River

by Shira Nayman

  This made Billy happy. “I’ll tell Elias when we get back. That I’m just the same as him.”

  That night, Billy went to bed feeling cranky and hot. I awoke after midnight to hear my parents’ worried voices.

  “A hundred and five,” Mama said, bustling about, getting things into a bag.

  Since he had been an infant, Billy had spiked high fevers.

  Mama saw I was awake. “Emily, we’re taking him to the emergency room. You stay and get some sleep. Emergency rooms are hard. And I don’t want you picking anything up there—all that sickness.”

  I’d been to the ER quite a few times as a tagalong—on occasion because of Billy’s fever spikes, but also because of what the doctor called Billy’s “catastrophic nose bleeds,” not to mention the time Billy got seventeen stitches after a fall. Scary, that’s how I’d always found it. No fun at all.

  “Okay, I’ll stay,” I said, sleepily aware of a small spear of panic starting somewhere in the pit of my stomach.

  “We have our cell phones,” Mama said. “You need to dial nine to get an outside line. And there’s someone at the front desk if you need anything.” Mama gave me a hasty kiss. Papa scooped Billy into his arms, and then they were gone.

  I fell into a hazy half-sleep, rattled by the odd nighttime hotel sounds I hadn’t noticed before: the muffled, clattery clash of the ice machine in the alcove outside our door; an intermittent soft beep that came from the smoke detector; the buzzy drone of a TV from the next room. I slipped in and out of troubled dreams involving Billy in dangerous situations, his dear face looming and fading as I ran and tumbled and tried to catch hold of his hand. In the midst of it, I bolted upright in bed, suddenly alert. A knife of fluorescent light beamed in through a crack in the blackout curtain.

  My heart pounded and I mouthed a prayer for Billy. Please, God, whoever you are, wherever you are, take care of my little brother. I repeated the prayer, twice, three times, waiting for the spread of calm. Instead, anxiety bloomed; something was troubling me, beneath my concern for Billy. He always recovered quickly from his fevers, and deep inside, I knew he was going to be just fine. Why, then, this terrible foreboding that was growing by the minute? My mother’s face swam into my mind’s eye: no sparkle in her eyes, no warm, affirming smile. A different Mama: that blue-gray skin tone deepened, and ashy circles appeared under dull eyes.

  “Mama!” I called out into the empty room. “What’s wrong?”

  But the Mama in my mind’s eye remained silent, nothing but an almost imperceptible shaking of her head.

  The agitation in my legs and arms made it impossible to stay in bed. I jumped up and quickly changed from my pajamas into my clothes; so restless, I felt I was jumping out of my skin. I needed to move. I thought I’d walk around the lobby—or maybe even take a quick walk outside. The thought of looking up at the stars comforted me.

  I slipped the hotel key card into my pocket and opened the door. The hallway was silent; the soft sounds of my footsteps on the carpet were soothing. I willed my still-pounding heart to slow to the rhythm of my steps and within minutes, I was once again breathing calmly and in command of my wayward emotions.

  I also knew where I was going and what I had to do.

  Passing by the front desk, the young woman on duty flashed me a look of concern.

  “May I help you, miss?”

  “I have to go meet my parents,” I said. My voice sounded surprisingly assured. “They took my brother to the ER.”

  “Of course, I talked to them as they were leaving. I hope your brother is doing better,” the woman said.

  “Can you call me a taxi?” I asked.

  “Actually, there’s one outside. The guy who dropped your parents off. He came right back—the hotel is his main station. We’ve known him for years. He’s very trustworthy.”

  She accompanied me outside and waved down the driveway for the taxi.

  “Back to the hospital,” she instructed the driver, who nodded.

  But once I was seated and we reached the end of the driveway, I told him there was somewhere else I wanted to stop by first.

  “The Touro Synagogue,” I heard myself saying, marveling at this strange new habit—my mouth bypassing my brain and speaking all on its own.

  “No problem,” the driver said. “It’s on the way.”

  Five minutes later, we pulled up in front of the synagogue. The moonlight settled around the building like a glimmering blanket, giving off a mystical awe.

  “I’d like to get out for a bit, if you don’t mind waiting,” I said. The driver swiveled around to face me.

  “Not a great idea,” he said. I only now took note of him—a middle-aged man with a kind face and a fatherly air. “It’s pretty safe around here, but it is after midnight.”

  I glanced at my watch. The driver was right; it was exactly 12:15. How could I not have registered the time? Why had I asked the driver to bring me here?

  I nodded. “Okay. But could we just sit here for a moment?”

  “Sure. No problem. I’ll take you back when you’re ready.”

  He turned off the engine and the world hushed. The sound of my own breathing filled my ears. And then, from behind the synagogue, I saw ghostly forms taking shape: people emerging, one by one, as if from a hidden cave—a few at first, and then more and more, swelling within seconds to become a small crowd. Shadow shrouded them, despite the brightness of the moonlight, in the hues of a black-and-white movie, multiple shades of gray. Squinting into the image, I saw that the people were dressed in shabby, old-fashioned garments, perhaps from somewhere in Eastern Europe, like Poland or Russia. An air of desperation hung around them. My eyes settled on a man, middle-aged, with hunched shoulders and piercing eyes. Holding his hand was a girl around my age with long black hair, her face dark with fear. And beside her—another girl, and how odd, I could see her fair hair, but her face was fuzzy, like a photograph in which the facial features are obscured. They made no noise at all.

  The driver slumped forward in his seat, breathing the heavy breath of sleep.

  “What do you see?” I blurted out in a voice louder than intended.

  He started. “I’m sorry, what?” he asked.

  I pointed out of the front window, jabbing the air.

  “There! What do you see?”

  “Why, the synagogue building, of course. What do you see?”

  I blinked once, twice. There was nothing but the synagogue, hugging the muffled brightness of the moon close to its angular contours. No people, no living beings at all; only the driver and me, sitting in the taxi, peering out into the night.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just …” I let my voice trail off.

  In the rearview mirror, the driver’s face was creased with concern.

  “Miss, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I think I’m just very tired,” I said.

  I had no idea what was going on. Tears sprang to my eyes and I blinked them away.

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  “Not to the hospital?”

  “No. Back to the hotel.”

  We drove back in silence. The streets peeled away, their sleeping buildings in rapid retreat, as if the whole world were silently reeling while I sat stock-still, frozen beneath the eye of the moon.

  Back at the hotel, I fell into a troubled sleep, punctuated by the clanking of the ice machine, which appeared in my dreams first as slaves trudging along muddy paths, their legs linked by heavy chains, then as a huddled crowd crushed up against a chain-link fence.

  I awoke to the sound of the door being carefully opened, and the looming shape of Papa carrying Billy, asleep, in his arms. The soft early-morning light peeped through the crack in the curtains. Mama told me everything was okay, that Billy had a double ear infection but was on strong antibiotics and no longer had a dangerously high temperature.

  “He’s going to need to rest,” Mama said. “They gave him so much Tylenol, he’ll be out like a log. Papa and I n
eed to sleep for a while. It’s been a long night. But let’s do something fun this afternoon, just you and me. Papa can stay with Billy.”

  I could hear the strain in her voice and appreciated Mama’s effort to put a good face on the situation.

  “Is he going to be okay?” My voice came out sounding choked and I realized how sick with worry I’d been about Billy all night.

  Mama put her arm around me. “Of course, darling. Those high fevers are scary, but he always recovers quickly. The doctor told us not to worry. The antibiotics do wonders. He’ll be back to his old self in no time.”

  I spent the morning reading, and in the afternoon, Mama and I went out for a late lunch and then visited the Newport Art Museum. We spent an hour looking at paintings by Helena Sturtevant, a renowned Rhode Island painter. Her landscapes pulled me in; one showed a country lane with bushes on one side and towering trees on the other, a soft sun in a bright sky thick with texture. I felt the path under my feet where the sunlight lay like butter in the dirt. And there was a painting of the Touro park as well as of the synagogue! I saw from the plaques that Sturtevant had been born in 1872 and died in 1946; seeing these places I’d just seen myself through her eyes excited me, as if history were shimmering, like sunlight on water. I closed my eyes and had the strange feeling that I could lift up my feet and climb into that sunlit water and perhaps float backward on its gentle tide.

  Something stirred within me—something new that was tantalizing, confusing, and just a bit frightening. An image crystallized in my mind’s eye: a patch of river, a rocky bank presided over by a single tree, and dust colors, the sky settling to a glossy peach, quietly alight with the day’s end. I snapped open my eyes to find Mama looking at me, her eyes searching, and a faint smile on her lips. She said nothing, only took my hand, and we continued our slow stroll around the gallery space. Painting after painting, all by Sturtevant; it was as if everything she ever noticed and cared about and loved were springing up all around us—her world, her vision, her mind and soul and heart.

  And then, a painting made my heart leap so intensely, it scared me. There, before me, was the exact image I’d visualized only a moment before, in the privacy of my own mind. That same piece of river, the rocky shore, the sky, hanging in glossy patches on the water’s surface, flecked with gold. I could hear faint birdsong coming from the tree, where a few dabs of yellow paint showed the light glowing through, and a scuttling in the foreground, a little family of lizards, I imagined, where flinty rocks glinted like jewels in the scruffy grass. How was this possible? What was happening to me?

  “What’s wrong, darling?” Mama asked.

  “I don’t know, that painting …” I said, staring closely at the scene. It was titled Paradise.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it,” Mama said. “There’s something about the light in the sky.”

  “It’s just that …” How could I tell Mama what was happening? That my mind had shown me this exact scene before my eyes had actually seen it?

  “What do you think the painting is about?” Mama asked. I wondered if she sensed my terror and was sidestepping it.

  “What do you mean?” I could hear the tremor in my voice.

  “I don’t mean the obvious subject—the landscape. I just feel the painter was trying to tell us something. Something else, besides showing us the beauty of this particular scene of nature.”

  I closed my eyes again for a moment, and the image from earlier reared up again. That same scene, vivid and real—not a painting at all, but an actual river! I could see the ripples on the water moving in silent, gentle time with the imperceptible touch of a breeze. How was it possible that I could have seen this exact view before we actually saw the painting? My mind lurched back to the eerie image of last evening, when I sat with the taxi driver in front of the Touro Synagogue. The girl with dark hair and the man with hunched shoulders, her father perhaps, walking silently, gray with dread. I had not told my parents about that strange adventure. They’d had enough to worry about, with Billy ill and spending the night in the emergency room. That vision had also been intensely alive, as if I were looking straight at reality.

  “I think the painting is about time,” I found myself saying. “Not only that the painter has captured a moment in time—this river at sunset—but that this little stretch of river captures the nature of time itself. What time is all about—”

  I felt overcome by confusion and inexplicably, the urge to cry. Before I could choke them back, tears spilled down my cheeks. I looked at Mama and saw that the worry in her eyes had vanished; her face shone with love.

  “I bet Helena Sturtevant would have been happy to know what her work made you think. And feel.”

  This was a comforting thought.

  “Expression and connection,” Mama said, “that’s what art is about for me. The landscape she painted brought something alive for her—ignited her artistic imagination. And now her painting has done the same for you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s like a chain, passing from person to person, across time. More than fifty years after she died …”

  In that moment, I knew why the painter had called her painting Paradise. Not just because it showed a scene of beauty and peace—it went beyond that, I felt certain.

  “I feel like I can see her, standing there, on the bank of the river. Almost like it’s me, seeing the water myself, hearing the sounds of birds, watching the sun set. But for the painter, that moment passed. And she knew it would pass. Other people would stand there one day and look at that river. In real life, but also looking at her painting, the way we’re looking at it now. All of it—I don’t know, timeless. That river is still flowing today. Both in real life and right there!”

  I pointed to the painting, as if that would explain everything, as if my finger were an exclamation point that would settle this once and for all.

  By next morning, Billy was feeling much better, though he was still weak and a bit woozy. After breakfast, we packed up the car. There was no talk of staying for the Friday night service at the synagogue; that idea seemed to have dissolved in the worry about Billy. Though eager to go to the service, I didn’t want to bring it up. Mama and Papa seemed to have a lot on their minds, and I didn’t want to divert them from their plans. I felt sad as we left town, taking the exit back onto the highway, and looked back over my shoulder, images of the Touro Synagogue flickering through my mind’s eye—what I had seen when we’d visited as a family, what I’d imagined on my strange late-night adventure, and also the memory of Sturtevant’s lively depiction of the synagogue painted almost a hundred years ago.

  Billy stared out the window, blinking under the influence of the antibiotics and Tylenol, which always knocked him out. I reached for his hand. He turned to me and smiled. “Don’t worry, Sis,” he said, “you and me will go to synigig one day. At home in Brooklyn. We have one of those there.”

  I guess he’d been thinking about missing the services, too.

  “Yes, let’s do that, when we get home to Brooklyn. Take a nap, now, little guy.” I patted his hand.

  Billy sighed, and drifted off to sleep.

  Mama turned from the front passenger seat, took note that Billy had fallen asleep, smiled my way and reached her hand out for a quick squeeze. She turned back and began talking to Papa in a low voice, so as not to disturb Billy, I supposed, though I wondered if there was something more to it. Papa nodded slowly a few times.

  I looked out the window, where an enormous dock unfurled, hoarding a village of boats, from small sloops to larger cabin cruisers, bobbing on the water. The road hugged the water, whose languid expanse was held in place by the shimmering horizon. I felt a plunging sadness that made no sense, given the beauty of the landscape—heard, again, the faint birdsong and reptilian scuttling that had echoed from the thick paint dabs in Sturtevant’s Paradise.

  The journey after that was a blur. While Papa concentrated on the road, Billy and I filled the long hours in the car playing games, with Ma
ma officiating from the front seat. The never-ending Great Count was Billy’s favorite; he was speedy with his estimate of head of cattle whenever we saw a field of grazing cows, shouting out with conviction. “Sixty-eight!” or “Ninety-two!” and, once Mama introduced him to the concept of a dozen, “Two dozen! Eight dozen!” I wrote down everything he said, “Word for word, Sis,” according to his instruction. We stopped at diners and other roadside eateries for lunch and dinner in whatever new town we found ourselves in. We wandered down main streets, once taking in a movie in a dilapidated movie theater, and another time visiting a churchyard where we wandered among old tombstones, trying to make out the names and dedications, feeling sad when we found a small grave whose dates showed that the deceased had been a child.

  I fell in love with NASA the moment we saw the massive rectangular vehicle assembly building rise from the flat surrounds, the painted American flag on the left and the NASA symbol on the right like two enormous mismatched, far-seeing eyes. Billy erupted with excitement as we walked through the exhibits in the Kennedy Space Center; I myself felt like jumping for joy, confronted with the magical details of space travel, the unimaginable-impossible rendered real. The sounds of Cape Canaveral boomed as we sat in the little theater, watching the Apollo launches, one after the other. And then, the historic Apollo 11 liftoff: Three … two … one … zero, all engines running, liftoff, we have a liftoff, thirty-two minutes past the hour.

  “They landed on the moon, right, Sis?” Billy said. “Let’s go there one day, on ‘nother crosscrountrytrip.”

  “That would be a cross-milky-way trip, Billy,” I said, tousling his hair.

  “Milky way?” he asked. “Astronauts got their mamas too, giving out candy on the trip?”

  I explained about galaxies, and that the candy was named after our own, and Billy nodded seriously, his face alive with the wonder of new knowledge.

  We ate at the Rocket Garden Cafe, where Billy ordered from the junior astronaut menu, a three-item selection, convinced that while in space, astronauts must eat only pizza, chicken nuggets, or “uncrustables,” all served with apple slices.