Meet Me at the River (3 page)

She needed me when we got older, too, just like she needs me now, which I’m pretty sure is why I’m still here. I know I didn’t go straight from the river to Tressa’s room but that’s the first thing I remember. Time had passed, but I still don’t know how much. Maybe I climbed up the wall of the house. But I don’t remember that, so I could’ve just shown up at her window.

Once I got inside her room, I could see her sleeping. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in a long time. She had
her brow scrunched up like she was concentrating. She looked like she was worrying instead of resting. I wanted to tell her I was there, but I didn’t want to wake her up. So I backed away toward the wall. Carlo must have heard me because he wagged his tail. His tags jingled and startled Tressa. She sat up.

It’s hard to explain the weirdness of that moment. I can’t really think of a word for it. Me knowing I shouldn’t be there and at the same time thinking, where else
would
I be? I thought she’d maybe be scared of me, but she just jumped out of bed and ran across the room. It almost felt like the old days, when she’d come back to Rabbitbrush after being away for a long time.

“I knew it,” Tressa said. She hugged me, and for a minute we thought everything was like it used to be, until after a couple minutes we realized that we couldn’t feel each other at all.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tressa said. She grabbed the collar of my shirt. “I don’t care. You’re here. That’s all that matters. You’re here.”

And so that’s when this other life began. Like the old one, what I mostly think about is Tressa. What I want is to get into her room. And when I can’t do that, I concentrate on what I remember about our lives, which is pretty much everything.

*   *   *

Here in the after-Luke I can watch the whole thing like a movie whenever I want. Look. There’s Tressa’s mother.
She’s sixteen. Her parents, the Earnshaws, have lived on their cattle ranch for three generations. I’m surprised that Hannah looks pretty perfect, not rebellious at all. What I see is a pretty girl, a good athlete, a straight-A student. Captain of her softball team.

Nobody knows better than me about growing up in Rabbitbrush. Your whole life happens outside. They strap skis and skates to your feet as soon as you can walk. When I think of being a kid, I think of hiking, rafting, skating, skiing, rock climbing. Hannah’s life looks pretty much like mine. She does every wholesome thing you’d expect from a kid growing up in a small mountain town. Not like me, she doesn’t do anything you’d worry about.

Hannah graduated from Rabbitbrush High. It still had a prom back then, and her date was my dad. Afterward they both went to CU, and then they moved to Telluride, and Hannah got pregnant. They had the twins but didn’t get married for more than a year. “About time,” Mr. Earnshaw said when he made his wedding toast. Jill and Katie were there somewhere, toddling around on the hill.

Tressa’s grandfather looks really young, making that toast. It kind of blows me away. I don’t see a single gray hair on his head. Pretty soon he’s going to sell his cattle and almost all his horses, plus a bunch of land. But for now he’s got more than four hundred acres, and cows grazing on the hill.

I can’t stop watching that wedding. I stare at Hannah, trying to figure out if she looks anything like Tressa. By
the time Tressa was a teenager her hair’d turned brown. But Hannah always stayed blond. Also she’s taller than Tressa. I think Hannah’s beautiful but not as beautiful as Tressa. If Tressa heard me say that, she’d laugh and call me a liar. Not many girls will admit to being pretty. Once I had a girlfriend named Kelly who admitted it. Hannah would have. But not Tressa.

*   *   *

After the wedding my dad and Hannah came back to Rabbitbrush. Hannah lasted six months. Then one morning she just took off. After my dad went to work she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote him a letter. She left it lying flat on the table and then drove the twins over to her parents’. Hannah told her mother she’d be gone awhile but she didn’t say how long. She didn’t say,
Mom, I need to disappear for eight years
. She just said, “I need a little time to myself,” then drove down the driveway and kept on driving.

I’m sorry,
she wrote in the letter to my dad.
I do love you. I just can’t do this right now.

Before the river I’d heard about that letter but I’d never seen it. Now I can look over Hannah’s shoulder while she’s writing it, and I can look over Dad’s shoulder while he’s reading it. There’s nothing in there about the twins so he figures she took them with her. I watch him drop his face into his hands. To me he looks like a kid, even though he’s older than I’ll ever get to be.

Dad looks too young to be anyone’s father. He
looks too young to pour himself that glass of whiskey. After the first glass he starts drinking from the bottle. By the time Hannah’s mother calls to ask when they’ll pick up the girls he’s too drunk to go and get them. I can tell from the look on his face that he’s scared. Probably he thinks he’s way too young to be a father all by himself to two little girls who’re still in diapers.

And that’s where my mother comes in.

I have an appointment to speak with Mr. Zack, the college adviser, which presents a problem. Luke’s mother is the guidance counselor, and her office sits in the same little block of offices by the principal, just a few doors down. Part of me wants to see Francine more than anything else in the world. She was always such a good listener. If I didn’t have to avoid her but could walk straight into her office, I would tell her about Carlo being sick and how worried I feel. But I know how much she hates seeing me, how the sight of my face is like a billy club at the back of her knees. By far the worst thing about school is the risk of inflicting myself on Francine, and that’s saying something. So much about school is awful.

For one thing, I don’t really know anyone. My class has graduated. And even if they hadn’t, I barely spent
two years at Rabbitbrush High before Luke died, and I never got close to anyone else. All of Luke’s friends were also friends with his ex-girlfriend Kelly, so even if it hadn’t been for my social lameness, it would have been hard to break in.

“I don’t understand that,” Dr. Reisner said last summer in therapy. “Why couldn’t you make friends on your own?”

I tried to explain that I’d shown up at enough strange schools not knowing how to do the right things, and wearing the wrong clothes, and saying the wrong things. In a way it hurt most of all in Rabbitbrush, which was the one place in the world I should have belonged. But by the time I came back here to stay, I had never even owned a pair of mittens. I didn’t know how to ski, or snowboard, or ice-skate. I could try my best to learn but could never catch up to the kids who’d been doing those things since the age of three. I would always be clearly
not
a native. This is truer now than it has ever been, because everybody knows the whole story about Luke and me, and how everything that happened was all my fault.

It’s one thing to resign yourself to life, another thing to actually have to live it. With Carlo so sick, all I want to do is hold my breath until I can escape school at three thirty. I don’t want to have to sneak down the corridor to Mr. Zack’s office. Francine’s office door is propped open, and I wish I could make myself invisible for the
millisecond it will take me to pass by it. Luckily, within a few feet of her door, I get the feeling her office is empty. I don’t glance sideways to confirm this. I just scoot past as quickly as possible, and land in the chair across from Mr. Zack with a sigh of relief. A too-loud sigh of relief, because Mr. Zack looks at me with an extra dose of concern, and I realize then that I should have knocked.

He doesn’t say anything about that, though, any more than he lets himself stare at my wrists, which are covered by the long sleeves of my cotton turtleneck sweater. Instead he goes right into talking about my academic situation. Last year I took three AP classes, and this year I am taking three more. Even though the school didn’t let me graduate, they are giving me credit for all the classes I took last year, so that when I finally get to college, I’ll be that much closer to my sophomore year.

“You can stick with your deference at CU,” Mr. Zack tells me, “but why not also do a couple more applications and see what happens? You might end up at a better school.”

“CU’s a good school,” I say, slumping in my chair across from him. I pull my turtleneck up over my chin. If I could, I’d wear it up to just below my eyes, my hair spilling down and covering the rest of my face. Hidden.

“It’s good enough,” he says. “But maybe you’d be happier at a small liberal arts school. Your grades and
SATs are very strong. You won that photo competition last year. That’s something new for your application.”

I don’t say anything. Last year, when Luke and I were applying, it seemed so stupid that I had a stronger shot at more prestigious schools. Luke was better than me at almost everything. He was better at guitar, and sports, and making friends. Better at just generally living in the world, which is probably why he never bothered too much with schoolwork.

“That photography contest is coming up again,” Mr. Zack says. “Have you thought about entering?”

Last year I won that contest with a close-up of a mule deer munching on the blue mist spirea behind Paul’s house. I’d been going through a phase of just carrying the camera with me, and got a lot of great wildlife shots. Now the camera sits in my bedroom closet, on the top shelf, high enough so that I can’t see it when I open the door. Its battery has likely been dead for months. There’s nothing I want to record. But since saying all this would just alarm Mr. Zack, I tell him, “Sure, maybe I will.”

He goes on listing colleges. “Stanford is a long shot, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. Or Colorado College, if you want to stay in state.”

“Aren’t those superexpensive?” I ask. My inflection rejects the suggestion, even though just yesterday I got an e-mail from Isabelle Delisle—the only friend I managed to collect during all my mother’s years
of wandering—who, coincidentally, told me that she planned on applying to these very schools.

Mr. Zack shifts his shoulders. In addition to his duties as college adviser, he coaches the ski and lacrosse teams—both of which Luke competed on. As I watch Mr. Zack gracefully tilt back in his chair, I think how he must miss Luke too, and I wonder if it’s hard for him to sit here talking to me. If it is, he does a good job covering it up—looking straight at me, his brows kind and quizzical, challenging my financial worries. In a town of modest incomes, my stepfather is known for his wealth. I consider pointing out that Paul is not my
father
. But of course Mr. Zack knows that, as well as he knows that my grandparents have kept themselves afloat for years on the money they made selling pieces of their land to the Nature Conservancy. They would gladly empty out their bank accounts and sell more acres to send me wherever I want to go.

“You could apply for a scholarship,” Mr. Zack says instead of pointing out those other options. “All I’m saying, Tressa, is that your grades are strong enough to get you into a competitive school. And you’ll have this whole extra year under your belt. Boulder is very big. You might find it more daunting than you realize. A person can get lost in a sea of faces.”

Without meaning to I close my eyes. It’s not that I want to go to Boulder. It’s that I really want to stay upstairs in my bedroom waiting for Luke. I can’t think
about the future any more than the past. I don’t want either of them to exist.

“Tressa,” Mr. Zack says gently.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Zack,” I say, opening my eyes. “I’ll think about it; I will.”

He places his chair back on the floor and leans toward me. I can tell he doesn’t quite believe me, and I don’t know how to convince him of what’s not true. Sometimes I think the only thing that would make the adults in my life happy would be X-ray goggles. They could stare directly into my mind and see whatever thoughts would indicate progression, recovery, a rosy path ahead.

“Look, kiddo,” he says. “I know applications are a pain, but I also know it’ll be worth it. You let me know if you need any help. With anything.”

I stand up. Mr. Zack’s office has two doors, one that leads back out into the hallway. The other door goes through the faculty lounge, where students are not allowed. From there I could sneak into the hallway between the library and the gymnasium, avoiding Luke’s mother’s office.

“Mr. Zack,” I say. “Do you think it would be okay if I used this door?” I point to the one to the faculty lounge.

He pauses for a moment, and then glances at the other door, as if Francine might walk by and see him grant me permission to escape her. Then he nods, and tilts his head in the direction I requested.

“Thanks,” I say, and duck into the small, bright room. My sneakers squeak over the linoleum, and the smell of hours-old coffee hangs thickly in the air. Only one faculty member sits at one of the four large round tables—H. J. Burdick, the new English teacher. He started teaching here last year. H. J. is one of those natives I’m surrounded by. He graduated from Rabbitbrush High the same year as Jill and Katie. He lives next door to my grandparents, and his sister, Evie, and I played together once or twice when we were little.

He looks up from his book,
Lord of the Flies
. “Hey,” he says, blinking behind wire-rimmed glasses. I can’t tell if he recognizes me, not only because we’ve had so little contact but because he seems so distracted. His hair is shaggy, and there are stains from dry-erase markers all over his Polartec vest. As it happens, the Burdicks are the only family in town to boast a history more tragic and bizarre than my own, but you’d never know it from looking at H. J. His long legs, crossed under the cramped table, are way too casual and relaxed for a teacher.

By the time I say “Hi,” wondering if I’m supposed to call him Mr. Burdick, he has turned back to his book.

“I have to teach this fifth period,” he says, not looking up. “And I’ve never read it. Can you believe that?”