Meet Me at the River (18 page)

*   *   *

Days pass. Mom and Matthew come home. The house becomes so full that it’s teeming, brimming. Filled with bustling, exhausted life—the constant sound track of that baby. The distracted air Mom had in the hospital seems to have vanished. She carries Matthew with her everywhere, she sleeps with him on her chest, she is up at all hours tending him. I would have expected to feel relieved that her attention has finally been diverted from me, or maybe even a little jealous, but I don’t feel either, not exactly. A couple times a day I manage to wrest Matthew away, usually once he’s fully fed. I find a place to sit down with him in my lap, and I stare at his little face. Every once in a while he does this startled movement, both fists pumping into the air above his head. When he yawns, he looks like a baby hamster. I love the way the top of his head smells. “You’re the best pet I ever had,” I tell him, and immediately
I’m floored, realizing that I’ve forgotten Carlo for a full minute.

Maybe that’s why he and Luke stay away; they sense the pressure, from everywhere, to make us all move on. Sometimes at night when the baby wakes, when I hear the crying from downstairs, I walk to the window. I’ve given up on my messages, but I stare out across the snow. I know I won’t see him, standing in the moonlight. I know he won’t be moving behind that tree, or within that shadow. But still I look. I feel mournful and lonesome, but not desperate the way I did last spring. Think of that baby. Miracles occur. Luke will return. It’s only a matter of when.

Come tonight
, I beg through the window.
Come now. Come soon.

The snow on the sill sits, pure, untouched, and silent.

*   *   *

One morning after New Year’s, not long before school begins again, I look in the bathroom mirror and am amazed to see what looks like my old self. My face has lost most of the pale puffiness that marked me as a recovering mental patient. My collarbones have returned, along with my cheekbones. The skipped meals and late-night roaming are returning me to my former size, but it’s more than that. Against all odds I’ve started to look like me again.

I put on a robe over my nightgown and go downstairs. Jill has gone back to Denver, but Katie doesn’t
seem in any hurry to get back to LA. She and Paul sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Matthew sleeps in a little chair in the middle of the table. He wears a one-piece pajama set and a striped cap. My mother is nowhere to be seen, asleep I suppose, and I know it’s only a matter of moments before this calm is shattered by his waking and crying for her.

“Good morning,” Paul says, unnaturally bright. He always makes an effort to be nice to me in front of the twins.
Look!
he’s saying to his daughters.
I have taken in my true love’s troubled child! I consider her my own! I show her daily kindness, welcoming her into my kitchen!

“Hey,” I say, heading straight for the coffee.

“We were just talking about you,” Paul perseveres. I open the refrigerator and hunt for the half-and-half, bracing myself.

“Here,” Katie says. She picks up the small carton of cream, which sits on the table between her and the baby. I walk over, sit down, join them. Before pouring the cream, I reach out and touch Matthew’s little toes through his footie pajamas.

“Don’t wake him,” Paul says, then tries to make up for the sharpness in his tone by smiling a little too kindly. Katie pours the half-and-half for me, and then my new brother betrays me by waking up and proving Paul’s point. He doesn’t cry, though, just makes a little cooing noise. His eyes roam the room thoughtfully, trying to focus.

“It’s funny,” I say. “He doesn’t look like any of you.”

Katie and Paul both lean forward to examine the baby. Paul frowns a little. I think that for all his robust and persistent handsomeness, he does not have particularly strong genes. The twins look like my mom. Luke looks like Francine. And this baby must look like the egg donor. Paul reaches out and touches Matthew’s hand. The baby closes his little fist around Paul’s finger, as if to make up for my callous observation.

“Tressa,” Katie says. “What Dad and I were talking about is, I’ve decided not to go back to California. I mean, I’ll have to go back to move. But I’m done with all that.”

“You are?” I say. “What about being an actor?”

She pushes her hair out of her face. “I’m done with it,” she says again. “Maybe if I’d had any real roles, it would be different. But I’ve been bludgeoned and strangled and axed and shot. My whole life last year was about nothing but death. I can’t take any more violence. I need to think of something else I’d be happy doing.”

“You’re coming back to Rabbitbrush?”

“No,” she says. “I was thinking Boulder. Dad said he’d pay for a place to start while I figure out if I want to go to grad school, or something like that. We were thinking, if I get a two-bedroom, then you could live there too. When you start college.”

The two of them watch me, waiting for my reaction. “I can’t,” I say after a minute. “Freshmen have to live in the dorms.”

“We could probably get a waiver for you,” Paul says. He doesn’t say why.

I don’t want to think about this right now, the impossible future. Instead I say to Katie, “But you always wanted to be an actor.”

“Well,” she says. “Sometimes ‘always’ changes. You know?”

I stare into my coffee mug, at the swirling cloud of cream that looks vaguely curdled.
No
, I think to myself. Always never changes. It’s always always.

Katie touches my elbow. “It might be fun, Tressa,” she says. “We’ve never really had a chance to live together, you and I. Jill could bring us plants.”

She looks soft and intent. I think of all the reasons she has to resent me, and I marvel at her kindness. Still, I don’t feel ready to give in. I know the reaction I’ll get if I say I might not go to college at all but just stay here in Rabbitbrush. So instead I say, “But I may not end up at Boulder. I applied to a few more places. I might be in Colorado Springs, or California.”

Katie and Paul exchange glances, and I wonder if the family has already ruled out these possibilities. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” Katie says. “For now just promise me you’ll think about living with me, for next year. We could take a weekend and look for a place together, if you wanted.”

“Okay,” I say, though there’s no way I would leave even for a weekend in Boulder. Later on, a way out of
this will present itself. For now Paul and Katie sit back in their chairs, exhaling with an air of accomplishment. Matthew starts crying, but Mom—newly psychic—swoops into the kitchen before anyone can reach for him. She picks him up and cradles him for a moment, rocking him back and forth, cooing at him with a face of such total absorption that the rest of us could easily vanish, disappear, and she wouldn’t notice. And I have this weird realization, that even if I’d succeeded in dying at Alta last spring, this scene would still be playing out exactly the same way. Katie would be sitting here at this table, giving up her career. Paul would be staring at Mom, who’d be rocking her baby. They’d miss me, sure, but life would continue in more or less the same way. Just as it has for them since Luke.

Stop
, I want to yell at life sometimes.
Stop continuing!
It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem respectful.

Matthew keeps crying, his toothless little mouth gaping wide. And I think how I bear the exact same relationship to this baby as I did to Luke. Matthew is Paul’s biological son, my sisters’ biological brother, but not my biological anything. My brother, but not my brother. It makes me feel strangely left out, not having any real claim to him.

When the phone rings, I startle everyone by jumping up to answer. It’s Evie, asking if I want to cross-country ski on the Ethel White trail. “Nobody’s been out there since the last snow,” she says. “We can break trail.”

I hesitate for a moment. My eyes roam around the kitchen, from Paul’s face—his fake joviality toward me changing into honest affection toward his son, my mother’s disappearance into the baby and motherhood, Katie’s concerned gaze fixed on me, coupled with a kind of puzzlement, the kind I’m used to. She doesn’t really know me, not at all. How could I possibly leave the place where Luke remains in order to go live with her?

“Sure,” I find myself saying to Evie. “I’d love to.”

At the beginning of the Ethel White trail a sign reads
WARNING. YOU ARE IN A MOUNTAIN LION’S HOME.
The sign tells us to travel in groups. It says not to approach the mountain lion (as if we would) or to run away from it.
STAY CALM IF YOU COME UPON A LION. TALK TO IT IN A FIRM VOICE IN AN EFFORT TO DEMONSTRATE THAT YOU ARE HUMAN AND NOT ITS REGULAR PREY.

Evie must have seen this sign and others like it a thousand times. But while I take my skis out of my mother’s car, line them up, and step into them, Evie reads it carefully, her brow furrowed in concentration as if memorizing the words.

I glide to the opening of the trail to wait for her. She adjusts her hat and casts an apologetic glance. “My mom always said I was just the right size for a cougar attack,”
she says. “She used to worry about it all the time, even though she skied here too.”

I nod. I wonder if now would be a good time to tell Evie that I’m sorry about her mom, but I worry that too much time has gone by, and honestly I can’t bear for the topic to segue into her dad. The last few weeks of school, the books on Evie’s lunch tray all revolved around Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I understand the impulse to explore what frightens you most—keeping it right there, always by your side, so it can never take you by surprise. Every time I see a new book on Evie’s tray, I order it for myself. While I like sharing this with her, I prefer to do it secretly, knowing it myself but never discussing it.

I try again to remember Evie’s mom, if she seemed like the kind of woman who worried about cougar attacks. In the old days my own mother never would have worried about such a thing, but now—since I managed to awaken every dormant shred of mother-worry—of course she would, or at least she would if she had time to think about it.

“Ready?” Evie says.

“Sure.” I stand aside and let her go ahead. The trail has already been broken, but the snow is perfect—deep and powdery with a thick, crackling crust on top. We make our way uphill in silence.

“I bet you miss your dog on days like this,” Evie says after a long while.

“I miss him pretty much all the time,” I say. “But he was kind of old for this kind of thing by the time we moved back here. I wouldn’t have been able to take him with me.”

“I’d really like to get another dog,” Evie says. “But I’m going to college next year, and H. J. thinks he’ll probably sell the house and travel.”

“You used to have a dog?”

“Yeah,” she says. “For a little while. A border collie. He died a few years ago. I really miss him.”

I wait for her to tell me more. A few years ago, after all—that’s when she lost both her parents. Did she lose a dog, too? Another burst of camaraderie explodes in my chest, but Evie says nothing, just glides forward in a steady, graceful rhythm.

“Do you know where you’re going to school next year?” I ask her.

“I applied to all the state schools,” she says. “Boulder, Durango, Fort Collins. Greeley. We don’t have enough funds for me to go out of state, and my grades aren’t that great anyway.”

“Those are all good schools,” I say.

“You still going to Boulder?”

“Maybe,” is all I say.

From up ahead we hear voices, no doubt the early birds who beat us to break trail. In a few moments two other skiers, a guy and a girl, whiz down the hill we’re about to climb. The guy swooshes neatly to avoid Evie, but the girl doesn’t turn in time and crashes just in front
of us. I hear her light laughter as Evie bends down and reaches out a hand.

“Oh, thanks,” the girl says. Then she says, “Hi, Evie.” And she looks up. It’s Kelly.

“Hi, Kelly,” Evie says. She looks back over her shoulder at me, her face filled with worry.

“
Kelly’s here,” Luke used to say, warning me when we arrived somewhere to see his friends. Not because the sight of her upset me but vice versa—and then of course I
would
get upset, hating that my very presence sent someone else running.

“Hi, Kelly,” I say now, bracing myself.

Kelly’s companion—the boy I saw her with in the cafeteria—stays still and quiet. So does Evie. I hear a clump of snow fall from a nearby branch, and then another. Kelly and I stand there, searching each other’s faces, waiting for the other to react. I wonder if this is how my mom and Francine might feel, facing each other after Paul died.

“Hi, Tressa,” Kelly says. Her voice sounds calm. She doesn’t run away, or cry. She just stands there, holding her ski poles, looking at me. I think of her cutting. I hope she has stopped, and I wonder what scars she has left over. I wonder if she would feel Luke if he touched her there.

“Well,” she says after a bit. “I guess we better go.”

“Okay,” I say. “Bye.”

“Bye.” And then she adds, “Bye, Evie. See you later, Tressa.”

Kelly and her friend head back down the trail, away from us.
See you later, Tressa
. It’s probably what her therapist advised her to do, next time she ran into me. I could just picture the sort of advice Dr. Reisner would give me.
She’s just another girl,
he would say.
All you have to do is say hello. And then say good-bye.
Hello, good-bye. The closest you can sometimes get to normal.

*   *   *

Evie and I don’t talk much after that. “Are you okay?” she asks once they’re out of earshot, and when I just nod, she understands that I don’t want to go into it, I don’t want to think.

So we ski for many hours, much farther than we’d planned. We ski beyond the trail, through the back of my grandparents’ place and into the field that borders Evie’s backyard. We stand in the almost-evening, not panting but cold and sweaty at the same time. I can feel every muscle in my body, from my ankles to my collarbones. There’s no way I can ski any farther. I may not even be able to walk.