Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  “How do you know they’re not circling the house now?”

  “They could be, but”—he smiled—“I highly doubt it.”

  “Speaking of house…” I turned in my seat. “Where are we?”

  “You remember the river?”

  I shrugged. “Sort of hard to forget.”

  “A few miles south of Trader’s.”

  My heart sank. “South of the powerline?”

  “You do know the river.” He nodded. “Two miles.” I did the math. We had just lost sixteen miles. Or rather, had them tacked back on. Now we were every bit of forty-six to Cedar Point and had to make our way back through real estate we’d already covered. It was a tough blow. He continued, “I imagine they’re trying to figure out what they’re going to tell the hospital when they ask about their injuries.” He leaned across the table, pointed an ear toward the sound of Abbie in the tub and whispered, “I know it’s none of my business, but I’m sort of curious to hear your side of why you’re on this river with that lady.”

  “She’s my wife.”

  “I understand that, but given her condition, why isn’t she in a hospital?”

  I sat down and forked my eggs around the plate. “I guess we can skip the small talk.” He nodded. “That’s a bit of a long story.”

  He checked his watch. “You been keeping up with the news?”

  I shook my head. “Hadn’t really had much access.”

  He flipped the channel on the TV, turned up the volume and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach. The screen flashed: ABBIE ELIOT UPDATE.

  Petey circled the table, stamping it with his feet. “Update. Update.”

  About there, it hit me that our trip downriver was over.

  33

  Spending so much time in treatment, Abbie got to know some of the other girls. All cancer patients stick together but breast cancer patients share a bond that is unique. One of those girls was Deborah Fanning. Deborah, or Debbie as she became to us, was fighting a similar battle: double mastectomy, cancer metastasized, doctors were chasing it around her insides, too. Her husband, Rick, came with her for the first few months. They were both professionals, big house on the water in Miami, vacation home, yacht, seemed like they had everything. But over the months, we saw him less. Eventually, we saw him not at all.

  Debbie just shrugged and said, “You know salesmen. Always traveling. Gotta pay that mortgage.” She wasn’t a very good liar. At Abbie’s suggestion, I requested they put her room next to ours. They did and we ended up spending a lot of time together. Watching movies, eating when they could, sharing stories, talking about life after cancer. I used to roll them both around the parking lot. We’d hang two bags on Georgie and I’d push both chairs. Debbie was a beautiful girl, four years younger than Abbie. She too had lost her hair, and though she never said it, she was terrified. It didn’t take Abbie and I long to pick up on the fact that her cell phone never rang. Rick wasn’t traveling.

  One afternoon, I walked into the room and Abbie was crying. She was also mad. Fuming. She said, “Are you going to divorce me?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “No. Abbie, what in the world are you—”

  She threw a stack of papers at me. “Well, Rick did.” She pointed next door. “He’s over there now telling her how it’s really for the best but it’s all her fault.”

  I leaned against the wall and listened. She was right. I pushed open the door to Debbie’s room, took three steps and punched him so hard it split all four of my knuckles. He lay on the floor, spitting teeth and foamy blood. I pointed down at him. “You don’t deserve her.” I picked her up, carried her into our room and that’s where she stayed until she died three months later.

  Now Rick’s got that on his conscience. And to be gut-level honest, I hope it stays there a long time.

  SO THIS BECAME OUR LIFE. Treatments, travel, staph infections, scans, more scans and still more scans, each one worse, this was the haunting fog we lived in and under. For us, the process of fighting became a Chinese water torture that weakened our expectation.

  The months ran together. Because cancer is a morphing disease, the chemo chases it. Cancer knows this so it cloaks itself and morphs into something else, finally finding a way to break through the chemo. Much like a bacteria works its way around an antibiotic, eventually becoming resistant. It’s the law of diminishing returns. The hope is to kill it before it breaks through. You want to keep at it, not give the tumors a chance to breathe, but we seemed to always be one step behind.

  We’d been in the hospital for weeks. Abbie was fighting an infection. My bed was a pallet on the floor. It was somewhere around seven in the morning and Abbie and I had finally fallen asleep, which was bad timing because it was shift change. Some alarm was going off above Abbie’s head and in the haze of sleep I heard a nurse at the station outside say, “1054 needs a line flushed.” A few minutes passed and I heard it again, “1054 needs a line flushed.” I began thinking to myself, What is 1054? Then, Who is 1054? Finally, Who is in 1054?

  I walked outside to the nurses’ station where everyone had gathered for the day. About fifteen nurses and interns stood awaiting orders from the doctors. I whistled as loud as I could. Maybe I didn’t look all that good, ’cause it got pen-drop quiet and everyone looked at me. I raised a hand and pointed. “Everybody! Follow me.” I realize I wasn’t making any friends, but I’d had it. Surprisingly, they followed. Maybe being a senator’s son-in-law has its benefits. I mothered everyone into the room and we all gathered around Abbie’s bed. Abbie’s eyes were heavy and she was slowly waking up. I stood near the head of the bed and said, “I’d like to introduce all of you to my wife. This is Abbie Michaels. You can just call her Abbie.” They looked at me a bit strangely. I held her hand. “She’s a wife, a daughter, a friend, she has a tendency to talk with her hands, she likes Lucky Strike jeans and she sees beauty where others don’t.” I paused. “She is not and has never been ‘1054.’” The head nurse spoke up while a doctor shook his head and started walking out. She said, “Mr. Michaels, HIPAA law mandates that we not—”

  I cut the doctor off and shut the door. He huffed, but I had everyone’s full attention. I palmed the sleep off my face while the doctor stood a foot from me. “I know you all work hard. A lot harder than most give you credit for. I’m thankful for what you do and how you do it, but HIPAA’s wife is not lying in that bed. I need to ask you to look at the woman in that bed and think of her not as a number. Not as a statistic. Hope is what feeds us. And, to be honest, it’s running in short supply around here.” I cupped my hands together. “It’s like…like trying to hold water. Please don’t take what little we have. Please…”

  I looked at each of their name tags and shook their hands as they filed out: “Bill, Ann, Elaine, Simon, Dean, Ellen, Amy…” They got the idea.

  Days later, I was walking past the nurses’ station in search of coffee and heard one of the nurses nod toward our room and mutter beneath her breath, “‘High Maintenance’ needs some sheets.”

  I shrugged. At least it was better than “1054.” Then I realized she was specifically talking about me. I leaned against the counter, speaking to her and the other three nurses writing in their patient notebooks. “You’re right. I am. And for that I’m sorry. But I’ll gladly let you trade places with her.”

  They never really said much to me after that. I’m not proud of that. It wasn’t cool or tough and it didn’t really win friends and influence people. I’m just letting you know where I was. The bottom is an ugly place to be.

  Problem was, I had a few floors yet to fall before I reached the basement of us.

  34

  JUNE 7, MIDMORNING

  Petey strutted around the table while Bob tuned the antennae for better reception and I tapped my fingers on my chin. The reporter narrowed her eyes, lowered her voice and seemed overly dramatic. “I’m standing outside the office of Dr. Gary Fencik, a primary c
are physician in the Charleston area. A lifelong friend of Abbie Eliot’s, Dr. Fencik has actively followed her illness since the beginning. The Charleston police have just issued a statement saying that they have received video surveillance tapes showing Doss Michaels stealing large quantities of three different types of narcotics from a locked cabinet inside this building.” The anchorwoman at the studio interrupted her, “Virginia, do we know how he got into the cabinet?”

  “The authorities believe Mr. Michaels had access to both the keys and the combination.”

  “Do we know what amount of narcotics Mr. Michaels allegedly took?”

  “Off camera, the office manager told me and I quote, ‘enough to kill an elephant.’”

  Bob clicked off the TV. He asked, “Any of that true?”

  A deep breath. “Yeah.”

  “Which part?”

  “Well…from a certain point of view, all of it.”

  He glanced at the windowsill where an electric panel read temperature, humidity, wind direction, barometric pressure, high and low tides and chance of rain indicated as a percentage. He frowned, checked his watch and then stood. “Personally, I think you’re nuts, but I imagine you’ve got a pretty good reason or you wouldn’t be out here. And you probably think you know what you’re doing, in which case I’d also say you’re nuts. Either way, you’re nuts.” He glanced at the readout again and the wind reading had dropped to two miles per hour. “I’ve got to get to work. I’ll be back a bit after dark.”

  He pulled on a shirt and began walking out a side door. I hollered after him, “Hey, if you’re going to get the police or call my father-in-law, there’s not much I can do to stop you, but I’d like to know before they show up.”

  He stopped, put on his sunglasses and shook his head. “If the police show up here, it won’t be because I had anything to do with it. But if you want some advice, you should call them. Picking the location of your own surrender is much better than letting them pick it.” He smiled.

  “Is that experience speaking?”

  “Yup.”

  He turned again and I hollered one last time, “What do you do? I mean, for work.”

  Another smug smile. “Agricultural aviation.”

  That explains a lot. He waved his hand across the house. “Make yourself at home. Clothes are in the closet. Mi casa es su casa.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “My house is your house.”

  He whistled, Rocket ran after him and the two disappeared down a well-worn footpath that led away from the river. I stood outside thinking, listening to Abbie do the dolphin-frolic in the tub. About five minutes later, I heard an engine crank then speed away. Ten seconds later, the sound of the engine returned. The Stearman brushed the treetops then shot upward, looped once, rolled, then returned—upside down. He was waving at me.

  While Abbie bathed, I tucked the revolver behind my belt and took a walk around the house. If the four amigos came back, I wanted to have an idea of how and where. As for the revolver, I wasn’t sure. I just knew I’d rather have it tucked behind my belt than sitting on top of the bed. Bob’s house was an old river house, built up on a bluff on the Georgia side. I followed the footpath down which Bob had disappeared. It led to an airstrip and a makeshift hangar. The runway was dirt and short, which made me think that he must be a pretty good pilot. Two older Honda dirt bikes leaned against a far wall. One seat was less dusty than the other. Both needed a tune-up. The dirt road that led to his house ran for at least a half mile before it ran into another dirt road. Fresh tire tracks snaked along the soft sand. Feeling too far from Abbie, I turned around.

  Beyond the house, further downriver and resting atop a small bluff, sat a one-room cabin. Like Bob’s house, it was tucked up into the trees. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it. I walked around, peered in the windows and checked the doors but it had been winterized and was sealed up rather tight.

  We seemed to be pretty well surrounded by woods without another house in sight or earshot. Even from the air, we were hidden beneath the trees. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Bob was hiding, too. I knew the bend in the river, having passed through here a lot, but I didn’t know much beyond the banks, because in all my passing through, I’d never ventured far from the water’s edge.

  I walked back in the house and found Abbie stepping out of the tub. She hung an arm over me and I helped her slip back into her bathing suit and cutoff shorts and then laid her on the couch while I searched for a shirt—seeing as how the last one I’d stolen from the yoga class had been ripped down the middle. I walked into Bob’s room, pulled open his closet and started picking through the clothes. He didn’t have much. Clothes were not his vice. I found a denim workshirt with snaps and slipped it off the hanger, thinking it might be easier for Abbie to get on and off. I was closing the door when I noticed the framed letter hanging inside the closet. It was partially hidden by a white coat. I slid the coat out of the way and read the letter. It was from the Diocese of Florida and dated 1988. It read,

  The Rev. Robert Porter:

  The purpose of this letter is to inform you that it is the decision of this Diocese that you are no longer a priest in good standing and are no longer a rector of St. Peter’s. Having been hand-delivered to you, your receipt of this letter insures your acceptance and compliance. In accordance with the canons of the Catholic Church and due to your admitted violations of the criminal code of the State of Florida and the admitted moral violations committed by you against your parishioners, and having abandoned the communion of the body elect, you are hereby released from the obligations of the ministerial office and are deprived of the right to exercise the authority of a Minister of God’s word and sacrament as conferred in Ordination. Please vacate the premises of St. Peter’s immediately, and inform the office of the Bishop of that date.

  In God’s Service,

  The Rt. Rev. Phillip Turgrid, Ph.D., J.D.

  I looked again at the white coat, but it wasn’t a white coat at all. Hanging alongside the robe was a clerical shirt with a collar, three long pieces of fine white rope and several multicolored pieces of fabric that looked like those things priests wore over their robes.

  I made Abbie some soup for dinner but I’d stolen so much in the last week that I’d started feeling guilty and I couldn’t bring myself to steal from a priest. Even a defrocked one. Abbie drank most of the broth and ate about half the noodles along with a few saltine crackers. When she’d finished, I propped her back on the couch, covered her in a blanket, then walked out onto the porch.

  The only sound was that of the metal rings of the hammock rubbing against the metal anchors in the wall. Petey balanced on a dowel above me that had been driven into the support beam for the porch. He seemed happy enough, although if he decided it was time to go to the bathroom, I was in trouble. I stared out through the tree limbs, while the river moved along without us. I’d watched the news on and off all afternoon. I wasn’t sure about the guys who’d jumped us, but if they saw the reports of us, or heard the senator’s news conference, they might go to the authorities with a slightly altered story and hope to capitalize on it. I wasn’t quite sure where to go or what to do. If I went home, the senator would intervene. That would get ugly and I had a feeling that my time alone with Abbie would come to an end. If we showed our faces in public, we ran the risk of getting turned in, so I knew we’d need to be careful. Lastly, I knew that whoever had jumped us in the boathouse wouldn’t let up so easily. We’d been lucky. The next time, I doubted we’d be that lucky.

  Bob’s plane landed an hour after dark. Ten minutes later, feet climbed the steps and entered the house. Wasn’t long after that, Bob walked out onto the porch, a bottle of tequila in one hand, a cigar in the other. “Since you’re now a guest in my house, why don’t the two of us have a little come to Jesus meeting.”

  I lifted my head off the hammock. “Are you qualified to have those?”

  He saw Abbie in his shirt and se
emed to take notice of it. Then he nodded. “Used to be.”

  I knew I owed him an explanation. “We’ve been at this a few years. Abbie’s and my struggle has, admittedly, narrowed our view of the world down to us. I rarely see much beyond our own needs. I’m not apologizing for that, but I know it’s insensitive. And for that, I am sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Sounds to me like you’ve earned a little understanding.”

  “How’d you become a priest?”

  “After college, I found myself in Rome. Worked four years in the Vatican. Thought I’d found my calling. Was assigned to a small parish in Mississippi. Then Florida. Finally, Georgia.”

  I nodded toward the closet. “What happened?”

  “Oh, that.” He smiled and swigged. “You want the honest answer?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “I stole too much of the parish’s money and slept with too many of my female parishioners.”

  “That’s honest enough.”

  “Twelve years in prison has a way of shaking you loose from the lies you hold dear.”

  He took another long swig and then lit the cigar. The breeze swept through the screen, caught the smoke and filtered it out through the other side of the screen before it hit the trees. He pulled long on the cigar, turning the end bright red, and said, “You thought about your options?”

  “Not sure I have any.”

  He pointed beyond the screen with his cigar. “I’ve got a rental downriver. At the moment, it’s empty.” He laughed. “Actually, it’s been empty awhile. Last guy to hole up there was some nut who ran a hedge fund. I think his name was Thad but, can’t remember. He was something of a rock star for the better part of a decade, but then he made some bad decisions, the market turned against him and he couldn’t cover his shorts. I don’t pretend to understand all that, but at the end of the day, he was broke and so were his clients. While they were trying to put his head on a platter, he decided he had always wanted to be an artist. Only problem was, he had trouble selling his art.” He nodded. “’Course, that might be because he had trouble making any. Haven’t seen him in a while. You all are welcome to stay in there as long as you like.” He tapped his cigar, shaking off the ash, and then bit some dead skin off his lip. “Sometimes”—he tongued the skin around in his mouth, finally spitting it out—“it helps to let the storm blow over before you…venture out.”