Two Rivers (7 page)

But the next day when we got to school, Betsy was sitting at her desk, crying into her hands, and my heart sank. “Mrs. Praker’s in a nuthouse,” was scrawled across the chalkboard in Howie’s backward script.

And even though we were at school and everybody was watching, I went to her. I put my arm over her shoulder and hugged her. In front of the entire eighth-grade class, I held her. And in the crook of my arm, she shook with a sadness I knew I would never be able to understand or share.

“I told Mindy not to tell anybody,” she cried, wiping furiously at her tears. “She was supposed to be my friend. She
promised
. Why would she tell him?”

Mindy’s motives became clear that afternoon when instead of playing basketball, she and Howie disappeared behind the school and came back five minutes later with leaves in their hair, looking both guilty and proud. (Howie said later that her boobs felt like peaches, an observation we all believed since none of us yet had evidence to the contrary.)

Mindy Wheeler moved away before school let out for the summer, and everyone in the whole school seemed to mourn her passing except for me. I was glad she was gone. But thanks to Mindy, at least I’d found my purpose. I had been put on this earth to protect Betsy. To keep her secrets and to keep her safe.

A
fter my bumbled TV interview at the station, I left work and went home, quietly unlocking the door just in case the girl was still sleeping. When I entered the kitchen, Shelly was sitting at the kitchen table, her schoolbooks spread out in front of her, and Marguerite was standing at the stove. My spine went stiff as a rod.

“Daddy!” Shelly cried when I stepped into the kitchen.

I took off my hat. “Hi, baby girl,” I said, squeezing her, trying not to let on that anything was out of the ordinary. Normally, I would have thrown her over my shoulder like a potato sack and marched around the house until she pleaded to be released, but lately she’d gotten too heavy, too tall, and tonight there was a stranger standing at my stove.

“Let go,”
she giggled, and wriggled free.

The whole kitchen smelled like something I’d never smelled before.

“I thought you would be at Mrs. Marigold’s,” I said to Shelly, part question, part reprimand.

“I
was
,” Shelly said. “But she said we had company. That our
cousin
was taking a nap on the couch.”

“I see,” I said.

“Did a train really wreck in the river?” she asked excitedly. “Jason Pittman in my class said a hundred people drowned.”

“It derailed into the river. A lot of people got hurt. Not a hundred, but a lot.”

“Were you there?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Did you
see
it?” Shelly was jumping from one foot to the other. She was always such a ball of nervous energy.

“I didn’t see the accident happen. I got there afterward.”

“Did you see anybody, you know, drowned?”

I looked at Marguerite, but she was busy peering into my cupboard.

“This isn’t great dinner conversation,” I said softly.

“We’re not even eating yet,” Shelly argued. “Did you?”

I turned to Marguerite, forcing myself to sound bright, cheerful. “So, what’s for supper?”

“Maggie’s making jumbo liar,” Shelly said, climbing back up into her chair and reaching for her pencil box. “It’s got sausage in it. And rice. It’s spicy.”

“That sounds great,” I said,
“Maggie.”

“That’s my nickname,” she said, winking at Shelly. Then she looked at me, as if daring me to challenge her again. “With my
girlfriends.
”

“We’re going bowling tonight!” Shelly said.

“No,” I started. “Not tonight.”

“Daddy,” Shelly said dramatically. “It’s Friday. It’s
Ladies Night
.”

On most Friday nights since we moved into the apartment, Shelly and I would eat dinner (corn dogs for her, chili for me) at the bowling alley and then, before the ladies’ leagues showed up, we’d bowl a few strings. Because it was Ladies Night, she could order whatever she wanted from the laminated menu, and she could also pick whatever songs she wanted on the jukebox.

“Ladies Night means ladies’ choice,” Shelly explained to the girl,
Maggie
, who was tasting something from one of my wooden spoons. She scrunched her nose and shook in a few drops of hot pepper sauce she had excavated from the depths of my cupboards. She tested the concoction again and smiled.

I knew a lot of the women in the ladies’ leagues: a lot of the girls we went to high school with, some of the wives of my coworkers down at the station. Hanna’s sister, Lisa, bowled. Word would get back to Hanna one way or another about the girl. She knew I didn’t have any family from anywhere but here; even my own mother’s family tree’s branches did not extend out of New England. We couldn’t go. Anywhere. Two Rivers was too small for a stranger, especially a stranger of Marguerite’s caliber, to get lost in the crowd. She could spend the night, but then she’d have to be on her way. And no Ladies Night.

“Y’all sit down,” Marguerite said. “Dinner’s ready.”

Shelly sat obediently in her chair, moving aside her schoolbooks. I sat down too, exhausted and starving. The smells coming from that one pot were more intense than anything I’d managed to put together since we’d moved into this apartment. Sweet tomatoes, spices. I’d never really learned to cook; I hadn’t felt comfortable trying to do more than make myself a cup of coffee in Hanna’s kitchen.

Marguerite grabbed three plates and set them down on the table. She scooped a heaping pile of the stuff onto my plate and an only slightly less generous pile onto Shelly’s. On the plate she’d set for herself, she plopped down some plain rice from another pot.

“
What
is it called again?” I asked, shoveling a heaping spoonful into my mouth.

“It’s called jambalaya, Mr. Manners. Didn’t nobody ever teach you it ain’t polite to start eating without saying grace?” Marguerite asked.

Shelly set her utensils down, pressed her palms together, and closed her eyes. “Father, bless the food we take, and bless us all for Jesus’ sake. Amen.”

“Who taught you that?” I asked.

“Mrs. Marigold.”

“Oh, did she?” I asked. I would have to remember to say something to Mrs. Marigold on Monday.

Shelly scowled at me. Marguerite leaned over to her and said, “At my house we say, ‘For bacon, eggs and buttered toast, praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’”

Shelly giggled.

Marguerite pushed the rice around her plate as I finished first one, and then two more helpings. Shelly ate a whole plateful as well and asked Marguerite for more when she was done.

“Ladies Night,” Shelly said, tugging at my sleeve.

I shook my head, and she looked at me sadly. “Please? It’s my
birthday
.”

Her birthday. With all of the confusion and excitement of the train wreck and Marguerite, I’d forgotten to pick up another birthday present. Feeling awful, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pair of barrettes and handed them to her.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said, but her eyes were welling up with tears.

“It’s your
birthday
?” Marguerite said, putting her hands on her hips. “Well, it’s a good thing I made a cake. Not quite a birthday cake, but if your daddy’s got a candle, you could still make a wish on it.” She opened up the fridge and pulled out a pineapple upside-down cake.

Shelly beamed.

I agreed to Ladies Night against my better judgment, because of Shelly. It was the poor kid’s birthday, and once again I’d failed miserably. So Ladies Night it was, and the three of us descended the stairs leading to Sunset Lanes. And luckily, when we got to the door, there was a sign posted that all league games were canceled due to the train wreck. Inside, the bowling alley was deserted save for a few regulars drinking coffee and a couple of kids shooting pool in the arcade.

“Where is everybody?” Shelly asked, clearly disappointed. Shelly was a mascot of sorts on Ladies Night. The women of Sunset Lanes fawned over her as if she were a small animal instead of a girl. Part of the reason I kept bringing her back on Friday nights was because all of those women made everything seem okay. Since we’d left Hanna’s, the absence of a mother in Shelly’s life seemed even more pronounced.

If I had been like most of Two Rivers’s other widowers I would have simply found myself someone new, someone to fill the empty spaces Betsy left behind. But most of the widowers in this town were well into their seventies when their wives passed away. Remarrying was what kept them alive for another ten, fifteen years. I was twenty-two years old when Betsy died. I wasn’t even sure then that I
wanted
to survive.

I suppose I could have found someone if I’d really wanted to. It was almost alarming how many women came out of the woodwork after Betsy passed away. Almost right away, girls we knew from high school, ones who never talked to me, were suddenly very concerned about my grief. Their casseroles arrived at Hanna’s doorstep, with perfumed notes expressing their most sincere condolences. As time went on the casseroles stopped, and they started to bring things by for the baby. Tiny clothes and handmade blankets. I would have thought these gestures to be only our community’s genuine efforts to take care of its wounded. But Hanna, who was always wiser than I, noticed that the gifts often came along with invitations—to go catch a movie at the Star Theatre, to join one of them or another at the Two Rivers Inn for supper, to attend the Christmas party at the Paper Company. “Those women are despicable,” Hanna snorted. “Betsy’s barely even cold yet.” So I accepted their casseroles and baby sweaters but not their invitations, and after a while most of them gave up.

Of course, after a while I did start to date again. Over the years, there were probably a half dozen or so women I spent time with. But as nice as they were, as smart as they were, as pretty as some of them were (and some of them were very, very pretty), nothing ever got too serious. They probably knew that as hard as I tried not to, I was always comparing them to Betsy, holding them up against her. A few years ago when I met Lucy, an English teacher from Bennington whose brother lived in Two Rivers, I thought maybe I’d found someone I could share my life with. Lucy was beautiful, quiet. She loved books. But when I asked her to move to Two Rivers, told her I loved her, she just shook her head.

“You’re in love with a shadow,” she said. “A shadow that covers your whole world. I can’t live in that kind of darkness, Harper. I’m sorry.”

After Lucy, I figured it was likely I’d have to finish raising Shelly by myself. Lucy was right. Betsy’s shadow loomed large. And as far as finding a new mom for Shelly, it wasn’t like she didn’t have women in her life. Hanna was like a mother to her. And now that we were on our own, we had Mrs. Marigold and the bowling league ladies.

At the bowling alley, Shelly played “Ladies Night” on the jukebox until a couple of guys groaned audibly, and I stopped giving her quarters. Marguerite was quite good. She said she and her girlfriends liked to bowl too. We bowled until Shelly slumped over in a booth, exhausted, and Marguerite said her feet hurt.

When we turned in the rental shoes, Kip Kilroy, the counter manager, said, “Hey, Harper, I saw you on the news. Man, what a disaster.”

I was worried he would ask about Marguerite, but he only said, “Those size sixes work out for you okay, miss?”

She winked and said, “A five and a half woulda been better, but I still rolled a two-twenty.”

Back upstairs in the apartment, I offered Marguerite my room for the night, put some clean sheets on the bed. I told her I’d sleep on the couch, though I doubted sleep would likely come tonight either.

“Tomorrow we need to get in touch with your family,” I said as I handed her a clean towel and washcloth. She didn’t say anything, but she accepted the towels.

“Thanks again,” she said. “This is really nice of y’all.”

In the morning I would call over to the train station, talk to the weekend crew, have them check their roster for a girl named Marguerite, for her mother. But for tonight, I let her rest. The kitchen still smelled like jambalaya, and when I opened the window it seemed the heat had finally broken. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, the air smelled like rain.

W
hen Betsy said she was running away, I knew I had no choice but to go with her. She needed me. Besides which, I would have followed Betsy Parker anywhere.

On the last day of eighth grade, as Miss Bean said her tearful farewells to us, Betsy leaned over across the aisle that separated us and whispered, “Today.” I ignored her, staring straight ahead as Miss Bean wiped at her nose with a tissue she plucked from a box on her desk. Truth be told, I was moved by Miss Bean’s heartfelt speech. I even felt a small lump swell in my throat as she spoke. She was the youngest teacher that Two Rivers Graded School had ever had—fresh out of college and still in love with the idea of teaching. Miss Bean, unlike our other teachers, believed in us; she believed that we would not only go on to graduate from Two Rivers High, but that we might even eventually find a way to change the world in some significant way. And perhaps it was Miss Bean’s enthusiasm, her thrilling naiveté that got into my gut that early June afternoon as flies slapped sluggishly at the windowpanes in our basement classroom. It was Miss Bean, wearing a soft pink sweater and a matching scarf knotted at her throat, and her promises that the road less traveled would, indeed, make all the difference that made me consent to Betsy’s wildest scheme yet.

Betsy and I had had endless conversations about leaving Two Rivers. I participated in these discussions mainly because I loved Betsy Parker. It had everything to do with the way she smelled like lilacs, even in the winter, and nothing to do with actually wanting to leave our hometown. I loved Two Rivers. The way I figured it, I was probably about the only person who wasn’t trying to get away. But I cherished this nothing place. I treasured it: the way the woods smelled after rain, the thunderous sound of the train, that still place where the two rivers meet. Betsy’s machinations to flee contradicted every instinct I had. But Betsy Parker, like the giant maples that grew inexplicably in a perfect circle around the town’s library, had also grown out of Two Rivers. And I loved her more than water, so I listened as she devised her plan. And agreed when she asked me to go. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. But now, Miss Bean was hugging me so hard I could feel the gentle cage of her ribs pressing into my cheeks, her
breasts
pressing into my cheeks, and Betsy Parker was giving me the signal that the time had come. Suddenly, I was thirteen years old, a graded school graduate, and the whole wide world lay before me like some sort of open road. That’s the way I saw it; I pictured the dirt road that led from the river eastward, the one that would wind and twist and branch onto other dirt roads, leading, finally, to Maine, where Betsy had deigned we might finally settle.

Most other girls at thirteen might have pointed their starry eyes westward, fueled by too many winter nights spent curled up under covers reading about all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier adventures. Not Betsy though. Betsy Parker was an adventurer of the truest sort. She knew her limitations, could differentiate between fantasy and potentiality. When she set out to do something, she did it. This was what made me both adore Betsy and fear her. She never made idle threats, and she never made idle plans.

Betsy chose Maine as a destination because of a photo of her mother that she had found in a box in her basement. In the picture, Mrs. Parker was perched on top of a large rock, the wind blowing her hair across her face, the ocean crashing against the shore below. It was taken on the coast of Maine, back when Mrs. Parker was an aspiring model, long before she married Mr. Parker. Betsy told me that one time her mother grabbed her arm tightly and said, “I died the day I met your father. You are looking at a corpse.” She said her mother’s fingernails left four bloody half moons in the soft skin of her upper arm; she even showed me the four faint scars, which I wanted, but didn’t dare, to touch. It was hard for me to imagine Mrs. Parker with her oven mitts and patent leather pumps saying this about Mr. Parker
or
to imagine her hurting Betsy. But it wasn’t hard for me to envision Mrs. Parker sitting on a rock with waves crashing below her, a photographer clicking away. Betsy wouldn’t let me see
this
picture, but I imagined her looking like Annette Funicello, wearing nothing but a smile. I think Betsy envisioned herself perched above a rocky beach. When she fantasized about running away it wasn’t about riding in a horse-drawn wagon but about walking barefoot in the sand, ankles numb in the cold Atlantic. “Besides which,” she offered when I gave her my typically dubious smile, “you can fish. That’s how we’ll make our money.”

As we left school that afternoon, Betsy didn’t give in to my usual diversions. No stop for Red Hots at the drugstore, where Brooder and Ray would be parked at the counter, digging around in their pockets for loose change. No detours to the cemetery, where I liked to see how many angels I could hit with my slingshot. She was all business, pulling me by the hand until we were in her backyard. She left me standing by the oak tree and went into her father’s shed, where he kept his tools and lawn mower and the stash of dirty magazines, and came out with a small shovel. I followed her to the far corner of her yard, where she looked up at the sky, crossed herself as if she were in church, and then started to dig.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me. And after she had dug about a foot down into the earth, she silently dropped the shovel and knelt down next to the hole she had made. She continued to dig with her hands, her expression serious, intent. When she pulled out the soggy cardboard box, I thought it might be some sort of hidden treasure. There was a part of me, even then, that resided in the stories my mother read to me at night.
Treasure Island
.
The Swiss Family Robinson
. “What is it?” I asked.

When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. She blinked hard and lifted the lid of the box. “When I was six,” she said, quiet, like a question, “a bird smashed into our front window. A robin. My mom had just washed the windows, and the stupid bird must not have been able to tell there was glass there. I was playing jacks on the front porch, and I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It sounded like a gun or something. And then the bird was just lying there in the rosebush. There wasn’t any blood or anything, but its neck was all twisted. Its wing was crushed. Mom came running out of the house to see what happened, and when I showed her the bird, she covered my eyes with her hands. They smelled like ammonia. I remember they smelled so clean it could make you sick. She made me go inside, told me to go to my room and not come out until she said. After a long time, she finally came and got me. She told me that the bird was really hurt, but that she fixed its wing. She said that it flew away.” Betsy’s hands were trembling, the box was trembling in her hands. “So I forgot about the bird. And then a few days later I was out here and I saw this pile of dirt. I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to dig it up. And I found this.” She motioned to the box, to the bones inside the box. “Course it wasn’t just bones then. It still had its feathers and everything. Its wing was still broken. Its neck was still broken.”

I knelt down next to Betsy and looked into the box. Inside were yellowed bones, impossibly small and collapsed. The miniature skull with its empty eye sockets was looking up at me.

“She probably just didn’t want you to feel bad,” I said.

“Well I
did
,” Betsy said, and she seemed almost angry.

“Are you going to bury it again?” I asked. There was something disconcerting about the skeleton. About Betsy right then.

She nodded and lowered the box back into the ground. “Dumb bird. Flying around, just being a bird, and then
bam
, it’s over.” She looked at me and frowned. “Nobody bothered to tell him about the glass. You’d have told me, right? If I were that bird? And you were my bird friend?”

I nodded. I would have.

She’d packed for both of us—everything we needed except for my clothes. She’d been stealing food from the pantry for nearly two months. She’d also been pilfering from the pickle jar where Mr. Parker threw his spare change. She had almost forty dollars, which she’d had Nancy Butler’s older sister, who worked at the Two Rivers Savings and Loan, turn into bills so as not to raise any eyebrows. She had toiletries she’d shoplifted from the drugstore and even a pair of men’s hiking boots she’d found at the Goodwill, which she offered to me like a gift. “We’ve got many miles ahead of us,” she said. “I don’t need you going home when your sole blows out.” The way she said it made me think of my soul exploding. My mother did not believe in God, but I had my suspicions.

“Where will we sleep?” I asked.

“I’ve got a tent,” she said. “I
was
a Brownie, before I got kicked out, you know.”

I didn’t ask any more questions.

I dawdled. I stood in my bedroom, looking for a way out. It was futile. I didn’t even have a proper closet in which I could hide. My closet was full of more of my father’s inventions; no one had dared open that door in years. Downstairs my mother was playing the piano, angry music. Last day of school music. She had a summer of daily piano lessons ahead of her. Never mind a thirteen-year-old boy puttering around the house. My father was at work. By the time he got home, I would be gone. It made me sad. Though Betsy had forbidden me to do so, I got out a piece of paper from my school notebook and scribbled down a quick note: “I’m okay. Don’t worry. I’ll call when I get a chance. Your loving son, Harper Montgomery.” I wasn’t sure why I bothered to sign my last name except that it made the whole thing seem somehow more official. I muttered “Good-bye” to my mother, kissed the top of her head, and she nodded her farewell as she continued to abuse the piano keys.

I met Betsy at the drugstore, as planned, for a final soda pop. I ordered a Vanilla Coke, and she got her usual Orange Crush. Luckily, Brooder and Ray weren’t there or else I might have chickened out. We sat at the counter, both of us making those drinks last as long as they possibly could, until finally Betsy said, “Let’s go.”

By the time the sun was starting to set, I had lost my bearings. Betsy insisted that we travel through the woods until we were out of Two Rivers, lest anyone driving by might wonder what we were up to. She had calculated even the most minute details of our escape. She carried elaborate maps, which she had traced from her father’s road atlas. A compass. A pocketful of stones to make a trail, even, I figured. But after the sound of the river faded into the sound of wind in the trees, I couldn’t tell which way we were headed anymore and I was starting to wonder when one of us would finally say, “Uncle.”

As the sun burned red and orange through the thick foliage all around us, Betsy stopped. “Let’s camp here for the night.” As she pitched the tent and unrolled the sleeping bags, I waited for her to stop what she was doing, to turn to me, punch me in the shoulder and say something like, “All right, let’s head back.” But she didn’t. “Why don’t you go find some wood for a fire?” she asked.

I agreed and set out in the waning light to look for kindling and firewood. Though I didn’t have a watch on, I figured it to be about eight o’clock. If I were at home, my father would be climbing the stairs from his basement laboratory, stretching and calling out to my mother, “Helen, come watch
Wyatt Earp
with me.” She would mutter something from the other room, and my father would fix himself a peanut butter sandwich as he waited for her. When she emerged from her study, bleary-eyed and yawning, he would motion for her to join him in the living room. They would settle onto the couch then, and my mother would lay her head in my father’s lap so that he could stroke her hair. I would sit Indian-style on the floor in front of them, in front of the TV close enough to reach over and change the channel during the commercials. If someone were to ask me what the word
family
meant then, this is the image that would have come to mind. We did not eat together, but we did meet religiously for prime-time television. For this, I would abandon games of kick-the-can and hide-n-seek as soon as the streetlights hummed. Now, in the woods, I thought of my father walking up the basement steps, my mother devouring one more paragraph. I wondered at what moment they would realize that I was gone.

I bent over, selecting twigs and fallen branches haphazardly, without any real expertise. I hadn’t joined the Boy Scouts because my mother considered them an organization of Christian zealots. She did think their survival tips were important however, considering the amount of time I spent outside. She found a used copy of the
Cub Scout Leader Book
as well as the
Wilderness Survival Guide
at a library sale, and taught me how to make a tourniquet, how to identify edible mushrooms, and how to track a badger. None of this seemed pertinent right now.

I brought the pile of sticks to Betsy, eager for her approval.

“Over there,” she said, motioning to a circle of rocks she had created not far from the opening of the tent.

I dropped the branches on the ground and sat down next to them. I thought of my mother, unwinding her hair from the two frayed braids she wore pinned to the top of her head.

Betsy made a pyramid of twigs, crumpled a piece of newspaper, which materialized from the pack she’d been carrying on her back. She lit a match just as the last embers of sunlight burned beyond the forest, and started the fire. We ate creamed corn and hot dogs, charred from the open flame. I sat next to Betsy, eating quietly, and knew that my parents had probably realized by now that I was missing. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen my mother look afraid.