Meet Me at the River

by de Gramont, Nina

  Inside the café a few scattered customers sit eating eggs and drinking coffee. A quick scan of the place tells me each of the ten or so customers is a local, including my stepfather and grandfather, in heated discussion at a corner table. I wave to Mr. Tynan, who is already waiting for me on the other side of the room, then go over to say hi to Grandpa and Paul. I can’t exactly ignore them, even if they didn’t seem to notice me walk in.

  When Grandpa sees me approaching, he rearranges his face into a smile and stands up. He’s so tall that he has to bend at the waist to kiss me. “Tressa,” he says. “My girl. What are you doing here? Did you sleep well?”

  I nod and then say, “Hi, Paul.” He hasn’t bothered to rearrange his consternation and looks up at me, still scowling. Grandpa and he must be arguing about that stupid drive-in movie theater.

  “Hi, Tressa,” Paul says. “What are you doing here? Are you all right?”

  I wonder if everyone will always ask me this last question. My mother says that any time she phones her parents, the first thing they say is, “Where are you?” If I can’t blame them for that, I guess I also can’t blame anyone for that inevitable query directed at me.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m meeting with my English teacher to talk about a project for next term.”

  Paul turns and looks across the room as if he needs to confirm my story. Being a former English teacher himself, Grandpa approves of this appointment. He pats my arm and says, “Good girl.” Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet.

  “No, no,” Paul says, also reaching for his wallet. “I’ll get it.”

  “I have money,” I tell them.

  “Nonsense,” Grandpa says to me, gently, and then not so gently he snaps at Paul: “Put it away,” he says. “I’ll pay for her breakfast.”

  Paul obediently puts his hand back on his coffee mug, and despite myself I feel sorry for him. Grandpa is a formidable opponent. He hands me two twenties, which at the Rabbitbrush Café is enough money to buy breakfast for me and five other people. I know the excess is partly due to generosity—he wants me over-loved, overfed—and partly to make a point to Paul. We don’t need your money, the “we” referring not only to us, the Earnshaws—including my mother—but also to Rabbitbrush itself, the town whose land has enabled the son of ranchers, an English teacher, to spontaneously bestow green upon his youngest granddaughter.

  “Thanks,” I say to Grandpa. “I better not keep Mr. Tynan waiting.”

  Grandpa smiles at me. He doesn’t sit back down but stands watching me as I cross the restaurant. When I reach Mr. Tynan’s table, I wave at Grandpa. He waves back, then takes his seat. Typically, he never takes his eyes off me until he knows I’m settled, just like when he drops me off at Paul’s, waiting in the car until he knows I’ve made it safely inside.

  “Hi, Tressa,” Mr. Tynan says. “How’s your family?”

  “Fine,” I say. “My mom just had a baby boy. His name is Matthew.”

  “Yes, I heard,” he says. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. It’s funny how everyone says that to me. It’s not like I did anything.”

  Mr. Tynan smiles. He’s younger than Paul and Mom by about ten years, and he’s not from Rabbitbrush originally. He says, “They’re congratulating you because babies bring happiness.”

  I think of Matthew’s scrunched little face, and his tiny fists flying up above his head. The other day I went with my mother to the pediatrician and saw another newborn do exactly the same thing, raise his arms up over his head in a startled jerk. It turns out that’s called the Moro reflex. It bothered me to find out that all babies do this—the gesture had seemed so particularly Matthew’s, his own little expression of gusto and surprise.

  The waitress comes to the table. She graduated from Rabbitbrush High the same year as my sisters, so of course she has to ask how they are before she fills my coffee cup and takes my order for oatmeal and fresh fruit. When she heads back toward the kitchen with my ticket, Mr. Tynan says, “So have you thought about what you want to focus on for your project?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I want to write about Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill. And Ted Hughes, of course.”

  Mr. Tynan doesn’t say anything. We look at each other across the table. He has curly light brown hair, just starting in on its first streaks of gray. He blinks several times, then says, “Tressa. Do you think that’s a good idea? Two women who committed suicide?”

  The waitress returns with our breakfast. I stare down at my oatmeal and bananas—what passes for fresh fruit in the dead of Colorado winter—wishing it were a plate of greasy fried eggs and over-buttered toast like Mr. Tynan’s. He watches my gaze and pushes his plate toward me.

  “Here,” he says. “Take a slice of bacon.”

  “No, thanks,” I say.

  “Come on,” he says. “It will show evidence of wanting to live.”

  “Not if you consider the cholesterol.”

  He laughs and pulls his plate back toward him. “Touché,” he says, and dips a toast tip into the runny egg yolk.

  “Look,” I say. “I know that I’m supposed to act like I don’t even know suicide exists. I know everyone wants me to pretend life is rosy and never-ending. But truthfully, suicide’s what I’m thinking about. Not in terms of committing it, but as a student. That’s what interests me right now, that’s what’s on my mind.”

  Mr. Tynan doesn’t look up from his plate. One of the reasons I like him is that he assigns work outside of the standard high school English canon. He doesn’t shy away from books chock-full of profanity and sex. In his class last year we read Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson and Rabbit Redux by John Updike. He assigns Tom Robbins and Dave Eggers. On the first day of class he always tells us that he doesn’t grade on class participation. “I understand what it feels like to be a shy student,” he’ll say. “And I’m as likely as the rest of you to think, I wish that asshole would shut up when someone goes on too long.” Mr. Tynan keeps a pair of old, battered couches in the classroom. Whoever gets to class early enough can sit on one of the couches instead of at a desk. He sometimes stops class discussion to play a relevant song on his CD player—anything from Gregorian chants to Lady Gaga.

  I thought if anyone in the world would let me write a paper about Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill, it would be him. So my heart drops in disappointment when he says, “I’m sorry, Tressa. I don’t feel good about this.”

  I stick my spoon into my oatmeal and move it around without lifting it.

  “It doesn’t seem healthy,” Mr. Tynan continues, “to dwell like that. I’d love to see you study something more . . . life affirming.”

  “Life affirming,” I repeat.

  He looks up from his eggs. His eyes look darker now. They won’t quite rest as he tries to focus his gaze on me, and I recognize guilt in the way they shift. It occurs to me that Mr. Tynan himself would not have a problem with my doing this project. He might even think it’s a good idea. But then what if I end up slashing my wrists again? Or what if I swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, and they find me dead on my bed surrounded by copies of The Bell Jar, Ariel, Birthday Letters, and Lover of Unreason? Mr. Tynan could lose his job.

  He’s thinking of H. J., I realize. I remember the two of them, standing in the hallway at school, the uncharacteristic sternness on Mr. Tynan’s face. And I say out loud, almost before I can stop myself, “Just do it a little bit.”

  Mr. Tynan blinks again, startled. “What did you say?”

  “It wasn’t the worst advice in the world,” I say, not just out of a renegade impulse to defend H. J., but because I believe it. I take a bite of oatmeal. Mr. Tynan puts down his fork.

  “Tressa,” he says. “I think you should make an appointment with . . . ” He trails off, and I know that he was about to say, out of reflex, Mrs. Kingsbury. Instead he picks his fork back up and halfheartedly pokes at his eggs. I slide a piece of bacon off his plate in an attempt to convince him I’m willing to affirm
life, even if our only school counselor can’t humanely be expected to counsel me.

  “Tressa,” he says, trying again. “I hope you’re still talking to someone. It’s so much to go through. I really think you should have ongoing care. Of course it’s not my place to say any of that. Or this. I hope you’re not spending time with H. J. Burdick.”

  “Evie is a friend of mine.” I say this sentence slowly, enjoying the way the words sound. “A friend of mine.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Tynan says. “That’s great. Evie’s great. I’m glad. But the thing about cutting a little bit? That was bad advice. And I don’t want him advising you similarly.”

  I wonder how H. J. could possibly do this. What would he say? Just kill yourself a little bit? Mr. Tynan looks across the restaurant toward Paul. He and Grandpa lean toward each other across the table. They almost look like a married couple, in the midst of a heated argument they don’t want anyone else to hear.

  “Look.” I try to make my voice sound as calm and self-aware as possible. “The last thing I want to do is alarm anyone. This isn’t a cry for help. I just don’t want to pretend all that didn’t happen, that it doesn’t matter. That wouldn’t be healthy either, would it?”

  “I guess not,” Mr. Tynan says, but he doesn’t look convinced.

  “So will you at least think about it?” I say. “Letting me do this project? I’m going to read the books anyway. It might as well be under your supervision, right?”

  “I suppose so,” he says. “But, Tressa. I hope you know that everybody—your parents, your teachers. Everybody. We just want what’s best for you. We may not always say exactly the right thing, but we’re rooting for you. We want you to be well.”

  “You want me alive,” I say.

  He smiles, but it’s a very wry smile, and his eyes suddenly look damp. “Yes,” he says quietly. “We want you alive.”

  I reach out and touch his hand. “I know,” I say.

  * * *

  My mother doesn’t answer her phone, so I head back to my grandparents’. Passing the Burdicks’, I slow down, half hoping that Evie or H. J. will run out and wave me inside. I like the thought of being back in that living room. If I brought up their father’s death, H. J. would talk to me about it. He wouldn’t sugarcoat or pussyfoot. He would answer my questions, straight, no euphemisms or apologies.

  Nobody emerges, and I actually stop the car and let it idle in the road for a minute. H. J.’s station wagon is gone. He and Evie must be off somewhere. I have a hard time getting my head around the story Luke told about their father last night. It seems so cruel, to leave two kids when they’ve just lost their mother. And then on top of that to take the dog along with him. I would never have hurt Carlo, would never have taken anyone else along with me. I think of Assia Wevill, who killed her four-year-old daughter when she gassed herself the same way Sylvia Plath did. This act seems so repulsive. No matter how I try, I simply can’t connect it with anything I have done, ever.

  I feel the same way about Mr. Burdick, but at the same time I also feel a little jealous of him, a little outsmarted. Why didn’t I think of that, driving my car head-on into a stone wall? I remember something another patient at the hospital said, a boy who’d swallowed a bottle of Valium. He told me that wrist-slashing was a naive method of suicide. It hardly ever worked because it had to be done so precisely. “Next time you should hang yourself,” he told me. “Do it right, and SNAP—there’s no time for intervention. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  It’s not like hanging never occurred to me; it just seemed too heavy-handed, so blatantly an execution. Whereas Mr. Burdick was clever, original—engulfed in flames, instant escape, instant death, no window of time for park rangers and EMTs. For rescue.

  * * *

  When I get to my grandparents’, Grandma and Katie sit across from each other at the kitchen table, holding hands. Katie lifts her face and blinks at me, and I see tears running down her mottled face.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  Katie wipes her face with the back of her sleeve. “Oh, I don’t want you to feel bad, Tressa.”

  “What?” I say, my stomach clenching. “What happened now?”

  “It’s Francine,” Grandma says, her voice an odd mix of sympathy and exasperation.

  “What about her?” I say. “Is something wrong?” I hate to think of Francine, alone in that house, without anyone to take care of her. Luke used to heat up soup whenever she had a cold.

  “Yeah, yes . . . ” Katie pauses, as if unsure about saying the next words, but then goes for it. “She’s in agony over Luke. And she won’t see me or speak to me. She hasn’t been taking my calls, and when I went by the house, she asked me to leave. She said it was too painful. She said we’ve taken everything she ever had away from her.”

  Katie starts crying again, and drops her face onto her arms. I look at Grandma, flummoxed. She reaches out and pats Katie’s head.

  Katie gulps before continuing. “I can see why she’d feel that way about Dad and Hannah. I can even see why she’d feel that way about you, Tressa—I’m sorry, but I can. But what does that have to do with me? Why do I have to lose another mother?”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “It’s all my fault.”

  Grandma and Katie both turn to look at me. I see that Grandma wants to say that it’s not my fault, but she doesn’t, waiting instead for Katie. Katie waits a minute and then, instead of contradicting me, wipes her eyes. She says, “H. J. Burdick called a little while ago. He said he invited you over there tonight.”

  I shuffle my feet, not sure how to respond, and try to imagine the conversation Katie had with H. J. Maybe she had a moment of thinking he was calling for her, and then felt let down. Or maybe Jill’s teasing all those years ago was just that—teasing—and Katie never really had any feelings for him.

  After a minute I say, “That’s true; he did invite me.”

  “I don’t think you should go,” Katie says. Something suddenly hardens inside me. I’ve got my own resentments against my sister, who never supported Luke and me. Once she even called our relationship incestuous. I get the sudden, familiar flash—of my family, working to stand between me and possible happiness.

  “Why?” I say, surprised at sounding so defiant when I feel so sincerely contrite about Francine’s rejecting her, which really is my fault.

  “H. J. is a grown man. Who was just fired for impropriety with a high school girl.”

  “You’re making it sound like something different. It’s not like he made a pass at her.”

  “Got the story from the horse’s mouth, did you?”

  “Girls,” Grandma says quietly.

  My first impulse, to say that I’m eighteen and that H. J.’s not that much older, sounds in my head like the wrong line of defense. So I say to Katie, “It’s not like a date, going to the Burdicks’. Mostly I’ve been hanging out with Evie. She and I are friends.”

  “We’re awfully glad for Tressa to have a friend,” Grandma says. Her voice sounds so strained and hopeful.

  “Still,” Katie says. “I don’t feel good about it. If Evie’s your friend, why did H. J. call? I want you to call him, Tressa, and tell him you can’t go.”

  I pause for a moment, remembering that cozy, smoke-scented house. Then for some reason I can’t name—maybe loyalty, or simple tiredness—I nod. Katie narrows her eyes at the obvious reluctance of that movement.

  “Seriously, Tressa,” she says, her voice softening. I think about how everyone wanted me to stay away from Luke. How they discouraged and dissuaded and finally forbade. Katie and Grandma stare at me, and I know they’re sharing this odd sort of déjà vu.

  “Fine,” I say, giving in. “I won’t go to the Burdicks’. And I’m sorry about Francine, Katie. I truly am.”

  “It’s not your fault, Tressa,” she says, but the words sound tired and weary, a mantra she’s had to recite her whole life and never for one second actually meant. Then she stands up and crosses the room. She pi
cks up a brown paper bag from the counter and hands it to me.

  “Here,” she says. “Before I left, I asked Francine if I could have something of his. She gave me this. I want you to have it.”

  I peer into the bag and recognize the garment instantly—a black turtleneck sweater that Luke used to wear with jeans when he wanted to dress up. Forgetting that Katie and Grandma are watching me, I stick my head into the bag as if trying to recover from hyperventilating, and breathe in the long-ago scent of sandalwood, snow, Luke.

  “Thank you,” I tell my sister. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  I leave a message on H. J. and Evie’s answering machine, saying that I can’t come over. When I hang up, I can’t help thinking that if I’d been this obedient last May, Luke wouldn’t have been at the river.

  For a long time I lie awake in my bedroom at my grandparents’, wearing Luke’s sweater, staring at the ceiling. I don’t change into my nightgown or read a book. I don’t do anything but lie here, trying to imagine what the experience of nothingness might be, how total stillness would feel. I might be a tree, or a rock. I would enter a state of permanent semi-dreams, aware of the world around me only in terms of weather, a chill wind, a sideways rain, the hot sun beating down.

  I’m not sure what time it is when I hear barking outside. The night has gone completely dark, and it has been a while since I heard Grandpa’s and Grandma’s quiet movements around the house. I get off my bed and peer out the window without opening it. It takes me a minute to register the dog, my dog, standing down there by himself. At the sight of me his tail wags ferociously, and he barks again.

  When I come out the front door, Carlo doesn’t run up the steps but barks again, so I go down to him. He trembles with happiness at the sight of me. I sit on the damp, snowy ground and cross my legs. He manages to wind his seventy-five pounds into an awkward circle and rest there in my lap, his head pressed up beneath my chin, just like he used to when we were both alive.