Two Rivers (25 page)

After I hung up the phone, Freddy found me sitting on the floor speechless and trembling. He offered me his hand, pulled me up, and then guided me back down the dark corridor to our room. He made a pot of coffee on a contraband hotplate and made me sit down on the edge of my bed and tell him what happened. And as I spoke, as I tried to articulate the smell after the fire, the smell that still permeated my dreams, as well as the sound of my father’s voice like shattered glass on the other end of that line—as I tried to explain the recollection of my mother’s hands stroking my hair after a childhood nightmare, the memory of her wading into a pond to capture pollywogs in a jar for me, the image of her trying to teach my father how to do a cartwheel in the backyard, I knew that the sadness I felt was already yielding to something more powerful than grief. A child was growing inside Betsy’s womb, but something terrible was growing inside me. I had never felt anger like this before; it was an anger as cold and as deep as a bottomless lake.

B
rooder drives until the logging road abruptly ends. The smell of pine is so strong, so antiseptic, it reminds Harper of the science lab on campus. Of formaldehyde. When he squeezes his eyes shut, he imagines steel trays. The rigid bodies of frogs and pigs and cats. He had no stomach for that. He has no stomach for this.

Brooder stops the truck and cuts the lights. Ray follows behind him and does the same. Inside the car, the air is quiet and cold. The dash lights dim as Ray cuts the engine. Ray’s hands are shaking now. Harper watches him try to light a cigarette, each match going out in his unsteady hands.

“Shit,” he mutters, trying again.

When he succeeds, and the paper crackles orange and hot, Harper is grateful for the smell of smoke. He reaches for Ray’s cigarette and takes a long, hard drag. He lets the smoke fill his lungs and tries to imagine his chest expanding. His body growing. He is so constricted now, compressed, he fears he might snap. Or crack. Like ice. Or glass.

It is dark here, in the woods. Now the moon casts only an orange glow, distant and strangled by trees.

The sound of the man’s body hitting the ground makes Ray jump, dropping the cigarette in his lap. And then there is only the antiseptic scent of the pines, the smell of burnt denim, and the stink of flesh.

M
y father was sitting at the kitchen table when Betsy and I entered the house in Cambridge. It was hot in the kitchen, the windows all closed tight despite the warm spring day. The table was strewn with copies of the
Freedom Press
, most of them torn, all of them wet, the ink running onto his hands. My father looked deflated, a withered balloon sunken in on itself. His eyes drooped behind his glasses, which were also smudged with ink.

When he stood up from his chair, Betsy rushed to him, throwing her arms around him. She cried into his chest, and he awkwardly stroked her hair. Watching him in his clumsy attempts to comfort her made me feel embarrassed, as if I were witnessing a private moment I wasn’t meant to see. Betsy must have sensed my discomfort, because she pulled away after only a few moments.

“Well,” she said, wiping at her tears.

“Well,” my father said, forcing a smile. “You must be hungry after the drive? Thirsty? Would you two like some root beer?” He gestured toward a crate sitting in the corner by the refrigerator. “It’s been brewing for nearly a month. The first batch was a disaster. Blew up and ruined a whole batch of your mother’s papers.”

“These?” I asked, pointing to the pile on the table.

“What?” he asked, looking confused. “Oh, no.” He sat back down at the table, looking sadly at the bleeding newspapers. He rubbed the top of his head, smoothing his hair down nervously. “These were all over the street.” He sat down and picked up one paper, futilely pressing it flat. “I went there, to Roxbury, to get the car. To see where it happened. To try to figure out…and the whole street was littered with them. It was like there had been a parade.”

Betsy’s hand flew to her mouth when a startled gasp escaped.

“Every month since we came here. Every single month, she drove to that neighborhood and dropped off the papers. She knew the names of every shop owner, every clerk, every person who lived on that street.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

My father shook his head.

Betsy sat down next to him at the table. “What have they said? The people she knew there? Has anyone called?”

My father shook his head first and then nodded, reaching for a
Boston Globe
, which was sitting on top of one of the piles of paper. He thumbed through the pages until he got to what he was looking for. “‘The community leaders of Roxbury express their disappointment and remorse for the damage incurred to property during the riots,’” he read.

“Who was it?” I repeated. I wanted a name. I wanted to give features to the dark shadow faces I saw every time I closed my eyes. I wanted eyes, flecked with yellow. I wanted noses and lips, hair and teeth. I wanted the sounds of their voices and the smell of their breath.

“I’m sorry, did you say you did or didn’t want a root beer?” my father asked again, standing up and grabbing two bottles from the box on the floor. He set them down on the table and then sat down again. When neither one of us accepted, my father looked at us, defeated. Sunlight streamed through the window, catching in the brown glass of the two unopened bottles on the table.

I was hot.

Betsy reached for his hands and took them in hers. “Maybe they don’t know all of what happened. I’m sure if they knew, someone would do something.”

My father looked down then and studied Betsy’s hands. He turned them over and over in his own, examining them—the same way I’d seen him study a circuit board, the insides of a clock.

“She hated to drive,” he said. He looked up at me. “Remember that, Harper?”

I nodded, though I was still imagining those strange, dark faces pressed against the windshield of the station wagon.

“When I met her,” he said. “The very first time I met her, she was walking along Route 125, walking from campus all the way into town. There was a blizzard. I pulled up next to her and offered her a ride. It must have been thirty degrees below zero with the windchill.”

I’d never heard this story before. At least I couldn’t
remember
hearing it before. Something about that, about the fact that I’d rarely considered the moment that my parents met, made me feel tremendously sad. I’d somehow assumed that they had always known each other. I’d never had the slightest notion of them as anything but the two people who lived inside the walls of our home. Their separate histories had never really occurred, or mattered, to me before.

“She was giving piano lessons then, to help pay for school, and one of her students—a little boy, maybe six, seven—his father lost his job, couldn’t afford to send him anymore. But he had a great deal of talent you see—she could always see that, the potential in people. But his father wouldn’t accept charity. Told him that he had to quit. And so once a week she walked into town and met him, in secret, at his elementary school, where she gave him lessons.”

“Did she accept the ride?” Betsy asked.

He smiled sadly. “No.” He laughed. “Said she needed fresh air.”

I was suddenly so hot I felt like I might burst into flames. I ripped off my sweater and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt. I reached for the bottle of root beer and popped the lid. It bubbled and ran down onto my hands. I held it to my lips and tipped the bottle back, but instead of refreshment, the warm bitter liquid burned my throat.

“When are the services?” Betsy asked my father softly.

“She didn’t want anything like that,” he said. “She wanted to be cremated. No funeral.”

“Maybe we could invite people to come here. I could make hors d’oeuvres. Sandwiches. Punch. Just something small. For her friends.”

“Good idea.” My father nodded.

My whole body felt like it was about to ignite. “Sandwiches?” I said. “Fucking punch? Jesus Christ. She didn’t die in her sleep. She was
murdered
. By those
people
. Those ungrateful bastards.”

Betsy stood up and reached for my elbow. I yanked my arm away, and she shrunk away from me as if she’d been burned.

“Somebody has to
do
something.” I looked at the bottle in my hand, at the brown glass. I watched my grip tighten around the bottle, the veins on the back of my hand rising to the surface. My father stood, bewildered, running his hands through his hair over and over.

“Goddamn it, Dad, why don’t you do something?” I yelled, and threw the bottle at the refrigerator. It shattered against the door, shards scattered across the linoleum. I stared hard at my father’s sad face.
“For once?”

A
t work I couldn’t concentrate on anything. In the freight office, the one place where I had always been able to focus, I felt suddenly scatterbrained. I had always thrived on the order of numbers, their predictability and reason, but suddenly the numbers seemed to mock me: so tidy and certain, while my own life was in such utter disarray. On top of my own inability to concentrate, the representative from the railroad had left, and Lenny was at my door every five minutes with a new question.

“You filed that report on the Bloom family?” he asked, his boorish frame filling my doorway.

I looked up from a sea of paperwork. “What?”

“The Bloom fam-i-ly,” he said, enunciating every syllable as if he were speaking to a child.

“Yes,” I said, irritated.

“You had lunch yet?” he asked ten minutes later.

I had made the mistake of joining him for lunch one day early on in his tenure, and ever since he considered me his lunch buddy. Most days I brought my own lunch to avoid having to sit across from him at Rosco’s as he chewed with his mouth open and gossiped about everyone who came in and out of the diner. He was a transplant, but he still had dirt on just about everyone in Two Rivers.

“No,” I said. “I need to get these orders processed.”

“Come on, Montgomery. Everybody’s got to eat.”

“I said, I’m busy.”

“Fine,” he said, gruff and pissed off.

While he was gone, I struggled to focus long enough to complete even the smallest tasks. I couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie, the sweet earnestness of her face. Her awful naiveté. My own. I hadn’t been able to look her in the eyes since we’d had the conversation about the baby.

I looked through the phone book for adoption agencies. The closest one was in Burlington. I scratched the number on a piece of paper and then crossed it out. She was a minor. I was pretty certain that this small detail would likely be accompanied by some fairly enormous legal ramifications. I had no power of attorney, no custody. Besides, she claimed she was here because she didn’t
want
to give the baby up for adoption. I flipped through the worn phonebook and looked for a list of teen counselors. Again, the closest was in Burlington. I scribbled a couple of names and numbers and then crumpled the piece of paper up. I couldn’t imagine a counselor making any headway with Maggie. Or vice versa. Frustrated, I chucked the whole book in the trash can.

When Lenny came back an hour later smelling of meat and a lunch hour cocktail, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“You got the number for Bellows Falls?” he asked, picking at his teeth with his pinky nail.

“Jesus Christ, Lenny,” I said. “I’m trying to get some work done here.”

“Well, excuuuuse me,” he said. This was the fifth time he’d performed this nails-on-a-chalkboard impersonation today.

I stood up from my desk and waited for him to leave. When he didn’t budge from the doorway, I went to where he was standing and started to close the door.

He put his foot in the way and said, “People over to Rosco’s are saying you got yourself a new girl.” His breath stunk of onions. Liver. Vodka.

“Get out of my office,” I said.

Lenny lifted one meaty finger then and pointed into my chest, pushing me back into the room. “Little half-breed with a nice sweet apple of an ass,” he hissed.

“I said get the fuck out of my office,” I said, catching my breath.

“Hear she’s only fifteen years old too. Not much older than your own girl. A guy could go to jail for that. Especially if you’re that baby’s daddy.”

My fist made contact with Lenny’s face before I knew what I was doing. The sound the blow made was loud enough to send a few people running down the hallway toward my office. And the broken bones in my thumb that had healed so many years ago were suddenly shattered again. Just like that.