Two Rivers (16 page)

I
t had been two weeks since the wreck, and with every day that went by, fewer and fewer relatives of the victims came to the station. The excitement and novelty of the wreck had also worn off, and things were slowly getting back to normal at the station. The anxiety I’d been carrying with me to work every day like an extra lunch bucket had even started to ease up, because with each passing day it seemed that Margaret Jones’s father either didn’t know or, more likely, didn’t care that his little girl was missing. But just as I’d let some of that fear go (the heart-thumping worry of every phone call, the way I almost jumped out of my skin every time someone knocked on the freight office door), I’d think about Shelly and what I would do if I knew she’d been on a train that crashed into a river. There had to be more to the story than Maggie was letting on, and despite wanting to believe her (wanting it to be this simple), I knew I probably should do some sleuthing of my own. Just to make sure. Maggie had lied to me already about her name, about her mother, and no matter how good she was at mending my shirts and minding my daughter, I couldn’t just let things go on much longer without knowing the whole story.

Even though I spent most of my time in the freight office, I was still fairly familiar with the passenger lines. The Crescent ran from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., making stops in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina along the way. If Maggie had, indeed, been coming from Alabama, she would have taken the Crescent from Tuscaloosa to Washington, D.C., where she would have caught the Montrealer to get to Canada. The Montrealer, the train that derailed, was the only passenger train that stopped in Two Rivers.

Because of the accident, it was easy to get passenger information. Everybody wanted to be the hero, to be able to offer up something related to the crash. Just mentioning that I worked at the Two Rivers station opened up all sorts of doors, making me privy to information I shouldn’t have been able to get my hands on otherwise. It only took one phone call to the ticket office at Union Station in D.C. to find out exactly where Margaret Jones had come from and where she was headed.

“Yep. Here she is.
Margaret Jones
. Picked up the Crescent in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Transferred here. Montrealer headed to Two Rivers, Vermont.”

“Yep, that’s where the train derailed,” I said, nodding. “But where was she supposed to get off? Cantic? Montreal?”

“I already told you,” the ticket agent said. “Her ticket didn’t take her to the end of the line, only as far as Two Rivers.”

“Here?”

“Yes, sir, that was her destination.”

Heat rose from my gut to my shoulders, spreading down my arms and up into my face. I hung up the phone and gripped the edge of the desk.
Here?
Why on earth had she come here? What about her aunt in Canada? I struggled to come up with a logical reason why a pregnant black girl from Tuscaloosa would get on a train headed to Two Rivers, Vermont, but there was no reason that made sense. None that I could handle anyway, none that wouldn’t change the world as I knew it. I needed to get home, talk to Maggie.

When I looked up from my desk, Lenny was standing in my doorway.

“Montgomery, the toilet’s clogged up again,” he said. He was holding a dripping plunger, which he pointed at me accusingly. “Take a crap this morning?”

“Jesus,” I said, standing up, reeling. The plunger was dripping sewage onto my blotter. Between the filthy water on my desk and the fact that I’d been holding my breath since I hung up the phone, I thought I might pass out. “I’ve got to go home.”

“You sick?
Knew
it was you,” he said, shaking the plunger again. “Come to work with the shits, and break the goddamn toilet.”

I stumbled past him and out of the station. It was just five o’clock, but it was already getting dark. The sky was pink, streaked with orange. I raced home, as if I could beat the inevitable descent of darkness.

I ran all the way up the stairs to our apartment, but once outside my door, I could barely unlock it; my hands were shaking so hard. Out of breath, I stood panting in the kitchen. The apartment was empty. There was a note on the kitchen table, propped up in the fruit bowl. Her round cursive was like a child’s: “Gone out for pizza. Be back by 8. Love, Maggie and Shelly.”

Luigi’s was just down the street; I thought for a minute about going there, about grabbing Maggie by the scruff of her neck and dragging her back. Instead, I threw off my work clothes and jumped in the shower. I scrubbed my legs and arms and hands, hard. As the hot water pelted my head and body I tried to imagine the anger, the fear, the sense of dread washing off me. There had to be a simple explanation for why Maggie had come here. The alternative was unthinkable.

On the roof, my skin raw but clean, I sat down and waited. The streetlights were dim, Depot Street cloaked in a thick haze. With the green glow of the pool, the entire town could have been under water. I half expected that if I opened my mouth I might breathe water instead of air. I thought about what I would say to Maggie, rehearsed my questions, my confrontation, the way an actor might memorize his lines. I had to be careful. I had to be smart. I couldn’t afford to lose it. Not this time; there was too much at stake.

I could almost see the pizza place from this vantage point. I expected I’d see the girls as they walked home, but when Maggie rounded the corner, she was alone. She was carrying a pizza box, walking slowly up the street, stopping every now and then to look at the shop windows. I could hear her singing, something soft and sweet. She did that sometimes in the kitchen too.

My heart started to race. Where was Shelly? My hands were slick with sweat. And then finally, I saw her. She was walking with a boy. I struggled to make out his face; he wasn’t anyone I recognized. When he threw his arm over her shoulder, I almost leapt down off the roof. Instead, I crawled toward the window and into the shadows to get a better view. Shelly and the boy were laughing. When he pulled her into him, I saw her look up toward the apartment, and I pressed my back against the wall. And then he kissed her. It was clumsy and quick, but still, I felt both angry and paralyzed. All of the stress I’d been feeling about Maggie was suddenly diverted,
derailed
. Somehow I managed to make my legs move me toward the open window and back into the house.

And then I heard Maggie open the door.

She handed me the pizza box, and I took it from her. “I got you a whole one, half pepperoni, half cheese. I didn’t know what y’all liked.”

“Where’s Shelly?” I asked.

“She’s just walkin’ home with one of her friends. I was feelin’ tired, so I came on home early. It’s not even seven yet. She’ll be home before eight.”

I opened the pizza box and sweet smelling steam wafted up into my face.
Stay calm.
I took out a piece of pizza, shaking my fingers after the hot greasy cheese burned them. “Shit,” I said.

“Gotta watch out. I knew somebody who got a third-degree burn from a pizza once,” Maggie said with a laugh.

“So your
aunt
,” I said. “She’s in Montreal?”

“Yeah?” she said, cocking her head at me.

“Because we got a phone call at the station today from a woman, a woman from Montreal, Canada, and she was looking for her niece. She said she was supposed to be on the Montrealer, the one that crashed into the river.” I hadn’t thought this through. Who did I think I was kidding?

Maggie scowled, sat down across from me and started to take off her shoes.

“She said she was really upset, that she wanted to come right down and look for her herself. Since,
technically,
her niece is still missing.” I kept talking, worried about what would happen if I stopped.

Maggie waited a long time before she spoke. She turned her shoes in her hands, looking at the soles, at the heels.

“That sure is interestin’,” Maggie said, setting the shoes down on the floor, putting her feet up on the chair next to me. “Boy, my feet hurt these days. Would you mind giving them a little rub?”

Because I was already in too deep, I reached for her tiny little foot. Maggie closed her eyes as I worked at the knots in her feet. I pressed my thumb into her arch, watched her back stiffen.

“There wasn’t anybody waiting for you in Canada,” I said. “Your ticket only went as far as Two Rivers.” I let go of her foot and swallowed hard. “And I want to know what it is that you want from me.”

Maggie didn’t say anything. She leaned her head back, eyes closed, rolling her neck like she was just trying to get a crick out.

I held onto her foot, aware of every small bone.

After a while, when the silence was almost excruciating, she opened her eyes, looked square at me and said, “I got raped.”

I let go of her foot as if I’d been burned.

“Nobody knows. They all think I went and got myself knocked up the usual way. And so now nobody wants nothin’ to do with me anymore. Not my auntie, not even my daddy. I ain’t got nobody in the world except for a big brother I never met. I came here looking for him.”

T
his is the way a body falls. It is not the slow, gentle collapse you’d expect. No quiet yielding. No gentle acquiescence.

The man resists. After the first strike, his limbs flail madly and he stumbles about as if he were only drunk. He lunges toward Brooder, who raises the weapon over his head again and strikes a second time.

Harper feels the sour taste of whatever it was he last managed to eat rising into his throat. Burning. He stares at his hands, which are gripping the dashboard of Ray’s car.

“Jesus Christ,” Ray says. “What the fuck?”

Harper squeezes his eyes shut, pretending that he is watching a movie. That what he sees through the windshield is only a projection, only vivid pictures on a screen. The drive-in movie theater. A Technicolor nightmare.

Ray rolls down the window and leans his head out. “Hey, man, that’s enough!”

And then Brooder is staring back at them, as if he has completely forgotten they are there. He is both looking at them and past them. Entirely lucid but, at the same time, completely absent.

Harper’s back tenses as Brooder raises his arm one more time, and the man circles him, swaying dumbly.

With this strike, the man goes down. The descent is both fast and loud. The body yields, but the ground beneath him does not. Harper presses his hands against his ears, anticipating the moans of the very earth as it catches him.

W
ithout Betsy, I became a sleepwalker: my feet moving me from one place to the next while my mind was always elsewhere. (
Back in Two Rivers. Back inside that barn, lightning illuminating her in erratic and beautiful flashes.)
For the first month at Middlebury, I wandered the green expanse of campus, somnambulant. Oblivious. I had enrolled in five classes that fall: Ancient Philosophy, English Literature, Calculus, European History and French. In my “free” time, I audited an Art History seminar and a Poetry writing class. I figured that I might be able to fill my brain so that there wasn’t any room left for Betsy Parker. But no matter how hard I tried, she occupied every corner, every crevice. I was dreaming her still, even when I was wide awake.

My roommate at Middlebury chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes and spoke fluent Latin. His name was Alfred (“Freddy”) Van Horn III; he came from a long line of Van Horns who had made their money in the publishing industry.
Magazines
. His grandfather, Freddy the First, was the publisher of a certain gentleman’s magazine that I recognized as the ones Betsy had introduced me to all those years ago. “Titties,” Freddy explained over our first pint of beer at a pub on the outskirts of campus. “Titties and ass.
Ad nauseum
.” Freddy knew that I was only biding my time at college, that despite my apparent academic zeal, school was really just a distraction from the real obsession of my life. He’d seen the photos I kept tucked into the corners of my mirror, between the pages of my books, and in most of my drawers. Betsy Parker was everywhere. Freddy’s attempts at diversion were tireless and admirable. He knew a lot of girls, and he was always bringing them by in the hopes that one of them might cause me to relinquish my devotion to Betsy Parker. There were short girls, tall girls, happy girls and melancholy girls. Good girls and bad girls. But the one thing they all shared was a fascination with Freddy Van Horn. He was like Brooder with a private school education. He had the charisma of a politician without any of the political aspirations. But he was also an academic savant, managing always to get good grades despite his lax study habits. There was something
easy
about Freddy Van Horn. Something I suppose that came with affluence and good fortune. He never had to work very hard for anything, and so he never perceived the world to be a difficult place. While I felt tortured by it, he saw the world at Middlebury as something created to serve him and his desires.

“What are her stats?” Freddy asked, peering over my shoulder at a photo of Betsy’s face, which was marking my place in
Othello
. I could barely concentrate. It was almost Homecoming weekend, and Betsy was coming to stay for three whole days.

“Stats?”

“Hips, waist. Bust?” He outlined the shape of a woman with his hands, and in the invisible trail his gestures made, I imagined Betsy’s body.

“Go away,” I said.

“When does she get here?”

“After I get out of Calculus. I’ve got to get into town by three o’clock. Can I borrow the Vespa?” Underclassmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus, but Freddy had an Italian scooter that he had shipped from Italy the last time he was in Rome and upon the back of which I had ridden several times during his kidnapping attempts.

“But of course. Don’t go crashing it into a tree now though.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Is she staying at Battell?”

“Yeh,” I said. “She’s bunking with another girl coming in from Dartmouth.”

“Wonderful! I know a way to smuggle her out pretty easily.”

I rolled my eyes and picked up my books.

I drove the Vespa cautiously into town. I had hoped that some of Freddy’s worldliness might rub off on me—that arriving to pick her up on a scooter instead of in the old DeSoto might prove to her that I had something exciting to offer now that I was a college man. I also imagined how it would feel to have her pressed against my back as we rode through the corridors of autumn foliage back to campus. But the Vespa wasn’t as easy to drive as it was to ride, and when I arrived at the bus station, I slipped getting off and felt the terrible sensation of a burning hot exhaust pipe touching the exposed part of my ankle. I stifled a scream, grabbed my leg and pitched face forward toward the ground. I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could, picked up the scooter, and glanced quickly around to see who, if anyone, had witnessed this ridiculous display. I limped into the bus station, my ankle stinging something fierce, and went straight to the men’s room, where I splashed cold water over the welt. Back at the station, I nursed my wound the best I could, sitting on a hard bench near the restrooms, pressing a handful of shredded ice I’d grabbed from the café against my blistered skin.

“Holy crap,” her voice said. I looked up and saw a pair of knees. Then two peachy-colored thighs. As I lifted my head, I didn’t recognize the legs (thinner than I remembered)
or
the dress, a gray wool thing that would have been dowdy had it not been for its length, which barely reached the top of those glorious thighs. Betsy was also wearing makeup: lots of black mascara and a thin coat of white lipstick. Her hair was in two low pigtails on either side of her head. She had cut it, probably about a foot from what I could tell. I felt my heart sink.

“You cut your hair,” I said.

“What
happened
?”

I glanced quickly down at my leg. The burn was bad. Purplish black. Oozing. Betsy squatted down next to me, and the skirt rose higher up her legs. She touched the skin near the wound, and even the slightest touch of her fingertips against my skin stung.

“Oh God, I can smell it,” she said, covering her nose and mouth with the back of her arm. She stood up, and so did I.

“I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“How did you
do
that?”

“Jesus, what happened to
hello
?” I stepped back as if I were studying a painting or a sculpture. Betsy smiled broadly and then blushed, clearly aware that she didn’t look at all like the girl I’d known only a month before. She leaned into my arms, suddenly shy, and hugged me. At least she still smelled like Betsy. Soapy. Lustre-Creme shampoo and lilacs.

When I showed her the Vespa, she shook her head.

“It’s safe. Just don’t touch the exhaust pipe. That’s how I got burned. Here,” I said, offering her help getting on.

“My skirt,” she said.

We stood looking hopelessly at the Vespa. I kept thinking about her legs. “Take my sweater,” I said. “You can tie it around your waist.” I pulled the sweater I was wearing over my head, the air crackling with static. I patted down my hair, hoping it wasn’t standing straight up on end. It had gotten much longer without my father’s monthly cut.

“You need a haircut,” Betsy said.

I got on the scooter and Betsy got on carefully behind me. I could feel her legs pressing against my legs as I pulled away. And then we were rushing through the autumn afternoon, and I realized I hadn’t felt so alive since I’d left Two Rivers. The crush of leaves, the impossible scent of fall, and Betsy’s chest pressed against my back with only her dress and a thin cotton Oxford between us.

“Is this it?” Betsy asked. Her breath was hot in my ear.

I nodded and leaned the Vespa into the curve, suddenly an expert driver. When we pulled up in front of my dormitory, I felt cool. And when Betsy Parker in her minidress and pigtails got off behind me, I hoped that Freddy was watching out the window. We walked across campus together to get Betsy checked into the girls’ dorm where she would be staying. Betsy reached for my hand about halfway there and held onto it. I never realized how very small her hands were. When we got to Battell, I opened up my hand slowly, as if I were holding a bird or butterfly on the verge of escape inside. And suddenly overwhelmed by the architecture of her small bones, the incredible complexity and beauty of each digit, I lifted her hand up to my face, pressing it into my cheek. And then, embarrassed, I kissed her hand as if that’s what I intended to do all along.

That night I had planned to take Betsy into town again for dinner and a movie.

Freddy feigned snoring. “Bo-o-oring.”

It was, indeed, a mundane sort of thing to do with a girl I’d loved my entire life.

“Take her to Burlington,” Freddy said. “Get drunk. Go skinny-dipping in the creek. Jesus. Dinner and a movie. Who
are
you, goddamned Archie Andrews?”

Freddy insisted on coming along with me to pick her up. I resisted at first, not wanting to share even a moment of this night, but finally his incessant pleading got the better of me, and I told him he could come along if he promised to leave us alone afterward. Plus his excitement at meeting the object of my affection was infectious, and I wanted to show her off.

Freddy and I waited for her in the lobby of the girls’ dorm. The housemother rang her, and within minutes she materialized at the top of the stairs. The sight of her brought a lump to my throat.

“Rare avis,”
Freddy whispered, as she descended the stairs. “What a rare little birdie.”

She had changed from her woolen shift into a black pencil skirt and soft white sweater. She had also loosened her hair from the pigtails. I’d almost forgotten how dark her hair was, the blue-black stillness of it. Like water at night.

“You must be Freddy,” she said, thrusting her hand toward him. It seemed to catch him off-guard, rendering him (for the first time since I’d met him) speechless.

“Enchantée,”
he said, taking her hand and kissing it dramatically.

Betsy smiled.
“Moi aussi,”
she said, curtsying. And then to me, “I’m taking French at school. My roommate and I might study abroad junior year. Paris.”

The lump in my throat felt like a hard candy. Stuck and suffocating. “Well then, our reservation’s for seven,” I said.

He kept staring at her.

“Bye, Freddy. See you later.”

“Sure thing, old fellow,” he said. “See you back at the room. Let me know if you need
assistance.
”

At the restaurant, Betsy said, “Your friend Freddy’s nice.”

“Hmph,” I said. I was thinking about France.

“How’s your leg?”

“Fine. I’ll go to the infirmary on Tuesday.” The truth was that each step sent pain shooting out from the wound in all directions. “So you’re going to Paris?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m doing really well in French though. My professor says my pronunciation is good for a first-year student.”

“Hmph,” I said again.

The waiter brought us a basket of bread and a silver bowl of ice with little pads of butter on top.

“This place is
fancy
, Harper,” Betsy whispered.

“I suppose,” I said.

But despite the restaurant and its fresh flowers and linen tablecloths, its extensive array of flatware and silver candelabras, something felt spoiled about the night. All I could think of was Betsy going to Paris. About how on earth I would survive a whole year without her. Hell, I’d barely made it through the past month.

“I’m not very hungry,” I said as I studied the menu.

“Oh,
I
am,” Betsy said. “I’ve only had a cup of coffee and a bag of peanuts today.”

“No wonder you’re so skinny,” I said.

Betsy blinked hard. She was wearing false eyelashes and thick black eyeliner, which framed her eyes in a way that made them both startling and pretty.

The waiter came with two menus, the size of newspapers, and I hid behind mine.

“Why are you being so mean to me?” she asked softly.

“I’m not,” I said, feeling terrible. I lowered the menu but couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I’m just…”

“What?”

“You’re so different,” I said. “Wearing perfume. Makeup. It’s just weird.”

“I’m a
girl
,” she said. Her voice was trembling. “And I thought this was a
date.
”

I felt like a total shit. “I’m sorry,” I said, desperate to backpedal. To rewind. To start over.

She looked toward our waiter, who was busy with another table, and said, “Can we
leave
?”

“Now?” I asked.

She nodded, reaching across the table and grabbing my hands. She leaned toward me and whispered, “I want to be alone with you.”

I nodded and stood up, almost knocking my chair over backward. “Let’s go.”

Freddy had extended the loan on his Vespa, and as soon as we got on and headed into the night, I’d realized he’d been right about the dinner and movie idea. Betsy was no Betty. Hell, she wasn’t even a Veronica. I drove us across the stone bridge that traversed Otter Creek and stopped. We both got off the scooter. Below us were the Otter Creek falls, an eighteen-foot cascade of crashing water.

“Wow,” she said, peering over the bridge at the rushing falls below. When she climbed up onto the edge of the bridge to get a better look, I resisted the urge to pull her back to safety. She motioned for me, and I climbed up onto the ledge next to her. We sat there, our legs dangling over the rushing water. I couldn’t even bear to look at her.