“Guess what,” H. J. says. “I got fired on Friday. I mean, I knew it was coming, but they made it official. I haven’t told Evie yet. I thought I’d work off some adrenaline and tell her this afternoon, so she doesn’t hear it at school tomorrow.”
I stop tying my skate and sit up. H. J. isn’t wearing his glasses, which makes him squint a little. His eyes are the same hazelish brown as his sister’s. I try to read his face so I can know how best to respond. He doesn’t look sad exactly, just weary. It doesn’t surprise me that he burst out with this personal information without a lead-in. I have figured out that he doesn’t bother with small talk. I’ve also figured out that I like this about him.
“That’s too bad,” I say. “I bet you were a good teacher.”
H. J. shrugs. “I was okay. Maybe I would have been good eventually, if they’d let me keep going.” He sounds more wistful than sad, and I imagine that he has learned to put things into perspective. He knows how to sort out disappointment from tragedy. I feel myself relaxing, not wanting him to go away anymore. “Anyway,” H. J. says. “It was pretty stupid, how I handled it. Probably they’re right to keep me away from school-age children.”
I laugh a little. Kelly is about the same age as me, and I don’t exactly think of myself as a school-age child. “I guess,” H. J. goes on, “that I didn’t realize how serious it was. Cutting. I thought she was trying to shock me, and maybe if I wasn’t shocked, she would just . . . stop.”
“Can I tell you something?” I say. A low cloud blows over the lake, giving the early morning a sense of gloaming. H. J.’s face looks sweaty and cold at the same time, pink blood rushing under skin that’s been whitened by chilly air, and I’m surprised by the youngness of it. He doesn’t say anything, or even nod, but I go on. “If I were Kelly. I mean, if I were a cutter.” I close one hand around my wrist, where H. J.’s eyes immediately flicker. I remember Katie saying, “He stands too close and he looks too hard. It’s not comfortable.” But I don’t feel uncomfortable, so I keep talking.
“If someone said that to me, what you said to her, about just doing it a little bit? It would make me feel better. Like what I was doing wasn’t so sick. So horrifying. You know? Maybe you gave her permission to do it so she felt less ashamed. Maybe that’s what gave her the guts to admit it to someone who could really help her. It got you fired, which is awful, but maybe it also saved her.”
“That’s a nice thought,” H. J. says. “I would like to save someone.”
His voice catches on this last word, and we both sit for a moment, thinking—I think—of the various people neither of us have managed to save. Then I say, “I saw Kelly in the cafeteria on Friday, and she looked happy. She was laughing.”
“Laughing is good,” H. J. says. But he doesn’t smile. He puts his hands on the log, on either side of his thighs, as if bracing himself for something—a gust of wind, an unwelcome emotion. I think about asking again if Kelly told him why she was cutting, if the reason—as far as she was concerned, anyway—had something to do with Luke. But as soon as Luke’s name forms in my mind, I get this picture, as if I’m looking at myself from across the lake. I see myself sitting on a log with a guy—a man—having this very personal conversation. H. J.’s shoulder doesn’t exactly touch mine, and neither does his leg. But both hover close enough that I can feel their molecules, the tiny breadth of space between us. And suddenly I want him to go away, even though I feel more myself with him and Evie than I have with any living person since last spring, even Isabelle. Even my mom.
The thing is: I’d rather feel uncomfortable. I may be obligated to stay alive, which to some extent means fighting against misery, which means going toward the things that make me happy, which I have completely forsworn. It’s an impossibly vicious circle, and suddenly I feel exhausted. The only thing that ever gives me a break is Luke, and suddenly he won’t come.
Sitting out here on the log, chatting with H. J., feels like creating a friendship, something new. In other words it feels like the thing I refuse to ever do, which is move on. What if someone came upon the two of us, sitting on a log and talking? Even though H. J. is essentially someone’s dad, he’s not that much older than me, and it could easily look like . . .
No. I get this horrible feeling of the whole world watching us from behind every one of these bare branches. My mother behind that tree, Francine sitting on that rock. Paul watching too, and my sisters and my grandparents, and worst of all Luke—standing in the middle of the lake. What would he think? I imagine him turning to walk away, Carlo at his side, the two of them disappearing into gray skies, finally gone forever, while I run after them, yelling in vain: No! Stop! It’s not what you think!
My fingers act before I make a decision. They unlace the one skate I’ve managed to put on. “You know,” I say, without looking at H. J., “I feel really cold all of a sudden. I think I’m just going to go home.” I can feel him looking at me but keep my eyes on my skates. If I’ve hurt his feelings, I don’t want to know.
“But you’ll warm up once you start skating,” he says. “Come on. It’ll be fun. We can race.”
“I’m a crappy skater,” I say.
“That’s okay,” H. J. says. “I just like your company.”
I yank my Sorel back on, then try to tie my skates together as I realize my fingers are shaking. I don’t want him to like my company. I don’t want to skate with anyone except for Luke.
“I’m sorry,” I tell H. J. “I have to go.”
Once my boots are on, it takes all my might not to run down the hill toward Paul’s house. I can feel H. J.’s bewildered gaze on my back, and then I think maybe he’s not bewildered at all. Maybe he understands completely. And I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t know how to protect myself from becoming so sad again, so sad that I want to die; and at the same time I don’t know how to protect myself from returning too fully to this world.
Because how can I possibly face it, the rest of my life? What am I supposed to do? Grow up? Go to college? Have other boyfriends? That last idea is the wrongest thing I can possibly ever think, and I feel so lost, so hopeless. I wish that forest ranger had never found me at Alta the day I slit my wrists. I wish I hadn’t told Luke to meet me at the river. Most of all I wish that I had fallen down the bank instead of Luke. Leaving him on the bank, helpless in that moment, and sad—yes—but so much better equipped than me for everything. Especially life.
part two
staring down before
( 13 )
LUKE
It happened toward the end of May. Paul and Hannah had this plan to send Tressa back East to be a counselor at a girls’ summer camp. Tressa took it hard but to me it seemed pretty temporary. In June we’d be eighteen. In August we’d both head to Boulder, something Dad and Hannah didn’t know. I told Mom to tell Dad that I only got accepted at Greeley. I admit it was kind of hard, letting him think I wasn’t smart enough to go to Boulder. But we had to make sure they didn’t try to send Tressa someplace else. The main thing was, soon they wouldn’t be able to do anything about us.
And you know what else? Part of me looked forward to the summer on my own. I could go to parties and hang out with my friends. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. It doesn’t mean I don’t remember the V of her T-shirt coming down a little lower than she probably realized. It’s not like I didn’t want to be with her. But I also knew how to wait. I’d had a lot of practice.
* * *
I walked through the woods past the old, rusted-out school bus to meet Tressa. She was right where she said she’d be, sitting with Carlo in a stand of aspens by the river. She stood up. I could see she’d been crying; her face was swollen and red.
“What’s wrong?” I said. She stepped forward and hugged me hard. Her cheek felt wet. She said something into my neck that I couldn’t understand, but I could guess.
I stepped back and put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s just the summer,” I said. “Eight weeks. And then this whole
part of our lives will be over.”
“Or else we could run away,” she said.
I laughed. Tressa stood there looking at me, completely serious. “I mean it,” she said. “I’ve got my Jeep. We could just leave. We could drive away and never see their faces again, and we could be together.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” I tried not to sound annoyed. We both knew summer would be so much easier on me, here in Rabbitbrush. “Look,” I said. “We’ve got one more month of high school. Two months of summer. It would be crazy to run away now. We just have to wait it out.”
Tressa looked away, toward the river. “I guess you’re right,” she said.
I put my arms around her waist and kissed her. She dropped Carlo’s leash. We stood that way, kissing awhile. I really liked the way those jeans looked, and I slipped my hands into her back pockets. In the river, sticks and leaves rode the current downriver. Carlo lay across Tressa’s feet. Finally she pulled away. We held hands and walked by the raging water.
Carlo went trotting ahead in his lopsided old-dog way, his leash dragging behind him. One of us should have picked up that leash. He’d slipped down the bank before, and once he almost landed in the water. But neither of us did. We just held hands, nothing to be afraid of, walking along the Sustantivo River.
( 14 )
TRESSA
How could you do it, to people who love you?
Nobody ever asks me that question in words. I see it in their faces. I hear it in my own head, insistent and accusing. After all, I knew what it felt like, to lose someone. I saw everyone else—parents, sisters, friends, acquaintances—and how that loss laid them low, the empty space it left behind. The disbelief, the horror, and the impossible, unavoidable longing to stop time and wind back the world. Please, please, let me do this over. Let me do it right this time.
How could you do it to your grandparents? How could you do it to your dog, Carlo, who trusted you, who made protecting you his life’s work? How could you do it to your sisters, who had just lost their little brother? Worst of all, how could you do it to your mother, who chose you again and again—who not only loved you but needed you?
My only answer—there didn’t seem to be any choice. Once as a kid I burned my hand very badly in a campfire. I remember the squirming agony of that burn. It hurt so much, I couldn’t stop moving my feet or my shoulders, like I had this instinctive need to wriggle out of my body and escape the pain. Multiply that times a hundred, and you get how I felt after Luke died. My stupid, stupid impulse to cling to him had clung him right into those freezing waters. Now I wanted to go back. Was that so much to ask? Let me go back and not leave that note in his locker. Let me go back and greet him with a smile—Yes, I will endure one last separation. I will be as strong as you. Let me go back and not bring Carlo along, or at least let me hang on to his leash, keeping him safe and sure beside me.
It seems like such a paltry request, to go back minutes in time. But then the minutes turn to hours and days and weeks, all time that you have to live with this burning regret and sorrow and loss. How could I live with myself? How could I live without Luke? I needed to see him. It felt so urgent, so imperative. I had things to tell him. I had forgiveness to procure. I couldn’t stand the pain a second longer, without doing something to stop it. So I sat down at the kitchen table, the same place my mother had written her fateful farewell note, years before Luke or I was born. There were a million things I could have written. A million words for my sadness, none of which even began to cover it. So I wrote down the simplest part, the most elemental truth:
I’m sorry. I have to see him.
The day Luke died the ground was soggy because the crust of ice had just melted. A few leaves and shoots tried to break through, but they didn’t stand a chance, not at this altitude. One last storm could still come along and cover them with snow. But on that day, for a few hours anyway, we had spring. Birds chirped all around us. The river crashed fast and hard from all the melt-off.
Luke took my hand. The two of us walked beside the river. I knew I should pick up Carlo’s leash but I didn’t. What could go wrong—an old, obedient dog. I want to go back and shake myself, hard. Don’t you remember how he loses his footing? Stupid, stupid girl.
Because after all the yelling and rules and the alarm system, here’s what finally managed to keep Luke and me apart—a rabbit. It burst out from behind a tree, and Carlo—forgetting his age and arthritis—gave chase. Luke and I laughed at the same time, the exact same noise, blending together so that it sounded like a single sound from a single person. Sometimes I think I made up what I said next, that I’ve created this memory as a way to make myself feel better. But at the same time I know for certain my exact words when the laughter stopped. I said, “Oh, my God, Luke. I love you so much.”
Luke would have gathered me up and kissed me, except that as soon as the words were out of my mouth, we heard the splash. Neither of us saw the fall itself, Carlo tumbling down the bank. The next thing we saw was his sleek black head bobbing above the water, his paws in a frantic dog paddle, his body hurtling downstream the way we’d just come.
Luke and I ran along the bank of the river, calling to Carlo. I still can’t describe the panic I felt, watching my dog go. After a while he seemed to stop struggling. We couldn’t see his paws, just his head, occasionally—terrifyingly—sinking below the water, then bobbing back up.
“Hold on,” we both yelled to the dog. “We’re coming.”
Luke hurtled ahead of me, until after a while I couldn’t see him. He had escaped down the path, running like an action hero, his dark head rising and falling on shore the way Carlo’s rose and fell in the river current.
And then another slip. From my distance around the bend, I heard it, a foot sliding in the mulchy leaf litter. I heard the sound of a tumble, and a splash, and suddenly it was me running like an action hero, faster than I would ever have imagined possible.
The forest ranger and the EMTs said he must have struggled. The current was too fierce. If only he had given up, the way Carlo did—which is why the river finally released the dog, just around the next bend a quarter mile or so down, as it came upon a beaver dam. The water pooled and almost stilled. When I reached that point, my chest heaved and my air emerged in honking gasps. Carlo managed to pull himself out of the river, soaked through to the bone. He shook himself off and sprayed me with water before he collapsed onto the bank in an exhausted heap. While Luke floated facedown, still traveling downriver but painfully slow.
I ran forward, splashing into the calmer water, all that ice-cold, melted snow. I turned Luke over so that his face pointed toward the sky. I pushed wet hair and leaves off his face and placed my lips on his, trying to breathe for him, but I couldn’t get enough traction. So I moved behind his head and looped my arms under his shoulders. I dragged him onto the bank and beat on his chest and blew air into his lungs, amazed at how exactly Hugo’s course in CPR came back to me.
But Luke. He did not come back to me. What I labored over, it was only his body. He himself, Luke, had already made his exit, somewhere upriver, while I had run after him with my useless, pounding feet.
* * *
In the hospital, before Francine arrived, they let me go into the room with his body. I opened the door and walked on tiptoes across sterile linoleum. The nurse stood next to him and lifted up the sheet. My heart swelled with the most illogical burst of relief, almost joy. Oh, I thought. It’s not him!
This reaction went beyond wishful thinking. Despite Luke’s beautiful face, his shiny black hair, the peace sign with the bit of pearl hanging from its leather thread. A body just doesn’t look like itself when a person no longer inhabits it. Luke without Luke no longer looked like Luke. He, Luke, had left the building. And if he wasn’t there, he must have been somewhere else. Right?
I tried to continue, to move forward, to stay alive. The devastated faces of Luke’s father, our sisters, his mother, showed me exactly what would be wrought if I
did what I wanted and followed him.
“Let’s go away,” I said to my mother one night when she walked into the living room, a book under her arm. Paul was over at Francine’s collecting his share of Luke’s ashes. I couldn’t stand the thought of him walking through the door, carrying those split-in-two remains.
“Tressa,” Mom said, her voice appalled, as if she and I hadn’t run away together a million times.
“Why not?” I said. “There’s nothing keeping us here anymore.”
“There’s Paul,” Mom said. “My parents. This house. Our life.” We stood in the living room, next to the red velvet love seat. I pushed her hard on the shoulders, and she sat down. The heavy book fell to the floor.
“Mom,” I said. I didn’t yell. My voice sounded more furious than if I had yelled. It sounded strained and broken. How could she not get it? Who had taught me that the best antidote to anything was getting into your car and pressing down on the gas?
“I have left for you again and again,” I said. “You’ve dragged me away for your own purposes, and now I am telling you, I need to get away. I need to get away now!”
“Tressa,” Mom whispered. Her face clouded, sad, and hopeless, and she picked the book up off the floor and held it up for me to see. What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
I stared. My first thought—stupid, stupid!—was to tell Luke. You won’t believe it. Another sibling that we half share. But I couldn’t tell him anything, not ever again, and I sank to my knees and sobbed in my mother’s lap.
“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hand over my hair. “I wish I could. But I can’t. I just can’t.”
I have seen the regret in her face every day since. If only she had granted my wish and taken me away. Because on my own in Rabbitbrush—the town where Luke didn’t live anymore—I could only think of one place to go. One thing to do. Over the next week an urgency mounted. I had to escape, to get away from all these feelings. Never mind the mourning, grieving faces all around me. They’d be better off without my face to remind them of everything they’d lost. Only one person in the world could grant the forgiveness I needed to continue living. In the absence of that there was simply one thing to do, and nothing else:
Meet Me at the River Page 12
