Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  The box Tim had made for my seventeenth birthday sat on the coffee table in the drawing room. I’d turned away from the window and picked it up.

  Danny joined me. “Damn, Tim gave you a nicer present than I did.” He walked over, cuddled my neck.

  “Never,” I said. Danny had given me a charm bracelet with a single shell on it. I held my arm up and shook the bracelet. “Never.”

  “Well, you can put all your favorite stuff in here.”

  “Our stuff,” I said, and found his lips.

  Then somehow we spent an entire afternoon writing our dreams for the future on small scraps of paper and stuffing them in the box. We took our two favorite pictures of each other and shoved them in there also. Tulu came in twice and laughed her pure laugh.

  “Now,” Danny said, lowering me to the floor. “When we are old and gray, when the kids are grown, we can look back and see if we’ve made all those dreams come true.”

  I pushed him off me. “Danny, Mother will be home any minute. Get up.” I jumped up and laughed. The mere thought of Mother discovering Danny and me together would ruin anything special about it.

  Now I ran my fingers across the old papers as if they might disintegrate. I pulled out the first torn sheet. “Be a vet,” it said in all capital letters. That was how Danny had lived his life: in all capital letters.

  The next piece of paper contained my crooked, loopy handwriting with a heart for the dot of the letter i. “House on the beach with porches galore.”

  I took the papers out one by one: dreams of a boy and girl long, long gone. “Have a boat,” he’d written; “Teach kids,” I’d written. “A big bed overlooking the ocean,” he’d written. “A library overflowing with books,” I’d written. We’d made wishes for cars that weren’t even made anymore, for friends I’d since forgotten about.

  I had known what I wanted so surely that I had written it on scraps of paper and just believed it’d happen. The naïveté of the pitiful girl who had no idea of the tragedy awaiting her shone through the carefree dreams she believed were possible.

  Inside this box were two entirely unlived lives, but one of us was still alive.

  A slicing pain cut through my middle and I bent over the carpet and lay down. So I had accomplished my goal—when Danny had died, so had this girl. But she really hadn’t, because here she sat on her childhood carpet reading her childhood dreams.

  I reached inside the box and pulled out the first picture—of me on my sixteenth birthday at a surprise party my parents had given me at the roller-skating rink when skating was the in thing and I owned a pair of pink leg warmers. Light surrounded my hair—stick straight and pulled into a barrette in the back. Although I couldn’t see the clip, I remembered it was red plastic with a small hole in the middle. My hair fell to my chest, and light surrounded me from a disco ball above me that wasn’t visible in the photograph.

  Danny had loved this picture—said I looked like an angel—and now, at forty-something, I agreed with him. Ah, to look like that again. More important, to feel like that again.

  I stared at this girl and I felt it all—I was sixteen; I loved my leg warmers; I loved Danny; I loved my friends; I loved when the skate DJ played “Maybe I’m Amazed” by Wings.

  I pulled out the picture of Danny but held it upside down for a moment. I fingered the paper, savoring the moment, and then flipped it over. I took a sharp breath and felt a quiver under my lungs. I tasted the salt air, heard his fingers whisper across my skin moments after I’d taken this picture. We’d been on a family picnic on the shores of Seaboro Beach—the McFaddens and Garretts attempting some type of bonding, although the families were as different in origin as the sunrise and sunset.

  In the picture, Danny stood at the edge of the sea, his hand outstretched to me, his palm flat. His mouth was open and I remembered what he’d said: “Put down that camera and come swim.” I’d stepped back and shot this picture and then he’d splashed me. I’d dropped the camera on the beach blanket while pretending to fight his attempts to pull me into the ocean. Of course he’d won; I’d let him.

  The warmth of the sea, the feel of his skin next to mine, our families laughing at us.

  I curled into a ball and tucked the picture into my palm. I closed my eyes and let sorrow cover me, not only for this boy who was gone, but also for the girl in the pink leg warmers who wanted to “teach kids” and have a “house with porches.”

  A rustle of silk and the soft vibration on the floor told me Mother had entered my room. I jumped up.

  “Meridy, are you okay?”

  “Yes, yes.” I wiped at my face; the photograph fluttered to the floor.

  Mother advanced to the photograph I’d dropped, and picked it up. A long moment of silence spread across my room like the hum of a vacuum. She didn’t look up when she spoke. “You can’t live in the past.”

  “I’m not living in it. I’m . . . remembering it, mourning it maybe.” My voice came out in a whisper, although I hadn’t meant it to. A wave of emptiness rose. “Or maybe just looking at it.”

  “You have to worry about what you have now, Meridy. You can’t just throw it away . . . Don’t.”

  “I’m not throwing anything away, Mother.” I waved my hand toward the scattered papers on the floor.

  “All it does is bring pain and bad memories and—”

  “It doesn’t bring just bad memories. It brings back great memories too.” A thought came to me, as though looking at these things of the past gave the memory permission to return with joy. “Remember when Daddy took Danny and me out on the boat, and we got lost in the fog and landed on a sandbar and had to wait until the tide came back in to go home? We laughed until our faces hurt. Remember when Danny tried to help you out by cutting the back lawn because the gardener was sick, and he cut down your dormant prize rosebush because he thought it was dead?” I was whispering now. “There is so much good in the past you want me to forget.”

  Mother bent over and picked up the photograph of me. “Your sixteenth birthday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” She rubbed her finger across the picture. “You were so beautiful that day, so gracious to your guests, so . . . poised.”

  “What?”

  “I was so proud of you that day, proud of the woman you were becoming.”

  I didn’t remember the day exactly like that. “I was grounded the next day for breaking curfew that night.”

  “Probably.” Mother looked up at me.

  I looked out the window; an osprey dipped below the tree line and rose again with a fish dangling from its feet. Alive—everything was so damn alive here. At home I’d stare out my back window into my neighbors’ fence line and the tip of their pool slide. “You know,” I said to Mother, “I had very simple dreams. I wasn’t all that complicated.” I indicated the scraps of paper. “I didn’t ask for an Oscar or dream of a Pulitzer . . . or a house big enough to hold a clan of families.”

  “That was the girl you were then. . . .” Mother held up the picture. “Then.”

  “The girl I was then is part of the woman I am now.” I understood only it as I said it, and a sensation appeared in the middle of my heart—the kind I felt standing next to rivers—the possibility of change, of life.

  The phone rang in the hall and Mother turned toward the door, then back to me. “You should let all this go, Meridy. Danny is—”

  “Dead. I know. Danny is dead.”

  “I was going to say gone,” she said.

  “But I’m not.”

  Mother closed her eyes. “Thank God.” And then she turned and walked out of my room.

  “But I’m not,” I repeated.

  The curriculum papers lay heavy in my hands. I stood on Tulu’s porch and listened to her footsteps labor down the narrow hallway. When she opened the door I was already holding the packet out like a gift I was in a hurry to give.

  “Hello, lil’ one.” She hugged me while ignoring the papers. “You came back.”

  �
��Are you okay, Tulu?” I touched the side of her head where a white bandage, the size of a credit card, covered a shaved spot on her head.

  “Oh, I’m such a klutz. I fell on the porch and . . . I’m fine. They made me stay in that nasty place overnight just to prove I’m okay.” She touched her head.

  “Mother told me you refused tests. You should’ve let them at least x-ray it.”

  “Why? So I can spend my children’s money on something unneeded? No. I’m fine. What are you doing back here?”

  “I came because I heard you were in the hospital.”

  “That is the only reason?” She winked.

  Of course it wasn’t the only reason—I needed her. “There’s more. I wanted to give you this curriculum—see if I’ve covered it all. I really want to do this right. I want the children to see the culture the way it really is—all the things of the past that still matter.” And just like Tulu’s, the words I spoke were as much about me as about the papers.

  “Come in, come in.” She swept her arms across the doorway.

  I wanted to sit outside on the porch, away from the reminder of her poverty and dilapidated house and furniture. Porches always seemed so much more friendly and . . . equal. I didn’t have a single porch on my house in Atlanta; I had a deck, but not a porch—there was a difference.

  “Can we sit out here?” I pointed at a chair.

  “Sure,” Tulu said.

  We sat facing each other in shredding wicker rocking chairs. I watched her face as she flipped the pages and read through my work. The curriculum was still handwritten and I felt like I was ten years old and waiting for her approval on how well I had made my bed.

  Finally she raised her head. “Lil’ one, this is wonderful. You have captured the essence of the Gullah culture. You have a gift—you know that—of communicating in a way a child can understand. We must always know the entire story to understand any of it. You used everything I told you and made a story—you know how to tell a story.”

  My heart swelled. “Really?”

  “Really, really. But do you mind if I show you one thing more? I feel that you’ve left out a few important things.” She stood.

  “I’d love to see something more. . . .”

  She had me drive to the curved edge of Seaboro where a Gullah graveyard sank into the ground between a disintegrating iron fence and the riverbank. Here the river ran wild, fast and alive, full of songs to the sea. Trinkets lay on gravestones: broken pots, bowls and stopped clocks. Fresh plants and herbs were scattered among the overgrown weeds and thick rush grasses. Tulu held my elbow as we walked toward the graveyard’s center.

  I spoke first. “When we were kids we’d dare each other to come here at night and touch the stones.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you do.” I laughed and immediately felt irreverent. “Sorry.”

  “Stop being sorry. Stop now. You must laugh again—stop hiding your laughter. Do you know why we build our graveyards by the water, by this river?”

  “No . . . ,” I said.

  “So that our souls will be carried across the sea to our home in Africa.”

  “Home . . .”

  “Yes. The river runs past this graveyard and out to the sea. The most dangerous part of the river is where it meets the sea—where the tides run in and out and create a dangerous current.”

  I nodded, but she didn’t look satisfied.

  “Ah, I can’t make you see, can I?”

  “See what?” I looked past her to see if there was something behind her I was missing.

  “See that the river is our life, a flow that takes us home. And where it meets the heart, it is the most turbulent.”

  My breath caught in the bottom of my throat. I stood very still. I hadn’t let life reach my heart in a very long time. It was too dangerous, risky and turbulent. I had let meager trickles of water run by and had withheld the remainder.

  “I do see,” I said, my voice as soft as the moss below my sandals. But I needed to absorb this revelation alone, not discuss it in the middle of the graveyard. I took a deep breath and leaned down, touched a broken clock.

  “And the clocks, trinkets and containers . . . what are those all about?” I asked. “I bet kids would love to know about that.”

  Tulu retreated from the quiet moment as well. “Most of the items are water symbols. And the clocks are usually stopped at either twelve—for Judgment Day—or at the time of death. I wanted to show you one more thing. . . .” She ran her hand over a small tombstone. “This was my first child—she lived only two days.”

  “Oh, Tulu.”

  “Her name was Anyika. The only thing I feel you’ve left out of your class lectures is the meaning of names—one can easily lose the right to a name. Names have power.” She tapped the gravestone with her forefinger. “My child’s name meant ‘She is beautiful.’ ”

  “Oh. I’ll definitely include a section on names.”

  “You can see that we respect our graveyards and our names. We believe the dead are still with us—that their souls go to God, but their spirits stay on earth.”

  “Tell me you don’t believe in ghosts, Tulu.”

  “Do you know the ghost story from the Keeper’s Cottage?”

  “Not Danny . . . ,” I whispered. “Not about him, right?”

  “No . . . back in the mid-1800s, the lighthouse keeper had a daughter, Lilly. They say she was as beautiful as the flower she was named after. A man commissioned from the government came to check on the lighthouse and fell in love with her. He was married and though he promised to one day return for her, he never did. They say Lilly still wanders the tower looking for him over the sea.”

  “The tower is gone. . . . It fell that night.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “She can’t look for him anymore.”

  “He wasn’t coming back for her,” Tulu said.

  I stared off toward the river, which ran into the sea a few hundred yards away. “What are you trying to tell me? Tell me in plain words, Tulu.”

  “Stop looking for something you already have, Meridy. Stop looking for a ghost of the past to give you permission to fully live your life. Stop wandering and waiting, or you are no better off than Danny or Lilly—ignoring what is alive and here for what is dead and gone.”

  Anger that often comes with painful truth ran over my arms in a chill. I gritted my teeth as I spoke. “I’m not waiting for permission or someone to come so I can live my life. I am living my life. . . . I’m here to do that.”

  “Then do it.”

  Tulu appeared exhausted, faded. I shivered in the warm afternoon. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine—it is you I worry about. You can’t continue this way with a dead heart. I see nothing of you anymore—you might as well be here.” She spread her hands across the hand-carved stones.

  “No!” I think I screamed the word.

  Tulu smiled. “There you are, Meridy. Let’s go home.” She ran her hand again over the top of her baby’s gravestone.

  When we arrived at her house, I sat in the rocker on the front porch. “Thank you for this.” I held the papers up to the air. “Thank you.”

  “See what it is telling you.”

  “Okay, I’ll try. Tulu?”

  “Yes.”

  “I opened the box.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “A bunch of stuff I’d wanted when I was seventeen years old.”

  “No, Meridy.” She leaned forward and her eyes came awake, sparkled. “Those are the smaller pieces that only add up to who you were. Take the sum total of what they tell you. It is not things or accomplishments you wanted. It was a value. Those pieces of paper won’t tell you what to do, but they just might tell you who to be.”

  “No, they just told me all the things Danny and I wanted. You know, houses, jobs, porches . . . all that.”

  “No, those are what came from who you wanted to be. Those were just the result of the being. One tree does not
make a forest—look at all of them.”

  I turned away, confused again. She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Lil’ one. I need you to promise me something.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to promise me that you will allow the river to reach your heart, not stop life’s flow as you have.”

  “What?”

  “Just promise me.”

  “Okay. I promise.” Frustration overwhelmed me. Enough of the proverbs and half-told truths. I stood, leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Thank you for everything, Tulu.” A porch board beneath my feet crackled; I jumped back. “Tulu, you can’t live . . . like this.” I grabbed her hand.

  She didn’t need any help. “Oh, dearest lil’ one, you always thought it was me who was the poor one. You thought it was me when it is your heart that is asleep—it is you who is poor.”

  Poor, I’d never once thought of the McFaddens as poor. “We were the poor ones,” I said, closed my eyes and leaned my forehead to hers.

  “Only in spirit and truth,” she whispered.

  I sat in the car for long moments before driving away; I felt that I needed to go tell Tulu one more thing, or maybe hear one more thing. I shook off the thought and stuck the key in the ignition and drove back to Mother’s house. Maybe we McFaddens really were the poor ones all along.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’ve been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots.”

  GULLAH PROVERB

  I drove home from Tulu’s slowly. I passed the Seaboro Library and made a sharp turn into the parking lot. Mother didn’t have Internet access and I wanted to discover what my name meant, what power my name might have.