by T. Greenwood
“Why won’t it rain ?” she asked, as we threw our towels around our necks and got on our bicycles to make our way back home. I had the new camera in my backpack, waiting for the right time to give it to her. As we rode through the woods, I could feel it banging against my back. (It was heavy, an Argus C-33; they called it the “Brick” because of its shape and heft.)
The rushing air against our wet skin was the only relief from the heat. I rode behind Betsy, as I always did, as she chose the path that would lead us out of the forest. My eyes stung with river water as I watched the familiar way she navigated both branches and brush, her bare feet callused and pedaling furiously. I paid no attention to where we were going; I was preoccupied with the dimples on either side of her spine, just above the waistband of her cutoffs. I only realized that we weren’t headed home when my legs began to strain with the incline. We had plans to listen to records at my house, as I finished my packing.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To watch the lightning,” she said.
Betsy surprised me with her sudden fearlessness. Normally, she would have wanted to be anywhere but out in the open like this.
Just as the sun was starting to go down, we arrived at the top of a large hill. Though the view wasn’t as spectacular as from the Heights, you could still see down on most of Two Rivers. Lightning streaked the sky, which was also brilliant with a setting sun. Betsy laid her bike down and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene before us.
“Oh my God,” she said.
I nodded, behind her, where she couldn’t see me. If she had, she would have seen an eighteen-year-old boy so sick in love (with his hometown, with his life, with this girl in cutoffs before him) that the idea that this moment, like all the other moments before them, would soon be gone was almost unbearable. But she didn’t turn around; instead she faced the sunset and the exploding atmosphere, feet planted firmly on the ground and hair tangled from the ride.
I thought about the camera, but just as I was reaching into my backpack to retrieve it, Betsy flinched, just the slightest bit, slapping at the raindrop as if it were a mosquito. And then the rain was coming down in hard, cold slivers and Betsy had turned to me with that familiar look of terror.
“Come with me,” I said, reaching for her hand and pulling her down the other side of the hill where I could see a dilapidated barn in the distance. We ran across a pasture that was endlessly green and soft. Betsy could run fast, especially when in danger, and I was breathless when we reached the barn, which was, indeed, an abandoned structure. Shelter.
Inside, Betsy laughed, shaking her wet hair like a dog. It sprayed me, and the cool water felt good. “Phew!” she said.
The barn smelled heavily of hay and rain, a wet sweet smell. The roof was leaking in so many places, we had to search for a dry place to stand. There were some rusty farm tools hung on the wall, hammers, sickles: a rustic museum. Outside, the sun was rapidly setting, and I wasn’t sure how we would find our way back to our bikes, never mind find our way home, once the sun was gone. But inside that warm wooden barn with the rain pounding against the roof and the impossible violet of heat lightning illuminating the fields beyond the barn outside, I didn’t care if we never found our way home again.
“I have something for you,” I said.
“Hmm?” she asked, distracted by the sky.
I pulled the camera out and offered it to her. “It’s not the best one, but it takes good pictures. I don’t know much about photography, but the salesman said this is a good starter. It has four lenses. You can use regular thirty-five millimeter film….”
“Harper,” she said, tentatively taking the camera from me. “This is too much. This is…”
“If you want to exchange it, it won’t hurt my feelings.”
“Is there film in it?” she asked, turning the camera over and over in her hands.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“We have to take pictures of this,” she said. She held the camera up to her eye and fiddled with the lens. She clicked several times, rushing from one dry place to the next, peering out at the fracturing sky. After a while, she stopped shooting and came back to me. It was getting dark outside. She sat down on a wooden sawhorse, facing the open barn door, and set the camera down next to her. She pulled her hair behind her head and then over one shoulder, wringing out the rain. She sighed and stared out at the sight before us. “It’s a beautiful world, Harper Montgomery.”
I nodded again.
“I might not notice that sometimes, if it weren’t for you.”
I smiled.
She turned around to face me, but it had grown darker, and the brilliance of the sky behind her made it impossible to see the details of her face. I had them memorized though, so I imagined her smiling at me. I knew the way her lips curled a bit at the edges, the two faint lines at the corners of her eyes.
“Are you going to come sit with me or not?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, and ambled as coolly as I could toward her. I sat down and we faced the last remnants of the orange skyline together. Another hot pink flash of light, and she took my hand.
“Tomorrow’s just another day,” she said. “Just another beautiful day.”
I couldn’t have disagreed more, but I returned the squeeze.
The sun quickly and completely disappeared, but I didn’t let go of Betsy’s hand. The rain kept coming, thunder kept cracking, and lightning kept flashing. At least between the fireflies and the lightning, there were moments of extreme clarity, sometimes one after another. And each time the sky filled with light, I could see Betsy’s face. Single seconds to study her and speculate what she might be thinking. Finally, I summoned up courage I didn’t know I had and asked softly, “Do you want this?”
Betsy was so quiet, I wasn’t quite sure she’d heard me. Wasn’t sure I’d spoken at all.
“Yes,” she said, finally, and in the next flash of light I saw that her eyes were wet.
And because I wasn’t sure when the next flash would come, or if it would come at all, and because I had left everything to the last minute (as I always left everything to the last minute), and because I felt fearless and hopeless, exhausted and exhilarated, I turned to Betsy Parker, framed her face with my hands, and kissed her. And kissed her.
Our clothes were wet, stuck to our skin and difficult to peel off. I struggled with my shirt, my jeans, my shoes and socks. Betsy slithered out of her shorts and T-shirt and stood in front of me in only her panties and her bra. The skin of her stomach trembled. I went to her, wrapped my arms around her, and the second my skin touched her skin, I could barely stand it. I held her face in my hands and kissed her lips, her eyelids, her forehead. The top of her scalp. Her throat. I buried my face in her neck and kissed the skin there until my skin and her skin were hot. I wanted to disappear into her, into that incredible heat.
“Stop,” she said, pushing me back gently, and I felt my heart sink.
I backed away, hard and ridiculous. Panting.
“Take a picture?” she said. “Of me?”
“Really?”
She nodded, reached for the camera, and handed it to me. She stepped in front of the open door, the rough wood with peeling paint making a sort of agrestic frame for her silhouette. She unhooked her bra and it fell to the floor. She bent over and wriggled out of her panties. When she stood up again she was naked, her body luminous i
n each flash of light. I watched this through the viewfinder. I listened to the shutter click. I made myself breathe.
“It’s too dark, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “It won’t come out.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“What if we forget?” she asked, desperate. “What if you forget?”
I shook my head. “We won’t. I won’t. I promise.”
As we lowered our bodies to the hard floor, I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Betsy’s body, pressed against mine. I thought about those dimples I’d never noticed before, feeling them with my hands as I explored her back. The rise of her behind. The slope of her thighs. I thought about the rain on the roof and the rain that was dripping down through the roof onto my shoulders. I thought about leaving, about not wanting any of this to end. And I also thought about Jeffrey Norris, writing a letter that didn’t show up until after he was already dead. I didn’t want to be gone before Betsy Parker knew how I felt about her. I didn’t want her to read it in a letter when it was already too late. And so I whispered, “I love you.” Just a simple comma at the end of first one kiss, and then the next. I must have told her a hundred times, until, at last I had disappeared inside her, and there was no longer any need for words.
The Montrealer
I t had been two weeks since the wreck, and with every day that went by, fewer and fewer relatives of the victims came to the station. The excitement and novelty of the wreck had also worn off, and things were slowly getting back to normal at the station. The anxiety I’d been carrying with me to work every day like an extra lunch bucket had even started to ease up, because with each passing day it seemed that Margaret Jones’s father either didn’t know or, more likely, didn’t care that his little girl was missing. But just as I’d let some of that fear go (the heart-thumping worry of every phone call, the way I almost jumped out of my skin every time someone knocked on the freight office door), I’d think about Shelly and what I would do if I knew she’d been on a train that crashed into a river. There had to be more to the story than Maggie was letting on, and despite wanting to believe her (wanting it to be this simple), I knew I probably should do some sleuthing of my own. Just to make sure. Maggie had lied to me already about her name, about her mother, and no matter how good she was at mending my shirts and minding my daughter, I couldn’t just let things go on much longer without knowing the whole story.
Even though I spent most of my time in the freight office, I was still fairly familiar with the passenger lines. The Crescent ran from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., making stops in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina along the way. If Maggie had, indeed, been coming from Alabama, she would have taken the Crescent from Tuscaloosa to Washington, D.C., where she would have caught the Montrealer to get to Canada. The Montrealer, the train that derailed, was the only passenger train that stopped in Two Rivers.
Because of the accident, it was easy to get passenger information. Everybody wanted to be the hero, to be able to offer up something related to the crash. Just mentioning that I worked at the Two Rivers station opened up all sorts of doors, making me privy to information I shouldn’t have been able to get my hands on otherwise. It only took one phone call to the ticket office at Union Station in D.C. to find out exactly where Margaret Jones had come from and where she was headed.
“Yep. Here she is. Margaret Jones . Picked up the Crescent in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Transferred here. Montrealer headed to Two Rivers, Vermont.”
“Yep, that’s where the train derailed,” I said, nodding. “But where was she supposed to get off? Cantic? Montreal?”
“I already told you,” the ticket agent said. “Her ticket didn’t take her to the end of the line, only as far as Two Rivers.”
“Here?”
“Yes, sir, that was her destination.”
Heat rose from my gut to my shoulders, spreading down my arms and up into my face. I hung up the phone and gripped the edge of the desk. Here? Why on earth had she come here? What about her aunt in Canada? I struggled to come up with a logical reason why a pregnant black girl from Tuscaloosa would get on a train headed to Two Rivers, Vermont, but there was no reason that made sense. None that I could handle anyway, none that wouldn’t change the world as I knew it. I needed to get home, talk to Maggie.
When I looked up from my desk, Lenny was standing in my doorway.
“Montgomery, the toilet’s clogged up again,” he said. He was holding a dripping plunger, which he pointed at me accusingly. “Take a crap this morning?”
“Jesus,” I said, standing up, reeling. The plunger was dripping sewage onto my blotter. Between the filthy water on my desk and the fact that I’d been holding my breath since I hung up the phone, I thought I might pass out. “I’ve got to go home.”
“You sick? Knew it was you,” he said, shaking the plunger again. “Come to work with the shits, and break the goddamn toilet.”
I stumbled past him and out of the station. It was just five o’clock, but it was already getting dark. The sky was pink, streaked with orange. I raced home, as if I could beat the inevitable descent of darkness.
I ran all the way up the stairs to our apartment, but once outside my door, I could barely unlock it; my hands were shaking so hard. Out of breath, I stood panting in the kitchen. The apartment was empty. There was a note on the kitchen table, propped up in the fruit bowl. Her round cursive was like a child’s: “Gone out for pizza. Be back by 8. Love, Maggie and Shelly.”
Luigi’s was just down the street; I thought for a minute about going there, about grabbing Maggie by the scruff of her neck and dragging her back. Instead, I threw off my work clothes and jumped in the shower. I scrubbed my legs and arms and hands, hard. As the hot water pelted my head and body I tried to imagine the anger, the fear, the sense of dread washing off me. There had to be a simple explanation for why Maggie had come here. The alternative was unthinkable.
On the roof, my skin raw but clean, I sat down and waited. The streetlights were dim, Depot Street cloaked in a thick haze. With the green glow of the pool, the entire town could have been under water. I half expected that if I opened my mouth I might breathe water instead of air. I thought about what I would say to Maggie, rehearsed my questions, my confrontation, the way an actor might memorize his lines. I had to be careful. I had to be smart. I couldn’t afford to lose it. Not this time; there was too much at stake.
I could almost see the pizza place from this vantage point. I expected I’d see the girls as they walked home, but when Maggie rounded the corner, she was alone. She was carrying a pizza box, walking slowly up the street, stopping every now and then to look at the shop windows. I could hear her singing, something soft and sweet. She did that sometimes in the kitchen too.
My heart started to race. Where was Shelly? My hands were slick with sweat. And then finally, I saw her. She was walking with a boy. I struggled to make out his face; he wasn’t anyone I recognized. When he threw his arm over her shoulder, I almost leapt down off the roof. Instead, I crawled toward the window and into the shadows to get a better view. Shelly and the boy were laughing. When he pulled her into him, I saw her look up toward the apartment, and I pressed my back against the wall. And then he kissed her. It was clumsy and quick, but still, I felt both angry and paralyzed. All of the stress I’d been feeling about Maggie was suddenly diverted, derailed . Somehow I managed to make my legs move me toward the open window and back
into the house.
And then I heard Maggie open the door.
She handed me the pizza box, and I took it from her. “I got you a whole one, half pepperoni, half cheese. I didn’t know what y’all liked.”
“Where’s Shelly?” I asked.
“She’s just walkin’ home with one of her friends. I was feelin’ tired, so I came on home early. It’s not even seven yet. She’ll be home before eight.”
I opened the pizza box and sweet smelling steam wafted up into my face. Stay calm. I took out a piece of pizza, shaking my fingers after the hot greasy cheese burned them. “Shit,” I said.
“Gotta watch out. I knew somebody who got a third-degree burn from a pizza once,” Maggie said with a laugh.
“So your aunt ,” I said. “She’s in Montreal?”
“Yeah?” she said, cocking her head at me.
“Because we got a phone call at the station today from a woman, a woman from Montreal, Canada, and she was looking for her niece. She said she was supposed to be on the Montrealer, the one that crashed into the river.” I hadn’t thought this through. Who did I think I was kidding?
Maggie scowled, sat down across from me and started to take off her shoes.
“She said she was really upset, that she wanted to come right down and look for her herself. Since, technically, her niece is still missing.” I kept talking, worried about what would happen if I stopped.
Maggie waited a long time before she spoke. She turned her shoes in her hands, looking at the soles, at the heels.
“That sure is interestin’,” Maggie said, setting the shoes down on the floor, putting her feet up on the chair next to me. “Boy, my feet hurt these days. Would you mind giving them a little rub?”
