Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  A single tear trickled off his cheek. Finally, he said, “Abbie once told me that nobody paints like God, but”—he waved a hand across the studio—“you get pretty close.”

  Not a week passed that we didn’t sit in my studio, quietly making art. It was what we did. Together. You’d think Washington might miss him, but he could slip out when wanted.

  A year passed.

  HE HAD BEEN THERE all morning, the two of us easy with each other’s company and lost in the smell and color of paint. Not talking had become easy. Which told me a lot about us. At lunchtime, he was walking out. I’m not sure why, other than time, but he finally stopped to ask me the question that had been on the tip of his tongue for almost a year. He pointed at Indomitable. I’d finished her several months ago and let her hang there, staring down at me. He said, “May I…please?”

  It was his olive branch. The senator had forgiven me. More important, he had forgiven himself.

  “Yes.”

  A deep breath, big enough to fill his barrel chest. “You sure?”

  “Senator, our trip downriver was not my gift to Abbie. It was her gift to me—and I have a feeling that she’d been planning it a long time.” I studied my work. “I didn’t paint her to imprison her. I painted her…to set us free.”

  Abbie’s death had shattered his tough exterior. Now he lived with his emotions close to the surface. Sewn on his sleeve. “She teach you that?”

  The hurt reminded me of what was, and is, beautiful. Of what I’d known, and lost. Of love given. And taken away. The more it hurt, the deeper the ache, the sweeter the memory. So while I mind the hurt, I live with it.

  I smiled.

  The senator hung Indomitable, and many others, in Abbie’s design studio, which he turned into my gallery. Or rather, our gallery. We call it “Abbie’s.” He named it. He hung the Fein print in his bathroom, where it’s his alone to see. He stares at it when he’s shaving. The interest in my work has been overwhelming. It’s funny. Now New York is coming to us. Two weeks ago, he called to say we’d gotten six figures for something I painted a few months ago—a picture of me walking back across that lawn at the Bare Bottom with Abbie laughing so hard it hurt. The buyer said something about that laughter, something about Abbie’s face, how it tugged at him and wouldn’t let him go. How it spoke to him.

  That pleases me in places that words don’t reach. The senator told me that a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” I’ve known silence my whole life. I’m okay with that, too. Only difference now is that my hands are screaming at the top of their lungs.

  Last week, I pulled my cap down, slid on my sunglasses and mingled around the gallery. Sort of eavesdropping. Nobody knew me. I got to talking to this lady and she said she’d been there for four hours. Said she’d been doing that once a month for six months. She tapped her chest and said, “Something about is satisfies me.” I asked her which one was her favorite and she quickly pointed at this little eight by ten. It was the picture of me and my mom on the river, sitting on that bench. I pulled off my hat, slid off my glasses, lifted the piece off the wall and gave it to her. When I left she was still crying. Maybe my mom was right. Maybe some people just need to dive in and drink deeply. Maybe we all do.

  THE SMELL OF PAINT filled my studio. The painter’s high. The light over Fort Sumter was gentle, even golden. I stared at the vase on the shelf to my left. She’d been there every day, watching. Reminding me of my last promise.

  The eleventh wish.

  It was time.

  I set down my brush, picked up the phone and dialed the number. When he picked up, I asked, “Can you land that thing on a dirt road?”

  I could hear him move the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “’Pends on the road.”

  I put in a call to my probation officer. While the district attorney had dropped all charges against me related to Abbie’s death, they couldn’t let the drug thing slide. In truth, I did steal a rather large amount of drugs and transport them across several state lines. I admitted it. The evidence would have been difficult to hide. But given that they found none in my system, they gave me twenty-four months’ probation. Any time I leave the city, I need to register it with a guy behind a desk in Columbia who likes my painting.

  I made a stop at the senator’s house. He was in his study. Yesterday, he’d made the announcement that he would not stand for reelection. He saw the vase in my arms. “You decided to keep your promise?”

  I nodded. “I can put you right alongside her.”

  He smiled. We’d come a long way. Abbie would have liked that.

  He nodded and began unfolding and folding his handkerchief. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”

  BOB PICKED ME UP outside of town and we flew south, hugging the coastline. When we reached Cumberland Island, he banked hard west and we buzzed the town of St. Marys. We circled it once and Bob landed on a dirt road not far from the point. I walked down the dirt road, hopped the ditch and slogged through the marsh. I held Abbie in a backpack slung over my shoulder. I stepped out onto Cedar Point, talking. “Won’t be long now.” I walked through the cedars, the knee-high grass, around what was once our campsite.

  It was a tough place.

  The river moved by, sliding across the earth’s surface like sheet of polished slate. I stepped in and it tugged on me. I waded in waist-deep and pressed her to my chest. I missed her. And standing in that water, I missed her a lot.

  An osprey glided above me and a pelican floated by some hundred yards away. Downriver a shrimp boat’s horn sounded. I lifted the lid, held her, turned her over and watched as Abbie took a swan dive.

  AFTER ELEVEN DAYS on the river, we had reached Cedar Point and, unbelievably, we had checked off all but one. Nine out of ten. I pulled her halfway up the shore. A helicopter sounded in the distance. “Honey…Abbie…” Her eyes fluttered. “We’re here.” I could hear men running toward us in the marsh. Her father’s voice in the background.

  She swallowed and tried to catch her breath. I didn’t know what to say. She nodded but didn’t open her eyes. “We’ll save the dolphins for another day.”

  I patted her cheek with my hand. “You should have wished for more?”

  She lifted her hand and touched my face. “I got all I ever wanted.”

  I was stalling. “Hey, you…you said you wanted to give me something. Didn’t you? An anniversary present?”

  She nodded. “Already gave it to you.”

  “But…?”

  She tapped me in the chest. “It’ll be there when you need it.”

  Her eyes were starting to roll back. She sucked in a deep breath. Eyes closed, she placed her hand behind my head and pulled me toward her, pressing her forehead to mine. “Don’t keep all that to yourself. People need what you’ve got. So you give it away. Invite them to your island.” She closed her eyes and lay back. Her face was on fire but her hands were clammy and her breathing was shallow. She pulled my face to hers and whispered, “When you wake up and discover the hurt places, don’t run. Sink your paddle in and ride the river.” She tapped me hard in the chest. “Every time. Dive in, let the river take you, and you’ll find me.” She pointed toward the ocean. “I’ll be waiting.” The tears began to flow. Her arms fell limp and breathing all but disappeared. I held her head in my hands. “Abbie? Abbie?”

  Her body tensed, she inhaled—filling her stomach—and focused somewhere ten thousand miles behind me. “Abbie?”

  She pulled on me. “Promise.”

  “But…”

  She smiled and her eyes returned to me. “Doss?” I couldn’t look. She pulled again. “Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes. This…is goodbye. But not our last hello.” She tapped me in the chest. “Say it.”

  My voice was broken. “I promise.”

  She sucked in hard, blood draining out of each nostril, and pointed toward the ocean. “I’ll be there. Waiting. So bury me�
��where the river ends.”

  She lifted my hand, placed my finger between her temple and her ear—and then she was gone.

  HER ASHES SPREAD across the water. There were so few. They spread out covering the surface, stretching from ripple to ripple. The outgoing current tugged at them, then strung them out single file in a long stretch toward the ocean. A hundred yards away, I saw the flash of a tail. A bottlenose dolphin rose up through the ashes. Then another. And another. Four of them rolled slowly through, painting their skin in white ash. The water was warm and clear. I whispered softly across the ripples on the water, “Abbie…wait for me. Wait for me where the river ends.”

  She passed out of view and I walked up on the bank. Dripping.

  I stood on the beach, watching a fiddler crab crawl across my toe. I crossed the point, through the marsh and headed back up the dirt road. A man I didn’t know approached. Long hair, short-cropped beard, pad of paper in his hand. A second man with a video camera perched on his shoulder was following him. The first said, “You’re that artist? The one that made the trip downriver…with Abbie.” I nodded. He crossed his arms and stood between me and the end of the road. “It’s been about a year, hasn’t it?”

  He was no dummy. He was here for the story. “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you come back?”

  I scratched my chin. “We had one thing left to do.”

  He nodded like he knew. “Still checking items off your list?”

  I stared at him. “Something like that.”

  He stood off to one side while the cameraman got a better view. “Public record says you bought this piece of land. That true?”

  I shaded my eyes, staring downriver and nodded.

  “You got a name for it?”

  I shook my head, remembering what Abbie had said, I didn’t tell that paper man everything.

  “Okay, tell me this…would you do it again?”

  I’ve given that a lot of thought. Sometimes, in weaker moments, I can second-guess myself. But then I remember. I nodded. “In a heartbeat.”

  He scribbled in his notebook and walked backward. “You’ve been rather quiet the last year. Word is you’ve spent most of your time painting in your studio. That right?” I nodded. He shrugged and stepped in front of me. “So…I mean, what’s the reason? Why all the trouble?”

  I considered him. “Take a deep breath.”

  He looked at the cameraman, shrugged, then back at me with an uncomfortable smile. “What?”

  “Take a deep breath.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now hold it.”

  He spoke like a man who’d just taken a long drag off a joint. “How long?”

  “Just hold it.”

  He looked into the camera and shrugged. A minute passed. His face turned red. Another ten seconds and his face turned the shade of a beet. Finally, he let it out. He caught his breath, stared at me and held the microphone in my face. “That’s the reason.”

  I walked to Bob’s plane, where the wind kicked up the dust and tickled my nose.

  He leaned against the wing, watching the breeze rattle the marsh and shift the color from green to brown and back to green again. After several minutes he whispered, “You ever think about remarrying?” The look on his face was not one of pilot, or crop duster, or thief or adulterer, but of priest. Bob was taking my pulse. It was an honest question.

  I shook my head and spun the wedding ring around my finger.

  In the distance, a bell sounded, and then as if launched from a canon, dozens of dirty seagulls and ragged-looking pelicans appeared out of the marsh and headed en masse to the dock at St. Marys where, evidently, a shrimp boat was unloading. The bell continued ringing in the distance.

  He leaned across the wing. “What now?”

  Months ago, I had started carrying a copy of Abbie’s wish list in my wallet. I pulled it out, unfolded it and read back through each one. “It’s simple, really. I paint what my talent will allow…and every now and then Abbie visits me.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  A long silence followed.

  I folded the article and slid it into my wallet. “Yes…” I filled my chest, sucking in deeply. “Hurts like hell. And that’s good.”

  WHEN I WOKE UP, the floodwaters had risen and the undercurrents tore at me in ways I could not defend. It flooded my banks, spread wider and threatened to swamp my island.

  But time does heal. Not like we think it does, not like we would—from the front—but more from the back or side or someplace we can’t see it coming. It bubbles up beneath and rises all around. All of a sudden I dried my eyes long enough to look up, look beyond myself, and discovered my pain had become the sinew that held me together. I stood on the bank, stared out across the vast epicenter of me and faced a choice—do I risk the river? So I cut the water, paddled out of my own black hole and discovered that the river was not one but many, and like it or not, they all merge. Each turn, each bend, led to something beautiful, something whole, something worth remembering. Why? How? I can’t answer that. I just know she kept her promise. She was waiting. And there in that Devil’s Elbow, I found the glue that connects the pieces of me.

  Tides ebb, rivers flow crooked, and love uses pain.

  Bob waved his hand back across the river. “After I got out of jail, I wanted a place to hide. Some place with no past. A short time later, I bumped into Gus and he befriended me. And unlike others, he didn’t hold me against me. I asked him why and he told me something I’ve yet to forget. He was standing in the water and pointed at the flow. He said, ‘Once this water hits the ocean, the sun lifts it up and collects it in clouds until they get full enough, the wind blows, nudges them back over land, where they empty themselves across the continent.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “The river never ends.”

  We climbed in, he taxied, if you can call it that, and then he took off, pulling the stick back hard. Up front, my defrocked river-priest sang at the top of his lungs. A couple of chords out of tune, he conducted the clouds as we sliced through them. And while my ears listened to his beautiful song, my heart heard laughter. We circled the town, then followed the river, past Point Peter, around Cumberland and the ruins at Dungeness and then out over the waves breaking across the shoreline where the tide was just beginning to turn.

  The last time I looked down, Abbie was still swimming with the dolphins.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is my sixth novel to find its way to the shelf. I have yet to pick a favorite or say, “This is my best stuff.” I simply can’t. It’s like asking me which of our three boys I love the most. But each story has required from me a certain amount of sweat equity. A certain measure of physical, emotional, and spiritual gut-wrenching, or pouring out of myself. When I submitted this book in August 2007, I knew that this story had required more of me than any I’d written to date. Maybe more than any two. Just ask Christy. It took nearly a week before we could hold an adult conversation.

  Take that for what it’s worth.

  Along the way, I had much help—more than I deserve. The following “thank yous” touch on a few and in no particular order.

  John Train, M.D.—once again, thanks, Doc, for pointing me in the right direction. You truly are a genius. Still glad you’re not a lawyer.

  Kathryn Pearson-Peyton, M.D.—for allowing me to spend a day with you, for introducing me to your work, along with the pleasures and dilemmas you face daily. You are gifted at what you do, and the women of Jacksonville are fortunate to have you.

  Elizabeth Coleman—for opening my eyes to your side of Charleston, then coloring it with your grace. You’re a blessing. I’d have never seen it without you.

  Kim Neitzel—for your candid e-mails and honesty. One day I hope we get to meet face to face.

  Laura Wichmann-Hipp—for your tour of Charleston that gave me insight and history I’d never have found on my own. Can’t thank you enough.

  John and Kay Miller—for sharing your st
ory with me, for introducing me to Misty, and her life, and for the afternoon we spent at her graveside. Please hear me when I say that this book never could have occurred in its present form without your honesty, your laughter, and your tears—of which we shared many.

  Carol Fitzgerald—You “discovered” me six books ago and have not stopped talking since. Many thanks.

  Virginia McNulty—from changing my diapers to here, we’ve come a long way. Thank you for introducing me to John and Kay and for sharing my stories.

  Jon Livinston and David Flory—for broken paddles, soaked sleeping bags, and for the laughter that echoed across three days on the river.

  David Wainer—thanks, pal. You’re a rock.

  Todd Chupp—for the river, the miles of portage, for coming prepared with your space blanket, glow stick, and mosquito repellant, and, most important, your friendship. Psalm 144. Oh, and, yes, I do have enough research for my book now.

  Chris Ferebee—for your friendship, your counsel and…for this. Oh, and for future reference, you sit on the seat-looking thing and the flat side goes down.

  The Doubleday Broadway Team—to all the folks I’ve yet to meet who have done so much already. From marketing to publicity to foreign sales, you all have exceeded every expectation. My deepest thanks.

  Michael Palgon—thank you for taking a chance on me, for tirelessly running with this story, for letting me work with Stacy and…for this.

  Stacy Creamer—you took a relatively good story and made it far better. I’m grateful. Thank you for your excitement, enthusiasm, your encouragement of me, your friendship and…for this. I simply cannot thank you enough.

  Band-Aid, Scoop, and Sportmodel—Don’t ever sell your dream at the altar of convenience, money, laziness or, worst of all, fear. One day you’ll understand this. Probably about the time you need to hear it. Forgive me if I ever get in the way of that. I love you.