while my parents were out, knocking softly on my window. I was jumpy, and my eyes refused to settle on his face like I wanted them to. We talked for a while, and soon he was tickling me and we laughed ourselves into another kiss, which lasted for the better part of an hour. But when he upped the ante, unbuttoning my pants and touching me lightly between the legs for a second, I stopped him. I didn’t want to stop him, but I was scared. My brother was home, and I couldn’t risk being caught. Corey said that he had promised my father to stay away from me anyway—I was too young and he was too much trouble. His body betrayed the promise. I felt him hard against the flat plane of skin between my hip bones, but he left anyway. I was angry that two men had negotiated this experience without my input, before I’d even thought of the question. I wanted to be with Corey and I wanted him to wait for the timing to be right, to fight for me, to stand up to my dad, but he wouldn’t.

In retaliation, I invited another boy over to do the job instead, with a plan to leak the information to Corey the next time I saw him. If he thought I was too much a girl still, I would force him to be wrong. I kissed this boy, too, but when things seemed to be going too far I said no—I didn’t know him like I knew Corey, and it wasn’t worth it, even if it would mean getting back at him. This replacement boy wasn’t the one I’d intended and no one else would do. I tried to back out, but it was too late. The boy had already decided on an outcome. Throughout the brief ordeal, I looked out my window, into Corey’s window and through another window beyond that.

The week we moved, I helped my father cut lilies and hostas at our old house by the river, preparing them for transplanting at our new house. We were moving half our yard from one place to the other—everything but the grass itself. I disliked this idea and thought it in poor taste, bringing the old purposely to live in the new. At fifteen I was quickly gathering regrets, and this was not a clean start. There had been plenty of good times at the river, but there was also enough bad to make this a legitimate concern. I felt similarly dissevered, leaving half of myself rooted by the river while my other half would grow afresh down the road. And where would Corey go next? What would happen to him? He was moving to another nearby town, leaving the river too. It wasn’t the future I’d imagined for either of us.

We cleaved the hostas between growth points at the root, dividing them into old and new. “First you cut, like this,” said my father. “Right between the notches. Then you loosen the two portions apart, gently. See that?” His voice was thick and slow, purposeful, like Bob Ross’s demonstrating on PBS how to paint a waterfall.

It was harder than it looked, to cleave the growth. I watched how he cut the roots before trying it myself, eyeing his precision with the tool and the ease of his pull. I made a single chop into the plant’s root bed and wiggled the severed portion away from the old growth, trying to minimize the damage to the root hairs, jumbled up like old phone cords, only far more delicate. I looked up at him. “Like this?”

“Not bad. Little less off the tip, if you can.” He showed me again. I liked working with my dad. When he was teaching me something he knew how to do and I was quiet and obedient, things were all right.

I attempted the maneuver again, without much improvement. He didn’t seem to notice. When we’d cut all the plants that the yard could spare, we packaged the spliced roots of the new-growth plants in wet dirt. We wrapped them in flimsy plastic bags, loaded them into my father’s truck, and drove away. The plants slid up and down the length of the truck bed for three paved miles to our new yard.

When Corey finally got out—done doing time, at last, for his juvenile crimes—I had my license. Our incident of sexual misconnection was a year behind us, and we had never spoken of it again. I picked him up and drove him over to our new house. On my map of home, we were still in the patch of yellow between the pink dots, but the new home was three miles due east and a half mile due south of our river house. Mapwise, we’d barely moved below the blue wavy line, but it felt farther.

We sat across from each other at the table, and I asked Corey what it was like where he’d been—the detention centers, the boys’ school. “I’ve seen a lot of things I shouldn’t have seen, and I’ve learned a lot of things I shouldn’t have learned,” he said. “Criminal things.”

But what I heard was, “Nothing you need to know.” The window of time in which he would share things with me had passed. Our easy bond had taken a new form, in which withholding was the only language we would speak.

I didn’t ask him anything else, but I knew that what he told me was not good news. We sat at my parents’ kitchen table eating store-bought cookies, smiling, happy he was home. I tried not to be distracted by the questions forming in my head about what he had seen and learned, questions about what he felt for me, if anything. I was anxious to be out of my parents’ purview, so I took him for a drive in my new car while they waited nervously for me to return, their standard fears—safety, boys, etc.—etched across their foreheads. Corey wore his seat belt and leaned toward me, letting his shoulder rest on mine as he turned up the radio. A void swelled between us, but neither of us would be the first to touch it. He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re driving. Little girl, all grown up.”

I saw a flash of light in his eyes. I thought it was a promise that he was back, that the future I’d imagined between us might become real despite his silence. That the night we had almost spent together had meant something. Did he even remember it? I wrote headlines about us in my head:
Window Boy Falls in Love with Girl Next Door. Couple Runs from River, Chasing Happiness
. But he confirmed nothing. He offered nothing. We said nothing. We exchanged a quick hug and a casual good-bye. He would probably be bedding someone else by dark, and I hated him for it. Hated myself for my own muteness.