Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  “A beautiful mess.” I walked over to the computer. “It is so full of you.”

  He walked up behind me and clicked a button, and the Internet glared from the screen. “Yeah, so full of me that my ex-wife couldn’t find room for herself here.”

  I typed in a search engine, looked up at Tim. “No, she could have found room just like I could have found the words to tell Beau the truth. If you really need or want to find something . . . you will. Even if it is too late.” I sighed, typed in, “Name meaning Meredith,” and stepped back from the computer.

  Tim read what I wrote. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to know what my name means.” I punched a few keys until I found the name Meredith and clicked on it. A Welsh name meaning “sea lord” flashed on the screen.

  “So you’re a sea lord. That makes a lot of sense, except your name isn’t Meredith,” Tim said.

  “Mother said my name came from Meredith. I asked her after Tulu told me that names have power . . . that someone could lose the right to their name.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you’ve lost the right to your name. You’ve always been . . . I don’t know . . . part of the sea.”

  “Used to be.”

  “Was, is, still are . . . whatever. You’re still lord of the sea even without someone else to tell you. Now let’s go—we’ll miss watching Weatherly’s husband make a fool of himself. He and his opponent each get to talk about why they want to be mayor . . . should be interesting.”

  “Okay, then, let’s go.” His elbow brushed my shoulder as I turned off the computer; his hand reached down for my hand as I got out of his chair. “You heard about Tulu, right?”

  Tim nodded. “I’m sorry. I know you cared a lot about her.”

  “I feel like we weren’t done. She had so much to give.”

  “I know.” He nodded.

  “I ran to her house. I thought she’d like to know that I’d figured out some of what she’d been trying to tell me. I knew she’d have more and more to say. Before she died, she tried to warn me that opening up my heart would be dangerous. Maybe she knew.”

  “Knowing Tulu, she probably did know she was leaving. But I guaran-damn-tee that she didn’t want you to close up your heart.” He hugged me and we left his house.

  Tim drove his pickup truck and it wasn’t until I had walked over the new boardwalk and tossed down a plaid blanket on the sand that I realized we were on the same beach where we’d celebrated graduation those long years ago.

  The Keeper’s Cottage that had once squatted on the end portion of the beach was missing. Blankets, tents and tables were scattered across the beach. On the firmer ground of grass and pine straw a large stump from a once-proud live oak stood with a tent over it. Streamers hung down the sides of the tent and danced along the ground. I pointed to it. “What’s that for?” I asked Tim.

  “Weatherly’s husband, Mitchell, will get up there to make his speech—try to make us all feel like this is an old-fashioned political party where the candidates get up on their ‘stump.’ ”

  “Very clever.” I sank to the blanket and stretched my legs out. The day’s heat was now hidden in the deeper parts of the sand, and a tepid breeze—the most we could hope for—whispered in from the sea. “I might not get up from here all night. This is so . . . nice.” I dug my toes into the sand.

  Tim sat down next to me. “Nothing like a little sea and sand for some perspective, huh?”

  I nodded. “Everything seems upside-down lately. Everything. I never thought Harland would leave Cate, you know? Never. She’s funny and smart, and like me, she never forgot what she wanted or who she was. And Harland just decided he’d try something new. I never thought I’d talk or think about the Keeper’s Cottage again. I never thought I’d come back to Seaboro . . . You just never know what’s going to happen or what people are capable of doing.”

  “Meridy, I have a very hard time believing that you would’ve fallen in love with a man who is capable of cheating on you.”

  “You know what? I probably didn’t. But people forget who they are. . . . I’ve seen that. The numbing quality of life makes us forget who we are, and then we’re doing things we never would’ve done otherwise. After Danny died, I thought I’d never fall in love again. Ever. I’d resigned myself to that. Then I met Beau. . . .”

  “And you fell in love.”

  “Not at first. In the beginning I admired him. But I remember the day I knew he loved me.” I closed my eyes and felt it, remembered the feel of my dorm room quilt under my legs. I opened my eyes. “You don’t want to hear this, do you?”

  “Oh, yes, I do.” He stretched and leaned back on his elbows. “If I’ve missed all this, at least I can hear about it.”

  “It was my junior year at university and I’d been elected by my sorority to run for class president. I was scared to death. I was incredibly nervous about my speech in front of the students and faculty at the Student Forum Center. This was not the kind of thing I asked for or even wanted. I called Beau—he was in law school at the time and I told him I didn’t think I should’ve been elected to run. He told me my magnetism bubbled under the surface and that other people saw it too but didn’t know what it was. . . .”

  Tim nodded. “Yep.”

  “I told him I’d been chosen because of my grades and volunteer work, but he told me how I had no idea, that I was so much more than the sum of my grades and accomplishments. And then I knew he loved me—really just me. You know?”

  “I know,” Tim said.

  “But then I kept trying harder to earn this undeserved love from him. You’d think trying to be good would make you a better and better person, but all it did was make me obsessed with my image and pretense, and then I couldn’t find any feeling at all, besides the feeling that I cared what other people thought of me. And now that I want to get past that, through that falseness, I might have lost him. And even though I’m sure it’s my fault for letting him think I was more than I really was—I set myself up for the fall. I wish there was a way back to my heart without ruining who Beau and I are together. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “You make his love sound like some kind of reward. Like you won his love with good behavior or something.”

  A seagull dived, emerged with a fish dangling from its mouth. “I don’t know.”

  “Meridy, this is exactly what happened to me; my wife left me when I wouldn’t conform to who she wanted me to be. It doesn’t have to be that way. It just doesn’t.”

  “Well—I guess it is.” I dug my toes into the sand. “Ugh, enough of this . . . go get us something to drink.”

  Tim jumped up. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I leaned back on the blanket and stared out to the sea I was definitely not the lord of. What I didn’t tell Tim was that I had also known then that I loved Beau.

  I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes. And Beau had loved me well. This restlessness had nothing to do with how well he’d loved me or taken care of me.

  Sand scattered across my skin and I startled, sat up. Tim and Weatherly looked down at me.

  “Hi there, Meridy, long time no see,” Weatherly said in a cultured voice she’d mastered by sixth grade.

  I stood up, offered a hug. “It’s good to see you, Weatherly. How are you?”

  “I’m just exhausted.” She ran her hand through her coiffed and blond-streaked hair. “This campaign has been so much more grueling than I thought and . . . oh, it’s boring. I’d heard that you were back in town. I was hoping I’d get to see you. Then I heard you left again.”

  I held my hands up. “I’m here.” I smiled, but my lips shook. I was acutely aware of my wrinkled shorts and T-shirt next to Weatherly in her floral lime green ironed sundress with matching purse and earrings—something I would’ve worn if I was at home in Atlanta.

  “Well, it is really good to see you. There are so many things to catch up on,” she said, touched my hand.

  Tim edged away. “Okay, I’m leaving
you girls alone to yap. I’m gonna go help the men crack open the oysters. Can’t have a grumpy, hungry crowd when it’s speech time.” He winked at Weatherly.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t help build the fire.” I elbowed Tim.

  “Very funny.” He feigned a punch to my shoulder and left Weatherly and me staring at each other in the awkward initial moments of attempting to fill vacant years with conversation.

  She smoothed her sundress and sat without causing a single wrinkle. “Sit, Meridy. Tell me how you’ve been.”

  We exchanged common chatter about children, where we lived and the facts that allow conversation to keep moving. Weatherly leaned in closer. “When was the last time I saw you?”

  “I think at the Fourth of July parade a few years ago.”

  “You know, Mr. Cragg told my mama about your great idea for the arts festival to raise money for the Keeper’s Cottage. Fabulous. I can’t believe none of us thought of that. I thought it was terrible, all that pressure they were putting on Tim when it would’ve wiped him out.”

  “Thanks, Weatherly, but I had a selfish motive too.”

  “You know what, Meridy? I’ve tried to remember that night a thousand times and picture you in it, but I never can find you. I know Danny was still there, but I don’t remember where you were.”

  “I was with Danny. . . . Then I passed out and then they rushed me to the hospital . . . or that’s what they told me anyway.”

  “So you didn’t see . . . Danny after that?”

  “No.” I cringed and Weatherly must have seen my face.

  “I did,” she said.

  “I know. . . . Mother told me you saw him at the top of the tower before it fell.”

  She touched my arm. “I saw him fall off.”

  I stiffened in surprise.

  “I saw Danny fall from the tower. . . .” She looked away when she said this, as though the Keeper’s Cottage still stood on the beach.

  “I couldn’t do anything though, Meridy. He landed in the most horrible way . . . all twisted and . . .” Her mouth became a thin line as she pressed her lips together. “And then the tower fell on top of him and there was chaos and smoke and a policeman dragged me away and Danny was just . . . gone. And they couldn’t get to him and they couldn’t find him . . . and he was gone.”

  “He died when he fell,” I whispered.

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders, lifted her eyebrows “When? You never came back and you never called anybody ever again and . . . I called your house a hundred times back then, and I finally figured you didn’t want to talk to me. I told your mother to please tell you to call me. . . .”

  My first impulse—to blame Mother—was replaced by a feeling of empathy. Mother had been protecting me the best she knew how. Complete denial, complete shelter: it was how she’d survived and how she felt she’d help me endure the tragedy.

  I placed my arms around Weatherly’s shoulders. “I never knew you called. And I’m sorry I never called. Thank you so much for telling me this. . . . I’ve always wondered exactly how he died. But you know what? I knew anyway. I knew before you told me. I saw it in my mind.”

  She nodded. “You would. . . . That’s how you two were.”

  “Let’s get some oysters,” I said, squeezed her hand.

  We jumped up from the blanket. “Yes, let’s,” she said, and hooked her arm in mine, and I laughed, remembering how badly I wanted to be invited to her birthday party in fifth grade.

  The remainder of the evening, for long moments, I forgot Ashley’s voice on the phone, forgot Tulu was gone, forgot anything except the joy of the beach, the sea and this party with old friends. In one moment I stood back and looked at the beach through my adult eyes, stared at all of us grown and yet still gathering to celebrate life’s moments at the curve of the beach where the river ran to meet the sea.

  The stump speeches were given and applauded; oysters were baked over an open fire; chilled wine and beer flowed. I laughed more than I had in as long as I could remember.

  Tim found me sitting in a sagging lawn chair, staring out to the sea. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.

  His face wavered in front of me. “I definitely, most definitely, had too much cold beer.”

  He laughed. “And when was the last time that happened?”

  I groaned. “I have no idea.”

  “Only one way to work that off—dancing.” He swooped me up into his arms and with the rest of Seaboro we jived to beach music until I collapsed, sweating and dizzy, onto our blanket.

  I held up my hands. “I give. I’m done. . . .”

  The night had crept up on us and the half-moon provided the remaining light. Tim held his hand out to lift me up. “Okay then, let’s go.”

  He walked me to his truck, opened the side door, but stood still, blocking my way to the door. “What?” I whispered, leaned against the truck, pushed my hair out of my eyes.

  He touched the side of my face. Then his hand remained on my cheek. The fog of beer, dance and moonlight cleared. He leaned forward and for the first time in all the years I’d known this man, I wanted to kiss him. But what I wanted to do was not who I wanted to be. The distinction was clearer than the blazing stars overhead.

  Tim ran his thumb along my bottom lip and I think I let out a sigh, or maybe it was a whisper that said, “No.”

  He tilted his head. “This would not be a very good idea, would it?”

  I shook my head. “A long time ago, it might’ve been.”

  He nodded. “Maybe.” And he lifted his hand from my face, mussed my hair with a wink.

  I stood for a few moments and stared at the sky—alone. I allowed the briefest moment of want for Tim Oliver to pass by and over me. I didn’t understand why I craved this kiss, except that the feeling was some part of the closeness that existed when someone knew who you had been and who you were, then cared about you anyway. It was an unearned love and I craved it desperately.

  Tim started the car as I climbed in. He patted my leg. “Let’s get you home.”

  “I’m not really sure where that is . . . ,” I said.

  The true silence of night filled my room: an owl call, a soft murmur of wave, branches scratching the roof outside my window. Sleep came nowhere near me and I doubted it visited Sissy either, two doors down the hall. I slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of velour sweatpants and a T-shirt. I tapped my fingers on Sissy’s bedroom door; she opened it before I’d finished.

  I grabbed her hand, whispered, “Come with me.”

  She held up a finger, reached back into her room and grabbed some slip-on tennis shoes. She was dressed in silk pajama bottoms and a tank top. I led her to my room, closed the door. She sat on the bed. “Oh, I thought we were going outside. I thought I’d get that beach walk you asked for last time.”

  “We are.” I walked over, lifted my window.

  “You’re crazy,” Sissy said. “We can just walk down the stairs and go out the front door—we’re not little kids sneaking out.”

  “Oh, yes, we are.” I jumped up on the windowsill, slung my legs around and planted my feet on the roof. “Come on, prissy Sissy.”

  “Ooh, I hated when you called me that.” She came to the window, placed her hand on the sill as if testing for firmness. “I was not that prissy.”

  “Prove it,” I said, squatting on the roof.

  She laughed. “If you’re finally trying to kill me, it just might work, because right now I really don’t give a flip.”

  I motioned for Sissy to follow me down my well-etched path over the roof, down the back of the trellis and to the soft ground.

  Sissy landed with a grunt and sprang back up. “Have you always done this?”

  “Since I was twelve.”

  “How could I not know that?”

  “Because that’s what sneaking out is all about—no one knows.”

  Sissy shook her head in the moonlight fallin
g into the backyard through scattered clouds. She glanced up at the sky. “You can see the stars so much better here than in the city.”

  I nodded, started walking. “Yep.”

  “Where were you tonight?” Sissy asked. She walked ahead of me, talking over her shoulder.

  “Tim took me to a party. . . .” I felt I needed to give further explanation, begin with the phone call to Beau and how I ran to Tim’s house, but I hesitated.

  “And?”

  “And nothing . . . that’s where I was.”

  “Is something going on . . . with—”

  I held up my hand before she could finish her question. “Sissy, don’t even ask me that.”

  “I’m sorry, I guess I see the monster of infidelity behind every tree and bush.”

  “Me too, sis, me too.”

  She twirled around, walked backward in front of me. “You too?”

  “Sure.”

  Sissy stopped, waited until I came up next to her; then she swiveled and fell into step with me, as if my admission of seeing the same monsters allowed her to walk next to me.

  “It’s kinda scary out here at night . . . like the world goes on forever,” she said.

  “No, it’s awesome.” I flipped my shoes off and ran my toes into the moonlit froth at the edge of the wave. “Just awesome.”

  “Well, look at us—here we are. I’ve completely screwed up my life and you’re the one that’s all fine now. How the hell did that happen?”

  “All fine now? Hardly.”

  “You know, I just don’t get it. You never did anything right when we were kids, and everyone liked you better—Tulu, the boys, the neighbors.”

  “Not Mother.”

  “That’s not true. She just . . . got frustrated.”

  I ran my toes along the edge of sea and sand. “The tide is coming in.”

  “How do you know?” Sissy crouched down, ran her finger in the sand, and I could envision her at ten years old showing me how to dig fast enough to grab the ghost crabs scurrying below to hide.

  “I just started noticing again. . . .” I squatted down next to my sister. “Did you know Mom had a really hard childhood?”

  Sissy turned to me. “Well, I knew she grew up on a farm in south Georgia.”