“What then?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “I did the only thing that would get to him.”
“What?”
“I started the fire.”
“Why?”
“To ruin him.”
“You mean to burn his records, all his game plans?” Everyone knew Briggs kept game plans about every game he ever coached. He was fanatical about taking notes, recording every detail. Maybe he was going to write a book or his memoir.
“It wasn’t that,” River says. “That’s what everyone thought.”
“Then what?”
“He kept something else, I found out.”
“What?”
“Profiles of every kid who ever played on his teams. I was in his office one day when he was out on the field, and I opened the file drawers to see what he had in there. He detailed everything he could find out about all of us, from our strengths in the game to our weaknesses.”
“Why?”
“To control us. But that wasn’t all. He found out about our private lives too.”
I hold my breath.
“He knew how my mom died and where,” River says. “He had her obit in his file. He had my transcripts and all the articles about me from the school paper. He even knew who I dated and where I hung out. There were pictures of Lexie and me. Even reports from a shrink she went to and accusations of bullying against her that came into the guidance office. I had no idea about any of it.”
“That’s so creepy.”
“It gets worse. The biggest file was about Ryan. Stuff about his jobs, modeling pictures, a list of the bars where he hung out—even pictures of different guys he was with.”
“Did he ever use any of that against anyone?”
“I’m sure he would have if he thought it would help him. Briggs is sick, obsessive about every detail.”
“Know the enemy,” I say.
“Or your team.”
“Did anyone else know?”
He shrugs. “So I burned it all to gut him, to gut his power.”
“How did they know it was you?”
“He told them.”
“He wasn’t afraid?”
“You think anyone would believe me over him?”
“So the school called the cops?”
“About an hour after the fire. Briggs told them I missed practices and that I was late too often. He said I was on drugs. He gave them the coke from my locker as proof with my fingerprints on it. That was all they needed. Briggs said he held it because he wanted to give me a second chance, that he had high hopes for me. But he said I was furious when he told me he was going to kick me off the team.” He shakes his head. “They brought me before a corrupt judge, and that was it, never mind my side of it.”
“But how come nothing ever came out?”
“The school hushed it up. It was so ugly, they just wanted it to be over. No publicity. No nothing.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, hugging himself, his head down. It looks like all the energy and fight are drained out of him now. He closes his eyes, exhausted.
Chapter 30
RIVER
I have to get out of here.
We leave Briggs’s office and go back to the theater, up on the stage to stay dry. We stay up all night going over it. How my life changed after that. About Briggs. I never thought I’d tell anyone, only when I started talking to her, I couldn’t stop. She cared. She saw the me that no one else did anymore.
It’s still raining, but the wind is quieter, as if the storm is running out of energy. We’re stretched out behind the dark curtains, hidden away.
“Remember Prometheus?” Jillian says.
“That was my term paper.”
“Fire was his gift to humanity,” she says.
“Right, and they chained him up and every day an eagle ate his liver.”
“But it grew back,” she says.
“Yeah, until the next day when it happened again.”
“But he was freed,” she says.
“Eventually, in some versions.”
We talk about all the things I could or should have done differently. About being wronged with the whole world believing a lie that takes on a life of its own. And no one giving you a chance.
By two in the morning we burn out, fantasizing that by getting out the truth, you can heal, like washing dirt out of an infected wound and then stitching it up. But wounds leave scars, and I have them inside and out.
In spite of the damage around us, in spite of me telling the story I had replayed a million times in my head, but vowed never to speak of—or maybe because of all that—we fall dead asleep in each other’s arms for what seems like a lifetime.
I sense that something’s different before I even open my eyes. The chaos outside has been replaced by calm. I stand up and go over to the windows in the theater, pulling back the curtains.
Overnight, the world has been reborn.
There’s brilliant sunshine for the first time in forty-eight hours. All the destruction that surrounds us is now bathed deceptively in a golden light. I stare at the sky and question my sanity. Did it really happen? How could everything change so much overnight?
It’s hard to understand what I’m seeing. Jillian gets up and we climb up on a second floor windowsill and stare out at demolished homes, downed power lines, toppled trees, garbage, furniture, roof shingles, and worst of all dead animals—lots of them now, birds, cats, and dogs—floating along as calmly as if they’re asleep. And beneath the surface of the water probably snakes, all kinds of them.
“We can’t go outside or we’ll get electrocuted. The power lines are all close to the ground now.”
“Someone will come around here and find us,” Jillian says. “Or there will be helicopters flying over us. If we can get onto a windowsill, they’ll see us.” She stares off into the distance, and then turns back to me. “When life starts again, you have to talk to Ryan and convince him to go to the police. Briggs can’t get away with what he did.”
“The school heads don’t want shit raining down on them,” I say. “They won’t want to admit what happened. What they believe is that I set the fire. Kids could have gotten killed.”
JILLIAN
I stop and it hits me. Secrets. We had been telling each other our deepest secrets, but River was still keeping the hardest one inside him.
“Believe?”
“What?” he says, looking confused.
“You said, ‘What they believe is that I set the fire.’”
He turns away.
“River …” I grip his arm. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“The truth matters—please.”
“It’s too late.”
“It isn’t!”
“I paid for it,” he says. “I lost almost four months of my goddamn life, not to mention half my brain and my sanity. I thought I’d get a few weeks, maybe a month at most and then they’d spring me. Only it didn’t work that way.”
“It was Ryan, wasn’t it? He set the fire and you took the blame.”
He looks at me and turns away.
“Why? Why would you do that, River?”
“He was so broken,” he says, his voice cracking. “You know what he went through. I couldn’t let anything else happen to him. He would have killed himself, and it would have been my fault. I tried to get him to tell them, but he wouldn’t. There was no other way.”
“You have to tell at some point. You have to report him.”
“At some point,” he says robotically. “If anyone cares.”
“You were locked up for no reason, and Briggs has to be stopped.”
“It’s over now; it’s too late. You think anyone will really care?”
“We’ll make them
care. We have to,” I urge.
“Bullshit.” River looks around like he’s reliving it. “You want to hear something really crazy?”
“What?”
“You know what I still think about sometimes?”
“What?”
“The canary, Briggs’s canary.”
“What do you mean?”
“Before the fire Ryan put the cage near the window and opened the door. The tiny bird stood there for a few seconds as if he was thinking about it, like he was weighing his options. Then he went out, he flew away. Ryan knew he would. He wanted that helpless thing to escape from Briggs, whatever the cost.”
“Yeah?” I say.
“I keep wondering whether the poor bird survived.”
Time stands still. A wide oasis of silence surrounds us under the cornflower-blue sky. There’s no wind, no motion. The only things we see stirring are the mosquitos feasting on the garbage outside.
We wait inside where it’s safe. There’s nothing else to do. Someone will pass by. Someone will check on the school or the streets around it. It’s just a matter of time. We perch ourselves on a windowsill in a second-floor science room.
River reaches for my hand and holds it in his. He’s in pain from his shoulder, his face strained, his jaw tight, but he manages to stay calm. Both of us are filled with the same sense of relief. It’s over, and we survived. Only I can’t help asking myself, why? What obscure toss of the dice in the universe decided we would make it when so many others lost their lives?
EMS workers in trucks arrive, floodwater covering their tires. They pull up to the school. Two men get out. Am I seeing a mirage? We call out to them and they make their way to the school door, carefully stepping around the downed wires, brushing away the mosquitos and flies swarming over the stagnant pools of water surrounding us.
“What the hell,” one of them says. “How did you get in here?”
“It’s a long story,” I say.
We go outside with him and climb into the truck. “How are you? You need medical care?”
“My shoulder … it’s broken,” River says.
“Was there anyone else inside with you?”
River looks off momentarily and then back at him. “No,” we answer at the same time.
The EMT hands us water bottles and we drain them. “I have a sat phone,” he says, handing it to me. “Try your parents.”
I was almost eight when it happened. I remember because it was before my dad left. It was storming outside, there was thunder and lightning. We were staying at a house we rented in Maine for part of the summer. Our dog, Bree, was always scared of storms. It was too bad outside to walk her so we put her into the backyard to go. We waited for a few minutes to give her time, but when we called her, she didn’t come back. Bree was trained, she always came when we called her, so we got concerned.
All of us went outside to look for her. We thought that maybe she ducked under a bush to hide from the storm, but she wasn’t anywhere. Then Ethan shouted.
“The backyard gate. It’s open!”
The guy who cut the grass had been there in the morning, and we realized he had forgotten to lock it behind him. We got into the car and drove around the neighborhood, shouting her name from the window. We called her again and again, but we couldn’t find her. We must have been driving around searching for an hour when my dad suddenly stopped short.
Bree was running across the road.
If he hadn’t stopped in time, he would have hit her. He ran out and called her name and she stopped. He carried her into the backseat and all of us started crying, happiness mixed with relief.
That scene comes back to me now as the phone rings and rings and finally, I hear her voice. The connection is full of static. It sounds like she’s a million miles away, or at the bottom of a well. But it’s her, it’s my mom. She’s alive. She’s OK.
“Mom?” It’s hard to breathe.
“Jilly?”
That was what she called me when I was growing up. “Yeah, mom,” I finally answer, my voice cracking. I hear a stifled sob.
“Oh my God, honey.” Her voice breaks. She can’t go on.
Then I hear Ethan’s voice. “Jill?” He takes the phone from my mom. They must have found each other.
“You know how scared we were?” he says. “Jesus Christ!” And then silence before I hear something I’ve never heard before—my brother sobbing too.
“It’s OK, Ethan,” I whisper. “It’s OK.” I cradle the phone against my heart, waiting for him to stop.
River takes the phone after me. He dials his dad’s cell number and waits. No answer, not that it surprises us. He hits end and stares off into the distance. A grimace of pain washes over his face.
I reach for his hand, slipping my fingers through his, holding tight. He squeezes my hand back, then stares ahead, biting the side of his lip.
My mom is staying at a hotel in downtown Houston, and I meet her there. Ethan is with her. He came back as soon as the storm ended, staying downtown in a hotel where Jerry’s dad worked.
River comes with me while city workers try to contact local hospitals and aid workers to find his dad. We get to my mom’s room, but she and Ethan must have gone outside, so we go inside and watch the news while we wait.
“Much of the highway traffic was hit dead on by the hurricane,” the reporter says. “Cars were lifted and sent flying. Thousands were killed. We don’t have a final count of the dead. That could take weeks.”
The TV shows aerial views of people on rooftops waiting to be rescued and highways submerged in water. It looks like a topsy-turvy world of water. Streets have been turned into giant bayous with trees and light poles sticking out of the water at odd angles.
There’s an interview with the mayor, who’s wearing an open shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His eyes are half closed, like he hasn’t slept in days.
“All that the police, firefighters, and city officials care about right now is cutting losses and saving people before it’s too late,” he says. “But it’s a huge city and the devastation is everywhere. People are trapped in houses, buildings, and cars, slowly dying of thirst and starvation. They need help fast, and fortunately we’ve gotten calls from EMS workers and firemen throughout the country who are making their way here to help us.”
The camera switches to aerial footage of the city again, and a voice-over provides a running commentary: “Bodies are everywhere, stuck in attics where people ran to avoid floods below, and in hospitals that ran out of food, oxygen, and medication. Corpses are on the streets too, floating in the floodwaters, flesh decomposing, giving off the stench of rotten eggs. The bodies are everywhere, left behind like soldiers on a battlefield. Only these victims were defenseless.”
Looting is widespread, the report says. There are unconfirmed reports about drug addicts going into hospitals and shooting nurses in the head in their desperate efforts to find drugs.
And the people left standing, the ones we see on the streets who were spared, look numb and in shock.
We want to turn the TV off, but we can’t look away. We’re speechless, unable to move, tears blurring our vision.
Nothing in this city will ever be the same again.
Chapter 31
THREE WEEKS LATER
RIVER
The National Guard was called in. Volunteers from across the country came to help put life back together. The bodies are being buried. There are funerals. Every day.
My dad survived. Turned out that the marine corps sticker on his car helped save his life. After sitting in gridlock for hours after we left, he got off the highway. He came looking for us, but the storm got worse and he had to give up. He searched frantically for shelter, going to building after building, and finally, after pounding on the side of a warehouse door where he heard sounds, someone answered. The guy inside was a f
ormer marine too, and he took my dad in.
After it was over though, he spent a couple of weeks in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital. Dehydration, broken ribs, and some weird blood infection that nearly killed him. All the names of hospital patients were listed on a registry they printed in the newspaper. I went to see him three weeks after we left the school.
I open the door to his hospital room and stand still.
“Go ahead,” says a nurse passing by. “It’s fine.”
I’m not sure it is. I nod to her and take a step in. He’s sharing the room with two other men. One of the beds has gauzy white curtains drawn around it. A second holds a man with an IV in his arm. I figure my dad is in the bed near the window, only his face is turned away, so I can’t see it.
I feel off balance, like the earth is vibrating under my feet. I need something to hold on to. I hate hospitals, everything about them—the smells, the staff people who don’t meet your eyes, the look of the place—all of it, ever since …
I walk over to his bed and grab the cold handrail to steady myself. He’s sleeping. He’s almost yellow, his eyes sunken, the creases across his forehead deeper than I remember. His lips are dried, cracked. He looks broken down, almost lifeless.
“Dad?” I whisper.
After a few seconds, his eyes flicker and then open. He turns to me, a look of shock on his face.
“River!”
I can’t make out his expression. Disbelief? Despair? I see a sudden flash of anger in his eyes.
“You just ran …” he says, and then as quickly the anger vanishes. “But you made it.” He shakes his head. “You outran it.”
I never thought I’d see my dad break down. I drop to my knees, still gripping the railing. “It’s OK, Dad, don’t cry.”
“I didn’t know what to think. What could have happened. You just ran and …” His voice breaks.
I reach over and put my hand over his. He grabs it and holds it tightly. I look at him, not knowing what else to say. I think about all the conversations we never had. All the memories I should have, but don’t, and it scares me because so many years have gone by like this. There’s only this emptiness to look back on. We never talk about anything important. Anything real. Part of me feels like I’m looking at a stranger.
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