I’m sorry, I wrote. I have to see him.
( 15 )
LUKE
I can’t see it like it’s happening, and I can’t remember because I wasn’t there. I know what she did but I can’t talk about it. The words don’t come together. I only know it in the foggiest kind of way, like waking up from a dream where you remember the feeling but not what happened.
I want to take the whole thing off Tressa’s shoulders the same way I want to wave my hand over her wrists and make the scars disappear. But then I remember what’s bringing me back and letting me touch her (according to Tressa, anyway) and I get confused.
I get confused. I need to rest. It’s too much to think about, Tressa and me wanting different things. Before when we wanted different things they were pretty insignificant, like a party, or her going to summer camp. But in the after-Luke there’s this. I want to live and she wants to die. Which sounds like the same, even though I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not.
TRESSA
That night I hung on to Carlo for the longest time, my face buried in his fur. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again and again. “I love you. I’m sorry.” I knew I couldn’t bring him with me, because he wouldn’t let it happen. He would bark and whine and howl for help. And then I’d be gone and he’d be deserted.
My mother had a bottle with five Vicodin left over from her last miscarriage. I had already stolen them from her medicine cabinet. I had also stolen an X-acto blade from Paul’s toolbox. Back then I still had my Jeep. I bundled up. Nights were cold. I didn’t want to be uncomfortable. I didn’t want to hurt myself. I wanted the pain to end. For everyone. I wanted to see Luke. I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened since he’d been gone.
At the funeral I had watched the different faces and the various reactions. There was Francine, front and center, unable to look my way. There was Kelly, weeping in the back pew. There were all Luke’s friends, buttoned into coats and ties, looking pale-faced and shell-shocked and tearful. The whole town was there, and I sat in the front pew with Mom and Paul and my grandparents. My sisters sat across the aisle with Francine as if it were a wedding, one side bride, one side groom. And all the places I hadn’t belonged had nothing on that moment—me sitting in the front row, supposedly a star mourner, when all I wanted to do was spare everyone the miserable, guilty sight of me. I would rather have stood before a firing squad than in front of the entire town, acting as if I had any right to even grieve.
* * *
The night I left I carried a backpack with the knife, the Vicodin, and a bottle of Paul’s red wine. I chose the one that looked cheapest. I just wanted to make it possible, what I had to do. I locked the dog door and closed the kitchen door carefully behind me, pushing Carlo’s nose back inside, sliding my arm through the barest crack so he couldn’t wriggle through and follow me. In the rearview mirror I watched the windows to see if any lights came on, but none did. I was safe, driving out of Rabbitbrush, down the highway toward Ouray, and Alta—the abandoned mining town. I don’t know why I chose Alta except that the place always seemed so rife with ghosts. When I finally arrived, I sat for the longest time in my car, which I could drive all the way up to the buildings now that the snow had melted.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought I’d be able to see those ghosts, the people who used to live there, going about their business. The miners’ wives would stop to chat with each other as they hauled water or chased children. Maybe I’d see the whole community, all of them, walking to the large common building for a town meeting. Maybe some of them would be wearing headlamps, shining toward me through midnight, letting me know what I could expect, just around the corner.
I didn’t know what to look for. I’d never seen a ghost before.
For hours I sat there, seeing nothing but the night, the moving trees, the falling-down buildings. Darkness masked all the years of graffiti by hikers and skiers and tourists, but the town didn’t look any more inhabited than usual, or anything more like its former self. Like Luke, Alta wasn’t in Alta anymore. Everything that mattered had gone.
I took a sip of the wine, wincing. I had never developed a taste for alcohol, especially since my one experience had ended so badly. Tonight I drank for purely medicinal reasons. After the first few sips it tasted fine, warming. My head began to spin a little, but the hole in my heart still gaped open.
Wisps of light rolled over the horizon, this mountaintop one of the first spots touched by sunrise. The gas gauge read almost empty. I turned off the car. I opened up the Vicodin bottle and swallowed the five pills one by one, sipping the wine to wash them down. I knew the combination wasn’t enough to kill me. I only wanted to block the pain so that nothing would prevent me from doing what needed to be done.
I left the half-drunk bottle of wine on the road beside the car. I carried my pack, though I only needed one thing inside it. I chose the closest building, a family cabin probably, the old fireplace in its center ground down to nothing but a pile of bricks, the staircase crumbling, leading up to nowhere.
* * *
I had learned from the Internet that slicing vertically works best. Every single resident of Rabbitbrush knows what happened next. There’s barely any point in telling. How my strong young heart worked overtime, pumping more blood to compensate for the loss. I couldn’t stop it from doing so; I had passed out. I had forgotten to tell my body that I had no more use for properly functioning organs.
Still, my plan would have worked. My mother didn’t find the note inside the bread box until after I’d been brought to the hospital. Even if she had found it, chances are slim they’d have figured out in time where I’d gone. Naive method or not, I severed an artery. The blood was flowing, I lost consciousness, I was on my way out. But a park ranger decided to have his breakfast at Alta, sitting in his truck, watching the sun rise and the ghosts evaporate. He saw my car and the wine bottle beside it and set out searching. He found what should have been my body but was still me, and he ripped apart his own shirt to stop the blood.
Life assaulted me by continuing. Instead of oblivion and possibly Luke, I got a blur of sirens and white coats and two days in the state mental hospital, followed by four weeks in the private one paid for by Paul. At the time I thought he’d spend any amount of money just to have me gone an extra month. Now I realize my lack of gratitude, considering. And all I can say is I’m sorry, truly sorry, for all the expense and worry, all the pain and grief that I caused, beginning with killing Luke and ending with trying to kill myself.
I understand, believe me, all the ways I need to atone. But in the meantime I am grateful for the one thing that persists, my last acceptable solace—which is Luke and me, together again. I will take that in any shape I can, however limited or brief or fleeting. Please believe me when I say that I regret everything. And still I would do whatever I needed, anything in the world: to bring him back to me.
part three
getting through the after
( 16 )
TRESSA
Luke stays away. He stays away well into early December, while my mother grows so large that she has to walk with her legs waddled wide apart, as if she’s balancing a bowling ball between her thighs. I’m in a fog the last weeks of winter term. At night I lean out my window and trace messages in the snow. Sometimes I write, I love you. Sometimes I write, Come back. Sometimes I write, Goddamn it, Luke, or Where the hell are you? The snow sifts inside, piling up beneath the window. My mother wonders why the floorboards have started to buckle.
* * *
School lets out. The snow falls and falls, and still Luke doesn’t come. I send in the last of my new college applications to Stanford and Colorado College. I use the same essay I wrote last year, about my years of wandering and how they affected my character and what I learned about the world and myself. Blah, blah, blah. I do not consider for the barest second writing a new one about everything that’s happened since last May.
My grandfather br
ings us a Christmas tree cut from his Western hill. He will not look at Paul when he delivers it. He barely even looks at my mother. He offers me ukulele lessons again, and I hate saying “No, thank you,” because he looks so disappointed. My sisters—our sisters—come home mid-December and plan to stay a full three weeks because the baby is due. My mother goes into labor a few days after they arrive. Paul and she go to the hospital together while Jill, Katie, and I wait at home by the phone. We get a call around midnight.
I have dozed off on the couch. Katie crosses the living room and picks up the phone in the kitchen. I hear her voice, matter-of-fact and not particularly celebratory. Jill listens along with me, a few feet away in the red velvet armchair. The twins both have blond hair, like our mother, and her same pale blue eyes. Jill is built on a thicker scale than Mom, more like our grandmother, with broad shoulders and strong legs; Katie was like this originally, but since moving to LA she has lost the twenty pounds her agent demanded and looks unnaturally thin. They both wear their hair long, but contrary to what you might expect, Jill’s always looks perfect—combed and loose and glossy—whereas Katie usually pulls hers back in a ponytail or messy bun. Katie would never admit that the desire to be a movie actor is a piece of wildness inherited from Mom. I wonder what she looks like in the horror movies she won’t let us watch. I’ve never seen her with the barest stitch of makeup.
Jill and I listen to Katie’s low voice until she replaces the phone onto the receiver with a gentle click. She comes back into the room. She wears checked flannel pajamas and looks much younger than twenty-four.
“Hannah is fine,” Katie says. Neither of the twins ever call her Mom. “Everything’s fine. They ended up doing a C-section, but that was pretty much expected because of her age. It went well. The baby is fine.”
“What is it?” Jill asks.
“A boy,” Katie says. “A healthy baby boy. Seven pounds.” I nod, surprised by the relief I feel. It hadn’t hit me, not consciously, the worry that something would go wrong, until I hear that everything has gone right.
“Why do they always tell you the weight?” Jill says.
“Because,” Katie says, “if the kid only weighed two pounds, that would be bad news. But seven pounds, that means he’s okay.”
“What did they name him?” I ask.
Katie crosses the room and sits down on the couch with me. “His name is Matthew,” she says.
Jill stands up and walks over to the window. She peers into the darkness and taps on a pane. For a strange moment I think maybe she sees Luke and is trying to get his attention. But then she says, in a flat voice, “Dad loves those apostles.”
Katie and I look at each other. She puts a hand on my knee. “Well,” she says. “We have a brother again. I guess we can all go to bed now.”
Climbing the stairs behind my sisters, I concentrate on how happy my mother must be. Finally, a boy. I wonder if Paul feels scared, or grateful, or both—at everything he has to do over again, and hopefully get right this time.
* * *
In my room something about the air has changed—it feels like a barrier has constructed itself around the walls, the window. This new being in the world, this new sort-of brother. I sit on my bed and remind myself that this baby was planned—conceived even, implanted—before Luke’s death. He was never meant to replace him. Now I can only hope he won’t prevent Luke from coming back.
I hear footsteps on the stairs, one of the twins. Before the knock I already know it’s Jill, who moves much more assertively than Katie. She doesn’t wait for me to answer her knock before she cracks the door and pokes in her head.
“Tressa?” she says. “Are you all right?”
I grab a pillow and hug it to my chest, realizing as I speak that the gesture may seem to contradict my words. “Fine,” I say. “I’m happy for Mom.”
Jill crosses the room and sits at the foot of my bed. She says, “I’m happy for her too. I want to be, anyway. The whole thing still feels so surreal.” She scratches her nose with the back of her hand, three or four brisk rubs. Then she flattens her hand on my quilt, Francine’s old quilt. I wonder if Jill recognizes it.
“I guess I keep waiting for it not to be hard,” Jill says. “Hard to think of having a little brother that’s not Luke. Hard to believe she’ll take care of a kid this time. Which of course I want her to do, but then I think, if she does, then why couldn’t she do that for Katie and me? And for you.”
This last is just a polite attempt to include me. But I say, “I know what you mean. It’s a little weird. The milk-and-cookies mom.”
“Or even a mom at all.” Jill has every right to feel the way she does. But I don’t want to betray Mom—who is Mom to me—by agreeing with her.
“Anyway,” she goes on. “It’s very weird. The whole thing. On so many levels. I keep wondering what Luke would say.” She raises her chin and stares at me with clear, faintly challenging eyes, then moves her gaze back to the quilt, picking at a loose thread. “You know,” she says. “I know Katie and I weren’t here for you and Luke. I feel bad that I never said anything to Dad, to try to help you two out more.”
“Oh,” I say. I recognize this as a chance to grant what I want most—forgiveness—and jump at the chance. “Don’t worry about that. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway.”
“Maybe not. Who knows? I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s very hard coming home and having him not here. When I’m in town, I can’t stop expecting to see him when I turn corners.” She picks harder at the quilt. “I wake up in the morning and I think I should go over to Francine’s and see him, and then I remember. I feel sad all the time about him being gone, and at the same time I keep forgetting he’s gone. You know?”
I lean forward and put my hand over hers. She looks down at our two hands and says, “I have to admit something to you, Tressa.” I hold my breath, slightly scared of whatever she’ll say. “It wasn’t just laziness or distance that kept me from helping you two. The truth is, I never wanted you together, partly because it was weird—my sister and my brother. But the other part . . . it wasn’t that I agreed with them, that Luke would corrupt you. Honestly I didn’t even care if he did, because what would it amount to? A couple of beers? Lost virginity? Big whoop, right? But still I just thought it would be for the best if you weren’t together, because I felt sure you would break his heart.”
This idea is so bizarre, so apart from anything that ever could have happened, that all I can do is point to my chest. “Me?” I say, as if she could mean anyone else. “Break Luke’s heart?”
Jill nods. “I guess, in my own weird way, even though it wasn’t your fault, I always thought of you as running away. I saw myself in Luke. That’s what I realize now. I saw myself in Luke, and Hannah in you, and I thought you’d do to him what she always did to me.”
“Jill,” I say, my voice a little twisted, a little hoarse. “That never would have happened. Not in a million years.”
She smiles sadly. “But we’ll never know,” she says. Tears have started streaming down her face.
“I know,” I whisper. “I would never have left him. I promise you, Jill. I would never, ever have run away. Not from Luke. Not ever.”
Jill wipes the flat of her palm over each eye. I try to imagine my sister’s daily life. She lives in Denver and works taking care of plants in large office buildings. Such a loving job, tending and nurturing, but also solitary. It probably gives her way too much time to think about these past months and what they’ve done to our weird and fractured family.
She flops down on her side, lying across the foot of my bed. I pull my feet away and cross my legs. Jill lies there for a long time, the two of us looking at each other, until her eyelids start to droop, and her breathing slows. I watch her sleep, light freckles dusting the bridge of her nose, fairy-princess hair spread out across the bed. Asleep, she looks more adult than she did awake—less restful than worried, drained. Another wounded one o
f us.
Part of me feels disappointed that she’s fallen asleep there, knowing that her presence will keep Luke away for yet another night. Another part of me hopes even more strongly—if it’s possible—that Luke will come. I imagine myself waking Jill. Look who’s here, I would say. And then I could sit back, giving them room, watching the joyful reunion.
* * *
The next day, when my sisters and I walk into Mom’s hospital room, she’s sitting up in bed, alone, her head turned and gazing out the window. Paul’s not here, and neither is the baby. I can hear squalling from the nursery, and from adjacent rooms, but in here feels like a little bubble of quiet.
“Hannah,” Jill says when Mom doesn’t turn to look at us.
She snaps her head in our direction, as if we’ve startled or woken her. Her hair is pulled back, and even though she looks tired, the harsh lights don’t seem to be doing much damage. Instead of a hospital gown she wears a lavender nightgown that I’ve never seen before, with a high, ruffled collar. She looks pretty. I walk over and give her a hug, then climb onto the bed next to her. “Hi, girls,” she says to the twins, once I’ve settled in.
“Where’s Matthew?” Katie says. The two of them still stand just past the threshold of the room.
“He’s in the nursery,” Mom says. “I wanted to rest. Your father went down to get the paper and some coffee.”
“We’re going to go see the baby,” Jill says. She grabs hold of Katie’s elbow, pulling her toward the door.
Meet Me at the River Page 13
