The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “You’re okay, honey,” Wendy said. She pulled a hand towel from the bar on the wall and pressed it to his face. “You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay. Come on, let’s go to mommy and daddy’s room….” She took him out of the bathroom, and I stayed behind to regain my composure. As I focused on breathing, I heard Wendy go on: “You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay…oh, honey, what happened?”

  “I think…I hit my face on the floor. But I was asleep.”

  I went to Chris’s room and flipped on the light, what I saw nearly made me feel faint all over again. The carpet was patterned with pools and footprints and handprints of blood, and a sheet hung crazily from the edge of the top bunk. He’d fallen out of bed and hit his face, but it looked like a murder scene. I joined them in our room, and willed myself to keep calm.

  “Oh, Chris, you’re okay,” Wendy whispered, while flashing me a look showing she didn’t think he was okay at all. She held the towel to his face with her left hand, and stroked his hair with her right. Otto, the prodigal cat, jumped up to our bed and sniffed at the blood on Christopher’s face.

  “Get Otto away,” Chris said, muffled by the towel. I grabbed the cat and put him on the floor.

  “I think we need to get him to the hospital,” I said.

  “Ambulance?” Wendy asked. “Do we even try to drive in this?”

  “I’ll call 911.” Still in just my bloodied underwear, I went to the kitchen for the phone. Through the window I could barely see the utility light on the Olssons’ pole barn, so I knew it had to be snowing very hard. I watched the snow, and marveled at how calm the emergency dispatcher seemed when she answered my call.

  “My son…” I stammered. “He…he fell out of his bed…he has an injury to his face. And a lot of blood loss, I think.”

  “Do you need an ambulance?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  There was a pause. “With this weather it will be at least an hour to your location. Do you have a four-wheel drive vehicle?”

  “Uh, let me, let me call you back.” I ran back to the bedroom. “I think we need to drive him in,” I said.

  “Okay, Chris, sweetie, we’re going to drive you to the hospital. Neil, why don’t you get dressed.”

  I pulled on some clothes and traded places with Wendy while she dressed herself. I tried to not press Chris’s face too firmly, and the cat jumped back onto the bed and nosed at the towel.

  “Otto…stop,” Chris said.

  “It’s just Doctor Otto,” I said. “He’s giving you an exam. He thinks you need to go to the hospital.”

  “Go away, Otto.”

  “I have the keys,” Wendy said. I threw our comforter around Chris and lifted him up.

  “You’re pretty heavy, kiddo. Keep the towel on your face, okay?”

  “Don’t let Otto get out,” Chris mumbled.

  Wendy led us through the house, opening the garage door and the backseat door to her old Chevy Blazer for me. It was too awkward to simply deposit Chris in the car, so I eased myself in backwards with him on my lap.

  “Can you drive?” I asked Wendy as she got in the front seat.

  “Yes, I can drive.” She backed the car into a world of swirling snow, and crept down the drive to the highway. The road had been plowed at least once already, but about three new inches of snow had accumulated since, and it continued to fall steadily.

  “Not too fast,” I said.

  “I know what I’m doing.” The car fishtailed in a turn, and Wendy gasped. “Someone’s going to think I’m driving drunk!”

  “No one’s out here. Just keep going.”

  “The people at the hospital are going to think we did this to Chris.”

  “They won’t. They can tell those things. They’ll ask him to make sure.”

  At the main highway, Wendy worked up to almost forty miles per hour, and the snow made a curtain of white in our headlights.

  “Turn your brights off,” I said. “It will be easier to see.”

  “I want them on.”

  “But you’ll be—”

  “I’m the one driving!”

  Chris let out a little moan. “It’s hurts,” he said from my lap. “I can feel a flap with my tongue. In front of my teeth.”

  “Leave it, Chris,” I said. “Don’t mess with it.” I pressed on the towel, and Chris whimpered.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Hang in there.”

  We made it to the hospital at twenty ‘til six; the emergency staff rushed us in, got Chris in a bed and hooked up to an IV drip. We were lucky in that the plastic surgeon on call was already there for a car accident a couple hours before; he looked Chris over and pulled at his lip. I saw bone glisten white through bloody flesh as the doctor probed with his gloved fingers and I had to look away. Chris didn’t make a sound.

  “You’re pretty tough,” the doctor said, and he told the nurses to get Chris ready for surgery. Wendy visibly trembled when she heard him say it, but she kept herself together. The doctor motioned us out of the emergency bay.

  “He pulled his gum away from his lower jaw,” he explained to us, tugging his own lip down with his fingers to demonstrate. “You said he fell out of a bed? I’ve seen this before in car accidents. Not quite so substantial, though. Not so wide a separation. And it’s usually associated with more facial trauma. I’ll anchor the gum to his teeth with sutures, and within a year the tissue will recontour itself in there so you won’t even be able to tell anything happened.”

  The doctor left us to get ready, and we watched the nurses prepare our son. They joked with him, and told him how brave he was. When the anesthetist came to put him under, they told him he’d start to feel sleepy.

  “To be honest, Chris,” one of the nurses said with a wink as she leaned over him, “it feels pretty nice.”

  We walked with him as far as we could to the doors of the operating room. Wendy said bye and covered her mouth with her hand, and I told him we’d see him in a little bit. He was already out of it. Once they pushed him through and the doors swung shut, Wendy fell apart sobbing. The nurses swarmed around her, embracing her, and I stepped back.

  “You did a good job, mom….”

  “He’ll be fine, Doctor Fenton is the best….”

  “When my son cut his forehead I was the same way….”

  I stepped away while the nurses comforted my wife. I felt, in a way, inadequate. More than inadequate. I found a waiting area to sit and think, and enumerate my inadequacies:

  I’d nearly fainted when I saw how Chris was hurt.

  I’d bickered with my wife on the drive.

  I couldn’t support her when they took our son away.

  I sat with my eyes closed, and some time later I felt someone sit down next to me. It was Wendy, and she took my hand. Her eyes were red and she put her head on my shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she told me.

  “For what?”

  “For being here. For being so brave. I couldn’t have handled this by myself.”

  “I wasn’t so brave,” I said. “Chris is braver than both of us.”

  We waited. The surgery wasn’t long, only an hour or so, and Christopher came out with strips of tape up under his chin to support the sutures inside his mouth. They made sure he was alert and okay, and let us go home that afternoon. The roads were plowed when we drove back.

  Chris stayed in our bed for the first few days after the fall. We fed him chicken broth from an eyedropper, and later, mashed potatoes when he was ready to chew. We read him books and he played with his new Christmas toys. Otto stayed at his side. After a week, if it weren’t for the tape, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened to him.

  I remember at the time thinking: wow, that’s it, that was it, that was our big parental test. Everybody gets one. That was really something. I’m glad we made it through with a passing grade.

  Now of course, in hindsight, I know it was hardly anything at all.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

&nbs
p; To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 12, 8:50 am

  Subject:otto the cat

  _____________________________

  Wen-

  It broke my heart when we lost that cat. A couple years ago I was coming back from a run and I found him on the side of the road, right there before the bridge over Little Jib. I saw him from a distance, not moving, and I knew it was him and that he was gone even when I was a long way away. He wasn’t that far from our house either. I don’t know if he was coming or going when he got hit.

  I picked him up and carried him home, and Chris and I buried him near the firepit, right by that big rock he liked to sit on in the sun. The next summer, Chris chiseled OTTO in the rock, and I added A GOOD CAT under that. The chiseling jobs we did were sort of crude, but you get the idea.

  Fifteen years, though, that’s a pretty good run for a cat. Especially one that was outdoors so much. He was so big and tough I didn’t think anything would ever get him.

  I’m sort of glad you never had to know that it happened.

  -N

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The first call I receive about the article in the Friday paper does not come from Alan or Peggy Mackie, but from Lauren. I’m standing by the big living room window, watching the rain, when I answer her call.

  “Hey, busy night?”

  “Um, Neil?” she says. “Were you not planning to tell me about this? What the hell is going on?”

  “Are you talking about—”

  “The paper? The front page? Possible assault charges?”

  My stomach seems to fall away, like I’ve just gone over the big drop of an amusement park ride. I brace myself with a hand to the window frame.

  “Charges?”

  “Do I even know you? Hello? You’re going around beating up kids?”

  “Have you seen the video?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to see the video! What is going on?”

  “Lauren, calm down.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that! I’m not one of your students. Or I should say, ex-students, by the look of—”

  “Lauren!” I snap, and she goes silent. “Will you let me talk?”

  “How long have you…when did this happen?”

  “You’re not letting me talk.”

  “Neil, I’m really, really, really stressed, I’m freaking out about everything, then I see this—”

  “Calm down, okay?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, though?”

  “I wanted to tell you when I could actually talk to you. Not in a message. I tried to tell you last night, but you had to go and you never called back. I don’t even know what’s going on myself. Alan thinks someone put a lot of effort into that video to make me look bad.”

  “Apparently it’s working,” Lauren says with a sniffle.

  “Are you calmed down?”

  “A little.”

  “Can you come over?”

  “No, I can’t. Work. You didn’t do this, did you?”

  “Did you honestly think I did?”

  “God, Neil.” She takes a long breath. “Stressing, okay?”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know if you do. What is going to happen? The family says you were in a rage. The boy is too traumatized to talk about it. You’ve been targeting him at school—”

  “What? I only just heard this kid’s name for the first time Monday morning!”

  “Well that’s what it says. Here’s a quote: ‘The Port Manitou School District has zero tolerance for emotional and/or physical intimidation and abuse of students by staff—’”

  “Did Gracie Adams say that?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Fuck.” I sit on my couch and drum my fingers on my knee. “You really can’t come over?”

  “No. Like I said, work. Why didn’t you just tell me? Were you home yesterday afternoon? I was here, you had to see I was here.”

  “It was my turn to freak out.”

  “You’re not the only one freaking out,” Lauren says. She sighs. “What are you going to do?”

  “My sister put me in touch with a lawyer, but he’s expensive. Insanely expensive. The cops are looking at the video, Alan’s looking at it too, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the support of at least a couple people in the district.”

  “What happens if they do charge you with assault?”

  “The police were here to talk to me yesterday, and they didn’t mention anything about any charges. But if it does happen, probably I’ll lose my job. If I lose my job, I’ll lose my insurance. So in the short term, at least, I’ll probably move in with Carol and rent my place out for some income to help cover Wendy’s expenses.”

  “Oh God,” she says.

  “Yeah. So, there we go. It’s not pretty, but at least having a vision of it helps keep me clear-headed about things. But this sucks. That’s about the best way I can put it.”

  Lauren doesn’t respond.

  “Are you there?” I ask.

  “Sorry. Sorry. I’m here. I just….”

  “Just?”

  “I’m going to go. I’ll talk to you later.” She says these words in nearly a monotone.

  “Wait,” I say. “It’s going to be fine, really. I’ll get through this. We’ll get through this. I love you, okay?” I’m thinking, right there, the three magic words will snap her out of it. But they don’t.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” she repeats. And she goes.

  I don’t get up from the couch for a while. I stare out the window at the rain dripping from the edge of my roof, and wonder just how bad this will get. I almost call Alan, but I don’t; instead I go to the spare room and wake up the laptop. The video is there, maximized in the center of the screen, waiting for me.

  Hey!

  I had to like, fight him off me.

  I watch it once, and one more time after that. I almost start it a third, but stop myself. Can I still get into my work email? Why should I even try? I do, though, against my better judgment, and sure enough I’m able to log in. I skim through the subject lines, and when I see one that says WE ARE WATCHING YOU MISTER NEIL!! I flinch and snap the laptop screen shut maybe a bit too hard. I need to get myself away from this. Running would bleed off some of this feeling, I should go run, but there’s still the rain, that damned rain.

  A padded manila mailer sits on the table to the left of the laptop, the one I found a few days ago in a box of Wendy’s things in the garage attic. The envelope is wrinkled and creased with age; an edge is reinforced with tape, the end is torn open, and the label on the front is addressed to Wendy in the stiff cursive of her grandmother. The label has been crossed out with blue marker, and along the top it says ‘Property of Wendy Olsson.’ Underneath, the words ‘From Neil K.’—bounded on both ends by a pair of hearts—have been written in a more florid script.

  I pick up the mailer by a corner so the contents drop out onto the surface of the table. A bundle of my letters, gathered together with a thick purple rubber band, lies on top of the stack. I pick the letters up and feel their collected heft, the weight of a teen boy’s love. I poured myself into every one of them. I’d write them at school on lined notepaper, or at home when Mike thought I was just doing homework. I’d fold the pages into awkward squares and stuff them into envelopes provided by my mother. She’d give me postage too, with a smile and a wink. She knew what was going on with Wendy and me.

  I don’t unbind my correspondence. I went through them all the other day, and that was enough. Their mass in my hand is the only reminder I need.

  Wendy’s unsent letter is there on the table too. There’s a thickness to the blue envelope, more than a few pages inside, I’m sure. She was always neater than I was with her missives, always using perfect handwriting on her stationery, never sending a page with a word crossed out or even an eraser mark. With my eyes closed, I lift the envelope to my nose; there’s nothing there but the dusty scent of paper. I trace my index fingertip over the
gummed edge of the flap and imagine Wendy licking it and pressing it shut. But she held onto it. Why didn’t she send it? I could open it now, but I don’t. I keep my eyes closed and press the envelope to my lips.

  My thoughts are broken by my doorbell, followed by a knock. Leaning forward over the computer table so I can look out the window, I see Leland’s black truck, panels splattered with mud, parked in front of my home. For a moment I consider ignoring him, but I’m curious why exactly he’s here, so I go to the door to greet him. He has a somber look on his face.

  “Saw the paper this morning,” he says.

  “I haven’t read it yet. But I heard it’s bad. Come on in.”

  I take his jacket and ask him if he wants any coffee; Leland nods and he follows me to the kitchen.

  “You didn’t do that, I know,” Leland says, taking a seat.

  I laugh at this. “You’re the first person to say it with any sort of conviction.”

  “Come on, Neil. That’s not you. And Steve knows the kid. Says he’s a loser. I know the parents, sort of. Money. Big money from Chicago.” He waves his hand when I hold up the sugar jar. “No thanks. A little milk is fine, if you have some.”

  I bring two mugs to the table and take a seat with him. “So what does it mean, them having money? Does it mean I’m screwed?”

  Leland shrugs. “I know a good lawyer.”

  “So do I. They’re not cheap.”

  “No,” Leland says, shaking his head and giving a little laugh through his nose. “They are not cheap. And I’m a guy who’s dealt with them enough to know. What are you going to do?”

  “I guess I’m waiting for the school or the police to tell me what’s going on. It’s their move.”

  “You going to be able to afford this?”

  Now I shrug.

  “Listen,” Leland starts, “I know I’m going to sound like some kind of vulture—”

  “Here comes the hard sell,” I say.

  “—But I think there’s an opportunity for you here.”

  “What, if I sell?”