One more day, I say to myself. Just one more day, to see what happens.
That voice in my head startles me, and I wonder if I’m getting better. Is “better” the right word? What if, as I get better, healthier, the need to keep Luke here, hovering around this world, fades, and then—he fades too? I think of Carlo, walking away forever. What if Luke does the same thing? What if he’s supposed to? And me, so selfish, keeping that from happening. But to never see his face again—never—I can’t. I can’t!
I won’t. I stand here in the cold. It must be ten degrees or less. My body shivers and my skin stings. But I will myself not to care, not to wish for warmth. I will myself to court this danger, this pain, if only it will bring him back to me.
How can I want to get better if that means sending Luke on his way? At the same time my body rebels, urgently, against the frigid air that feels wrong, violent, in my lungs and against my skin. If I don’t know how to wish Luke gone, I also don’t know how to freeze to death. So finally I turn and walk into the artificial warmth of my artificial home.
LUKE
Don’t ask me why, but I disappear as soon as Tressa comes outside. Then I’m back, but standing in the woods. I can see her through the trees but she can’t see me. I try to walk over to her but it doesn’t work. This could drive me crazy. Her face looks way too pale, like she’s already got frostbite. Plus her lips are turning blue. All I want to do is head toward her but my legs don’t move.
“Where are you?” she yells.
I’m here. I’m right here. But I can’t hear my voice. I don’t think she can either.
Tressa stands there so long that I start to remember what cold feels like. It’s like her bare legs are my bare legs. Why is she wearing a nightgown in winter? It must be ten degrees out. Go inside, I yell.
Suddenly I feel guilty. If I went away like Carlo did, Tressa wouldn’t be out here with bare legs, looking for me, the kid who wasn’t strong enough to stop fighting and stay in this world. The same kid who can’t fight his way toward her now, out of these woods.
Go inside, I yell again. Maybe she hears me, or maybe it’s just that the cold finally gets to her. She turns back toward the house. I see her hugging herself and I can’t stand how much I want to walk over to her.
Maybe I should leave. But I can’t.
TRESSA
At the hospital, before they let me see him, before Francine arrived, I hit the EMT who told me Luke was dead. Maybe she thought I blamed her. It took so long for them to find us, the hiker who’d come upon us having shouted hysterical directions into his cell phone. But that wasn’t why I hit her. In my heart I’d known Luke was gone before the hiker even dialed 911.
The sheriff had driven Carlo to my grandparents, and I rode in the ambulance with the EMTs. On the ride they worked over Luke’s body too constantly for me to get near him. I hunched in a corner. When we arrived at the hospital, they handed the stretcher to medical personnel, and I slid out of the back behind them. One of them, the woman—not much older than me and not much taller—turned and placed one hand on my shoulder. She meant to be kind, to be honest.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You should know, there won’t be anything else they can do.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” she said. “We did everything we could, and I’m so sorry. But he’s already gone.”
Before that moment I had never hit anybody in my life. But I hit her. Even though I already knew Luke was dead, I lifted up my hand, and I balled it into a fist, and I punched her right in the face, knocking her backward. The two other EMTs ran to help her. Part of me wanted to run from them, away from the hospital, screaming at the top of my voice: No, no, no, no, no. But before they could reach me, or her, I felt a pair of arms encircle me, even though nobody stood nearby. A strong, disembodied, invisible pair of arms—wrapped around my waist, holding me steady.
Then the arms disappeared. I stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” I said to the woman. “I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s the shock,” she said, rubbing her jaw. The other EMTs looked at me, dubious. “It’s okay,” she told them. And I left them to walk inside and find Luke, before the rest of the world descended.
LUKE
I can’t get back to Tressa. I don’t know why. I try and I try and I can’t get there, so instead I visit my mom. Sometimes I sit at the table while she eats breakfast. Or else I sit on the couch while she gets ready for school. I like to hear her moving around the house like she’s still got important stuff to do.
One time I sit next to her in the car while she’s driving. I talk a lot, even though she can’t hear me. “I love you, Mom,” I say. Not something I told her much, the last couple years. And then out of nowhere, I tell her, “Hey. Mom. Watch out for Tressa. Okay?”
I know it’s not fair to ask. Probably she’s had enough of looking out for people, especially Hannah’s kids. But I can’t help it, and anyway, she can’t hear me.
I get out of Mom’s car and walk a long way, hours or days or weeks. I’m losing track. On what looks like a very cold night I turn up at my dad’s and find a kitten in the well of a basement window. It’s wedged up into a little ball, barely breathing. What’s a little kitten doing out in this weather? It’ll die out here. I reach in and touch its spindly back. There’s some warmth from the house, which I guess kept it alive so far. But that won’t last long. I know nights like this. If I leave it where it is there’ll be nothing but a kitten Popsicle come morning.
So I scoop it up. Just like I could feel Carlo when he was alive, I can feel the kitten. I hold it to my face. Its nose is freezing. How can I hold a kitten, feel a kitten, but not Tressa? It makes no sense. I close my eyes and try to will myself to Tressa’s room. When I open them I’m still standing outside. I stare up at the stars a moment. I’ll try again.
This time I head for the front door. It pushes open. The alarm panel blinks away, but for some reason it doesn’t go off. I guess I don’t register in the after-Luke, even when I open doors. So I go through the kitchen, up the stairs, past my old room.
When I get to Tressa’s room, she’s sleeping. I wish I could crawl into bed with her and just sleep. The kitten moves a little, like maybe it notices things have warmed up. I put it down next to Tressa.
I get onto the bed too. I lie down and put my arms around Tressa. She doesn’t wake up, but that’s okay. I’m here. I’m here. I close my hand around her wrist, feeling her skin. I know that if I close my eyes this’ll be over. When I open them I’ll be someplace far away. But I can’t help it. I close my eyes, so that just for this minute we can sleep, wrapped up. Together.
TRESSA
The strangest thing: I wake up, and here’s this tiny black kitten—a kitten!—no more than eight weeks old, curled up right on my chest, purring the creakiest little purr I have ever heard. I close my eyes, wipe sleep away, then open them. She’s still here. I’m not dreaming.
I lift her to my face. She opens her eyes, a thousand layers of emerald, a thousand more flecks of jade. “Where did you come from?” I ask, though I know right away. She is a gift to me. I am a gift to her. Luke was here.
I can smell it on my pillow, that sandalwood scent. I can feel it in the pulse of the kitten’s heartbeat beneath my thumb, pressed against her fragile rib cage. Luke was here. Luke brought me this kitten, and he wants me to take care of it. And I know, I know, exactly what he’s telling me: He wants me to stay alive.
I think about what H. J. said, about the chain of events we unknowingly halt or set into motion. I have thought about my life in terms of monumental moments that can’t be undone. My mother’s letter to Paul, all those years ago. That first day meeting Luke. Our last walk by the river. The X-acto blade across my wrists.
I have neglected the seemingly less monumental moments. The decisions we never think of again, the actions that change the course of time without our ever knowing. In another world and time I am a high school graduate. Lu
ke and I live miles away, we walk hand in hand beside Boulder Creek. We have left Rabbitbrush and its inhabitants, our families, behind.
In still another world my mother stayed put. She never sat down at that table, never wrote that letter to Paul. Instead she endured, took care of the twins, stayed with her husband. She never traveled, never met my father. Francine married someone different. Luke and I never existed at all.
But where I sit, in my room. It’s this life, here and now. My mother went away and came back, over and over again. Somewhere in the midst she went to Ireland, so I was born. She left room for Francine, so Luke was born. Luke and I fell in love as easily and naturally and unavoidably as lightning or rain. I may have saved his life a hundred times until the time I didn’t.
One day Luke walked by a field of larkspur and picked a purple flower. Toward the edge of the trail he dropped it. Its seeds blew in a Chinook wind, and now another field waits beneath the snow to erupt in spring.
Beside my ear the kitten lives, it purrs. Every single step of my life led up to this moment. And so I will do as Luke wishes. I will stay alive, at least for one more day. Though the winter continues in pale, white loneliness, and he does not return for two long, cold, and endless months.
part four
staying or going
( 26 )
TRESSA
The world stays mostly frigid—fewer signs of spring and thaw than I have ever known in Colorado. I see Genevieve Cummings wearing a snowsuit at the Mercantile. She’s with her new babysitter, so I go over to say hello. “Genevieve,” I say, kneeling in front of her. She looks at me, her puffy down hood circling a red-cheeked face that shows zero recognition.
Soon word from colleges will arrive. This season is a strange mirror of last year, when Luke and I waited for letters from Boulder. We had a happy celebration the day we both received fat manila envelopes, suddenly tasting it, the time when we would be together, unimpeded, uninterrupted. This time waiting to hear, all I feel is vague curiosity. Katie has already found a house in Boulder with enough room for both of us. I figure I can wait till the last possible moment to break the news that I want to stay in Rabbitbrush. Maybe I can go to one of those online colleges. It’s hard to imagine my mother objecting, since we’ve never been apart for very long. Even though I’m living with my grandparents now, I see her nearly every day because she always drops Matthew off with Grandma for a couple of hours.
It was the kitten that made me finally move out of Paul’s house for good. The morning she appeared, the first thing I did was carry her downstairs to the kitchen and open a can of tuna fish. I knelt beside her, stroking her tiny spine as she attacked the food. The softness of her fur made my heart expand, already falling in love.
“What’s this?”
Paul stood in the doorway, buttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves. He looked scowlish, angry, full of dislike—the look he would always have, regarding me, if there were no one else to see us together.
“It’s a kitten,” I said.
“I can see it’s a kitten. Where did it come from?”
I wondered what he would say if I told him the truth: Luke gave her to me. If ever there were a prototypical nonbeliever, it would be Paul. Then I remembered his faith in my mother, his belief that she might stay in this new life.
“She was crying outside last night, so I let her in. She would have frozen to death.”
Paul stepped over us and headed to the coffee machine. “You can take your mother’s car to school,” he said, “and drop the kitten off at the shelter on the way.”
I didn’t look up, just kept petting the cat. “I was thinking of keeping her,” I told him.
“That’s not possible,” he said brusquely. “Not with everything we have going on here, with the baby. The cat will destroy the furniture.” I wasn’t sure how these two things were connected and almost said so, when Paul added, “Anyway, I’m allergic.”
This probably wasn’t true; he just wanted to present as many inarguable points as possible. The bowl of tuna empty, I scooped up the kitten and held her to my chest. Upstairs the baby woke, his cries filling the house. Paul and I both looked at the ceiling, waiting for my mother’s footsteps. The coffee machine hissed and dripped with dramatic, explosive exhalations. Matthew cried. No footsteps.
“Shit,” Paul said, and left the kitchen. I heard him take the stairs two at a time, impressively fit, impressively youthful. Still holding the kitten to my chest, I crossed the room and picked up the phone. My grandfather answered after two rings.
“I found a stray kitten,” I said. “Paul won’t let me keep her.”
“I’ll be right over,” Grandpa said, joy in his aged voice at a new pet for me and the opportunity to thwart Paul for him. Conceding the movie theater still rankled.
I named the kitten Emily and moved in with my grandparents. A couple weeks later Grandpa bought himself a new truck and gave me his old one so I wouldn’t have to ride the school bus. But within a few days he decided he missed his old truck, shot muffler and all, so now I have a brand-new Toyota flatbed. It’s cherry red, and the color makes me think Grandpa meant to give it to me all along. He always drives blue trucks.
* * *
One Friday afternoon I drive home from school in bright sunlight that does nothing to penetrate the thick, crusted mounds of snow that line the side of the road. I slow down when I pass a young woman—lithe and graceful with a long, fair ponytail. As I pull up alongside her, I see that it is not a young woman at all but my mother, the tips of her ears bright red from the cold air.
I stop the truck and push down the passenger window with a sleek electric buzz. “Hey,” I call to her. “You should have worn a hat.”
She sticks her head through the window and reaches out her hand. “Hi,” she says. “Can I have yours?”
I hesitate for the barest fraction of a second. This particular hat was a gift from Francine. She gave it to me my first winter back in Rabbitbrush, before the nature of Luke and me made itself apparent. If I give the hat to my mother, there is a good chance I will never see it again. Still, my pause doesn’t last long before my natural obedience kicks in. I take it off my head and hand it over.
Mom pulls it over her ears, still looking unsettlingly girlish. “Soft,” she says, approving, and then adds, “I can’t get used to seeing you in this truck.”
“It’s nice,” I agree.
“Dad bought me one, very similar, when I was your age.”
It’s easy to picture her driving off to college in her red truck, leaving town, hoping it was for good. These days every time I see her, I expect her to ask me to come home. But she hasn’t, not once. She’s barely even referenced my absence. If she’s mad at Paul for driving me away by not wanting the cat, I haven’t heard anything about it.
“Where’s Matthew?” I ask.
She narrows her eyes, weary of everybody asking this question. “I sold him to the Indians,” she says. Instantly realizing her mistake, she turns bright red.
“The gypsies,” I say. “It’s the gypsies, in that expression.”
“I realize that.” She looks away, down the road, toward the direction she’d been walking. She can’t wait for me to leave. I imagine Matthew, a squalling little bundle in a basket on Francine’s front stoop. A single flash of confusion would cross Francine’s face before she gathered up the basket and took the baby with an electric air of renewed purpose.
“Bye, Mom,” I say. I wait for her to ask me to come to dinner, or go for a walk. “Bye, Tressa,” she says instead.
I drive away. In the rearview mirror I can see my mother, wearing my hat, her hands in her pockets, standing still, watching me go.
* * *
Heading home, as I pass the Burdick house, I see H. J. shoveling the walk to his front door. I wave, but he doesn’t see me. For a second I think about stopping but decide against it. Inside my grandparents’ house it smells like banana bread just out of the oven. There it is, cooling on the stove.<
br />
“Tressa,” Grandma says. “Sit down.” She slices the banana bread and butters a piece from the block of good, Irish cream butter she always keeps on her counter (covered these days, to protect it from Emily) and slides the plate in front of me. Emily jumps into my lap, her creaky little purr setting immediately to work. Grandma pours me a cold glass of milk—whole, of course—and puts it on the table with the food. These past weeks with her have destroyed all my dieting efforts, but how can I say no? The little girl who still lives inside me, who always wanted to come to Grandma’s and be fed, demands that I accept these offerings.
I close my eyes and bite into the warm, buttered bread. Heaven. Grandma sits down across from me. She takes an envelope out of her back pocket, unfolds it, and shows the front to me. It has an impressive collection of colorful stamps, a bust of the queen in their left-hand corner. I recognize my father’s slanted handwriting, always faint—as if he doesn’t believe his words deserve the full pressure of his pen.
“It came yesterday,” Grandma admits. “I don’t know why I didn’t give it to you. I almost read it myself.”
“Why?” I ask, surprised. My father has never been considered a loaded topic. He’s barely ever been considered at all.
“I’m not sure myself,” Grandma says. She frowns, more thoughtful than displeased. “I suppose things have just been humming along so peacefully these last few weeks, with you here. I didn’t want anything unsettling to happen.”
Without thinking, I close my right hand around my left wrist. I hate the worry that I continue to cause my grandmother, who’s never been anything but kind to me.
“I won’t even read it, if you don’t want me to,” I say.
Meet Me at the River Page 20
