Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  I cleared my throat, avoided B.J.’s eyes. “So, how’s Dad doing?”

  “Good, I guess. He said there was no way he could come with us—I guess the actual trial started today. But the new lawyer stopped by with some lasagna or something last night.” He cocked his head. “So I guess he’s getting fed.”

  Someone has to take care of poor Beau.

  A rush of nausea rose, but I forced a laugh. “Yeah, I can see Harland bringing me dinner when Dad is out of town. We do spoil you men. Let’s go say hello to Grandma and Aunt Sissy. Your cousins are here too.”

  He laughed. “An entire family reunion.”

  Except for your father.

  B.J.’s hair was longer; stubble covered his chin in a goatee pattern. “Nice beard,” I said.

  He rubbed his hands across his face. “Like?” He lifted his chin.

  “Come on.” I pulled him toward Mother, Sissy, the girls and Tim, who all were waiting for us. After the hugs and kisses and introductions, we piled food on our plates and sat at a round table in the corner of the tent.

  Heather spread her hands over the table, bangs falling across her eyes. “This doesn’t look like a funeral. . . . It looks like a party.”

  “The funeral was this afternoon. This is a party—one that celebrates Tulu’s life. All that food”—I pointed to the table—“is her favorite dishes and recipes.”

  Voices overlapped as we all tried to talk to B.J. at the same time.

  Sissy grabbed his hand. “We’ve missed you so much. I’m thrilled you’re here. I can’t remember the last time the girls saw you.”

  “Two Thanksgivings ago,” Amanda said.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here. I do love you,” I said.

  “Me too,” Mother said to my son.

  B.J. looked at Heather. “They are so embarrassing.”

  “I think they’re adorable.” She pointed her plastic fork at him and grinned. “You should bring me around more often.”

  The evening passed in the warmth of my family until fatigue and too much food caused my eyelids to droop. Children fell asleep on blankets and curled on parents’ shoulders. I stared into the darkness toward the place where the Keeper’s Cottage once stood. My heart lurched with memories. What had happened there had once deadened my heart, but now the cottage shook my heart awake.

  I closed my eyes and attempted to picture my home in Atlanta with Beau in it. But I couldn’t find the house—only a watercolor version blurred at the edges, faded in the middle. I walked down to the shoreline, where the tidal currents flowed out. I whispered good-bye to Tulu and remembered some of my last words to her, how I’d promised to allow the river to reach my heart. “I promise,” I said into the quiet night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “When you are here, you are home.”

  GULLAH PROVERB

  I had slept deeply, dreamlessly, yet woke with Beau’s absence like a physical emptiness in a full house. But I smiled at the thought that my son slept on the couch in the sunroom downstairs.

  The house was quiet in the still morning. I tiptoed down to the kitchen to find Mother drinking coffee. I kissed her cheek. “Good morning, Mother.”

  “Good morning, dear.”

  “We have a full house, don’t we?” I sat at the table.

  “Isn’t it wonderful? There isn’t an empty bed to be found,” she said.

  Sissy walked into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. “Why are you two up so early?”

  “We always are.”

  “We always do.”

  Mother’s and my voices overlapped and we laughed.

  Sissy poured coffee into a large mug. “Any plans for the day with all these people here?”

  “I have a society breakfast meeting this morning, but that’s about it,” Mother said. “So—I’ll just meet you all back here around lunchtime.” She stood and walked out of the kitchen, her dressing gown whispering behind her as if it held a secret that followed her wherever she went.

  Sissy sat next to me. “God, what a day yesterday. It was the never-ending day.”

  “I know. Have you talked to Penn this morning?”

  “No, and I have no plans to.” She leaned back in her chair. “Now, don’t get me wrong when I tell you this . . . because this is all terrible and horrible and disgusting, but you know, I haven’t loved Penn for a very long time. But I wouldn’t have done what he did. I wouldn’t have cheated on him or lied to him for all those years. I was trying to figure out how to love him again . . . how to feel something for him. And his affair has destroyed part of me: the part that might trust or love him again. But it has also freed me to find some joy in life.”

  “Wow,” I said, leaned on the table. “A little deep for first thing in the morning, Sissy.” But I grinned, then stood and hugged her.

  “I was never able to admit to myself how I truly felt—but now I can.”

  “Sometimes it takes a little pain to make us face how we truly feel,” I said to my sister, as much as to myself.

  She put down her coffee mug. “Did you ask Beau to come here?”

  “Yes, but his trial, the one he’s been preparing two years for, started yesterday. So I need to go home . . . tomorrow. I’ll spend some time with B.J. today and then head home.”

  “Well, I want you to stay here.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “You do?”

  “Yes, I do.” Sissy stood, pulled a frying pan from under the sink. “You want scrambled or poached?”

  “Scrambled would be great.” I leaned back in my chair and smiled just as the phone rang. I grabbed it, leaned against the wall. Mr. Jenkins, the local school superintendent, was on the line. “Mrs. Dresden, we were wondering if you could please stop by the board-of-education office on Monday.”

  “Oh, I’d love to, but I’m headed home tomorrow.” I knew it as I said it.

  “Home?”

  “Yes, back to Atlanta.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, is there any way you can stop by today, then?”

  “Well, can you tell me what this is . . . about?”

  “The culture class curriculum you wrote.”

  “Oh, you’ve read it. . . .” Mother had taken it to them. I must’ve written something wrong, accidentally insulted some group or made a mistake in dates or geography. “No problem.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dresden.”

  “Meridy, call me Meridy, Mr. Jenkins.”

  “Yes, Meridy. See you in a little while.”

  The four main buildings downtown were all constructed of tabby and brick, with slate roofs and pillars in front. Sunlight hid behind low, full clouds, but the heat was the same as if the sun glared down from a clear sky. I stood in the middle of the square, where a statue of a Confederate soldier presided in a chin-up position with a musket in hand. I rubbed the base as I walked across the street. On the front steps at the board-of-education building, pansies filled pots to overflowing. A child blew by me on a scooter, and a honey-colored butterfly landed on the steps. I wanted to take a snapshot of each detail, wanted to take it all in and use it to build strength to face what lay in wait at home.

  I walked up the stairs and entered the dank building, eventually found Mr. Jenkins in his office at the far end of the hall. I knocked with the tips of my fingers. The door flew open and Mr. Jenkins motioned for me to come in. A desk almost the size of the room filled the small space.

  “Sit, sit.” He motioned to a chair crammed in the corner.

  I sat and crossed my legs, smiled and waited for him to speak.

  He sat on the corner of his desk and looked down at me over spectacles that appeared as though he’d bought them at an antique flea market. “Mrs. Dresden, I know you did not write this curriculum for our school system, but for a system in the Atlanta area. I also know that you are going back there tomorrow.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I am. But if you see something in the pages that isn’t correct or you feel . . . misrepresents the area, I’m perfectly willing to change it. I tried v
ery hard to accurately—”

  He held up his hand, shaking his head. “Quite the contrary, this is one of the best pieces of work I’ve seen come through this office in ages. Work has become so slipshod—no one cares anymore. This is . . . a beautiful piece of work. So we have a proposal for you. Now, of course, the board hasn’t approved this yet, but I wanted to talk to you before you went back to Atlanta. We want to hire you to teach this to the elementary schools in Seaboro County. We have nine elementary schools in the county, and that would require that you teach this curriculum at a school a month—one week a month—for nine months. We aren’t a rich county, but we could pay you the same salary as we do all the specialty teachers. Now, now . . .” He held up his hand. “Please don’t answer too quickly. Think about it. Please.”

  He was offering me a job? “I don’t . . .” I rubbed my palms together, spread them apart. “I don’t live here.”

  “Yes, I know that. I thought you might . . . reconsider.”

  “Where I live?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a husband, a house. . . .”

  He nodded. “I understand. Our other option is that you could train someone else to teach the class. Or you could travel here once a month for a week at a time.” He tapped the papers on his desk. “I want this curriculum taught to our children in the Lowcountry. This is valuable.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jenkins. I enjoyed writing that curriculum more than I’ve enjoyed anything in a long, long time.”

  “I can tell by reading it. I can tell.”

  I stood formally. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do this. But can I think about it, call you?”

  “Fair enough.” He held out his hand and I shook it.

  I left the building feeling something unfinished floating on the horizon: The dreams, the papers, they needed a place to rest.

  I stood in front of the Keeper’s Cottage. Finally, I pushed aside the yellow CAUTION tape and stepped inside the structure. The floors creaked beneath my feet, making me jump. I slid along the perimeter of the rooms and walked to the back of the cottage.

  Seeing the fireplace in the kitchen, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Danny. The last time I had seen him had been in this place. I allowed the old and simultaneously young love to wash over me. He’d taught me what love was and made me safe inside his circle of complete belief in me. And I wasn’t here to wish him back. Other people mold us by their love—mothers, sisters, lovers. They make us who we are. Danny Garrett had loved me well enough to make me the woman I’d once dreamed of being.

  I reached down into my satchel, pulled out the scraps of paper with Danny’s dreams written on them, bound by a rubber band. I pulled up a loose piece of pine floorboard that was attached at only one end with an iron nail head. I peered below to the foundation of the cottage, and then I stuffed the papers into the far corner of the hole and released the board, which snapped back into place with an echo of finality. I wanted Danny to have his dreams back—he’d died so that my dreams, and those of the others there that fatal night, could live.

  Maybe there was a piece of my heart I had lost to Danny, a piece that he’d kept for himself in the sea, but I owned the rest of my heart and it was awake, fully awake. I touched my finger to the floorboard, tapping it home.

  I slipped the dolphin box back into my satchel—I’d kept his picture and my own scraps of paper. I saved them, not because I wanted to bring him back, but because I needed to remember these past dreams, as they were the smaller hints of all I’d meant to be.

  I left the cottage and made my way out the back door toward my car when I saw a silhouette against the front door of the cottage like an iron cutout of a man. Something familiar in his stance, the way he tilted his head: Beau. I gasped, turned too quickly and slipped, fell. I jumped up, called out to him.

  He started toward me and I ran to my husband, life finally reaching my heart. Whatever turbulence waited there, I was rushing willingly toward it.

  I stopped before him but didn’t speak.

  He reached out, touched my face just as he had under the portico all those years ago. My heart reached for him, but still I waited.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Why?” I whispered.

  “For taking so damn long to listen to what you were trying to say to me. I was stubborn and angry and my ego was bruised and I couldn’t hear you. I couldn’t hear you with all the noise in our life—until I was home alone and the loneliness around me let me hear what you were trying to say.”

  “What are you doing here? Are you okay? How did you know where I was?” I asked all in a jumble.

  “Whoa.” He laughed. “Slow down. Your mother told me where you were and I’m here because I love you.”

  I sank against Beau’s chest, wound my arms around his middle. “I love you so much too. Please don’t ever think I don’t.”

  “Don’t talk yet. I’ve been practicing in the car for hours and you have to listen to the whole thing. . . .” He smiled.

  I nodded.

  “It was all so empty at home. So damn empty. All there was to do was work and think about why you wanted to leave me.”

  “I didn’t want—”

  Beau held up his hand. “Then I realized what you’d told me—ten, twenty times—that you didn’t want to leave me, and I realized that you weren’t leaving me. I’m still hurt you never told me about your past, how you felt about it. I hate that you carried all that guilt around with you. But here’s the deal, Meridy. . . . I love all of you—who you were, who you are, who you’ll be. All of it.”

  “Am I allowed to cry if I don’t talk?”

  “Yes.” He reached for me this time and held me.

  I took a shaky, deep breath and inhaled the T-shirt and warm fragrance of my husband. “Why aren’t you in court? Didn’t the trial start yesterday?”

  He nodded. “I needed to come to you.”

  I didn’t want to laugh, but it bubbled up from a place of such relief I couldn’t stop it. “You’ll get in so much . . . trouble with Harland.”

  “What’s he going to do? Ground me? Some things are just more important than a job.” He laughed, scooped me into his arms. “I left the courtroom, drove here. The least I should get is a kiss.”

  I grabbed both sides of his face, kissed him. I stepped back. “You smell like your pillow,” I said. “I’ve missed that . . . you. I’m sorry.” I caught myself. “I’ve said that so much lately. I didn’t want to put us through this—I just had to come, and I thought I could help Tim without involving . . . you without hurting you . . . us.”

  “I felt like I was fighting a ghost. I was up against a memory and I believed you cared more about a dead boyfriend than me. . . .”

  “No. I was coming home. . . . I am coming home,” I said. “I was so busy trying to be perfect for you all these years, earn your love, that I stopped listening to myself, so why wouldn’t you stop listening too?”

  He held up his hand. “I’m just trying to tell you what has kept me away. You should’ve seen your face when you told me about your childhood—about Timmy and Danny. I hadn’t seen your face light up like that in a very long time. I thought the only way to get you to love me like that was to get you to come home. To make you come home and prove you loved me. Then . . . after you told me you were trying to bring yourself back, not Danny, I finally understood. I really did. I know I can be slow . . . but I do love you. So”—he pulled me closer—“this is the cottage you’re helping to save?”

  I nodded, afraid that words would chase the longing to the far corners of my heart where it often hid. “And my curriculum came out so . . . well that Seaboro offered me a teaching job. Isn’t that funny.”

  “Is that something you’d want to do?”

  I tilted my head. “I don’t know. . . . I was focused on getting home—to you.”

  “Well, if it’s what you’d like to do . . . we can figure something out, don’t you think?”

  “By the way,�
� I said, “what was Ashley’s deal?”

  “She annoyed the living hell out of me. She was bored and wanted to be involved in this case. Harland hired her. She went a little overboard . . . bringing meals, stopping by, trying to help.”

  “She wanted you.”

  “Oh, well.” He smiled. “You can’t always get what you want.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “I just want you, Meridy. Everything else is worthless if we’re not okay.”

  I reached up and touched the side of his dear, familiar face. Our marriage would endure, like the cottage behind us—unfinished and awaiting restoration. The foundations of both were intact, offering the hope, and promise, of broken places mended, empty spaces filled.

  AUTHOR NOTE

  The fictional character of Tulu in this novel was inspired by the Gullah culture of South Carolina. Gullah, which is both a culture and a language of African slave descendants, is rich in tradition, spirituality and history, and still exists in the Lowcountry. The Gullah proverb “If you don’t know where you are going, you should know where you came from” epitomizes Meridy’s journey. In the Gullah culture, proverbs are used to teach and advise, offering wisdom and humor. I am not an expert in Gullah culture, merely an admirer. For further information on the Gullah culture, contact the resources below.

  The Penn Center

  Tucked in the heart of the South Carolina Sea Islands, this center is the site of one of the country’s first schools for freed slaves.

  Penn School National Historic Landmark District

  P.O. Box 126

  St. Helena Island, SC 29920

  Phone: (843) 838-2432

  Fax: (843) 838-8545

  E-mail: info@penncenter.com

  Gullah/Geechee Sea Islands Coalition-Homebase