The River

by Mary Jane Beaufrand

  Mom said the change in our lives wasn’t that sudden, and that Dad’s break was a long time coming. She said maybe if we’d paid attention to the smaller things, the bigger thing wouldn’t have whacked us over the head the way it finally did. All I know is that I will always associate ruin with the sticky-sweet smell of cardamom bread.

  One morning last June I woke up at six and could smell the change in the air. I opened my window because inside had become close and airless.

  I wandered down to the kitchen where I found Mom and Dad. Mom was wearing her OSU Beavers T-shirt and boxer shorts. Her brown curly hair was winging out around her head, like clusters of purple-black grapes. Dad was in his favorite fleece robe and sitting at the table in the breakfast nook. His short blond hair was matted against his head as though he’d been running his fingers through it for hours. Most of him was pale, but the skin under his eyes was the color of coffee grounds.

  I watched from the doorway as Dad buried his head on his arms. “What have I done?” he mumbled. Mom stroked his back and shoved in front of him more cardamom bread, spread thick with honey butter. Then he’d start crying again and Mom would have to reapply her bread cure, like aspirin.

  “I don’t know why you’re taking it so hard,” Mom said. “You were just doing your job.”

  At this point I was tired of lurking in a doorway, so I came in stretching and rubbing my eyes as though I had just woken up.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  The two of them looked up. “Nothing, honey.” Mom patted me on the arm and shot me her comforting celebrity-chef smile. “Have some cardamom bread.”

  Dad sat upright. “That’s not strictly correct,” he said. “It’s not nothing.”

  “Come on, Paul. Stop beating yourself up. This guy was no worse than some of the creeps you’ve defended.”

  Dad snorted. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t suckered by them.”

  Dad’s area of expertise at the public defender’s office was guys who were remiss in their child support. Deadbeat Dads, he called them. He said that most of them could hardly be called dads at all. He didn’t like any of them; wouldn’t invite one home for dinner—a big deal at our house. If he passed any of his ex-clients on the street, he didn’t even nod. All my father did was speed these losers through the courts as quickly as he could.

  “He acted perfectly normal,” Dad said, talking about his latest deadbeat. “He’d been an alcoholic but he’d seen the error of his ways, and with the help of his church he wanted to atone for all he’d done.” The oven timer went off. Mom pulled another braided loaf from the oven as Dad picked at the thick slab of bread on the plate in front of him, making tiny efficient crumbs that were perfect spheres, the air squished right out of them.

  “I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard, honey,” Mom said.

  Dad pounded his fists on the table like gavels. “Not take it so hard? I helped him get his kids back, Claire. And that guy doesn’t deserve to be a parent. You didn’t see all the crap they pulled out of that house. There was bleach and rat poison everywhere. Then this whole arsenal. An AK-47 assault rifle in his closet. Pistols, shotguns…” He waved his hands around in the air as if he was surrounded by the weapons he was describing, and his only option was surrender. Then he crumpled like a used tissue. “Jesus,” he muttered. “There were little kids in that house. Kids that I helped him get custody of.”

  There were a lot of things about his mini-rant that I didn’t understand. I got why firearms made him so uppity, but bleach? Rat poison? Was owning them really a prosecutable offense? What if the guy just had rats and hard-water stains?

  Mom looked at me and then looked away. It was just a momentarily glance, but an unguarded one. For that moment she didn’t look confident and famous—she just looked tired and old. Then she started moving again. She was a deft cook, braiding and kneading and frosting, but it took all she had just to keep my father from falling apart.

  Looking at the two of them should have been my first clue about how my life was going to be from now on: Dad paralyzed by his depression, Mom trying to shield me from it, but incapable of doing so. Her hands were too full. There just wasn’t any care left for me.

  That morning I sat with Dad until after the sun was up. We didn’t talk; we didn’t eat; we didn’t go to work; we didn’t go to school.

  “I’m going for a run,” Dad finally said, pushing himself away from the table. He stood up and threw away the white peak of used tissues that had piled up in front of him.

  Three days later, Dad came home with our new “foster” family he’d repossessed from that last client, over my mother’s and my tepid objections. They weren’t technically fostered. They didn’t take our name and they still had a functional mommy—Gloria Inez, who seemed a fine woman but in need of a job for her green card; and her kids, Tomás and Esperanza. That was when I learned that Dad’s definition of little kid (as in “there were little kids in that house with the firearms”) included a teenage boy who was six foot six, brawny, and the only Latino I’ve ever seen able to dunk a basketball. Esperanza fit my expectations a bit more. She was seven, with large, frightened eyes and a thumb in her mouth that never came out.

  One week after they squeezed in with us and bathroom time became a commodity, Mom remembered that she’d inherited a run-down inn on the banks of the Santiam River, and wouldn’t it be nice to get away? We could fix it up. Only enough to sell it since we never went there anyway.

  But when we got there, a change seemed to creep over everyone but me. Tomás relished the room to stretch out. I once caught him standing in the living room, waving his long arms around, not hitting anything, a look of bliss on his face. He was the one who erected a basketball hoop in the parking lot.

  Dad ran his hands lovingly over the wooden banisters carved into shapes of animals (brown bears, beavers, herons, eagles) and took over the rain-damaged basement, decorated it with black light posters and converted it into the Astro Lounge. Fixing the tap and filling it with Black Butte Porter, dark and foamy, was the only thing that brought a smile to his face.

  Mom and Gloria Inez took steel wool pads to the kitchen and couldn’t seem to stop. At first cooking in the the kitchen was an adventure to them, boiling things over the wood stove and making corn bread in a cast-iron skillet. Then, when that became inconvenient, they started to order new stainless steel appliances and remodeling. There was a walk-in fridge, a gas range with twelve elements, and an industrial-size dishwasher that was so big you could practically drive through it.

  Even Esperanza, the small and frightened, wasn’t immune to the spell the place wove. She was the one who discovered the stash of quilts that my great-grandmother had made from scraps of gingham and calico. Each blanket was like a map—there was material of cherubic kids kneeling and praying, one of duckies floating in a pond, one of Paul Bunyan with his ax and his big blue ox—all stitched together in geometric patterns with coarse thread. Before we could even have them dry cleaned Esperanza claimed the softest as her own, wrapped herself in it, and plunked herself by the fire.

  All of them—they not only loved the place, they needed it somehow. I was the only one unmoved by the tall trees, running water, open spaces, and historic finds. I couldn’t wait to get back, and used every excuse to get someone to shuttle me into town. Please, I can’t miss this symphony. Please, I have to go to Lego Physics Camp. (Never mind that I didn’t like Legos.) I was growing frantic, I could feel my dreams being scoured off me with steel wool. All my other friends were going to Avignon to brush up their language skills, to Dartmouth to study with poet laureates, to Salzburg to take violin lessons, or Ashland for Acting Shakespeare 101. All I learned was how to poison baby rats then scoop their corpses out of fireplaces. But who cared what I thought, when you could smell the resin in the air, drink water straight from the river?

  Then on Labor Day, Dad decided we needed a weekend getaway every day of the week and moved us there full-time. At that point, all I coul
d do was smile a hollow smile. What was the use of fighting? By that point my old life was already gone, daddy, gone.

  But it all started before then, on that sticky-sweet morning in May, with my dad inconsolable and my mother frantically baking. That was when I first sensed life closing in on me. As I sat there in the warm kitchen of our funky urban house, watching my decisive father not know what to do, then finally realizing it was enough to move, that was the exact moment I first started running.

  6

  Mom and Dad were sitting on the front porch when we rolled up. Tomás, my not-quite foster brother, was playing hoops in the parking lot with Casey Burns. They made an odd pair since Casey was a foot shorter than Tomás. But then again, everyone was a foot shorter than Tomás.

  Tomás was someone I definitely didn’t want to talk to today. Don’t get me wrong—he wasn’t a bad guy. As far as I could tell he was a good kid. He had ways of fixing stuff around the inn before anyone even knew it was broken. But being around him was work. I tried to draw him out when he first moved in but all I ever got for my trouble was a shrug or a “dunno.”

  I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Casey, out here in the rain like a good sport, getting a slam dunk in the face for his effort. But he just laughed it off. Then he saw us climb out of Ranger Dave’s car. “Dude, I told you your sister was okay,” he said to Tomás.

  Tomás palmed the slippery basketball and banked a jump shot, trying to appear nonchalant. But he’d noticed us. “She’s not my sister,” he said.

  “Then why won’t you let me…”

  “Shut up!” Tomás elbowed Casey hard in the ribs.

  Mom and Dad raced down from the porch. As they did, I heard Tomás spit at Casey: “Do you always have to be such a douchebag?”

  Dad wrapped himself around me and squeezed hard, like a constrictor, as though crushing the air out of me would make me more alive. I understood, remembering how I’d whacked Karen harder and harder on the back when she didn’t breathe. Violence oughta do the trick.

  “Are you all right, Ronnie?” Dad said. “Dave told us not to come get you.”

  “You couldn’t have done anything, Paul,” Ranger Dave said.

  “Thanks for bringing her home,” Dad said.

  “You would’ve been proud of our girl. She kept her wits and did everything she could.”

  You can’t be proud of me, I wanted to shriek. I’ve done nothing to be proud of.Oh, man. I definitely didn’t have any friendly left in me. Even the word pride made me want to smack someone.

  “Is it true? Was it Karen?” Dad said.

  Ranger Dave nodded.

  “That poor family,” Dad said, and pulled hard on his face as though he could tug the whole thing off, like a mask.

  Mom, perhaps sensing another Dad meltdown, crowded in on me. “Well, at least you’re okay, Ronnie. See, Paul? She’s fine. You’re fine, aren’t you, honey?” She nodded at me, willing it to be true. But I noticed her hands were empty. Where were my s’mores? Where was the food that would transform me back into a normal human being? I wanted to lash out at her, claw her eyes from her skull. I wanted to say: This is your fault. We shouldn’t be here at all. You picked what was best for Dad over what was best for me and I’ll never forgive you for it.

  But Mom’s eyes were so bright and she kept wiping her dry, clean hands on a dirty dish towel. So I just said, “Of course.” I tried to keep my voice smooth, without grit. I clomped up the stairs toward the inn, eager to get away.

  At the top of the stairs, I couldn’t resist looking over my shoulder. Ranger Dave was having a whispering conference with Mom and Dad, and Casey and Tomás had resumed their game. I heard the plock boing plock boing of a ball on wet asphalt and then watched as Casey slapped the ball away from Tomás and drove to the basket for an easy layup. Normally, Casey would never be able to get the drop on Tomás, who was as quick as he was tall. He must not have had his mind on the game. Sure enough, Tomás was staring after me even though he looked away when I caught him at it. Rubbernecker, I thought. He was a nice guy but no different than the others who emerged from their split-level houses the instant they heard sirens.

  I was so busy feeling surly that I didn’t pay attention to where I was going, so nearly wiped out when my foot connected with something unexpected. I caught myself on the screen door, then looked down at what had tripped me.

  It was the two-by-four with Karen’s mud volcanoes exploding with lupine. Only now, thanks to me, they were fully exploded—Mt. St. Helens with a chunk taken out of it. I sank to my knees and hoped I hadn’t done too much damage to Karen’s last work of art. I started rearranging the lupine blossoms so they were centered, but I stopped.

  Dad came up behind me and patted me on the shoulders. “Leave it, Ronnie,” he said gently. “Tomás can clean it up.”

  I turned around. “No, Dad, you don’t understand,” I said. “Karen must’ve left these this morning. Should we tell someone? You know, in case she fell in somewhere around here and not downstream?”

  He looked at them with renewed interest and started scratching his beard. Not tugging, but scratching. A lawyerly scratch. I could practically see him analyzing it as a piece of evidence.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I’ll show the Brads. You go on in.”

  With that, he opened the door and shoved me inside.

  I stood dripping on the area rug, trying to shake off the excess moisture before traipsing over hardwood floors to get to my room. The Brads? Why would Dad want to tell the Brads about the mud pies?

  The Brads were these two blond trust-fund guys—Brad Boyle and Brad Wells, or Good Brad and Evil Brad. They were scruffy, skinny twenty-somethings who weren’t interested in anything other than snowboarding and drinking beer in the Astro Lounge. They’d been guests with us since Christmas and showed no signs of going anywhere else, like home or to get a job.

  Why would they possibly be interested in Karen’s mud pies?

  As I stood there dripping, Gretchen came winging out of the kitchen doors carrying trays of brioche French toast stuffed with crème fraîche and strawberries. She was wearing her khaki button-down shirt with the Patchworks logo on it and a white apron. She had brown hair cut in an inverted bob, silent screen star–style, but with a fringe of purple around the nape of her neck. Today she had a Snoopy bandage covering her left nostril, where she’d gotten her nose pierced last month. Mom said she had to cover the hoop while she worked here because it was unsanitary. I didn’t think sanitary was the real problem. After all: If you sneeze in the soup, does it matter if your nostril’s pierced or not? I tend to think it was more a presentation issue. With Mom, everything was about presentation.

  “Hey,” Gretchen said now. “We threw out your breakfast burrito. Your mom thought we should save it but I said you probably weren’t in the mood for eggs.”

  “Thanks,” I managed. And she was right. Nothing sounded good to me right now, least of all anything runny.

  Gretchen balanced the tray on her shoulder, her fingers buckling under the weight of all that French toast. Her eyes softened. “Ronnie…”

  “Table twelve’s waiting for their food,” I barked. I didn’t want to talk about it. Even with Gretchen.

  She narrowed her eyes but didn’t bark back. “Right,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. That must’ve been the most suckful thing ever.”

  Suckful didn’t even begin to describe it but I didn’t say so. She was trying to help. It wasn’t her fault that every word felt like an invasion to me.

  She managed a wan smile. I couldn’t help noticing how tired she looked. Even under all the dark eye makeup she had charcoal-colored bags. I looked at my watch. It was now 11:00. She’d been here since 3:00 this morning to start the loaves rising. Baker’s hours were always hellish.

  “You need to crash upstairs for awhile?” I kept a trundle bed in my room so Gretchen could stagger upstairs when she didn’t want to go home. And yes, it was a hotel so she probably could’
ve had a room to herself when it was slow, but it was rarely slow, and Gretchen and I kind of liked being bunkmates. Sometimes we talked about bands or boys at school, but mostly we just slept.

  “Maybe later,” she agreed. “Your mom wants me to get started on the sticky buns.”

  “Ah…,” I said. Of course. Sticky buns were Mom’s grief food. She said that tuna casseroles were overrated and no one wanted to eat them when they were happy, so why foist them on someone who was bereaved? Sticky buns were different. You could eat them and kid yourself that you weren’t technically eating, just tearing something off in a long gooey spiral. And oftentimes, Mom said, tearing was just what someone in that situation needed.

  “I’ll pull out the trundle,” I told Gretchen, and made my way upstairs, relieved that I still had the capacity to do something for someone else.

  I wasn’t kidding myself: giving my friend a place to crash was nothing. It was a small save. Even so, as I walked upstairs, I tallied up the small saves that had occurred this morning. There had been a lot of them: Gretchen throwing out my breakfast burrito, Ranger Dave patting my back as I threw up down the side of his car, Big Moustache Deputy Sheriff lending me his raincoat, Dad channeling his Inner Lawyer to assess what should be done about the mud pies—even Tomás elbowing Casey in the ribs and calling him a douchebag. Nobody in town had any trouble with the small saves.

  It was the larger saves that evaded us all.

  7

  A shower seemed like the next logical step. Then I would go downstairs to help serve the lunch crowd.

  Alas, showering was a mistake. As soon as the hot water hit my back, I realized I’d been getting through the day on numbness. I didn’t want the feeling back in my skin. I tried to rub it off, loofahing red welts onto my arms and legs, but it didn’t make me feel any better. What I’d seen was still wedged tight somewhere, underneath blood and bone.