Meet Me at the River (6 page)

“I’m so sorry,” Mom tells me. “Paul already took him back to Dr. Hill’s.” I don’t ask what for. Probably to be cremated.

I walk outside and sit down next to the spot where Carlo should still be. The blanket’s gone too; the grass underneath is bent sideways in his shape, and I run my hand over the blades again and again, deepening the indentation.

Mom walks outside and stands over me. I don’t have to look up to see the worry on her face. “You can stay home today if you want,” she says. “We can go for a drive or something. Go for a hike. Or just hang out. Anything you want.”

I think about going for a drive with my mother. I think about the two of us, getting into a car and driving for a thousand miles and never coming back. Knowing this isn’t a possibility, I say, “No. Thanks. I want to stay busy.”

Her fear—that I won’t be able to handle this—makes me even sadder. But then so does everything else—the memory of Carlo’s painful last breaths, the inability to tell Luke about it, the worry I constantly cause, and the image of Luke’s last moments, which I’ve been able to push aside since he started coming back. I give the grass
one last, smoothing pat, then go inside and get ready for school. When I walk out the kitchen door, my mother is close behind me, holding it open. I know she’ll stand there until she sees me get on the bus. I know what she really wants is to walk two steps behind me, all day every day, so she can see for herself that I haven’t done anything to hurt myself.

At the top of the driveway, my grandfather’s truck putters up right at the same moment as the school bus. “Oh, look,” I hear Mom call. “It’s Dad.”

Grandpa rolls down his window and waves the bus driver away. Then he pulls into the driveway and gets out carrying a small guitar-shaped case. “Tressa,” he says, striding toward me on long legs. From a distance he hasn’t changed much since he first gave Carlo to me. But as he gets closer, I see all the years that have passed. He holds his arms out to hug me, but instead of walking into them I sit down on the stoop. Grandpa seems to understand that if I let him hold me, I’ll fall apart. He sits down next to me, and my mother closes the door as if to give us privacy. I hear her step lightly, back into the kitchen, but I know she’s hovering close enough to hear our conversation through the open window.

Grandpa puts his broad hand on my knee. I know it’s meant to be a reassuring gesture, but even though he is solid and strong, that hand looks old to me. It looks craggy and liver-spotted, and I find myself looking ahead to another loss that I simply won’t be able to bear.
I suck in my breath, which sounds wet and shaky with tears. The thing about deciding to live, even if you’re determined not to be happy—your body goes ahead and battles sorrow without you.

“You know,” Grandpa says, “one thing I’ve been thinking about Hannah is that it took almost losing you to turn her into a real mother.”

Grandpa says this kind of loudly, like he wants Mom to hear. Inside, something bangs a little too hard into the sink. Her parents will never forgive her for all those years she went away. But while Mom hasn’t exactly been Francine, she has had her moments—her own peculiar strengths—and I don’t like to hear these digs.

“She’s always been a real mother,” I say, hoping she’ll hear that, too. Then, to apologize for disagreeing with him, I put my hand on top of the little guitar case.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s a ukulele,” Grandpa says. “For you.”

“A ukulele?” The word coming out of my mouth sounds so ridiculous that I laugh.

“You never play your guitar anymore. I thought maybe you’d like to try something new.”

He slides it into my lap, and I unlatch the case. Inside is a yellow ukulele. It looks much too cheerful. “It’s yellow,” I say.

“Isn’t that your favorite color?”

“Sure.”
When I was ten
, I don’t say.

Grandpa moves his hand from my knee to the top of
my head. “I miss hearing you play guitar,” he says. He’s the one who gave me the guitar, for my eighth birthday. An old Martin, much too nice for a little kid. My mother hated having to drag it around with us. But she did it, for me. I feel like pointing this out to Grandpa but don’t want him to answer by putting her down.

So I just say, “I don’t know why you’d miss hearing me play. I was never much good at it.” If Grandpa contradicts this universal truth, I will know I am a lost cause. The only time I ever sounded halfway decent on guitar was when Luke or Grandpa played with me, drowning out my clumsy strumming.

Grandpa, who plays every string instrument there is, says, “So, now you can be not much good at ukulele. I’ll teach you. We’ll have fun.” He’s the one who taught me to play the guitar, and I loved taking lessons with him even though I never managed to learn more than five or six chords. Now I pluck a string of the ukulele, still in its case. The sound vibrates, startlingly cheerful and out of place—as if a palm tree just sprouted on the lawn next to the aspens and pines.

“You need a ride to school?” Grandpa asks.

“I guess I do. Since you sent the bus away.”

Grandpa reaches over and snaps the ukulele case shut. We stand up and walk to his truck. Grandpa doesn’t say good-bye to Mom. Lately his general annoyance with her is heightened by her giving that land to Paul.

As we pull away, I see her, watching us through the kitchen window. She waves to me, and I can tell she’s trying to look like she’s not crying. Carlo lived with her, too, all these years. I wave back, suddenly sorry I turned down her offer to stay home.

*   *   *

The day passes in a lonely fog until lunch, when Evie Burdick finds me in the cafeteria. Outside, a drizzling rain has started spitting against the windows. It might very well ease into the first real snowfall of the season. Here in Rabbitbrush it almost always snows by October, and this year is no exception. But there hasn’t yet been a real
dumping
, the sort to make everyone pile onto skis and snowshoes.

Evie slides her tray onto the table across from me. She wears faded jeans and a skimpy Johnny Cash T-shirt. I’m huddled in a thick wool sweater. I remember how cold I always got when I had zero body fat, and think that Evie must be freezing.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say back. “Aren’t you freezing?”

She laughs. “Everybody always asks me that. I never get cold.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

I usually make my own lunch, but this morning Mom made me a turkey sandwich and packed it into an insulated lunch box along with an ice pack. She also gave
me a stick of string cheese, an apple, and a thermos of pomegranate-grape juice. I sip the juice and bite into the apple but try to avoid the rest of my lunch. My fingers have gotten so fat that the pearl ring Luke gave me digs into my skin, creating a cracked and itchy indentation. If I don’t start losing weight soon, they’ll have to cut the ring off me with metal pliers.

Evie’s tray is piled with food from the cafeteria: chicken nuggets, a slice of pizza, SunChips, a Diet Coke, and a package of little chocolate doughnuts. She slides her book onto the table. I try to peek at the title for a possible conversation opener, but she turns it over and dives into the pizza. Ordinarily I would make some excuse and clear away. Maybe I would bundle into my coat and sit under the awning outside, or just toss my lunch and hide out in the library until my next class.

But I remember the other day, when Evie asked about Carlo. Weird, but I find myself hoping that she’ll ask again. All day I have felt so sad. It seems, I don’t know, disrespectful, not to talk about him.

Evie doesn’t say anything; she just eats her food. I want to ask her how she managed, in those weeks after her parents died. Last spring I couldn’t stand living in this world anymore. I just couldn’t, I wasn’t capable. The impossibility of Luke being
gone
because of that one stupid moment. The very second that moment passed, it was too far away to ever make right. And the further away I got from it, the
more
impossible it would be to
ever go back and fix it. The guilt and the loss were too huge. I couldn’t continue living, not even for Carlo or my mother. Not even for my grandparents. I understood that I ought to, but I just couldn’t.

Sitting across from one of the few people who might understand that feeling, I want to say something meaningful, or tell her about Carlo. Instead I find myself saying, “How was the corn chowder?”

She glances down at her tray, confused for a minute, and then remembers. “Oh, it was pretty good. H. J.’s a decent cook. He’s very into it these days. He stops at the grocery store on the way home from school, and as soon as he walks through the door, he just starts cooking. He even said something about culinary school, after I leave for college.”

She says this so nonchalantly, as if it hardly matters—the two orphans, living together. I glance at the back cover of her book and see the title,
Lover of Unreason
.

“Is that for school?” I ask.

She looks at me, then slides the book into her lap without glancing down at it. “No,” she says. “Just something I’m reading on my own.” I wait for further explanation, but she doesn’t offer any. Instead she says, “Hey. H. J. and I are going to ski in Telluride on Saturday. Do you want to come?”

Telluride is only fifty miles north of us, so the weather is pretty much the same, but for opening day the snow cannons will be working overtime. I almost say no to
Evie’s invitation. Then I remember my mother peering out the window this morning, how I should have stayed with her, and in a flash I see a way to make up for it. She would be over the moon about me accepting this invitation, a normal social activity. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to say yes. “You guys probably won’t want to ski with me,” I say instead. “I just learned a couple years ago, when I came back.”

“I don’t mind,” Evie says. “And H. J. loves to ski with beginners.”

I have a hard time believing this. Even with Luke, who taught me how to ski and couldn’t have been more patient, I could feel him longing to abandon me for the black diamond slopes.

But Evie shrugs. “He says it’s more interesting skiing with someone who has something to learn. He gets tired of the whole shredding culture. He says all anyone talks about in this town is ski equipment and snow conditions.”

I nod, knowing exactly how H. J. feels.

“He’ll probably move away at some point,” Evie goes on. “But he says it’s sunny here three hundred days a year, and he already knows everyone’s name. And he has his job. And, you know, he has to wait till I’m done with high school.”

Evie looks back down at her plate, and I wonder if this is my moment to tell her that I’m sorry about her parents. I try to remember the details of her father’s
suicide, how he did it, and I realize suddenly that this is something I can talk to Luke about. I can ask him about Evie and H. J., because Luke knew them when he was alive.

Outside, the rain turns to snow before our eyes. It falls halfway to the ground as droplets, then morphs into clusters of stars. Growing up, I didn’t see snow until I was six. Even when we first started coming back to Rabbitbrush, it was always in the summer. I can remember not completely believing in snow, the way I didn’t completely believe in dinosaurs, or Santa Claus. I hoped it was real but couldn’t be entirely convinced. It still seems like magic to me, in the first moments it begins to fall.

“Hey,” I say. I know what I’m about to tell her will feel out of the blue. At the same time, I think that probably Evie will understand. “My dog died last night.”

Her face rearranges itself in three quick, visible phases—shock, memory, then sympathy. “Oh, God, Tressa,” she says. “I’m really sorry.”

“Thank you,” I say. My eyes fill up with tears, but I realize that’s okay. Dr. Reisner would say it’s appropriate.

“Listen,” she says. “Come with us on Saturday, promise? It can’t make it better, I know. But at least it will take your mind off it.”

“Sure,” I tell Evie. “I’d love to go skiing with you guys.”

We clear our lunches and say good-bye a little awkwardly. I head to my locker to collect my books for French, and it must just be a Burdick kind of day, because I see H. J. and Mr. Tynan standing outside Mr. Tynan’s classroom. I am the only student in the hallway, and they don’t notice me, not at first. I wonder if I should wave or say something about Evie inviting me to ski on Saturday. But Mr. Tynan’s voice is uncharacteristically stern and sharp. Usually he moves gently, wearing a wry smile. But talking to H. J., his face looks drawn and angry. I hear the word “inappropriate.” “Massively inappropriate,” Mr. Tynan says.

I open my locker, and the two of them turn their heads at the metallic ping of the latch. I expect H. J.’s face to look penitent. But it doesn’t, only calm and composed.

“Hi, Mr. Burdick,” I say, though in my head I call him by his first name. Before H. J. has a chance to answer, Mr. Tynan grabs him by the shoulder and propels him inside his classroom, looking back over his shoulder, still frowning—as if he means to protect me.

*   *   *

A couple nights a week I can get away with eating at my grandparents’ house. The rest of the time, unless Mom and Paul go out (and my mother is still too committed to keeping a close eye on me to go out very often), I have to conform to this temporary family unit—Paul, my mother, me—at least until the baby comes, and I leave, and the future finally takes the shape Paul always dreamed of.

In my stepfather’s house, upstairs on the third floor, my room retains something of the spirit of our old life, my mom’s and mine. The eaves slant, the floorboards sway a bit. My maps are tacked onto the walls, and the furniture is a hodgepodge of relics from my grandparents’. I still use the old farm quilt I’ve been hauling around since we first came back to visit. I think that Francine may have actually given it to me, back when I was just a little kid and she hadn’t quite admitted my mother was a threat. My upstairs room is not fancy but frayed and worn in a cozy and familiar way.

Downstairs, on the other hand. The downstairs at Paul’s is modern and luxurious. It’s not ostentatious unless you know how much they spent on that sideboard in the dining room, or the brand-new energy efficient washer-dryer in the laundry room. When I was a kid, my mother used to haul our laundry around in old pillowcases. I have seen her stand on the street in front of Laundromats, begging strangers for quarters. Now she shuffles her pregnant self with surprising grace around a state-of-the-art kitchen. She bastes a roast chicken. Biscuits made from scratch wait patiently in the warming oven. Paul walks in and starts setting the table, and Mom asks me to toss the already prepared salad. I watch Paul lay out three wineglasses, and wonder if he will pour me a glass or if that third is just a nod to symmetry.