Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  A discernible tug rose below my rib cage—a fight about whether to be the girl Mother expected me to be, or to ride the longing and freedom I constantly felt rising within me. I leaned into the mirror and stared at my graduated face. I wanted to run out to the backyard and swing on the tire swing hanging from the gnarled live oak until the wind washed Mother’s words from my mind. Maybe there was a way to ignore the desire to find out what lay around every corner, to ignore the restlessness that rose with the sound of sea and wave, to ignore the want for more and more and more. But if there was a way, I hadn’t found it yet.

  I rubbed my face, pinched some color into my cheeks. I’d go downstairs and be the girl they wanted me to be, then run to Danny and we’d meet our friends at the old Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage to celebrate at Tim’s party. Mother believed I was going to McCall Hampton’s graduation party at the Seaboro Yacht Club, but nothing would be more torturous than that.

  I opened my bedroom door and ran into Tulu, our housekeeper. She was as dark as the chestnuts I collected in a sweetgrass basket. “Sorry, Tulu . . .” I hugged her; I loved the way Tulu hugged back, as if she knew what a hug really was.

  “You ready for your party, lil’ one?”

  I laughed. “I’m not a lil’ one. . . . I graduated today.”

  She leaned her head back and laughed with the sound of pure unrestraint. Tulu always seemed to enjoy me, but at the same time hold a secret she was never willing to tell. “You might be all grown up, but you must never lose the heart of your lil’ one.”

  “Is that another one of your proverbs?” When, I wondered, had I become too old to crawl in Tulu’s lap and listen to a Gullah proverb or ghost story, twist her braids between my fingers?

  “Not a proverb, just my truth.” Tulu lifted a pile of folded sheets from the hall table.

  “Well, if you listen to Mother, I’ve never lost the little one inside, can’t seem to quite get grown-up enough, can I?”

  “Getting grown-up is only part of the way life steals your heart.”

  “Not me, Tulu. Not me.”

  I walked down the stairs. Tulu’s gaze burrowed into my back, and the odd dread I’d felt in my bedroom moments ago returned, bringing a wave of panic. I shook off the emotion and entered the living room, smiled at the family and lifted my cup of tea. Only four more hours until the beach and Danny and our friends surrounded me—I could make it through this to get to that.

  I leaned into Danny’s chest and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer as he steered the car with his other hand. “How was the family party?” he asked.

  “Same. Sissy was perfect. Mother was critical. Daddy smiled and had another Bushmills on the rocks.”

  “And you were your adorable self.”

  “Yeah, tell Mother that. She didn’t like my hair down, she didn’t like the way I talked to Aunt Maddy, and she definitely didn’t like that I was leaving early.”

  “Well, we’re almost home free . . . just a few more months.” Danny drove the car down a dirt road obscured by palmetto bushes and clouds of Spanish moss filling in the cracks of light. Leaves and moss brushed up against the sides of the car until Danny parked among the other half-hidden cars and pickup trucks in the empty field behind the maritime forest that bordered the beach.

  We had almost taken the Boston Whaler from behind Danny’s house, navigating the Seaboro River to the sea, as the Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage sat on the end of a stretch of sand where river met sea. But we hadn’t wanted to worry about the tides, so we’d taken Danny’s car instead.

  I jumped from the passenger side and stretched my arms to the sky. “Only three more months.” My voice rose high and strong, and then stopped at the top of the oak canopy. Something wasn’t right, something felt . . . shifted. I glanced over at Danny pulling a cooler from the trunk. Maybe graduation wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; maybe I wasn’t as excited as I thought I’d be.

  “Danny?” He looked up at me, and my heart swelled with love.

  “What?” He dropped the cooler on the gray dirt. A puff of dust rose, settled at his feet.

  “Is something wrong?” My hands fluttered in the air. “I feel like there’s something . . . wrong.”

  “Nothing wrong here, you?”

  “I guess not.” I moved toward him.

  “Okay, then, let’s get this party going.” Danny walked around to the front of the car and pulled a cassette tape from inside. “Can you grab the tape player?”

  I nodded and yanked the player from the backseat, stepped into rhythm with Danny and headed toward my friends’ voices floating through the trees. The sea’s full voice mixed with the distant cry of a gull. A cluster of our friends stood around a pit in the sand that Tim had dug out with a shovel. He threw clumps of sand at Karen, the girl he’d been trying to hook up with since eighth grade. It still didn’t seem to be working, as she stomped away, rolling her eyes at him. Tim hollered instructions to our other friends as he organized his party at the beach. Bill Murphy piled dried driftwood to one side of the pit.

  Tim nodded at us, shouted, “Welcome to my party.” He pointed to a box in the sand. “I even bought firecrackers.”

  Danny dropped a blanket and cooler onto the sand, and then popped the tape into the player. As Boston blared with as much static as voice, everyone greeted us with lifted beers and “Where’ve you been?”

  “Meridy’s family had a . . . tea.” Danny lifted a few pieces of wood and began to build a pyramid inside the pit.

  Bill tossed a horseshoe crab shell into the woodpile. “Yeah, wouldn’t want to come without her, would you?” He ducked, expecting at least a punch to the arm.

  “Hell, would you?” Danny grinned and threw another log onto the pile.

  Bill groaned and grabbed me by the waist. “You’re lucky I love you guys so much or you’d make me sick to my stomach.” He lifted his beer, guzzled and then crunched the can on his head.

  “Bill, you’re crazy.” I ducked out from under his arm. “You’re gonna get kicked out of the Citadel in the first week.”

  “If only I’d be so lucky.” Bill turned around. “Beer, I need a beer, someone.”

  Tim—we’d all stopped calling him Timmy in eighth grade by threat of death and dismemberment—tossed a beer from the cooler. Bill caught the can in midair and yelled to the night sky, “We did it—we survived Seaboro High School.” Then Tim lit the logs and driftwood; the fire reached for the stars just like I felt I was ready to do—burst skyward.

  At least thirty of our friends, who’d all said they were going to McCall’s party, lingered around the coolers, the fire and the warmth of our common celebration. I thought of poor McCall staring out the door looking for all the people who’d said they were coming. She probably had her hair up in a bow and wore one of those dresses that looked like the material came from my grandmother’s couch.

  Fifty yards away from the roaring fire, the old Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage leaned toward the sea. The strip of sand the cottage stood upon had once been wider, longer. If I squinted, I could see the quaint cottage as it must once have been—white rockers on the railed porch facing the sea, a split-cedar shake roof sloping down to protect the lighthouse keeper and his family. Now the porch sagged and pieces of the roof had long since washed away like an old man losing his hair.

  The cottage was located behind barricades of yellow tape that read CAUTION, metal signs warning trespassers of being prosecuted and a list of the dangers of the crumbling house. None of us had ever paid attention to the warnings. There was no counting the number of Seaboro teenagers who had lost their virginity on the disintegrating heart-of-pine floors, or the parties held in the wee hours of the morning when parents thought each child was spending the night elsewhere. The cottage held memories of guiding ships in the early 1800s, the Civil War, hurricanes, the encroaching sea and the hearts of Seaboro youth who found the cottage a refuge while growing up.

  The wind had risen along with the song a
nd drink. It was graduation night and the Seaboro police would probably ignore the sounds of partying coming from the area of the Keeper’s Cottage.

  Bill danced, swaying to music that someone had changed to something softer, dampening the mood and slowing down the party. Tim appeared to finally reach his goal with Karen, who moved with him toward the cottage in a half dance, half stumble.

  I laughed and pointed at Tim, whispered to Danny, “Looks like he’s finally got what he wanted. Only took him five years.”

  Danny squeezed my hand. “It’s about damn time she woke up to Tim’s better attributes.”

  “Which wouldn’t be dancing.”

  Couples started to pair off in the darkening night. Others huddled and whispered and retold the stories of high school. Memories and gossip gathered in a farewell celebration that seemed as sad as it was joyful. We had survived, but survival also meant separation. Some were leaving for college, others staying to run family businesses, or to attend the local junior college. Everything either had changed or was just about to change.

  We stood on the cusp of before and after and we all recognized it. Nothing would be the same and we made promises that we understood we couldn’t keep—“Best Friends Forever” carved in the sand in a futile attempt to stay what would easily be washed away with the next high tide.

  Bill sidled up next to Danny and me. “This is just so . . . sad.”

  “Really, you think so?” I said. He’d obviously had too many beers. “I think it’s just . . . awesome.”

  “That’s because you know what you’re doing, where you’re going and who you’re going with. Not me. I have no idea what to do next.”

  Bill had been the quarterback, the homecoming king and the next best thing to a celebrity in Seaboro. But in the first football game of his senior year, he’d torn a ligament in his knee and dislocated his hip, and he hadn’t been recruited for a single college team—his only goal.

  “You’ll figure it out, Bill.” I hugged him. “You can do a million more things than play football.”

  “I don’t think so.” He lifted his head and howled at the moon, then looked down at me. “I really don’t think so.”

  I wanted to cry for Bill, for his lost dreams, but instead he shouted, “Hey, let’s get this party back on track.” He ran back toward the cars. “What we have here is a dwindling fire and a dying party.”

  As cheers rose, I snuck closer to Danny’s side. With ABBA playing in the background, with Danny breathing the same air, with friends laughing and mingling on the beach while deciding who was worthy of midnight kisses once the fire went out, I truly believed life would always feel this good, would always be so right. I sighed.

  “You okay?” Danny asked.

  “More than.” I ran my fingers through his hair and it was his turn to sigh.

  He wrapped his arms around me. “Come here, you.” He nuzzled my neck, picked up a box. “Let’s set off those firecrackers.” He grabbed a handful. “Follow me.”

  I did; I always would. He led me to the edge of a sand dune that dipped toward a tangle of sea oats with a long stretch of fragile picket fencing meant to stop erosion.

  Danny pulled me behind the sand dune, where we could hear but not see our friends. He wrapped his arms around me. “My sweet Meridy.” We tumbled down to the sand.

  Our love had always been sweet and stolen in the natural world that surrounded us, as if the land brought us together as much as the love buried inside us. He unbuttoned the top of my embroidered white peasant blouse I’d bought six months ago and saved for this night, ran his finger across my collarbone. Even with the evening sun still warming the sand, I shivered.

  “Meridy, I can’t believe we’re finally here . . . done, graduation.”

  “Hmmm.”

  He ran his callused fingertips along my skin. “Remember the day we met?”

  “Yes,” I murmured.

  “You know you woke up my heart that day.”

  Danny wasn’t given to romantic words; he just loved me in the way he treated me, held me, took care of me. I leaned away from him. “That is the . . . nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  He laughed. “Did it come out right? I practiced, ya know.”

  I punched the side of his arm. “Way to ruin the most romantic moment I’ve ever had.”

  “But I mean it. I’ve thought about it a lot this week . . . you know, with graduation and our whole life ahead of us and all that. I mean, who stays with the girl they fell in love with when they were twelve? Nobody. And I sorta started to wonder why we did, how we could. And the only answer I have is that when you jumped off that dock with that damned green dress flying over your head . . . you woke my heart up, so then you got to keep it.”

  I buried my face in his neck. “I love you. I swear you’ve saved my life. I don’t know how I could’ve survived my family without you.”

  “Actually . . .” He kissed each corner of my lips, ran his mouth down my neck. “You probably would’ve gotten along a lot better without me. . . . I’m half the damn problem.”

  “No, you’re the solution.”

  Danny ran his finger inside my blouse, lifted my frilled denim skirt to my knees.

  I gently pushed him away. As much as I wanted him, as much as my heart stretched and reached for him, there were too many people around. “Danny, let’s shoot off those firecrackers. . . .”

  He moaned and pulled me close. “You make me crazy, Meridy.”

  “Good.” I smiled.

  Danny grabbed a handful of firecrackers. I stepped back; the things scared me, but Danny loved them. He buried a tube in the sand, lit the fuse and grabbed my hand as we ran back to watch it fly upward, sputter and explode in the naked sky in a spray of blue and white. The sparks fell to the sea and sizzled on the dark waves.

  Cheers came from the crowd at the other end of the beach as they watched our display. I looked at Danny’s face lit in the scattered light of the gibbous moon and flying sparks of the firecrackers.

  Finally he grabbed the last one, larger and wider than the others. “The monster,” he said, handed me the lighter. “You do this big one. It’s called a Typhoon—it has streamers. Should be cool.”

  I lit the fuse; a sense of freedom and daring grabbed me as we backed away. Danny pulled me farther back this time, toward the Keeper’s Cottage.

  Wind rose with the ascension of the firecracker, caught the streamers in its breath and threw the sparks and scattered embers across the sky, across the beach and to the roof of the Keeper’s Cottage. I gasped, grabbed Danny’s hand.

  “Oh, shit.” Danny released my hand, backed up.

  It happened so fast—the fire, the screams—and I didn’t know until later, much later, that at the same moment I’d lit the Typhoon, Bill Murphy had thrown a can of gasoline onto the bonfire in an attempt to reignite the dwindling flames. Nature joined forces in wind, flame and dark night to create a memory burned into my mind—a branding of guilt.

  The flames fed off the rotting cottage’s roof, and the embers landed on small piles of brush. Fire leaped off the cedar in dancing patterns, reaching like a tongue over the house.

  Danny stared at me; the fire was spreading so quickly that I hadn’t yet spoken a word. Danny ran toward the cottage even as I reached out to stop him. I screamed, but the wind and waves swallowed my voice.

  I shivered on the top of the sand dune as Danny disappeared into the chaos of the night gone wrong. This was it—the cause of the dread in my belly before the party. In the dark-blanket night now filled with flame, the cottage leaned inward from the encroaching flames carried in whole pieces by the wind.

  I ran to the side of the cottage where the fire now dominated the night. I ran into Lilly McIntyre—her mouth opened, closed. I grabbed her shoulder. “Go get help. Call for help.”

  Lilly’s voice came strangled. “Bill . . . he threw a gas can in the fire and it went up as tall as the sky, I swear to God, Meridy. He was swallowed by the fire. . . . He
won’t answer me. He won’t move.” She pointed toward the sea. “He’s just lying there.” Lilly turned and ran toward the parked cars.

  Fragmented sentences hammered into my mind like metal spikes. My feet carried me toward the cottage, toward the stench of burning wood and the screaming voices of helpless panic.

  I lowered my head; I’d once heard that if you stayed below the smoke, you were okay.

  Danny.

  In the Cottage.

  I ran around to the side of the Keeper’s Cottage, crawled when I choked on the black smoke, the sand rising in the current of the fire. Smoke poured through the gaping wound of the side door to the kitchen. I pushed my head in the door, screamed, “Danny . . .” Louder. “Danny!”

  Only the sounds of hissing, creaking and a faint muffled human groan reached my ears. I pushed on, feeling my way past the cracked countertops and empty cupboards into the back hall leading to the two cramped front rooms. I crawled down the hall, inhaling only to scream Danny’s name again and again.

  I bumped into something hard, firm . . . a leg. I grabbed it. Danny. I pulled myself up. “Get out! Get out!” I screamed at him. I couldn’t see him, but I knew him.

  His arms reached for me, lifted me up, threw me over his shoulders. “Meridy, get the hell out of here. Now.”

  “Come with me, come with me,” I hollered, pumped my legs against him. I choked, lifted my head to try to find his eyes, just his eyes, before the descending blanket of darkness completely enveloped me. I couldn’t find his face, couldn’t catch my breath as he ran carrying me.

  He placed me down on the sand behind the dune, then turned again toward the flames. I reached for him and tried to find words inside my parched throat. “Stay with me,” I said, but I heard only cracked sounds of desperation. And then the darkness became complete.

  Sirens screamed inside my head; my throat ached for water. I tried to open my eyes but found them incapable of seeing more than a sliver of light. My hand banged against metal, voices came loudly through the fog of what felt like sleep but was something far from sleep.