Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  I sat on the back bench of the boat, my face lifted to the sun. Tim piloted the boat in the front—looking back at me every few minutes. I was so content to be on the water. In the past years when we’d come to visit Mother, the boys had gone sailing, fishing, swimming, while I visited with the relatives, cooked the meals and cleaned up, shopped and read books to quell the reminders of the past that rose and fell outside the windows of my home.

  This was the trip Tim had promised me the first day I’d come to Seaboro. I’d arrived an hour early, dangling my legs over the dock. For two days in a row, I’d worn a pair of khaki shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt with the words PEACE, LOVE AND CRABS, which I’d found in the dresser in my room. It was probably left by one of Sissy’s twin daughters, who spent the night with Grandma when Sissy and her husband, Penn, were away. I laughed to think of what Annie and Amanda would say if they saw me now.

  Tim turned at the sound of my laughter and lifted his eyebrows, then raised his hat in a salute. He throttled the boat forward and the wind settled as he steered into a slip in an unfamiliar marina. I stood and walked to the bow, motions I thought I’d long forgotten came to me easily as I jumped to the dock, dropped the side buoys and tied the ropes around the cleats.

  “Where are we going?” From the dock, I looked down at Tim as he grabbed a bag from below the seats.

  “We’re going to an island where you need an escort. It’s owned by a heritage trust and this company will take us out.” Tim pointed at a boat with the words LOWRY LOWCOUNTRY scrawled across the side in black letters.

  I tilted my head. “Island? Why?”

  Tim jumped from the boat, put his arm around my shoulder. “I’m taking you out to the island where they found Danny that day . . . three days later.”

  A numb rush began at my temples and pushed forward and upward through my head; a thin veil of confusion covered my thoughts. “No” was all I managed to mutter.

  “Yes.” He squeezed my shoulders.

  I pushed him away, stumbled backward on the dock. He grabbed me, steadied me before I fell into the river.

  “This was not nice, Tim. You should have told me. . . .”

  “You wouldn’t have come.”

  “Maybe I would have come; maybe I wouldn’t.” I kicked at the cleats, and pain shot through my toe to my ankle. Skipping backward, I hollered at Tim, “You should have told me where we were going. Take me home.” I waved my arms frantically in the air. “Forget it. I’ll take myself home.” I lurched forward, stomped up the dock toward the boathouse and street.

  Laughter rolled across the waves still bouncing against the dock. I twirled around, my big toe throbbing.

  “It is not funny, Timothy Oliver.”

  “Oh, yes, it is.” He ran toward me, grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me in a circle. “Here is the Meridy McFadden I once knew.” He kissed my cheek. “When did she show up?”

  Blood rushed into the numb places of my mind. Tears replaced my anger. “I’m sorry, I’m horrid. I’m sorry, I know you’re trying to . . . what are you trying to do?” I wiped away my tears, laughed.

  “Letting you say good-bye to someone you loved. I know they didn’t let you do that, Meridy. I know you never saw him again or saw where they found him. It’s time.”

  I bowed my head. “I shouldn’t have said those . . . things to you.” I looked out to the sea. “I have no idea what is wrong with me . . . at all.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you.” Tim shaded his eyes with his hands, looked up toward the boathouse. “Here comes our ride.”

  A man in a faded red T-shirt that looked softened by the sun and sea walked toward us. Brown curls flashed with streaks of sun. His steps were long and when he reached us, his face broke into a grin. “Hey, I’m Revvy.” He thrust out his hand. “At your service.”

  Tim shook his hand. “Hi, I’m Tim Oliver. . . . This is Meridy Dresden. Thanks for taking us out to Oystertip. Did your partner tell you why?” Tim glanced at me.

  “Sure.” Revvy nodded, tipped his baseball cap.

  I stared at the man who was about to take us across the sound to what I thought of as Danny’s final resting place. For me, Danny didn’t rest in the Seaboro graveyard, but in the sea he loved. We jumped onto Revvy’s boat. Tim and I sat at the bow as it cut through the sound to open sea. This was the memorial service I’d never attended, the funeral I’d missed when my parents had sequestered me in the house and then shipped me off to Daddy’s parents.

  The day they’d sent me away, I had curled in the backseat of Daddy’s Volvo with my pink-and-white-striped suitcase and my favorite pillow, laden with the sorrow now transformed into a boulder inside my heart. Daddy had played an eight-track tape of Simon and Garfunkel as the scenery changed from shaded oaks and sun-dappled dusty roads to harsh black pavement aimed straight through carpets of south Georgia farms. Cotton fields spread beside us like overblown popcorn bowls. The roads rose and dipped with my stomach. Graveyards of discarded tractors, slanted road signs selling jalapeño jelly, silver corn and homemade peach jam replaced the wooden announcements to buy fresh shrimp and Vidalia onions.

  When Sissy was born, Mawmaw and Grandpa had retired to a north Georgia mountain community and they’d given the Seaboro house to Mother and Daddy. Sissy’s birth was marked by the inheritance of the grand home; my birth was marked by exhaustion. It was only right that now I was being sent away—it didn’t matter anyhow. Nothing really mattered.

  Every once in a while Daddy looked back at me and grimaced, as if he had stomach pains but couldn’t stop the car. I stopped looking back at him; it only caused waves of sorrow, and I’d promised myself that feeling was something I’d never do again. I buried my head in the pillow until the car stopped. I wanted to hear the pure sound of silence in my heart that let me know it felt no more.

  “Pumpkin, we’re here. Wake up.”

  “I’m not asleep.” I grabbed my suitcase, spilled out of the car in the dazed state I’d become accustomed to the past few days. I stopped, listened. No tide, no wind—just the odd silence of the forest.

  I hugged Mawmaw and Granddad and politely thanked them for allowing me to come and stay. I knew this was for my own good. It had been explained to me in various ways: The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage was the town’s historic landmark, and when the graduation party’s bonfire had destroyed the cottage, charges were pressed against any teenager involved in the fire or trespassing. Mother and Daddy had told the police chief, coincidentally a second cousin, that I had not seen the gas thrown on the bonfire—which was determined to be the cause of the fire—and I hadn’t. Friends had also told the police the same thing: Meridy McFadden had been nowhere around; they didn’t know where she’d been. Mother and Daddy had never asked where I was or what I knew. So paralyzed in my armor of grief, fear and isolation from the outside world where blame throwing existed, I had been completely unable to tell the truth. If they’d only asked, I might have told, but they didn’t and the family name was left untarnished.

  Mother and Daddy had also explained to me that the best way for me to get over the devastation and grief was to escape, focus on preparing for university and resting. Avoidance and Repression, the family motto.

  This memory brought a profound sense of loneliness. I reached my hand across the seat to Tim and he leaned toward me. “Whatcha thinking?”

  “Remember when Mother and Daddy made me . . . leave?”

  “Of course.” His words filtered into the wind and were carried back toward Revvy.

  “What?” Revvy cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered toward us.

  “Nothing,” Tim mouthed, shook his head and leaned closer to me. “I remember. You never really came back.”

  “No, I didn’t . . . but I’m here now.”

  Tim squeezed my shoulders, pointed to a growing curve of tree and a thin stretch of beach. “That’s Oystertip.”

  I nodded and tried very hard, unsuccessfully, not to envision Danny’s body washing from the
Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage, carried by the waves and wind to the shore of a barrier island.

  The boat slid into a dock at the tip of the island. Tim jumped off and helped Revvy tie up the boat.

  “You coming?” Tim held out his hand.

  “I don’t know. . . .” I glanced back to the mainland, toward safety. What was I thinking, coming out here? This was insane. My hair was probably a mess from the wind and I was sure I looked like an idiot in a teenager’s T-shirt. My legs were way too big to be wearing shorts—I should’ve worn capris. Yet I knew where I was taking my mind—to the land of preoccupation with looks, perfection, clothing and image—a place far from nature and sea, death and chaos.

  I held up my hand to allow Tim to pull me to the dock. Revvy walked toward a small building at the end of the dock. “Come on, follow me, y’all. I’ll take you to the other side of the island in the Gator.”

  He drove us in what looked like an oversized golf cart, along paths through nature-cluttered acres of land. He explained that the island was a nature refuge. He offered us the names of the nearly extinct plants we passed, animals that scurried into bushes and trees. His explanations and labels didn’t diminish the wildness of everything surrounding us. God, Danny would have loved it here.

  Revvy stopped the cart, pointed to a strip of beach seen in pieces through the palmetto bushes. “I think you told me you needed to go to this area.”

  “Is this the northern tip?” Tim asked.

  “Yep.” Revvy jumped from the Gator. “Now, on barrier islands the sand washes from the north end to the south end, but this is where your friend would have . . . been found.”

  “Washed up,” I said, and jumped to the gray-brown soil soft enough to take me under, swallow me in the unspoiled unruliness of nature. I sucked in my breath and my heartbeat rose higher in my chest. Earth and sky and sea all met in the place where Danny came to rest.

  I turned away from Tim and Revvy and walked toward the beach. No path led to the sea and I pushed away thorns grabbing my legs, yanked holly branches from snagging my hair.

  “Always look down for water moccasins. Be careful.” Revvy’s voice came muffled through the trees.

  “She grew up here. . . .” Tim’s voice called back as he came up behind me; branches snapped under his weight.

  I burst through to blue, so much blue, nothing but blue sea and sky. The land ended abruptly in cobbled mounds of oyster shells and broken clam halves. I stumbled backward to avoid the waves licking the empty shells. Tim ran into my back, his chin bumping the top of my head. “Slow down. . . .” He laughed. “You’re gonna end up swimming back to Seaboro.”

  “This is where . . . they found him?” I swept my hand across the expanse of blue as if it were the only shade of color left on the earth.

  “Yes,” I saw Tim say more than I heard him.

  I squatted, touched a shell, understanding that Danny’s body had drifted here twenty-six years ago. It could not have touched this shell, this place, but underneath the shells and sand lay the same earth. I looked up at Tim—now he was eighteen and had just lost his best friend.

  “Oh, Tim.” I held up my hand.

  He pulled me up to stand. “You know I lost my two best friends that day,” he said.

  I wrapped my arms around him. “I never thought of that. . . . I was so absorbed with all I had lost, I never thought of all you’d lost. I’m a selfish woman who was once a selfish girl. God, Tim, I’m so sorry. I never called or wrote or visited.”

  “Neither did I, Meridy. Neither did I. It was all just . . . too much.”

  “How did you stay here?” I stared into his face. “You’ve built a life. You’ve . . . done fine.”

  “I didn’t leave and I believe it’s easier that way. I see the seasons change, the land change, lives change. It’s all stayed the same for you—it’s all still here and it’s probably like it all happened yesterday.”

  “Tim.” I took a deep breath, sat on a log. “I need to tell you something.”

  He sat down next to me. “What is it?”

  “This’ll take a while.” I looked at him.

  “Got nothing but time.” He threw a shell toward the waves.

  I glanced out toward the endless blue and told Tim Oliver the story I had never told a living soul, never uttered a word about until now. It was time, and the story came out fully formed as I unlocked the door to the sequestered dwelling of hidden words and deeds.

  PART II

  “How many of us dare to open ourselves to that truth which would make us free?”

  —MADELEINE L’ENGLE, Walking on Water

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “A burned child dreads fire.”

  —GULLAH PROVERB

  High school graduation had tasted like the freedom of a dive into the river off the dock behind Danny’s house. We’d waited so long—since we were twelve years old—to taste this freedom, to drink of it, immerse ourselves in it. Free. Free from my mother’s cold stares when my grade point average was three points below Sissy’s. Free from lectures about my irresponsibility for drag-racing Danny’s Camaro on the dirt road behind the old moonshine still. Free from expectations I could never meet and didn’t want to anyway.

  The graduation ceremony had ended as hundreds of thousands of graduations had ended before and since. Hats flew in the air; my friends all swore they’d change the world, that they’d be different and better than those before us. I knew where I was going and why. Danny and I would be married, have babies that swam in the sea before they walked, and live a life of beauty and freedom.

  Danny dropped me off at home for my family celebratory tea before the graduation party on the beach at the old Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage. This tea was a compromise Mother would never have made years before. Lately, though, she appeared too exhausted to argue with me about much—as if I’d finally worn her down after eighteen years of behavior inappropriate for a McFadden lady.

  I kissed Danny good-bye in the car, my graduation hat in my lap, his blue-and-green tassel dangling from the rearview mirror.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven thirty for Tim’s party,” he said.

  “You better come in and say hello to Mawmaw and Granddad.”

  “Can I do that when I pick you up? I need to get on home too.”

  I kissed him again. “You can do whatever you want.”

  “I wish.” He kissed the side of my neck.

  I leaned back on the vinyl seat and stared at him, touched his cheek. “I love you.” I jumped out of the car and leaned in the window, blew him a kiss. “See you at seven thirty.”

  “Have fun at the tea,” he called out the window. Although he couldn’t see me, I stuck my tongue out at the receding green Camaro he’d received for his sixteenth birthday; it was already rusting in the salt-laden air of Seaboro—an air that softened everything it touched, except for my mother’s heart.

  I skipped up the front steps and pretended not to notice Sissy glaring at me through the front curtain pulled to one side. Nothing would put me in a bad mood today. I had graduated and in less than three months I would leave for the University of South Carolina with Danny. Life had just started and even an uptight tea wouldn’t spoil it.

  I stopped in the front foyer when I heard my name; Mother was speaking to Uncle Tom. I adored Uncle Tom—Daddy’s brother—who always took my side in family arguments. He’d even covered my tracks a few times when I’d snuck out at night. Mother was in mid-sentence. “. . . and I would have had five more children if I’d known they’d be like Sissy. But with my luck I’d have five more Meridys.”

  Uncle Tom laughed and my stomach plummeted like an elevator dropping out of control. I held my breath.

  “You don’t mean that, Harriet. I know you don’t. She is so full of life and fun,” Uncle Tom said.

  “She’s worn me out, Tom. Just worn me out. I’ll miss her. I love her. But she is exhausting.”

  “Only because you let her be.” I heard the sound of a kiss.
“Only because you let her be.”

  “Oh, Tom. Always sticking up for her . . .”

  Footsteps approached, but I froze in the hallway. My behavior, my exhausting self, had caused Mother to never have more children. Shame and nausea rose together. I lurched toward the door of the hall bathroom.

  Uncle Tom came up behind me. “You okay, Meridy?”

  “Yes . . .” I leaned against my uncle’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Tom rubbed the back of my head. “You heard your mother.”

  “Yes, but I already knew that. I guess I already knew that about myself.”

  “Oh, she didn’t mean it.”

  I let go of my uncle, stepped back. “Yes, she did. But that’s okay, because I’m leaving in three months and she won’t be exhausted or miserable any more.”

  “Only lonely. Now pay no attention to what she said and go in there.” He waved toward the living room. “And open all those presents.”

  “I don’t want them.”

  I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The framed portraits of my relatives along the wall stared at me with their cold, disapproving glares. God, why didn’t any of them smile back? Someone had once told me it was because everyone had bad teeth in those days. I believed they didn’t smile because they’d all been taught that having fun led to a life of foolishness. First the smile, then eternal damnation. I reached the top landing, ran to my room and slammed the door.

  I wouldn’t go down and open the presents or face the family I had exhausted. I didn’t want to look at my sister in her pressed linen sailor dress with her diamond engagement ring from Penn Warren on her right hand. Of course, Sissy had done it all correctly and been engaged before her junior year in college.

  I pulled off my graduation gown and stood in my pink silk sheath dress in the middle of the room. An unnamed dread bubbled below the surface of my skin, and I believed it stemmed from Mother’s words—I had exhausted her.