After River

by Donna Milner

  ‘I want you to read this to Boyer,’ she said.

  I stepped back, recoiling from the book, ‘But—but, I can’t,’ I stammered. She had no idea what she was asking of me.

  ‘Yes, you certainly can,’ she insisted. ‘It’s too difficult for him to hold a book for any length of time.’ She nodded towards the parlour. ‘Now go in and sit down beside him and just read.’ She pushed the book into my hands. ‘It will do you both good.’

  In the parlour Boyer lay in Dad’s recliner, his eyes closed. On the television screen the Galloping Gourmet chopped onions. I walked over and switched off the set. Graham Kerr’s tear-stained face shrunk to a tiny white dot on the screen. When I turned back Boyer was sitting up. I could feel his eyes following me.

  ‘Mom said, she said I should read to you.’

  Boyer said nothing. He may have nodded. I don’t know. I stared at the book in my hand, at the oval rag rug at my feet, anywhere but into that face.

  I sat down in Mom’s chair on his right side and turned to the first page. I found my voice and began to read. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …’

  I read the words, but I heard, felt, none of them. I kept my eyes on the pages while my monotone voice droned on. We must have appeared a strange pair, the two of us sitting straight and rigid in our parents’ chairs, ignoring each other’s presence. Boyer, who taught me to read, who taught me to pay attention to the rhythm, the music of the words, stared straight ahead.

  When I was a child, he would listen closely as I read, then interrupt me in the middle of a sentence if he couldn’t ‘hear the passion’, as he said, ‘the truth’, in my voice for the words on the page. That Boyer would never have endured my lifeless reading. He would have stopped me after a few lines and insisted I let him hear the beauty of the words, or he would have repeated them from memory, giving them the life they deserved. But this Boyer said nothing.

  When I finished the last sentence of the first chapter, he stood up. The voice of a stranger said, ‘Thank you,’ a harsh gurgle sounding in his throat. He retreated to the sunroom.

  I held the sleeve of my sweatshirt against my nose to stifle the sneezes and the tears I felt building. Those two words were the first my brother had spoken directly to me since the night of the accident.

  The accident. That’s what my family had come to call it whenever they spoke of the night of the fire, which was seldom. I never spoke of it at all. But I ached to blurt out the truth. The next afternoon I sat down beside him to read again. But before I started, I decided I would tell him. I must tell him. I set the book unopened on my lap, and took a deep breath as I searched for the words. ‘The fire, Boyer, I .’

  I felt him wince as he leaned back in the recliner. ‘Not now, Natalie, I’m tired,’ the raspy voice of a stranger dismissed me. I fled to my room.

  When I came downstairs later to help with dinner, I heard Dad’s voice coming from the parlour. I peeked in to see him sitting in Mom’s chair beside Boyer. My father held a Dr Seuss book in his hands and was reading out loud from it. I backed into the kitchen and turned to my mother. ‘When did Dad learn—?’ I whispered.

  For the first time since summer, his name passed between us. ‘River,’ she said. ‘He was teaching him. That’s why he went on the milk round. They stopped for lessons at a booth in the back of Gentry’s every day.’

  I went back and stood in the doorway. My father was concentrating on the words while Boyer, who was laid back in the recliner, listened with his eyes closed. A smile lifted the right side of his lips. I turned away but not before seeing the trickle of moisture move down the smooth skin below his right eye. From the kitchen I listened to my father read those simple words about green eggs and ham as if they were the most important in the world. At that moment they were.

  Something changed for Boyer after that. Every afternoon he and Dad sat together in the parlour while Dad read to him. Before long they moved to the kitchen table with books spread out in front of them. By the end of January, my father was reading the newspaper for real.

  Boyer moved back up to the attic room. He took his place at the table for meals again and started working with Mom in the dairy. And the more he joined the world, the more I retreated.

  Once again, most nights I refused dinner and would later sneak down to raid the kitchen while everyone slept. One night in mid February, I loaded my plate by the light of the refrigerator.

  ‘How long can this go on, Natalie?’ My mother’s voice startled me. She stood in the parlour doorway in her nightgown.

  ‘What?’ I asked and shut the fridge door.

  Mom sighed and switched on the kitchen light. She came to me, put her hands on my shoulders, and spun me around to face the oak-framed mirror on the kitchen wall. I didn’t need to see the image, the tangled hair and swollen face. I knew what I looked like standing there in a baggy, food-stained shirt and sweatpants, clothes I had been living in night and day. I didn’t care. I twisted away from her and headed towards the stairway door hunched over a plate piled high with buttered bread, hunks of cheese and a wedge of apple pie.

  ‘Boyer is learning to live with his scars,’ she said wearily. ‘Why can’t you?’

  Because those scars are my fault, I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her then, all of it, but I remained silent, sullen. How could I tell her? How could she still love me if she knew the truth?

  Later that same night I woke to the sound of my own muffled moans. A few minutes later, I heard Boyer’s voice. He pushed open the door, ‘Are you all right?’ he asked from the doorway.

  I could feel him standing there, just as he used to when I was a child and had wakened from a nightmare. For a moment it was if everything was the same again.

  ‘Yea, I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I must have been dreaming.’

  ‘I could hear you from my room,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Just a stomach ache,’ I said. He came in and switched on the bedside lamp. I saw his scarred fingers reach across the crumb-filled plate – evidence of my once again stuffing myself until I was uncomfortable – on the night table.

  ‘Turn it off,’ I wailed as I rolled away. After he left, I pulled a pillow to my stomach as another cramp twisted my abdomen.

  I drifted in and out of sleep on waves of pain. Sometime later, I woke to Mom leaning over me, her hand on my forehead. Boyer stood in the doorway behind her.

  ‘It must be her appendix,’ Mom said.

  ‘Does your side hurt?’ she asked. Before I could answer, she lifted my shirt to feel my right side.

  ‘Dear God!’ she said as her hands touched me.

  I pushed her away. She turned to Boyer. ‘Can you drive us to the hospital?’ she asked.

  Growing up on a farm means knowing where things come from. Living close to raw nature means nothing is secret. You know the water you drink comes from a mountain spring because you helped your father repair the lines. You know the bacon and ham came from the sow that was once a piglet you were foolish enough to name. You know the eggs and drumsticks are from the same yellow puffballs you watched grow into beady-eyed hens. When platters of sliced roast beef are set on the table, you give no thought to the sudden whoosh of mucus that blew out of the steer’s nose as his knees hit the ground at the moment of death. Still you know. You know where it all comes from. You know birth and death, the realities of life.

  And yet, I still cannot explain how unprepared I was for Dr Mumford’s words in the sterile silence of the emergency room. ‘We’ll take her up to the delivery room,’ he said as he removed his probing hands from my stomach.

  Delivery room? What was he talking about? Delivery room? I tried to sit up on the examining table but another pain gripped me. I felt the firm touch of a nun’s hands insisting that I lie back down. As the grim-faced sister wheeled me away, I heard Mom’s voice repeating the questions that had formed in my head.

  ‘Delivery room? What?’

  ‘She’s about to giv
e birth, Nettie,’ Dr Mumford told her. ‘Surely you knew that.’

  For the rest of my life, I would wonder how I could not have known. How I could have carried life inside my body for almost eight months and not know of its existence. But until that moment I had no idea. And yet, when I heard Dr Mumford say those words to my mother, my heart recognized the truth in them.

  I gripped the icy stainless-steel side of the gurney as another pain ripped though me. And suddenly I was back in the gravel pit pressed against the black metal hood. The same searing heat assaulted my body promising to rip me apart.

  Since that June night, I’d managed to stay detached, numb. It was as if the horrors of that night, and the tragedies that followed, had shut me off. In the months since, I had walked around in a world removed. I acted on direction, doing what was asked of me, following where I was led when I had to, but unconnected from the life around me. With each wrenching pain, it was as if my body was waking up, being reborn against its will.

  I fought to stay numb. I didn’t want to return. I wanted to stay in the empty vacuum that had become my existence.

  As the elevator doors closed, I heard the nun’s firm voice. She was the first to say it. ‘You must have known,’ she said.

  In the cold white light of the delivery room, I twisted my head away from the gloved hand holding a black rubber mask to my face. I fought against inhaling the suffocating fumes, but after a few gulping breaths, I welcomed the darkness, the pulsating rings of light sucking me into their vortex, leaving the pain behind.

  Chapter Forty

  OUTSIDE ST HELENA’S hospital, Jenny leans into the intercom. ‘Jennifer Mumford here,’ she says. The intercom, like the ramp leading up to modern glass doors, is a recent addition. The marble entrance, the wide steps worn smooth at the edge by a century of footsteps, remains the same.

  A buzzer signals the unlocking of the door. Inside, Jenny ushers me to the stairway. ‘It’s faster to take the stairs than that old elevator,’ she says.

  I am visiting my mother here for the first time. The last time I was in this hospital, I left behind the lifeless body of a baby born too early. I’ve been running from that memory ever since. Tonight my need to see my mother is stronger than fright. I follow my daughter up the steps.

  Every time I visit Mom I wonder if it will be the last time I see her. Yet each time I leave knowing there are things left unsaid. Things left unsaid by both of us.

  Keeping secrets is a lonely business. The longer you hold them, the harder it is to let them go. I knew that my refusal to tell anyone, especially my mother, what Mr Ryan did to me that night in the gravel pit, was a useless sacrifice. He never kept his end of the bargain and I protected no one by remaining silent. Yet once the events that followed began – River’s death, Boyer’s accident – how could I add the horror of rape to my family’s sorrow? I let my mother, my family, everyone, believe that the stillborn child was the result of my night with River.

  Between Mom and me, there had been some kind of unspoken agreement to avoid discussions about that time in our lives. What good would it do to drag up the past? It happened. Shared memories would change nothing. But sometimes, sometimes, I long to unburden myself, to confess my part in all of it, to say out loud how it all came about, where it could have been changed.

  Sometimes I want to discuss the ‘what ifs’ with her just once. What if I hadn’t gone to River’s room that night? What if she hadn’t seen me? What if I hadn’t run to Boyer’s cabin, not seen him and River together? And mostly, what if, instead of running off into the forest that night, I had simply gone home? How different would our lives have played out then?

  But I can never say these things out loud to her. I can’t tell her of the many moments when I could have made other choices, choices that would have left our lives intact. What would be accomplished? What would be the point? Because I’m certain that she already knows most of it, that she has always known.

  What she doesn’t know, what no one but me knows, is the real cause of the fire in Boyer’s cabin. And I wonder if my guilt would be any less if I tell her?

  Guilt is a stern taskmaster. It requires you to always be on guard, always watch what you say. So I resisted the temptation to unburden myself, the temptation that crept up every time I looked into my brother’s face.

  And I avoided him. The last time I stayed out at the farm, the last time I was forced to fight my demons head on, was at my father’s funeral.

  When my brothers went to bed after the services that night, my mother put away the teacups and set a bottle of wine and two crystal glasses on the table. I sat across from her in the dining room while she talked about my father. I asked her how she fell in love with someone so different from her.

  ‘Your father was easy to fall in love with.’ She smiled and took another sip of her wine. ‘I was very young, and perhaps a bit too romantic. When I looked into your father’s eyes I saw what I wanted. I married your dad because I knew he would make a good father. I guess we all want what we didn’t have when we were growing up. What I didn’t have was family. I knew the farm and your father could give me that.’

  She began to talk about her disappointment in the intimacy of their marriage. It was as if she had been waiting to let it out, to tell someone about the barrenness of that part of her life. ‘Sometimes it left me feeling so empty,’ she said. ‘So lonely.’

  Listening to her reminisce, I felt uncomfortable, as if I were eavesdropping. I resisted the temptation to voice the questions I had wondered about since River’s death. Why was she outside his room that night? Did she go up to him after I left? Had River comforted her too? But her answers would not change anything. I knew about secrets; I would let her keep hers. Instead I asked her why she stayed with a man she couldn’t be intimate with. She seemed to come back from wherever her reverie had taken her and said, ‘We really did marry forever back then you know. We didn’t try it on for size then throw it away when it didn’t fit. Our faith and the times did not allow it. Besides, I loved him.’

  The next morning I watched from my window as she destroyed the rose garden, which to her represented an unfulfilled promise. While my bewildered brothers stood by gaping and thinking she’d gone crazy with grief, I understood.

  *

  The hospital corridors are dim on the third floor. The nurse at the night station looks up. ‘Doctor,’ she nods and acknowledges Jenny as we walk by. The odour of death and ailing bodies is heavy in the air. My father was right, all the talcum powder and alcohol rub in the world cannot mask that smell. Jenny seems immune to it, and I know that in a few minutes I will not notice it either. But at first it is so overpowering that I have to stop myself from covering my nose.

  The door to Mom’s room is open. A night-light glows on the wall behind her bed. We tiptoe in, not wanting to wake her. She looks so tiny, so lost in the white sheets.

  It started in her lungs. My mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, would pay the dues my father escaped. Yet even now, with this disease eating her from the inside out, her skin is that of a much younger woman, a healthier woman. At seventy-eight, my mother is still beautiful.

  At first she appears to be sleeping peacefully. Then I see the rapid movement of her eyes beneath translucent lids, as if she is fighting her dreams. I take her hand in mine. I feel the warmth as it wraps around my fingers and hangs on like a baby’s reflex.

  On the other side of the bed, Jenny flicks at the IV tube with her finger. ‘She’s out of morphine,’ she whispers. ‘I’ll go get the nurse.’

  My mother’s eyes snap open. She reaches up and clutches Jenny’s hand. ‘No.’ Her voice is weak, but she holds on to both Jenny’s hand and mine. I’m surprised by the strength of her grip.

  Her eyes focus on me. ‘Natalie,’ she smiles up at me. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  As if summoned, the nurse appears at the door, a syringe in her hand. ‘She didn’t want any more morphine until you came,’ she whispers. She a
pproaches the bed and smiles down at Mom. ‘Oh, you’re awake, Nettie,’ she says. ‘This will start working in a few minutes.’ She deftly inserts the syringe into the stopper of the IV tube.

  ‘Wait,’ Mom says. She takes a laboured breath. ‘I heard—’ a mucus-filled cough breaks the words in her throat. She catches her breath and murmurs something unintelligible. Jenny motions for me to lean forward and listen.

  ‘I heard the baby cry,’ Mom whispers into my ear.

  ‘The baby?’ I am not sure I understood her.

  ‘Oh,’ the nurse muses, ‘there are strange noises in this old building all the time. Some of the residents think it’s the nuns hiding in the closets. Your mother hears babies crying.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mom,’ I croon to her as I stroke her forehead. ‘It’s okay, there are no babies here anymore.’ But she becomes agitated and pulls me closer.

  ‘No,’ she breathes into my ear. It seems to take every ounce of energy she has left. ‘No, Natalie,’ she says. ‘I heard your baby cry.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  Nettie

  SHE FELT IT. Nettie felt it the moment she put her hand on Natalie’s stomach. Instead of the yielding flesh, the layers of fat she expected, her fingers felt the taut skin, the hardened muscles of a swollen abdomen.

  Still she told herself, just as she told Boyer and her husband, ‘It’s her appendix.’

  During the slow drive into town, as the truck tyres crunched through fresh snow, she held her daughter in her arms and told her the same thing. By the time they reached St Helena’s Hospital she believed it herself.