The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  AP physics serves to lighten my mood. The Ross twins keep straight faces when I make a few comments about Geiger counters—without giving away our plans—as a setup for my expected radioactive student tomorrow. Cross country practice is not so bad either; a welcome break from a day of stupid anxiety. No punitive sprints are needed, and the girls and I have a long, easy run through town, down along the Big Jib River bike path to the waterfront and back. We pass Lauren’s condo, and I see that her upstairs blinds are closed.

  After practice, there’s still nothing waiting on my phone, and my anxiety begins to tilt toward exasperation.

  I run home through another afternoon of glorious, temperate weather. Dazzling sunshine at my back on the highway north, cool shade embracing me as I turn through the trees. Sprinting around the last bend, breathing hard and pushing myself, to the gravel of my drive and….

  Lauren’s car is parked at Carol’s.

  This is peculiar. I take a step toward the farmhouse, but stop myself: maybe she carpooled to Lansing with one of the other nurses? Two of her coworkers are in the program with her; that would make sense. I could stop in and see if she’s there, find out just what in the world is going on, but if she wanted to let me know what was going on maybe she would have called me back last night and maybe I’m feeling just a little pissed off about this right now?

  Thinking about it, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.

  I continue past Carol’s house to my own; Lauren can be addressed after I’m cleaned up and composed. I take the side door into my kitchen where I drink some water, looking around for the canister of Chris’s magic recovery powder. That stuff was pretty good. I find it in the pantry, on top of his crate of secret ingredients, and mix myself a batch before going to the living room to check the answering machine. The glass nearly falls from my hands when I enter the room, however; Lauren is sitting on my couch, staring at the floor.

  “What…what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be downstate?”

  She’s slouched forward, with her hands folded over her knees, and her bag is slumped on the floor between her feet.

  “I’m late,” she says, in a voice barely loud enough to hear.

  “I would say so. Why are you here and not at your exam? And does it have anything to do with why you wouldn’t call me—”

  “I’m seven days late getting my period. I’ve basically skipped my period, Neil.”

  “Oh,” I say. I sit down on the arm of the couch, with my back to her. “Oh.”

  “That’s why I’m freaking out. That’s why I didn’t call you back.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know what to say. And when I started to think about everything, I mean, really think about how this whole thing is, you and me, I really freaked out. I thought, what am I doing?”

  I twist and slide down to take a seat next to her.

  “Do you think you’re pregnant?” I ask. Lauren opens her mouth as if to say something, but she doesn’t. Instead she leans forward to reach into her bag, pulls out a handful of chocolate-bar sized foil wrappers, and drops them with a clatter to the floor in front of her.

  “What are those?” I ask.

  “Pregnancy tests. I got them from my office. We have boxes full of them.”

  “Have you taken one yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “What are you doing, telling me not to pull out, when you—”

  “I was in my safe time, Neil, I was supposed to start any minute!”

  “Jesus,” I say. I’m trying to mentally tally all our recent unprotected encounters, and I’m losing count. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was waiting to start! I’ve been a couple days late before while we’ve been together.”

  “This late?”

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry about it. And now…oh, God, I don’t know, I don’t know! And you know what scares me the most? Do you want to know?”

  I’m pretty sure I’m going to find out regardless of what I say, so I keep quiet.

  “Sometimes I feel like you’re more dedicated to a woman who’s not even there than you are to me.”

  “Yes, take the test,” I say flatly.

  Lauren picks up one of the foil packs and tears it open as she stomps to the bathroom in the hall. The door stays open. I hear the trickle of her urination, I hear the toilet flush. I wait, and wait, and I hear my own blood rushing in my ears. Then another sound: the sound of a sudden, choking sob, Lauren sobbing, the sound of her feet running back down my hall, the sound of my front door swinging open and hitting the wall.

  The sound of her car driving away.

  I rise to my feet and go to the bathroom, but I already know what I’m going to find. On the edge of the vanity is a shiny beige plastic form with the words POSITIVE IF SECOND LINE/SINGLE LINE CONTROL printed beneath a little window sculpted into the material. I grab it with shaking hands and hold it up close to my eyes.

  The window is painted with two unmistakable blue lines.

  Clutching the test, I sink to the edge of the tub, bend over, and put my head between my knees.

  I run to Alan’s house, barge in without knocking, and head straight to his study. He’s seated at his desk, reading now, not flying or watching videos, and he pushes his glasses to his forehead as he peers up at me.

  “You look a little rocky, Neil.”

  I pull the test from my jacket pocket and toss it to him, and Alan lets out a low whistle as he examines it.

  “Did Chris get someone in trouble?”

  “I got someone in trouble. Lauren is pregnant.”

  Alan says nothing. He places the pregnancy test next to his book, and pushes his chair away from his desk.

  “Sit down,” he says. Alan leaves the room and comes back with a glass of water. “You want a sedative? Klonopin? Kristin has some. You’re looking pretty—”

  “I do not want a fucking sedative! What I want is for this to have not happened!”

  “Well, it did. Unexpected things come to us, Neil. You know that. Probably better than anyone.”

  “Fuck,” I say. “Fuck!”

  “Drink,” Alan says, pointing at the glass. “Come with me.” I down the water and follow him back outside, and we cross the lawn to Mega-Putt. Alan unlocks a shed with a key from his pocket, ducks inside, and emerges with a pair of putters. “Come on,” he says. “Front nine, seven wonders of the ancient world.” He takes a golf ball from his pocket and delicately places it at the tee. I’m nearly shaking as I watch him. “Plus a couple from the new world the classical historians missed. Number one is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It’ll look much better next spring when I can grow some flowers. You go first.”

  “Are you shitting me? This is happening and you want me to play a fucking game of Putt-Putt?”

  “I’m giving you the first turn,” he says calmly. “Go.”

  I shouldn’t be so stunned by this latest turn of events. I’ve been in this situation before. Wendy and I dated all through college, with one moderately bitter, brief interruption suggested by me our junior year to “see other people” that ended up with us deciding we were pretty happy seeing each other after not seeing anyone else at all. We were comfortable, we knew each other’s habits, and, while we never overtly discussed marriage, we knew without saying it that we were probably headed in that direction. Probably. It was a novelty for our friends that we’d been long-distance high school sweethearts, and it became something we sort of subtly boasted about. We had about us, perhaps, a mild air of superiority.

  Our senior year at Michigan State, against her parents’ wishes (and with some objection by my mother) we moved into an apartment together. Our neighborhood was made up of mostly graduate students, established couples, some even with children, and the friendships we made with our older neighbors seemed to cement our superior fantasyland sel
f-image. It was as if we were playing house, playing grown-ups like we’d skipped over some vast, unnecessary area of adolescence. We’d never known about it, and never really missed it.

  I was studying physics, and had been accepted into a masters program in Kyoto, Japan to do research work with the possibility of continuing for my PhD. Wendy, a linguistics major, was looking into English teaching programs through the university there. We were excited—so excited—for this adventure, for making a home overseas and learning a new language and meeting new friends and building on our superior image of ourselves.

  Then, in the early spring, Wendy missed a period too.

  She’d been taking the pill since our first clumsy encounters our senior year in high school when we’d started having sex, and decided after a few years that she didn’t like how moody it made her feel. To be honest, I didn’t care for it either, and I was happy for her to be through with it. She felt her moodiness might have even been responsible for our brief breakup, and she didn’t want something like that to happen again. So she quit. After that we used condoms—usually—and eventually she was fitted for a diaphragm, which we also used, when we remembered it. Did it fail some night, or had we simply been lazy? It could have been either.

  Everything changed. Everything. Japan was out of the question. Maybe we could have handled a baby overseas if we were older, if we were actually as mature as we believed ourselves to be. But we were really just kids, and didn’t even want to try. Wendy suffered with terrible morning sickness at first, and missed many of her classes. I knew I’d need a job, quickly, and found there were some grants in the state to help with getting a teaching certificate. The state needed science teachers, and doors opened pretty easily for me in that direction.

  An abortion seemed out of the question too. How could we consider it, really, when I’d been born to someone in presumably far worse circumstances? The very fact that I was living made us feel obligated to deal with the consequences of what we’d done, and the fact that my parents had gone to the trouble of adopting me and making me part of their family only strengthened our decision to follow through with it. Do I think differently about it now? I’m fine with anyone who needs to make that choice. I just couldn’t have done it myself back then. Wendy couldn’t have either.

  And anyway, I love my son.

  My parents were incredibly supportive. Whatever help we needed, they told us, they’d do what they could. I think they were impressed that we were going through with having a baby. To us, maybe, after the reality of it sunk in, it just seemed one more part of our grown-up illusion.

  We drove up to Port Manitou over spring break to tell Wendy’s parents. Wendy was less nervous about it than I was. We’d planned the trip weeks before we’d known about the pregnancy, and Dick and Carol had no idea what was coming. We told them at dinner the first night. Carol cried, and Dick just stared at me while Wendy squeezed my hand under the table.

  Despite Wendy being pregnant with our child, they still made us sleep in separate beds that night.

  Dick asked me to go for a walk the next morning. He brought a shotgun along, broken over his shoulder as was his habit on walks we’d taken in the past. It had never seemed quite so threatening before.

  “So what will you be doing for work?” he asked me, picking his way through some underbrush.

  “Teaching,” I said.

  “My mother was a teacher, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Like your father. A teacher. I have a great respect for what he does. And for his intellect. It’s good that you’ve taken after him.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I followed without speaking. We worked our way up through the just-blossoming cherry trees to the cedar woods, and silently went on through the low green scrub until we reached a sandy bank of the Little Jib River, broad and murky with spring runoff.

  “My brothers and I played here,” Dick said, nodding. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for a reply, so I said nothing. “Right here.” He nudged some dead leaves and earth with his toe and they splattered into the water. “Once when I was little…oh boy, I was tagging along behind Charlie and Ed, my big brothers, just being a pest, really. They were trying to get me to go home, and I was hiding from them, right here where we are now. And what do you know, I slipped off this bank and fell into the river when they weren’t looking. It was springtime, like now, the water was running just as big. Maybe even bigger. I tumbled in and went right down to the bottom of this eddy.” He pointed to a spot in the water. “I couldn’t swim, you know. I was just a little guy. I remember going under and looking up, I remember water going over me, branches floating over and the way the light came through it all…I wasn’t scared, not at that moment. It seemed peaceful, the way I recall it.” He adjusted the gun on his shoulder and gazed into the creek. “Well, who knows how long it took them to figure out what was going on, but after what seemed like a long while Ed hopped in and grabbed me, it wasn’t so deep for him, he yanked me up by the collar so I could get myself some air. Charlie bent down—right here—and pulled us both out. It sure did scare me then, Neil. After they got me out, it scared the daylights out of me. Charlie was white as a ghost. I guess I didn’t realize how close I was to being a goner. He knelt down and shook me, I was all wet and he shook me by the shoulders ‘til I started to cry, and he said ‘good lord, Dickie, don’t you ever pull a dumb shit thing like that again. And whatever you do, don’t tell Mom or Pop!’”

  Dick shook his head and smiled a half-smile, saying nothing else. I kept quiet. He resumed walking along the riverbank, along through the brush and with the current toward the lake, and I followed. He spoke again, more softly now, almost impossible to hear over the rumbling spring current and the twigs snapping under our feet. “It sure did stick with me, Neil,” he said. “But I never said a thing about it to my parents, and my brothers and I never did discuss it again.” He lifted a fallen branch from the ground and tossed it underhand into the water, and we watched it float away. “Later on, I never, ever let Wendy come up here if I could help it. Even when she was old enough to handle herself, I still worried. I know it was awfully silly of me. All the things she did, all the ways she could have ended up in trouble, just driving in a car, you know, or a thousand times in that little boat of hers. But this place, this river, it scares the hell out of me. I know it’s foolish, but it’s my own fear, and I put it on to her. What would you do if your own child drowned, Neil? How could you live with yourself if you could have done something to help it?”

  We turned south and pushed our way through the brush beneath the cedars until the growth opened up into a rising dune. We climbed up and looked back east over rows of blossoming fruit trees toward the field, and beyond that, rising over the newly leafing treetops, the roof of the farmhouse. Behind us, Lake Michigan spread blue-green to the horizon.

  “If you can get a job in Port Manitou, if you can save up some money, you and Wendy could build a house here on the property.”

  “That’s very generous, Mr. Olsson. But I don’t really know anything about how to build a house.”

  “I’ll give you a hand with it.” He looked at me. “You’ll always watch out for my daughter? You’ll take care of her, and your baby, no matter what?”

  I nodded. “I will. I swear I will.”

  “I think you mean what you say.” He turned back to the orchard and put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s good enough for me.”

  I don’t really have the patience or disposition to be playing Mega-Putt right now, but Alan gently urges me on, calmly giving me a guided tour of his project.

  “Hole number three, Lighthouse at Alexandria. Tallest man-made thing in the world for centuries. Anyway, what are you going to do? About this thing with you and Lauren.”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.” Putter gripped in trembling hands, I tap the ball, and miss widely. “She took the test, she broke down crying and she drove away. We didn’t even talk about anythin
g. I’m hoping she comes back. Before Chris comes home. He won’t be done with his stuff until later tonight—”

  “Hang on a minute,” Alan says, leaning his club against some concrete statuary to draw his cell from his pocket. “Give me just a second.” He punches his finger on the pad, and holds the phone to his ear. “Kristin? Hey, sweetie, listen….” He turns away from me and walks circles in the grass while he talks. I take deep breaths while I watch him. He swings back in front of me and stops.

  “Uh huh,” he says, nodding. “Yes. Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  “What’s up?” I ask him.

  “Kristin is going to give Lauren a call, then she’ll call us back.”

  I take another deep breath. On my next turn putting, I miss again.

  “But I’m serious here, Neil. What are you going to do? Do you love Lauren?”

  “Of course I do, you know that.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you tell her?”

  “I think I….” I look off across his yard to the orchard. “I kind of suggested we get married when we were walking home from your place.”

  Alan nods. “You two were a happy pair that night. Did you mean it when you asked her?”

  “I think so,” I say, and Alan raises his eyebrows. “No, I really did.”

  “Next question then. Are you ready to raise a child with her?” He nudges my ball into the cup with his own club. “That was close. I’ll give you that one.”

  “The thought of a child is so….” I clench my fists around the handle of the putter. “Another child. It’s not….”