Two Rivers (9 page)

“Y
’all coming with me to church?” Maggie asked on Sunday morning. She was standing in the kitchen in a yellow dress that was freshly pressed: no evidence whatsoever of train wreck or foray into the river. There was a pale yellow ribbon tying her hair back in a puffy ponytail, and she was wearing stockings but not her shoes, which were sitting neatly by the front door.

“Daddy doesn’t believe in God,” Shelly explained, though I had certainly never articulated my lack of faith to her in those terms. “He’s an
atheist
.”

“Where did you hear that word?” I asked.

“Mrs. Marigold,” she said. Mrs. Marigold, the expert on all things sacred and profane.

Maggie looked baffled and then a little hurt. “You
have
to believe in God,” she said, slipping on first one shoe and then the next. Her feet were tiny little things. Like a doll’s feet. “Who do you think made all the birds and flowers and stuff? Who put the blue in the sky?”

“I want to go to church too,” Shelly said defiantly.

“You do?” I asked. She had never expressed any interest in religion. Normally, we spent Sunday mornings watching reruns of
The Jetsons
together, eating frozen waffles and scrambled eggs. But before I could say no, Shelly was putting her own shoes on, making two loops and then tying them together. The way a child does.

I didn’t know how to explain to Shelly that it was probably not wise to be seen in public with Maggie. I’d given myself the weekend to make up my mind about what to do with her. To either try to find this aunt in Canada or call her father. In the meantime, I figured it would be best to act as if all of this was normal. For Shelly’s sake as well as my own.

“I’ll go with you then,” I said, thinking that my tagging along might make the whole trip less desirable.

Shelly raised one dark eyebrow, one of those few expressions that belonged to Betsy, one of those mannerisms that made a lump in my throat each and every time. “Okay,” she said, shrugging.

“You got a Baptist church here?” Maggie asked.

“Everything but,” I said.

“You got any place with singing?”

“I don’t think so. The only church I’ve ever been to is the Catholic one.”

“Good enough. One house of God is as good as any I suppose,” she said. “That’s what my daddy says. He’s a preacher, you know.”

Well, that explained things.

St. Elizabeth’s was just down the street, so we walked. Right through town. My mind was racing regarding how I would explain who this girl was when we inevitably ran into someone I knew. Shelly acted as tour guide, pointing out all of Two Rivers’s landmarks along the way as Maggie asked questions and stopped to ponder what she found. Laundromat. Bronze statue of Ethan Allen. The place I’d helped Shelly write her name with a stick in wet cement. Luckily, by the time my friend Stan, from the freight office, and his wife pulled up next to us and rolled down the window, I had it all figured out.

“Hey, Stan. Ginny,” I said, nodding.

“Hey, Harper. Saw you down to the river Friday. Helluva mess. I’m goin’ to work soon as I drop Ginny off.”

I nodded.

“Who’s this?” he asked then, leaning across Ginny and reaching out the window to shake Maggie’s hand.

I spoke before Maggie got a chance to. “This is Maggie—my mother’s college roommate’s youngest girl. She’s staying with us for a while.” I didn’t have any more to offer than that. I figured I’d let them come to whatever conclusions they wanted to.

“I’m here to help Harper take care of Shelly,” she said. “Till my own baby comes, of course.” Her smile was so broad and white, the rest of her almost disappeared behind it. The Cheshire cat.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Stan said.

Shelly tugged at me, visibly thrilled. “She’s staying? For real?”

As Stan and Ginny pulled away, waving, I squeezed Shelly’s hand. I never made a promise I couldn’t keep, not anymore, so I thought long and hard before I answered her. “She can stay for
a while
.”

“But what about Mrs. Marigold?” Shelly asked. Shelly was one of those rare children who almost always thought about other people before herself. “I mean, I’m pretty much too old for a sitter, but she thinks I still need her. She thinks without her I’d be eating corn dogs every night, that I’d be
malnourished
.”

My pride hurt; my knee jerked. “She
said
that? Christ. Yes, Maggie can keep an eye out for you. But just until we talk to her family.”

Shelly smiled the rest of the way to church. She grabbed Maggie’s hand, and they skipped ahead, swinging their arms like little girls. It was an odd sight; Shelly had gotten so tall over the summer, and in this dress Maggie’s predicament was obvious. Regardless, they skipped all the way up the forty-four steps to the doors of the church, and then Maggie straightened her skirt, whispered something in Shelly’s ear, and they proceeded quietly through the doors.

Inside, sunlight was streaming through the stained glass windows, which depicted Jesus’ demise—each window showing one step in His journey to crucifixion. We sat in a pew next to the image of Him carrying His cross. It struck me as ironic, and a little sad, this picture in glass of a man carrying the very instrument that would kill him. Shelly wriggled next to me on the uncomfortable wooden pew. Maggie stared straight ahead, her hands folded neatly on her lap.

I watched as families entered the church and found their seats, whispering hello to people to the left and right of us. I saw a few people look slightly startled to see us, though we weren’t the only strangers to the service. There were a lot of faces I didn’t recognize. Families of the passengers from the accident, I assumed. At least it made Maggie a little less conspicuous.

We all fumbled our way through the Mass, sitting and standing when the people in front of us did, searching through the thick hymnal for the words to the songs. Shelly seemed mesmerized by it all, the incense and colored lights shining through Jesus onto our laps. When the other parishioners started to form a line, Shelly followed behind Maggie, who turned to her and shook her head. “You can’t come if you ain’t baptized.”

“What are they doing?” Shelly whispered.

“Eating communion,” she said. “The Catholics call it the Body of Christ.”

Shelly looked mortified. She sat down next to me again and watched Maggie as the line moved slowly toward the front of the church. When Maggie, her mouth closed over the Eucharist, returned to our pew and knelt slowly down to pray, Shelly whispered loudly in my ear, “She didn’t really just eat Jesus, did she, Daddy?”

“No,” I whispered back, loud enough for Maggie to hear. “It’s just bread.”

Maggie kept her eyes closed and her hands pressed together in prayer.

“Mrs. Marigold said that sometimes people eat other people, and that it’s a sin. But only people from Africa.
Cannibals
, that’s what they’re called.”

“Shhh,” I said.

We made it through the Mass without further incident. Even when the elderly priest asked the Lord to hear our prayers regarding all the people who’d been on the train that spilled into Two Rivers, Maggie didn’t flinch.

Still, I was grateful to get outside the church after Mass was over. The day was cool and crisp, the sort of early fall day that normally made me feel glad to be alive. As we made our way back home, I hung back as Shelly and Maggie skipped ahead. And then just as we were about to round the corner to our apartment building, Paul and Hanna rounded the corner too.

“Hi,” I said, smiling dumbly.

“Harper,” Paul said. “We heard about the wreck. Are you okay? Someone said you were there, that you went in, looking for folks.”

“You must be…from the train?” Hanna said to Maggie, and then to me, “you know, Lisa and Steve have taken in two little girls whose parents were…oh, this is just so tragic. I’m sorry, what was your name, sweetheart?” she asked, reaching out for Maggie’s hand.

Maggie accepted her hand and shook it up and down vigorously. “I’m Marguerite DuFresne. I wasn’t in the wreck. My mother went to college with Harper’s mother. I’m here to help out with Shelly. I’m like family, really. See, when my mother found out that Harper was raising Shelly all by himself, she sent me straightaway. Besides, it’s good practice for me, what with the baby coming and all.”

Hanna was speechless.

Paul, who never liked anyone to feel uncomfortable, smiled and said, “Pleased to meet you, Marguerite.”

“Call me Maggie.” She smiled.

“Then let’s have supper,” Hanna said, forcing a smile. “It’s been over a month since you came by for Sunday supper.”

Before I could apologize, explain, and decline, Maggie was talking. Again.

“I make a mean Bananas Foster, I mean, if you don’t mind a little liquor in your dessert on a Sunday.” She smiled at Paul, and then she and Shelly were off skipping again, hand in hand down Depot Street toward Sunset Lanes.

A
fter the lightning and the tree, the only place Betsy felt safe during a storm now was inside a car. She’d heard somewhere that the best place to be if lightning were to strike was inside a vehicle. So on the days when the skies turned gray and thunder trembled in the air, I knew that Betsy would arrive at my house shortly, looking for shelter. Sometimes, if the rain had already started by the time she got to my house, she wouldn’t even bother to knock, going straight to my father’s ’51 DeSoto, which I inherited on my sixteenth birthday. She would wait inside that great beast until I discovered her there, where her anxiety dissipated into a sort of cool excitement. When I found her waiting in the passenger’s seat, she’d smile at me through the glass, motion for me to get inside the car, mouthing, “Hurry!” Then she’d grab my arm, a gesture that was simultaneously desperate and relieved, and say, “Let’s go watch the storm.”

Two Rivers is located in a valley, surrounded on most sides by hills. The Heights, just about eight miles outside of town, is the best place to watch a storm. You have to climb about two thousand feet to reach the Heights; my father’s old car was a weary soldier on these missions, but the journey was worth it when we got to the top. From up there, you can see all of Two Rivers: the paper mill with its sulfurous smoke hovering over the river, the train tracks, almost serpentine below. The churches, all three of them, steeples each jutting into the air with purpose and escalating grandeur (
Methodist
,
Episcopalian
,
Catholic
). Depot Street, the hub of our world, and all the tiny houses with their inhabitants’ tiny lives inside. During a thunderstorm, with the headlights out, it was better than the Fourth of July.

In the fall of 1963, not long after my senior year started, we had a week of storms. I remember this week as vividly as anything else that year. It was the same year that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke before a crowd of two hundred thousand people in Washington, D.C., and the Celtics beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals, but all that I remember was the incessant rain, the long slow drive up to the top of the Heights, with Betsy sitting next to me. The storm came in on a Sunday and did not leave until the following Saturday. Seven days and seven nights. Two Rivers had one of the worst floods in its 250-year history, a flood that killed livestock, destroyed homes, closed every school and almost every shop for a whole week. The playing fields by the school turned into ponds, causing Homecoming weekend and all of its ancillary activities to be cancelled, including the Two Rivers/Westport football game (a rivalry that reached epic proportions this time of year), much to the dismay of everyone, it seemed, but me. I welcomed the deluge, could have danced in the puddles, because each crack of thunder, each streak of lightning sent Betsy Parker into the front seat of my father’s car. In the late fall of 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed, but all that I remember is the static on the radio, the giant sweep of my windshield wipers, and Betsy’s long legs stretched out in the front seat.

Though it had been nearly five years since Mrs. Parker was sent away, the family stuck to their story that she was simply ill, convalescing somewhere in the Midwest, though most people in town still believed otherwise. Only I knew that once a week Betsy and her father drove to Waterbury to visit Betsy’s mother. Every Sunday morning, they descended the crooked steps of their house, Betsy wearing a dress and pumps, her father in a good shirt and pressed pants. His hair was always shiny with pomade, but on these days it looked like he’d spent an extra minute in front of the mirror. There was no reason for anyone to suspect that they were headed anywhere but to St. Elizabeth’s. My parents certainly never did. For one thing, they never went to church, despite the fact that they were both baptized Catholics. My mother hadn’t been to Mass in more than thirty-five years, not since she cussed at a priest and stormed out of a confessional after her first stab at this holy sacrament. In her version of the story, the priest had it coming; she said he’d told her that if she didn’t say a hundred Hail Marys that she was bound straight for hell. Her sin? Coveting her cousin Bobby’s bicycle. Not for the coveting, but because girls shouldn’t want to ride bicycles. She made it a point to ride her bicycle in front of the rectory every day after school after that. My father had lapsed not long after marrying my mother, and I wasn’t even baptized. (I didn’t tell my mother that sometimes I went to Mass with Ray and his family if I spent the night at his house on a Saturday. And I certainly didn’t tell her that I sort of liked the sounds of the organ, the smell of incense. The promise of prayers.)

But on the Sunday that the flood of 1963 started, Betsy and her father didn’t make their weekly trip. I was at home, helping my father build a device that would allow my mother to clean behind the toilet without getting on her hands and knees. It was really just a modified mop, with a swivel added on. My mother was in the kitchen, reading an article in
The New York Times
about four little girls in Alabama who were killed when a bomb went off in a church. She was talking to herself really, as my father was so engaged in the task of converting the mop, and I was busy checking the window, wondering why Betsy’s father’s car was still in the driveway.

“Children,” she said.
“Little girls
.”

I held one end of the mop as my father fastened the swivel to the other end.

Her voice grew louder and louder as she paced the kitchen floor. “Children who are kept ignorant so they can’t fight back. That’s the real reason all those bigots don’t want integration. Knowledge is power. And giving power to a Negro is just too scary.”

The whole idea of integration was as relevant to me and my life as a discussion about what to eat on the moon. There were no Negroes in Two Rivers. I’d seen one black person in my entire life when we went to visit my grandparents in Boston. He was standing at a bus stop, eating a hot dog. I didn’t really see what the fuss was about.

“And so they kill these children before they even get a chance. It makes me nauseated. Doesn’t it make you nauseated?” she asked us.

“Helen,” my father said, clearly excited about his latest contribution to her homemaking endeavors. “Look!” He held up the ridiculous gadget, smiling stupidly at her.

Her expression grew from one of abstract frustration to one of pure anger. I’d never seen her look so furious.

“Jesus Christ!” she said, grabbing the mop from my father. She held it horizontally, like a barbell without any weights on the ends. Motionless. And then, with one turn of her wrist, it became a javelin, and she threw it toward the kitchen sink. For a second I was sure it was going to smash through the window over the sink and land in our front yard. It did crack the glass but, surprisingly, did not exit our house. Instead, it ricocheted, shooting back toward us, making both my father and I jump out of the way. It landed on the floor, and (because of the unfortunate incline of our house) it began to roll. It rolled clear through the dining room and stopped only when a chair leg obstructed its path. All three of us stood staring toward the dining room, bewildered.

“I’ll be in my study,” my mother said, gathered the newspaper under her arm, and left us.

Outside the air was tight. The rain was deceptively soft. If it hadn’t been for the crack of thunder that was louder than shattered glass, you might think it was only a little sprinkle. My father and I didn’t speak as he retrieved his invention. I waited for Betsy to rescue me from this awful silence, and thankfully, within moments after the first flash of lightning, I heard the door of the DeSoto slam shut.

“That’s Betsy,” I said to my father, and he nodded.

I ran outside; the rain was coming down harder.

“Please,” she said. “Let’s drive.”

It was cold. One thing about that old DeSoto—the heater worked like a champion. Within a few minutes we were on the road, and hot gusts were blowing out of the vents. Betsy was wearing her mother’s ratty green sweater and jeans, the same thing she’d had on the day before.

“You didn’t go to the hospital today?” I asked. I always called it a hospital because in my imagination it looked just like the North Country Regional Hospital, where I had my tonsils taken out in the second grade. Only filled with crazy people. I tried to picture Mrs. Parker there, but my imaginings almost always involved her wearing a nurse’s uniform. Clean and white and pretty. Sometimes, in my fantasies, she was feeding me ice cream. If I
had
been religious, thinking about Mrs. Parker like that probably would have been a sin. Sometimes it was best to be godless.

Betsy stared ahead, silent.

The DeSoto sluggishly made its way up the road toward the Heights.

“She was supposed to come home,” Betsy said.

“What?”

“The doctors said she was
rehabilitated
. She just needed some rest.”

“It’s been
five years
,” I said in utter disbelief.

Betsy was staring at the window. “There’s medication, you know, to take care of the depression. It helps people, people like her, to
function in society
.”

I thought of my own mother, hurling the mop, screaming about racism and bigotry. I remembered Mrs. Parker’s lemon bars. The sway of her hips as she led me time and time again into that kitchen.

“That’s great!” I said. “When is she coming then?”

Betsy’s eyes filled, but she didn’t blink. A sob snarled in her throat. “She’s not.”

“Hey, you okay?” I asked, reaching for her hand. It was soft. Warm.

“They found her this morning. She took pills, her pills and a whole bunch of pills she must have stolen from the other patients.” She blinked hard, and wiped hastily at her wet cheeks. She laughed then, grimly. “I guess the idea of coming home was worse than staying in the hospital.”

We drove in silence the rest of the way, as the rain picked up momentum outside. When we pulled over at the overlook, it beat against the windows. I left the car running, the heat blowing. Streaks of lightning split the sky, and Betsy pulled the sleeves of her mother’s sweater over her hands. She looked straight ahead. She didn’t ask me to turn on the radio like she usually did. I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know how.

When she turned to me, I thought for one terrible but thrilling moment that she was going to kiss me. I anticipated the way her lips would feel pressed against mine. This wasn’t the first time I’d dreamed this. I’d been rehearsing this moment ever since she first kissed me. And then the reality of the moment crested:
Mrs. Parker was dead
. Guilt washed over me in one, big wave.

But before I had time to speak, she grabbed my wrist, hard, and pulled my hand toward her. Then she was lifting her shirt with her free hand, and my knuckles were grazing the soft skin of her stomach. I could feel her ribs, the fabric of her bra, and the soft swell of her breast underneath. I caught my breath. She was still holding my hand, but she was forcing my fingers open, spreading my palm flat against her skin.

“Sometimes,” she said, “my heart stops. Sometimes I can’t feel it beating at all.”

She was pressing my hand so hard into the center of her chest I could feel the resistance of bone. I wondered if she pressed hard enough, if it might just crumble.

“Do you
feel
it?” she asked. There was an urgency in her voice, a tremble I’d never heard before.

I pressed my hand harder. I could feel the rhythmic beating of her heart in my palm. Its cadence pounding through my whole body.

“Do you?”
she asked again. Frantic.

I nodded. “Yes.”

We stayed like this for a long time, me feeling her heart in my fingers, in my shoulders, in my
whole body
, and then she moved my hand. To her breast, slowly, and I looked at her (for some sort of explanation, for permission,
something
), but her eyes were closed. She leaned her head back then, and let go of my hand. Tentatively, I moved my palm back down to her rib cage, pushing my thumb underneath the bottom edge of her bra, holding my breath as I touched her. Her skin was so hot and soft, it hardly seemed real. I had to force myself to breathe as I reached further, holding her whole breast in my hand, cradling her in my hand, my thumb stroking the surprisingly hard nipple at the center of all of this soft warmth.

Betsy moaned softly, arching her back, her head thrown back and her throat exposed.

“God,” I whispered, my whole body aching.

Betsy reached up then and held my hand again, guided my fingers in slow circles. Under my fingertips, her heart beat hard and fast, but her breath was faster. And then her whole body trembled, electric. Blood pounded in my temples, between my legs. Outside, thunder cracked and she lowered her head, burying it in my neck. I stroked her hair, her face, her shoulders.

“I’m going to go to college,” she whispered. “Next fall.”

I couldn’t make sense of a single thing she’d said. I could still feel her skin, hot and tingling in my hand. I heard my mother’s voice,
Knowledge is power. Little girls.
I thought of Mrs. Parker building a snowman inside that winter kitchen, swallowing pills. All of this was jumbled inside my head, which was throbbing.