Two Rivers (2 page)

1980: Wreckage

P
eople say we are defined by the choices that we make; some of them are easy, small, while others are more difficult. These are the decisions that keep us up at night, forcing us to weigh the pros and cons, to examine what is right and what is wrong. They require us to examine the options, scrutinize the possibilities and potential outcomes. But what about the split-second decision? What about the one made without the luxury of contemplation, the one made from the gut rather than the brain? Does this speak more loudly to who we
really
are? The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good. But what about the man who feels nothing? What about the man who stands at the edge of the well and
does
nothing? Who is he? Once, a long time ago, I made a split-second decision that has made me question who I am, what I am capable of, every day since. And this instant, this horrible moment, has haunted every other moment of my life. I don’t think I am a bad man, but sometimes I just don’t know.

What I
do
know is that, twelve years later, all I wanted was forgiveness. I just needed to make things right, to somehow make amends. Over the years, the sorrow of that night had settled into my bones. Deep inside my joints. In my shoulders. In my hands. I needed absolution. I needed a second chance. I imagined the guilt dissolving like salt in hot water. I imagined it lifting off me, taking flight like a strange and terrible bird. But what I didn’t imagine was that my one chance at forgiveness would find its way to me in a train wreck and a pregnant girl with mismatched eyes. But opportunities are often disguised. I know that now.

The night before the wreck, I didn’t sleep. After Shelly went to bed, I stayed up, making cupcakes for her to bring to school the next day for her birthday: sad chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting. My efforts at holidays always seemed to fall short of what Shelly really wanted, though she would certainly never say so (store bought Halloween costumes instead of homemade,
homemade
valentines instead of the glossy ones sold at the Rexall, and so many bad cupcakes). Hanna would have made a cake from scratch, inscribed Shelly’s name in sweet calligraphy on top. Shelly’s great-aunt had taken care of the first eleven birthdays; when my efforts invariably failed, she always quietly stepped in and saved me from whatever disaster I’d made. But now, I was on my own, frosting cupcakes whose middles were as soft as pudding, chocolate crumbs mixing with the pink frosting like gravel. In the morning Shelly would be twelve.
Twelve years.
And I still felt as incompetent as the day I brought her home from the hospital.

Our new apartment was above the bowling alley. We’d lived there since we left Paul and Hanna’s house at the beginning of the summer. This too was a temporary situation; I had to keep telling myself that. I wouldn’t let the years slip by here, not in a dingy apartment above a bowling alley. I wanted so much more for Shelly.

Moving in with Betsy’s aunt and uncle was a decision I had made twelve years ago out of grief and desperation. Alone, with a brand new baby to take care of, I needed someone to keep me from shattering into a thousand pieces. None of us had planned on this lasting forever. But Shelly was happy there, and the years had just sort of passed by. It wasn’t until she finished up the sixth grade earlier that summer that I knew it was time to move on. She was too old to be sharing a room with her daddy, and I couldn’t help but feel like we’d overstayed our welcome. Our room was drafty and smelled like other people’s things. In all the years we’d slept there, Paul and Hanna never managed to move out the broken bureau or the old clothes hanging in the closets, and I never felt right asking them. Of course they offered to let Shelly stay,
wanted
Shelly to stay, but the thought of giving her up too was more than I could bear.

When I found the apartment downtown, I raided my savings account and paid six months’ rent in one fell swoop. This was mostly for Hanna. She doubted me, I knew this, and I wanted to prove that I was capable. That we would be fine on our own. And though she adored both Paul and Hanna, Shelly didn’t seem to mind leaving much. She took only the clothes that would fit into a small suitcase. She even left some of her belongings behind: a pair of ratty old slippers, a magnifying glass she used to spy on things she found in the river, a piggy bank filled with coins. I guess a child who loses her mother the moment she’s born learns not to grow too attached to things.

Besides, the new place had two bedrooms: one of them just for her. The first night there, Shelly stood on the mattress I’d put on the floor in her bedroom with her arms stretched out and spun around until she got too dizzy to stand. “I love it, love it, love it!” she said. And I felt for the first time in a long time that I’d done something right. She fell asleep before I even had a chance to put sheets on the mattress. Below us, the rolling balls and the crashing pins were an odd lullaby.

Tonight, I knew that between the heat of Indian summer and the sounds of the bowling alley below, sleep would once again pass me by. And so I resigned myself to wakefulness, figured I’d spend the night as I spent most every night lately: sitting on the roof looking at the cool shimmering green of the public pool across the street, closed for the summer now, while Shelly slept in the other room.

I poked my head in to check on her. A few weeks earlier, when summer came back, I’d put our only fan in her room. It whirred in the window, making the curtains billow out like ghosts. She was flat on her back and fast asleep, wearing one of my old Middlebury T-shirts and the gum wrapper necklace she never took off.

I quietly closed her door and went down the hall to the window, which led to my rooftop refuge. Even at almost midnight, the tar paper still held some of the sun’s warmth, and the air was thick. Across the street, the water in the pool was still. Shelly’s birthday again, and here it was: another batch of sad cupcakes. Another week of restless nights. I was kidding myself blaming my unease on the heat. It wasn’t the heat at all but rather the passing of another year. It was that Shelly had outgrown another pair of sneakers, another winter coat. It was that she didn’t need me to tie her shoes or brush her hair: each small milestone a cruel reminder that life was going on. Moving forward. She was growing up. And each year she grew older, Betsy was that much further away. A child’s birthday should never be the anniversary of her mother’s death.

Betsy.
Before this, before I knew the color of the sky at three
A.M
., before I knew the sound of a child sleeping—before I knew the fear of being entirely alone as the world slept—there was Betsy. Her name found its way to my lips on those waking nights, and I practiced their syllables as if I were reciting a poem or a prayer. She was always there. Before this, I had not known the world without her in it.

I looked for Betsy in Shelly. And sometimes I found her there: in the lazy blinking of her eyes, in a sigh, in a blush. But more often than not, in searching for Betsy, I only found myself. Shelly had my awkward long limbs, my pale skin, the same squinty blue eyes. She was almost
twelve
now—the same age that Betsy was when I first fell in love with her. But no matter how hard I looked at Shelly’s face, Betsy simply wasn’t hiding there.

Twelve years.

My rooftop reveries inevitably ended with thoughts of Betsy. It didn’t matter if I tried to concentrate on other things (the house for sale on Finney Ridge, the Sox’s recent loss to the Yankees, the John Fowles novel I was reading), my mind always found its way—no matter how circuitous the route—back to her. And as Shelly’s birthday approached, the journey back to Betsy Parker became less and less oblique. I’d start out considering what the mortgage might be on that three-bedroom Cape and wind up thinking about something Betsy once said about wanting to own a home that had an orange tree out front. (I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that oranges almost never grow in northeastern Vermont.) If I started out with baseball, I saw Betsy yanking Ray’s old Sox cap off his head and putting it on her own. It had covered her eyes, and we all laughed. And when I thought about that novel, the one where a collector of butterflies falls in love with a stranger and decides to first kidnap and then keep her, I began to wonder if Betsy ever felt like that: like a captured butterfly.

And here she was again tonight, curling up next to me on the roof. Waiting with me until the sun rose, insistent, over Depot Street. I left her only when I sensed that Shelly was stirring, that the day I’d been dreading had arrived.

Shelly came out of her room as I was making coffee. She rubbed her eyes and then spied the cupcakes sitting on the counter.

“I hope they’re okay,” I said. “The middles might be kind of soft.”

She smiled at me in that sad way she had and picked one of them up. She licked the frosting off the top and said gently, “Thanks, Daddy, but I’m kinda too old to bring cupcakes to school now.” And then, because she probably thought she’d hurt my feelings, she peeled the paper cup off the cupcake and popped half of it in her mouth. “Mmm. It’s really, really good, Dad.”

In my pocket was the gift I’d bought for her: a pair of glittery barrettes. I had planned to give them to her at breakfast, but decided then to wait, suddenly certain that the gift was all wrong. I didn’t want to let her down again. I’d have to stop at Kinsey’s after work. Maybe a charm bracelet would be better. A pair of earrings. A watch.

I was grateful for the morning’s rituals (making coffee, getting myself dressed and Shelly fed, packing our lunches) as well as for the morning’s unexpected events (a lack of hot water, milk gone sour in the fridge and a missing sock). Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them—distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands.

Shelly kissed my cheek and then walked down the hallway to our neighbor’s apartment as I watched her from our doorway. Mrs. Marigold, an elderly widow, took care of Shelly before and after school, while I was at work. Shelly insisted that I not use the word “sitter,” and especially not “
baby
sitter” when referring to Mrs. Marigold. But, whatever her job title, she made sure Shelly got to the bus stop. That she had a place to go after school. In exchange, I ran errands for her: buying groceries, depositing her husband’s pension checks at the bank, that kind of thing. She used to be a nurse, probably a hundred years ago, but this made me feel somehow safe.

“Happy birthday!” I called after her.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said over her shoulder, and skipped down the hall.

I had to leave for work earlier than I would have if I were driving, but as long as the weather permitted, I preferred to ride my bike. Most of the time, I left my car parked in the alley behind our building; I didn’t drive unless I had to anymore. After Betsy died, the world started to seem like a dangerous place. Every time I got behind the wheel, especially with Shelly in the car, I couldn’t help but envision every horrible thing that might happen. Every catastrophe. And so I’d opted instead for a bicycle, a J.C. Higgins three speed, which I knew had seen better days. I bought it at the Methodist Church rummage sale for five dollars and fifty cents. The spokes were rusted, and the seat was stuck at an elevation reserved for a taller man than I; even at 6 feet 4 inches, I had to stand on the pedals as I rode to avoid the unfortunate angle of the seat. But despite the inadequacy of the bike, there was something perfect about the two-mile journey to the railroad station each morning. In a month or so, when snow came and I had to negotiate my old VW Bug through the snow, I’d miss these mornings: the rushing air, the burning in my calves as I pedaled up the winding hill. The ride usually cleared my head, invigorated me, but today nothing could dispel the awful disquiet I was feeling.

By the time I got to work, I was antsy, like I’d had too much coffee. Too little sleep. I tried to look forward to the daily tasks, to losing myself in a stack of invoices, the bills of lading. I had been working at the freight office at the railroad station since I was twenty-two years old. I’d worked my way up, as much as you can in a place like this, and was now the freight traffic manager. It was hardly the job I’d thought I’d wind up with, but my ambition, like everything else, sort of flew out the window when Betsy died. I had never planned to make this job my career, but here I was. And I have to admit, there was a small but certain satisfaction when the numbers balanced out at the end of the day, the week, the month. At least there was order here. Predictability.

While I waited for the night shift to end, I sat at the grimy table in the break room thumbing through the previous Sunday’s
Free Press
and grabbed a doughnut from a box that somebody’s wife must have dropped off.
It’s just another day
, I thought. But just as I was about to take a bite of the doughnut and look in the sports section to see whether or not Boston had won Saturday’s game, Rene LaFevre, one of the French Canadian car knockers, came rushing through the door.