Two Rivers (18 page)

I
n the back of Brooder’s pickup truck, the man is slumped over like a harvest dummy. Just a flannel shirt and pair of jeans stuffed with straw. Not a real man. Ray and Harper are following behind with only the fog lights illuminating this scarecrow in the truck bed. There is a chill in the air, and though Harper can no longer feel his hands, he rolls down the window.

“Where’s Brooder going?” Ray asks.

Harper shakes his head.

“He’s bound to come to soon. He’ll probably jump.”

Harper leans his head into the wind, which stings his face like a slap.

“He’s just gonna scare him, right?” Ray asks. “That’s what he said.”

Harper thinks about opening the door, about jumping, about throwing himself out of the moving car. He wonders what the pavement would feel like as it kissed his skin. He tries to imagine the way his bones would feel as they shattered. He puts his hand on the handle and pushes his thumb, testing.

And then, as the pavement turns to dirt and Ray’s car bounces into first one and then another rut made by the recent rains, Harper hears what he thinks at first is a baby’s cry. It is piercing, strange. His head begins to ache and he hits the lock on the door.

The man is awake, sitting up and staring him in the face. Crying like an infant, or a wounded animal, into the night.

W
e were going to run away. For real this time. By the end of our freshman year, when spring finally came with all of its requisite sunshine and mud, we both knew we couldn’t take it anymore. The weeks between Betsy’s visits were unbearable: the days liquid, slow and thick. And even when she
was
with me, I could barely enjoy her company; I was so fixated on her impending and inevitable departure. We clung to each other, desperate and mournful. You’d have thought one of us was dying, the way we held on.

It was Betsy’s idea to drop out. “School’s pointless. It’s all pointless. I want to be with you. In the world. Doing things.
Living
.”

I nodded, emphatic, though truthfully, I didn’t mind school much. It was being away from Betsy that wounded me. I could have been anywhere with her, as long as we were together.

“I’m tired of the projectors. The slides. It’s ridiculous. Art shouldn’t be studied. It should be felt. Experienced.” Betsy was beaming. “Come with me?”

The plan was to go back to Two Rivers for the summer. We would both work, save our money, and then buy two one-way tickets to Barcelona. It was cheaper to fly into Spain than France, and we would get a Eurail Pass, ride the trains. Hitchhike if we needed to. The idea was thrilling, but abstract. When I lay in my narrow bed at night, my whole body aching for Betsy, Paris came to me in tissue paper fragments, a busted kaleidoscope: the stained glass windows of Notre Dame, the smell of espresso, red wine, and the dizzying vertigo of the Eiffel Tower. It was like assembling the fragments of someone else’s dream. So while Betsy counted the days until our European adventure would commence, I was content to imagine summer at home again.

It had been a difficult winter. Having sex on campus was punishable by expulsion, and finding love off campus was similarly impossible. (The hotels and motels in town were complicit in the college’s aim to promote celibacy among Middlebury’s students.) Terrified of being kicked out of school, I had only allowed Freddy to help Betsy gain entrance to my room two times. He snuck her in through a first-floor window both times without incident. However, getting her back out proved to be a more difficult and risky project. After leaving my room one late afternoon in February, Betsy was caught tiptoeing down the back stairs by a junior fellow. Luckily, he didn’t know Betsy and bought the story that she’d only gotten lost, that she’d wandered into the dorm to get out of the cold. After that near-miss, I gave up, relinquishing any chance of romantic entanglement beyond our desperate groping at the movie theater in town. I couldn’t wait to be back in Two Rivers, where it didn’t seem like the entire world was trying to keep me from getting laid. Now that Betsy and I were lovers, Two Rivers became more than just our old stomping grounds. Suddenly, it was a place of tremendous romantic and sexual potential: every meadow, every wooded area, every remote and pastoral place of my childhood now a possible site for amorous rendezvous. When I thought about summer, I imagined my father busy in his workshop, my mother busy in her study, and Betsy and I free to make love wherever we pleased.

Of course, my mother was still in Mississippi, had been there almost a year now. This was a fact that I knew to be true, but still had not quite connected with yet. Because I was away, when I thought of home, I still pictured her there. Perhaps if I had been in Two Rivers, I would have felt her absence more intensely, but as it was, I received a weekly postcard from her, which was much more frequent than any correspondence I had with my father, and it made her feel close. She never said so, but in my mind, she would be home by the time I finished up the school year. When the postcard arrived saying that she’d decided to stay on through another summer, I should have known the bottom was about to fall out. Then we got the phone call from Hanna, and it did.

Betsy’s father had been giving Jack Miller, the high school principal, a straight razor shave before the Memorial Day parade when Principal Miller suddenly screamed out, leaping to his feet, bleeding from a six-inch gash in his cheek. At first, Mr. Parker (like Mrs. Norris at the post office) seemed to have simply fallen. However, when he did not stand up, and could not speak, he was quickly rushed to the hospital, where the doctors said that he had had a massive stroke.

Betsy was visiting me that weekend. We were sitting in two Adirondack chairs on the grassy lawn behind Battell, reading a
Fodor’s Guide to Paris,
drinking ice tea when Miss Katy, the housemother, came rushing outside, her face flushed. “Betsy, honey, there’s a phone call for you. From home. It seems it’s an emergency, so you best come quick.”

Hanna tried to explain to Betsy about what had caused the episode, as well as the doctors’ prognosis, but Betsy only shook her head, blinking hard against the tears that were filling her eyes, and handed the phone to me. Miss Katy enveloped Betsy in her arms, and rocked her back and forth until I hung up.

Because the stroke affected the right side of Mr. Parker’s body, he was completely unable to use his right hand, which meant that his bowling days, as well as his barbering days, were over. He wanted to keep the shop open, however, and he asked Betsy to help him run the business that summer, just until he could find someone to take over. She agreed, and we continued to plan our trip for the fall. He would be better by September, she said, he had to.

Orange Crush and sad eyes. This was Betsy Parker at nineteen. Every morning Betsy made her father breakfast, helped him get dressed, cleaned the house and then left him propped up in front of the TV with everything he would need for the day. Then she got on her bicycle and rode to the shop, which she opened, promptly, at 9:00
A.M
. She thought at first that she might be able to get the necessary bookkeeping and other miscellaneous duties done by lunch, leaving Knight Rogers and the two other barbers to manage things until closing. But when I came to pick her up, sweaty still from mowing the nearly two-acre span of the cemetery, she was more often than not still sweeping mountains of hair up off the floor, washing out sinks, tidying the supplies—not having had even a moment to devote to the books. She worked late every night, and our romantic escapades were limited to frantic groping and making out in the alley behind the barbershop. So much for meadows and pastures.

And though I knew better, I felt cheated out of my summer.
Our
summer. As each day went by that Betsy was consumed with the upkeep of her father’s barbershop and the upkeep of their home and the upkeep of her father’s health, I found myself feeling more and more bitter. It was terrible, and I’m ashamed to admit it even now, but Mr. Parker’s illness exasperated me, as if he’d gotten sick to spite me. In my darkest moments, I thought about how much easier things would have been if he hadn’t lived through the stroke. And so when Betsy showed up at the cemetery, her face red and streaked with tears, a small, awful part of me felt joyous at the prospect that I would have her back. That she would belong to me again. But Mr. Parker hadn’t died, he’d just had another stroke, a terrible one this time, one that had rendered him unable to walk.

“He’s so sick, Harper,” Betsy said.

“He’ll be okay,” I said. We sat down together on the grass in front of a crumbling granite tombstone. “By fall?”

“We can’t go,” Betsy said softly. “To Europe.”

Though Paris had been distant in my thoughts, unreal and hazy, it’s what I’d been looking forward to since our summer plans had fizzled. This felt like a blow to the stomach.

“Harper, I don’t even think I can go back to school.”

“What about Paul and Hanna? Can’t they take him in?” I asked.

Betsy shook her head. Hanna had always blamed Mr. Parker for her sister’s suicide, though she never said so in so many words.

I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t go back to school either. That I’d come help her: that I’d take care of her. That none of it mattered as long as we were together. But before I had a chance, she started crying.

“I’ll never get out of here,” she said, her eyes wild. “I had my chance. And now it’s gone. I feel
trapped
, Harper. He trapped my mother, and now he’s trapped me too.” Her hand flew to her mouth as if she couldn’t believe the words that had escaped.

“Betsy,” I said, reaching for her, but she shook her head. And then she was running, winding her way through the gravestones toward the small stone chapel at the edge of the cemetery.

I went after her, slowly at first, unsure if I should follow her at all. When she disappeared into the chapel, I stopped. I leaned against a tree near the entrance and waited. When she didn’t come out, I knocked softly before opening the door.

Inside, it was cool and dark. It smelled like pine. Like musty wood. Sunlight streamed through the dusty windows in narrow beams. She was sitting on a pew in the front of the building. “Betsy?”

“I don’t feel God in here,” she said.

I went to her and sat down next to her. “No?”

“I thought I might, but I don’t. Do you?”

I looked around, at the raw wooden pews, at the crucifix. I closed my eyes and listened to Betsy’s breath, which stuttered and caught like a child who has cried too long. I didn’t know what God felt like, but I figured it was something like this. “I don’t know,” I said. I studied her face, noticing for the first time some new tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. And because I loved her more than anything in the world (more than the river, more than autumn leaves, more than fireworks on the Fourth of July), I blurted out, “I’ll finish school and then I can get a great job somewhere else. Anywhere you want. And we’ll go there. Europe. Paris. We’ll get someone to take care of your father. A nurse, somebody…”

Betsy turned to me and looked hard at me. Then she squeezed my hand until my bones ached.
“Promise me,”
she said.

And because I loved her more than endless pastures and thick woods and sunshine, because I loved her more than snow, I whispered, “Promise.”

Autumn was agony. By September, when Betsy and I should have been on our way to Paris, Mr. Parker was so ill he could barely get out of bed. Betsy had taken on almost all of the responsibilities of the barbershop, leaving her very little time or energy to make the bus ride to Middlebury on the weekends. My course load was heavy; going home to visit was impossible, and so Betsy and I were forced to carry on our love affair via the New England Bell. There was one pay phone in my dormitory, in the hallway on the first floor. The fall of my sophomore year I was known as “Phone Man.” I was a fixture in that hallway, sitting for hours on end with my back against the wall, the phone balanced between my ear and shoulder, talking to Betsy.

I lived for the phone calls: for those hours when Betsy and I were still apart but miraculously connected, our voices winding around each other despite the distance between us. She had a way of talking to me on the phone that she never did in person. In many ways, our conversations were more intimate than when we were face to face, as if, deprived of each other’s hands, we were forced to touch each other with our words. We talked until our throats were raw. Until there was nothing left to say, and then we simply listened to each other breathe. Sometimes I fell asleep out there on the hard floor of the hallway, the phone still cradled between my ear and my chin. I’d wake up, and her voice would come to me, “Go to bed, Harper. You were snoring.”

But relying on her voice alone, without her eyes, without her hands, was also dangerous. It was too easy to misinterpret a sigh, a laugh. A silence that lasted too long. When Betsy called to tell me that she and Howie Burke had spent the afternoon at his grandmother’s farm picking apples, I was studying for a Statistics midterm. (In light of our new plans, I had chosen Economics as a major and English literature as a minor. The major was meant to secure lucrative employment, while the minor was intended to ensure my sanity.) And though I was already sitting, when she described the sunset that colored the whole sky orange and purple, I felt like I was falling. There was a weakness somewhere in my joints, a sort of collapsing.

“It was incredible,” Betsy said. “Just as it was getting dark, one of the mares went into labor. Howie’s grandfather let us in near her stall, and I got to watch the foal being born. I should have taken pictures, but the camera was in the car and I didn’t want to miss anything. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Have you?”

“Nope,” I said, gripping the edges of my textbook, feeling completely untethered.

“Howie’s seen about a zillion babies being born—calves and kittens and puppies,” she sighed.

“Wow.”

“I
know
. Did you know that something like twenty-five percent of mares die when they foal?”

“Twenty-five percent,” I said, staring hard at my Statistics book.

“Something like that.”

“How was the apple picking?” As I asked, I pictured Betsy climbing the ladder, her golden knees bending, her long thin arms reaching for the fruit.

“Nice,” she said.

Nice.
One breathy word, and I could almost see her plucking the apple out from the depths of the tree. She might have studied it, inspecting it for imperfections, or she might have been less cautious, yes, she certainly would have been less cautious. She wouldn’t have looked at it at all; she would have just brought it to her parted lips and bitten. Below her, Howie Burke would have been holding the ladder steady, looking up at those amazing legs.