Meet Me at the River (13 page)

I just stood there on the sidewalk, staring at him.
“You’re seeing Tressa now?” he came right out and said. “Is that the new thing? You’re
dating
her?”

I shrugged, not wanting to say yes or no. On the one hand it was none of his business. On the other hand I liked anything that made him squirm. Like him, I finally had the girl I wanted. Unlike him, I didn’t have to worry about her bolting, ever.

“Do you really think that’s appropriate?” Dad said. I’m still not sure what he meant. Was I supposed to think it wasn’t appropriate because of our families? Or because of what happened with me and Kelly? It seemed like the real reason it bothered him had nothing to do with inappropriate and everything to do with inconvenient.

So I said, “Yeah, Paul. I think it’s totally appropriate. You know what wouldn’t be appropriate? My mother having to look out the window and see you standing here. So maybe you should get on your way.”

Dad raised a finger and touched me for the first time in over four years to poke me in the shoulder. Now that I think of it, it was also the last time he touched me. I wonder if that ever occurs to him.

“You’re not going to do with Tressa what you did with Kelly,” Dad said.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Huh. Thanks for the morals lesson, Paul.” Then I turned around and walked down the sidewalk. The only way I know he looked more scared than angry is that just the other day I went back to look.

But you know what? I don’t have any reason to blame him. Whatever else he did, the after-Luke is not Dad’s fault. Let’s say that instead of trying to keep me away from Tressa he slapped me on the back and passed around cigars. That still doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have walked Carlo by the river that day. We had done it a thousand times before. We would have done it a thousand times again.

*   *   *

Here’s how it went. Tressa came back to Rabbitbrush. She didn’t fit in. It bothered me more than it bothered her. That’s what Tressa said, anyway. And it did drive me nuts. It was so stupid, the things people didn’t see. Tressa may not have been able to ski, or talk about the things other kids did. But she had this cool way of speaking. And this cool walk, with a very straight spine. She looked like she came from someplace else, which may have been the whole problem. The girls at school thought she was stuck up.

But Tressa wasn’t stuck up. She was just this very particular combination of experiences. Once in the Mountain Village restaurant two people walked up to Tressa and started speaking French. They couldn’t speak English, they had some questions, they were having a hard time getting around. In a room full of about two hundred people, they looked around and saw Tressa and walked straight over to her. They didn’t even bother with “
Parlez-vous français.
” They just saw all the things
about her that drove other kids away, and they started talking.

The Kelly thing didn’t help Tressa make any friends. Kelly was popular, and whenever Tressa and I showed up together, she’d start crying. For example, at Tom Knudsen’s keg party, the August before senior year, out in the woods behind Silver Lake.

I don’t go back to see this. I don’t like remembering it but I can’t help it. We had a fight because Tressa didn’t want to go to the party. She told me to just go without her, but I wanted her to come. Finally she said okay, but she still didn’t want to, so she was already jumpy when we showed up. Kelly saw us and ran into the woods crying, three of her girlfriends taking off after her. I could tell from Tressa’s face that she didn’t want to start fighting again, so she kept quiet.

I poured two beers and handed one to Tressa. She held on to it but didn’t drink. It bummed me out, the way she just followed me around, not talking to anyone else. I thought, Could she at least try? Kelly and her friends came back, hanging out on the other side of the party, watching us and whispering. I pulled Tressa over to two girls, Ginger and Rachel, and tried to help her get into their conversation. Unfortunately they were talking about VH1, which I don’t think Tressa had ever watched in her life.

“Oh, I know Christina Aguilera,” Tressa said. “She’s in my American history class.”

Ginger and Rachel stared at her a second, confused. Then Ginger said, “Tressa, that’s Christina
Guevarra
. Christina Aguilera is a famous singer.”

They weren’t trying to be mean, but they laughed. I wished I had listened to Tressa and come by myself. Maybe then I could’ve enjoyed the party. And I wouldn’t have had to see Tressa, her face turning red. She swallowed her first sip of beer, probably ever, way too fast. I guess she just wanted an excuse to get away, so she downed the whole thing and went over to the keg for a refill. This repeated itself several times until I had to walk her home. She was stumbling, hanging on to my arm for balance, and then she puked all over the front steps.

That’s how Hannah found us, Tressa puking on the
WIPE YOUR PAWS
welcome mat and me with my hand on her back. For the first time since that day at her parents’ house, back when I was twelve, Hannah stopped looking embarrassed.

“You can go now, Luke,” Hannah said. “I think you’ve done enough for one day.”

And after that pretty much everybody, even Tressa’s grandparents, got on board for the anti-Luke campaign.

*   *   *

It wasn’t so unusual. The same thing happens every day all over the world. Parents lay down the law for reasons of their own. Before I brought Tressa home drunk and puking, there was already the fact that everyone figured we were having sex. And in our case maybe they were
a little trigger happy, since us being together weirded everyone out in the first place. Nobody wanted any kind of bridge between the chopped off sections of our family. They wanted to keep us separate. It made it easier to have a definite excuse, a reason to keep us apart.

When Kelly’s parents told her not to see me, she listened. But Tressa looked her mother straight in the eye and said no for the first time in her life. She snuck through a dog door in the middle of the night. She left notes in my locker, with the best places and times to meet her.

I know how she must feel now. She takes everything harder than anyone else. I should’ve thought ahead. I should’ve stopped myself from running by that river.

But I didn’t and now here’s what I see. Tressa, picking up that dandelion. I see her do it at twelve and sixteen. I see her do it at ages she’s never been, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four. Sixty. Ninety. I see her make the same wish over and over. I don’t see Kelly, not once, and not because I never loved her. Not because Tressa is prettier or smarter or better to anyone else except me.

The thing is, Kelly, and my sisters, and my friends. Even my mother. They’ll be okay. They’ll make other wishes. They might not do it quickly. It might take a long time. But once that long time’s over, they’ll settle into the after-Luke as the natural order of things.

But not Tressa. And that’s why I can’t leave. Why I won’t.

Kelly Boynton hasn’t been in school for a week, but today when I walk into the cafeteria, I see her across the room, sitting with a boy I don’t know. He has short blond hair like hers, and they lean their heads close together, creating a cheerful kind of symmetry. From a distance it looks like the sort of conversation that would make you smile, if you happened to overhear. The boy has a tray of cafeteria food, but in front of Kelly sits a crinkled brown bag. When they pull apart, Kelly laughs. She has nice, white teeth that I can see from all the way across the room. The smile breaks her face into an entirely different shape—diamond, sparkly.

I step backward into the hall and head to the main exit door. I don’t want anyone to see me watching, least of all her. For a second I imagine myself carrying a tray
over to their table, sitting down, joining in. It’s one of those visions that seems too improbable, even for fantasy, and I shake it out of my head. Instead I think of the map I could draw of the cafeteria, and all the tables. In the corner where Kelly and that boy sit, I would draw the happiest images possible, like a pair of sunflowers, or maybe sea otters—circling and tumbling, playing and smiling, not a single care or worry in the world.

*   *   *

When I get home that afternoon, just after the electronic Aussie has announced the kitchen door opening, Mom says, “You’ll never guess who called today.”

For a moment I freeze, certain she’ll say
Luke
. I almost want to say it out loud.

“Give up?” Mom says.

I nod, my throat full of insane hope.

“Isabelle Delisle!”

I sit down at the table, my hands shaking a little. I’m so stupid.

The prospect of talking to Isabelle should make me happy. She’s the daughter of the Frenchman my mother ran away with the very last time we left Rabbitbrush. Hugo is independently wealthy but amuses himself with a bar and restaurant in the Marquesas. Tending bar was always one of my Mom’s default positions—“You can always get a job if you can make a decent margarita,” she’d say—and she had been working at a club in San Francisco for just a few weeks when Hugo strolled
in and they drummed up a romance, which eventually led to the two of them, plus me and Isabelle, living sometimes on Nuku Hiva but mostly sailing around French Polynesia on Hugo’s forty-foot Baba.
Halcyon
, that boat was called. During those three years, the longest she ever stayed with one person, Mom became proficient at sailing and occasionally tended his bar, but mostly she worked as a professional sunbather. Hugo paid for everything, including the tutor who taught Isabelle and me from textbooks issued by the French government.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” my mother asks. I’m surprised to see her so happy at word from the past that she generally pretends never existed. I haven’t heard her mention Hugo or Isabelle or even the South Pacific since she remarried Paul.

“Where was she calling from?” I ask. Not long after my mom and I left, Hugo enrolled Isabelle at an all-girls boarding school in Connecticut.

“She’s in Telluride!” my mother says. “She and Hugo are staying at the New Sheridan. She wants you to go out to see her tomorrow.” Mom hands me a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled across it. I can tell from the slant of her handwriting that she was excited when she wrote it down. I remember living on the boat, when communication between us and this mainland was next to impossible.

“Are you going to come with me?” I ask my mother.
She glances toward the ceiling, and I guess that Paul is working in his office upstairs.

“I better not,” she says. “But it would be fun for you, right? You and Isabelle were so close.” Mom turns and starts digging through the utility drawer. She pulls out an extra set of keys to her Lexus SUV and drops them into my hand. I stare down at them. When I got my driver’s license, I inherited her old Jeep, but when I returned from the hospital, it had disappeared. “It hasn’t snowed all week,” Mom says. “The roads are nice and clear. Do you feel all right driving?”

I cock my head. “Do you feel all right with me driving?” I ask her.

Mom puts her hands on top of her belly. “Tressa,” she says. “I wouldn’t give you the keys if I didn’t.”

“Okay.” I can tell by her face that she doesn’t
truly
feel all right, and likely never will. But she’s so pleased at the thought of me seeing an old friend—my only old friend—that she’s willing to risk the worst, and can’t wait to hand me these keys, which I won’t even need until tomorrow morning. “Thanks, Mom,” I say, and then, “I promise I’ll be careful.”

Upstairs I check my e-mail for the first time in more than a week, to see if Isabelle has sent a note about her visit, but all I have is a note from Katie, probably asking what I want for Christmas. I don’t open it but just sit there staring at the screen, thinking about how Isabelle and Luke never met. How much fun would it be to
bring him into Telluride to meet her? I imagine the three of us sitting around a table, me and my only two friends.

Instead of reading Katie’s e-mail I log on to Facebook and type in Kelly’s name. Her parents might not let her post a profile picture of herself, but they haven’t checked her privacy settings. When I click on photos, I’m able see her albums. And even though it feels like spying, I sift through photograph after photograph, trying to find a picture of her and Luke. I want to see what the past looked like. I want to see what the present—the future—
should
look like, if I had never come back to Rabbitbrush.

There are pictures of Kelly on vacation with her family in a tropical place, and pictures of her with kids I know from school. There is photo after photo of a dog, some kind of pointy-eared heeler mix. She also has a series of pictures with a little girl, either her sister or someone she babysits for. Of course, this is Facebook, so in every picture Kelly looks happy, smiling, idyllic. No one looking at these photos could imagine her face streaked with tears or her arms scarred and injured.

But what strikes me most is that in all these pictures—hundreds of them, the computer counts for me—there is not a single one of Luke. Even though the photos date back several years, spanning the time she and Luke were a couple. Maybe she deleted them after they broke up. I imagine her destroying all evidence that he ever existed. And I imagine her regretting that now.

*   *   *

Late Saturday morning Isabelle Delisle stands waiting for me in front of the Village Market. Although the sun shines brightly enough that I wear a fleece jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, she has bundled herself into a thick black parka, mittens, a gray cashmere hat, and a matching scarf wound around her neck. When I called her disposable cell phone—not allowed at her boarding school and useless on the water, but purchased for this trip—Isabelle told me she had no interest in skiing. Raised on tropical climates and weighing about ninety-three pounds, Isabelle hates the weather at her boarding school and has zero fondness for winter sports. She may be looking at Colorado schools, but I bet she ends up in a place with a balmier climate.