by T. Greenwood
“Oh my God,” her mother might be saying, though her voice is lost in the steady thrum of the river. “Oh my God.” But Ruby is rendered speechless. Words failing. Her own voice seemingly sucked away with the house into the surge before them.
And still the river keeps moving. It is merciless, unrepentant.
Here is the night the world changes, your world changes. This is the night when all those safe, soft places become terrifying and dangerous. This is the night when you need to decide whether to fight or to give in.
Here is your daughter. And here is a river. This river that stole your son, the river that stole your entire life as you knew it. What have you done to anger the river? What have you done to inspire such violence and rage? Because it is angry. This you can hear in its roaring admonishments, in its castigation and watery tirade.
Here is the river, swelling like a tsunami, deafening in its rebuke. The dam must have broken, somewhere miles upstream. Another broken bridge. Another failure. Because it is unbridled now, ardent and vehement. Fed by the constant rain, grown urgent in its vengeful quest. It is coming for you. What will you do?
Last time, you let the river take your child. Stunned by its audacity, you gave in. Like Moses’s mother, you offered him up, your only son, watched as he was carried away, trusting (you fool) the river’s promises to keep him safe. But here you are now, and the river has taken your house and now has come for your other child. It has come, even, for you.
Sylvie feels as though the storm has entered her body now. She stands at the edge of that violence, peering at the brutal water, at the wreckage of her house as it passes her. And so she moves toward the water. She will swim if she needs to. She will fight the current with her fists, with every bit of her strength. But as she gets closer, Ruby screams to her from the opposite shore.
“No, Mama. No. Stay.”
Sylvie shakes her head, resists.
“Please. Stay with Nessa. With the baby.” Ruby stands on the other side of the river from her, across this vast expanse of violent water. But Sylvie feels closer to her than she has in years. Maybe ever. “I need you to stay.”
Ruby runs to the spot where her house stood. It seems impossible that it is gone. That destruction can be so very simple and complete. The world is ravaged. It is as though a bomb has landed here. Only the cement foundation remains, a deep hole in the earth. She stands in the driveway, the one that leads to nothing, staring into its quiet depths which are now filling with water, a mud-and-rain-filled swimming pool. Oddly, the shed is still standing, though the door and part of the roof have been blown off. She reaches into the pocket of her jacket; thankfully, she still has her cell phone, but the battery is nearly dead. She turns it off to save any remaining juice she might have.
She prays that her bicycle is still where she left it upstream, buried under the brush, and is amazed to find it there, the kickstand somehow still propping it upright. She gets on her bicycle and heads up the road. She is pedaling furiously, and hardly making any progress at all. It feels like one of those terrible dreams where you run and run, but your legs won’t move.
The wind is still so strong, it nearly knocks her off the bicycle, and she can barely see with the rain in her eyes. But she knows this road. Or at least she used to know this road. Now it too is like a river: water rushing down each side, a sea of mud. Soon it is clear that she is not going to be able to get her tires to move through this rushing sludge. She gets off her bicycle and begins to run. She is exhausted, her body resisting, but she is determined.
It feels like her legs are made of cement. And she thinks again about the foundation of the house. All that remains: the permanence of stone. She wishes the bridge she just made could have lasted. That it could have survived. That it might be here after the storm is gone, evidence of something, though she isn’t sure of what.
When she gets to the top of the hill to Hudson’s, the lights are out, of course. The parking lot is empty. What did she expect? The windows are boarded up, and there is a piece of paper with a Magic Marker missive, melting in the rain. Closed for Hurricane. The Coke machine is toppled over, the bench where the old guys sit and smoke is tipped over too.
She stands under the awning by the front door and pulls her phone out of her pocket. She clicks it on, making a silent wish. The battery indicator is red, but there are three bars. She has reception. But she has almost no time left. She pushes the numbers 911 and waits for someone to answer.
Nessa drifts in and out of sleep. Her body is exhausted, but her mind is wide awake and wild with racing thoughts. She is both here and not here. She is floating, moored only by this second heartbeat against her chest.
She thinks about the woman’s face, about that red jacket. She lost her son. Is it possible this is the same woman she saw that night? Or is she only seeing ghosts everywhere she turns? She’s come back here to find her, to tell her what happened that night. To give her an explanation for the unexplainable. But now, somehow, this woman has found her instead.
Nessa has been watching her whole life in reverse since the accident, every glance at her past a look through that rearview mirror. She remembers memorizing the details of the vehicle, of the bridge. Looking out of the window from the backseat like a child watching the world pass by. She remembers screaming at Declan to stop the car, to go back. But he just kept driving, his headlights gone out again as they raced away from town, across the other bridge, and then into the woods. She remembers he lit the joint that he dug out of the ashtray. That he used one hand to steer and the other to smoke. She remembers the way the smell of weed, the sweet scent of smoke, filled the cab. But she could think only of the car in the river, filling slowly with water.
She crawled back into the front seat, pounded the dash with her fists as he went faster and faster, turning onto the long dirt road that led to his barn. She remembers that he was sweating. She could see the beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead every time he took a hit off the joint and his face was illuminated, briefly, by the bright orange glow of the hissing burning paper.
“How can you do this?” she asked as he wiped at the sweat with the back of his wrist. “There were people in that car. They’re hurt. What if nobody finds them?” The words, the pleas come easily, steadily. They are like a string of hard beads making their way from her throat to her tongue. It is the most she has said to him in the last three months.
But somehow, he still couldn’t hear her. None of it registered. Her words were like this dark car in the night. Their syllables rushed through the darkness, but they were somehow not there.
She looked at him, pushed her face as close to him as she could and screamed, “Why don’t you stop! What kind of person are you?”
And she realized she had no idea what kind of person he was. She knew the feeling of his tongue on her body, the urging of his hands and hips. She knew the smell of his skin, the taste of his sweat. She knew the words he chose to put down on paper. She thought of those useless words, those carefully chosen words. The lies. Because this is who he was: a man who could cause an accident, and instead of staying to help, leave. He was careless, thoughtless, selfish, and he apparently had no conscience, because now he took his hand from the wheel and hit her hard across the face.
“Shut the fuck up!” he growled.
And she did. As his fist made contact with the soft bone of her jaw, and she felt it come loose, just a door on a hinge, she was silenced.
He slowed the car to a stop, and reached across her for the door handle, pushing the door open and then shoving her out. The world spun beneath her. The air was cold, the ground was hard. Rocks and gravel pierced her skin, she could feel her flesh tearing each time it came in contact with the road. But then she landed in grass and mud, and she was grateful for the coldness, the stillness. The silence.
And by the time she was able to stand up again, to focus her eyes, regain her equilibrium, his car was gone. He was gone.
She headed back the way the
y had come, walking, stumbling down the long dirt road. Her jaw throbbed with each step. Her entire body felt pummeled. She didn’t know where she was going or what she would do when she get there. Should she go home? What was home anyway? Her mother sitting upright on a couch, eyes fixed on nothing. Drowsy and muttering in her Oxy haze. The crackle and hiss of bacon, of rolling papers, of Rusty’s breath in her ear when he got too close, when he crossed that invisible, that impossible, line. Home, the word in her broken mouth, suddenly no different than Hole.
She barely remembers the walk back to the bridge. It must have taken her an hour or more. She had to keep stopping to sit down, to vomit. At one point she lost consciousness and then woke again, disoriented and weeping. She remembers one of her molars coming out, and she searched for it in the grass, desperate, for some reason, to keep it.
By the time she got back to the bridge, the ambulances had come. There was a lone police car parked cockeyed near the bridge, blockades with reflectors blocking the bridge. Three or four cars were parked at the edge of the road, a small huddled group of people stood at the edge of the river, staring at the bridge. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the shadowy faces of the man and the woman in the car, the silent terror on the other side of the glass. She wondered if they were dead. She wondered if she and Declan had killed them.
Nessa saw the woman before she heard her, standing at the edge of the water in her red coat, like a vessel burst and bleeding. And then she heard the low, aching howl. Like a wounded animal. The anguished cry of sorrow itself. The wordless moan. And she knew as the woman’s voice ruptured, the consonants abstracted, the vowels discarnate, that words were futile things. Deceptive and ineffectual.
And so instead of going to the officer like she should have, instead of trying to explain, to make sense of what happened, instead of falling to her knees, confessing, accusing, pleading, she ran. For miles, she ran until the pavement turned to dirt and then back again. Through the mud and tall grass, through the crush of fallen leaves until she arrived at the overpass, that concrete monolith. Then she climbed up and stuck out her thumb.
The station wagon was the first car to come. It looked like a hearse as it pulled up next to her, and she wondered if she had, somehow, died. If, perhaps, she was only a ghost. This is what she was thinking when the man reached across the seat and opened the door for her. That she was already dead.
But she realized then that the car was not a hearse. Instead, in the rain, it was a yellow submarine, just like in the song her mother used to sing when she gave her a bath at night. And she thought about her mother, about what leaving her would mean. This was the unbearable part. Because she knew that rather than terror, rather than anger even, there would be nothing but relief. That Home was the same as Poem. Just a word on a page of a book she once borrowed.
The man rolled down the passenger window and leaned toward her. “You okay, miss?” he asked. But she couldn’t speak to answer.
He motioned for her to get into the car and she obeyed. He looked like somebody’s grandfather. His eyes were kind.
He drove without asking another question, until he looked and saw that the side of her face was swollen. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
She shook her head, No, no.
He reached into the dashboard and handed her a crumpled up piece of paper and a pen.
She was shaking as she wrote, “Bus station?”
He nodded. “What is your name?” he asked then, and she wrote, Nessa.
“My name is George Downs,” he said, smiling, an even exchange. “But you can call me Grover.”
The days she spent on the road are hazy now. George, the man in the car, had left her at the bus station, given her his phone number on a piece of paper, and she carefully tucked it into her pocket. He’d promised her that if she ever came back to Quimby, that if she ever needed anything, to find him. She couldn’t understand his generosity, his kindness. It seemed unconditional, without strings when there were always, always strings. He gave her money for a bus ticket. He kissed her on the forehead, and she could feel the wet press of his lips for days. She imagined that it was like a seal, closing that night inside a clean white envelope. Protecting her.
She took the bus to LA, as far as the ticket would take her, but then she was on her own again. She ate what she found and slept where she could. She felt ethereal, invisible, now that she no longer spoke. It was as though her voice had given her a body, and now, in this new silence, there was no body either. She had, finally, attained invisibility. If not for her hunger, she might have had no body at all.
She felt both aimless and purposeful. Each day was a matter of survival; but there was no greater objective than this. She learned to exist at the periphery of things, to be every face, rather than no face. This gave her freedom she had never had before. She was unnoticed. She disappeared. And this invisibility empowered her. Fear slipped away. She became undaunted.
But now, as she tries to recollect those days, those months, those years, they too are fading. It’s as though her memory is failing. She is seventeen years old, but it feels like she is seventy, and trying so hard to recollect the last two years of her life, a nearly impossible task.
It took her jaw nearly three months to heal. And by the time it was better, she was so accustomed to her own silence, she no longer felt compelled to speak. It was as though she’d left her voice, her words on the side of that road. As though she’d forgotten to pack it in her backpack.
The woman in the red coat sits with her now, stroking her hair as she slips in and out of time. In and out of places. Each time she wakes up, she believes for a few confused moments that she is in another bed. Another person’s arms. But it only takes that warm, breathing, heart-beating baby on her chest to bring her back.
Had she spoken? Had she really spoken to this woman? Help. Help, she thinks. The word so simple, yet so rife with need.
She knows the baby is not well. She knows that this breathing is not the steady inhalation and exhalation it should be. But what does she expect? She has been living off of whatever scraps she can find to eat. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. She hasn’t seen a doctor. She hasn’t taken care of herself. She has been careless. And now, she will be punished.
She looks up at the woman’s face, studies the fine angles of her nose and chin. She peers into her dark eyes. They’re the kind of eyes that keep secrets.
“I know you,” she says to the woman.
“What’s that?” the woman asks, caught up in her own quiet reverie.
“I was there.” It is too late now. The words have built up like water behind a dam. There is a flash flood coming. It is unstoppable.
The woman’s hands stop in her hair, and she can feel her fingertips go as cold as ice on her fiery skin.
“What?”
“I came back. And I saw you, standing at the river.”
“The flood?” the woman asks, her eyes wide. Terrified.
Nessa shakes her head. “His lights,” she says, trying to select the words that could possibly explain what he did. How he fled. “They didn’t work. You didn’t see us.”
The woman sits back on her heels as if she has, indeed, seen a ghost. That she is face-to-face with an apparition. She backs up, scurrying like a frightened animal toward the door. She scrambles to her feet.
Nessa searches for the words, but they swim before her, elusive like shiny fish beneath the surface of water. If she can just catch the right one, she thinks, it will be okay. She can make all of this better.
“What do you want?” the woman asks. “What do you want from me?”
The baby sputters and coughs, the sound coming from her chest like a terrible whistle. Like the storm is inside her. She presses the baby to her chest, harder, as though she can offer her own lungs. Her own heart.
And then the word comes; it rises to the surface, a dead fish floating on still water. It is flaccid and sick. “I’m sorry,” she offers and remem
bers that words are not enough. Words fail. Still, she tries. “I was so afraid.”
The woman looks at her in horror and then she is gone, disappearing out into the darkness, and Nessa is alone again. Only now, she is not alone. The baby’s chest whistles and it sounds like a scream for help.
Ruby gives the dispatcher the address of a house that no longer exists. “There’s a lady who just had a baby on the other side of the river. I think the shack where she’s staying is on the Monroes’ property. Please send somebody. My mother is there too.” And then the phone goes dead, and there is an odd silence. Her ears feel strange, achy in the absence of sound. Of course, there is still the steady sound of the rain on the ground. But here, she can no longer hear the river.
She has no idea how she’s going to get back across to the other side where her mother and Nessa are. The bridge she made is gone. It’s as though it resided only in her imagination, existed in the world for a single purposeful moment, and then disappeared back into her dreams again. There is not a single bit of evidence to prove that it ever existed at all except that she is here. Alive. That she survived.
She starts back down the road, imagining that the ambulances will come to the house. Or to the place where the house used to be anyway. She will need to show them how to get to her mother. And to Nessa and the baby.
Her shoes are soaked, her feet freezing cold. She looks down at her hands, and they are covered in rain and mud and leaves. She must look like some sort of yeti walking along the edge of the road. She must look like a beast.
It is pitch-black now; it feels like when the battery in her phone died, everything else went dead as well. How could she not have noticed how dark it is? It feels as though she is walking inside a black hole, as though she has been swallowed. She remembers a story her mother used to read her about Jonah and the whale. When Jonah disappears into the whale’s mouth, he has a candle, which illuminates the inside. It used to bother her. She always thought that if she were the one to write the book, she would have made those pages black. Just two dark pages so you would know what Jonah really felt like inside the whale. There are no streetlights out here, not a single flicker of light. She is inside those imagined pages. Inside the belly of the whale.
