Suspicious River (31 page)

I open my eyes.

I close them: My mother, holding something dead over the stove. Something unfamiliar dragged up from an animal. Frozen. Thawed.

Someone opens the bedroom door briefly but closes it again, and I hear a scrap of Gary’s voice in the distance of the living room. Laughter. Dull, as if it’s passing through thick glass. I keep my eyes closed, and I know the bruises around them are magenta, or midnight blue.

He lifts his weight from my body, and I hear him pull his pants back on, stuff his shirttails into them, pull on his boots. I don’t move.

Silence, then he sits back down on the edge of the bed.

I can smell October on his clothes. Dark, wet fur. The smell of winter pushing up through the Michigan dirt. Twisted tree roots. Rusty water seeping under that.

Something cold passes between my breasts, and I remember the tang of metal in my mouth, once, when I drank a handful of that rusty water from the river.

The cold passes up my chest like a tin finger into the soft, empty, round place that pulses at the base of my throat. As if a small animal lived under there, in a throbbing nest. I can hear him. Growling, I think, deep in his chest, like a hungry dog. Rattling and damp. Famished. Ready to eat some other ruined animal alive.

The cold doesn’t move, and I don’t open my eyes. It’s as if a small, chilled bird has settled there. A frozen bird.

A frozen diamond.

Or a sharp sliver of hail:

Some mirror fragment of the sky fallen onto my throat.

And when I finally realize it’s the edge of a knife he’s holding there, steady and pressing, just above my collarbone, that it’s a sharp metal blade pressed firm and icy against my neck, and what that means, I sit up.

Suddenly frantic, I gasp straight into that knife with all the life I have and cut my own throat fast.

U
NCLE
A
NDY
stood behind my mother, his shadow falling across her, but she was laughing. A hoe in her hand, it filled up with blue sky when she wiped it on the grass and let it fall beside her as she packed the dirt down around the rosebush he’d given her.

Pressing the earth.

Packing it down. She was wearing a halter-top, and her back was pure light, reflecting nothing. He ran his darker hand over the skin, dividing the light between her bare shoulders.

I looked at the rosebush, which was already heavy with dead, red petals—though the earth under it was wildly alive, being tunneled and torn up, turned by insects squirming, being born. My mother hummed low and hungry behind her lips, and I could hear it coming up from that black soil.

She stood and kissed him, and I picked up the hoe and stabbed it over and over into the soft ground my mother had broken and closed around the rose.

“What the fuck”—the light snaps on, and I see his face above me. The blue eyes, the blond beard, a few inches from my own before the yellow room flashes off the knife in his hands and I close my eyes
(too beautiful, too bright)
. His lips are wet, but his eyes are stunned as something just born. Blood on his shirt—redder than you might imagine, redder, maybe, than he’d imagined. When he sees it on himself, he gasps.

And when I close my eyes, I see my mother planting a rosebush in the back yard in summer—the only time I’ve ever seen her garden. That velvet red. Her hands are full of dirt, and the dirt squirms with fat and steaky worms. She isn’t wearing gloves. Her legs are smooth and white. I remember, that morning, how she’d shaved them, and a trickle of blood had run from her thigh down the drain, billowing in the bath water, luxurious as hair. “Leila, get me a Band-Aid,” she’d said.

“What the fuck did you cut her for?”

When I open my eyes again, Rob is standing over me—pale in the yellow light, shaking, weak, familiar. His forehead flickers with sweat. Someone moves into the doorway behind him, and he turns fast. “Get the fuck out of here,” he says, voice cracking. He goes to the bedroom door and slams it shut.

“Oh my god, oh god, oh god,” muttering. He starts to search the dresser drawers for something, throwing handfuls of white socks and underwear to the floor as he searches. Finally he hauls out a woman’s short bathrobe. Terrycloth, and he tears it in half fast with his bare hands. There is the sound of fur being slashed with a pocket knife as the cloth rips. Something small and sharp cutting a tough, dry hide, and I see that deer again. In the neighbors’ yard. Swinging a bit in the October wind. Its eyes were open, or closed, and something ran black from its slack mouth.

“Sit up, sweetheart,” he says, slipping a hand behind my back, between my shoulder blades, easing me up. I feel dizzy, and the room grows darker before it explodes again with light. Rob presses a torn square of the bathrobe to my chest.

“We’ve got to get you out of here, baby,” he whispers in my ear. The message, as it tunnels through the canals, musty paths to my brain, is soft and warm, while the rest of the house comes alive with louder whispering now. Outside, I can hear clear sound. A raccoon screams cold and sharp. Something dragged, metal, across cement. And the dog is back, chained again, leaping at the emptiness before him in silence, clanging, just the sound of a woman dancing without music in metal shoes.

“Do you hear me, Leila? We’ve got to get you out of here. You’ve got to sit up, sweetheart. We’ve got to get your dress on.”

Out there, I can hear the cluttered ruin of the vegetable garden, too, rustle. Then, silence, except for Rob’s breath, like a bear’s—except for the low whispers in the living room. I think of a field of pumpkins I’ve driven past in October. Just at dusk, all those heavy heads resting, nestled, in deep green vines like godheads or sleeping hoboes off the road: They were dreaming the future for me. My death. A white frenzy of feathers in the sky over Suspicious River. Their whispers grew louder and louder the further and faster I drove.

Rob leans over to pick the dress up off the floor, stands to slip it over my head. There’s blood on his hands and on the dress when I look down. Oily, and bright. He buttons the pearl buttons over the blood, and they go dark and thick with it. Whispering again, “You’ve got to stand up, baby. Gary’s back. You got to get out of here now.”

Rob’s sweat shimmers on his upper lip as he slips another woman’s sweater up my arms, buttons it up over my dress. It is a black sweater, and it fits. I can smell my blood in the unfamiliar wool of it like a strange, new animal—something undiscovered, moving through the sewers while we sleep, something that’s made a nest and given birth down there.

The yellow light becomes cold as Rob slides the bedroom window open. I hear him rip the screen with something sharp. I hear animal feet scurry through the grass outside. Small claws clicking in the branches overhead. I think there must be new species being born all the time—in the sewer, in the woods, crawling out of the forest to be mangled, unrecognizable, on the highway under tires.

Beyond recognition
comes to mind.
Identified by dental records
comes to mind. I remember a headline,
Two Severed Female Legs Found in Muskegon Dumpster
, and another article, an inch long, about a hunter whose dog dug up the body of a girl I’d gone to high school with.
A runaway
they’d called her when she disappeared one Saturday after a football game. Maybe they’d imagined her leaping, white-hoofed, across the burnout of autumn fields,
running away
. But she’d been strangled with a belt and buried in a duffle bag instead.

That hunter hadn’t wanted to look, but the dog
would not leave the site
, the paper said. It howled and tore at the earth. Frenzied.

He knew what was under there
, the hunter said, shaking, when reporters asked him for details the next day.

The dog pawed up the grave, snuffling, until the hunter saw hair.

Rob helps me to the window, and I stand in front of it, leaning into him, looking at the slash in the screen that leads outside to nothing but a blue-black sky.

The air blowing through it tastes like a tarnished spoon in my mouth, and I gulp what’s on it down.

Shadows.

Something moves out there, slips behind a high hedge of loose leaves like a ragged wall. Thin blade of a moon. A few cool stars. Bats, maybe, or something with wings tossed from the roof—bleating a bit, but flying.

There’s blood on my teeth now, too. Blood on the back of my hands. I can see black roses on my cheekbones, still swelling. Rob doesn’t look at my face. He touches my hair gently as I step through the ripped-open screen into darkness and wind, not sure how far down the earth will be as I feel myself fall through it, getting used to falling just before the earth stops me fast and hard in an exhausted garden, covered now in cold leaves and a few damp squares of burlap.

I’m lucky
, I think when I touch my knees and elbows with the palms of my hands: Once, I saw a bald, wet baby bird, wings pink and useless as the lids of a child’s eyes. It had fallen like that from a nest and landed on the windshield of the neighbor’s car with no sound at all.

Rob leans out of the window as I stand up again slowly, tired, and he’s still whispering. I can barely hear him. He seems to be suspended over my head like a hollow planet, an exposed god, by long white threads. “Go down to the river and start running in that direction,” he points to the sky in front of him. “You’re five miles from town. I’ll come after you as soon as I can.”

“
Go
,” he says, making an arc in the air over me as if he’s throwing something invisible into the wind. “
Run
.”

I can’t feel the ground underneath my feet, though I know it’s there, shocking up through the bones of my legs each time I hit it with my bare heel. The house is quiet and bright behind me, but even without it I can see in the dark. I see a swing set, red striped, ruined by weather, and it smells like rust. An old bicycle, a girl’s, collapsed on its kickstand as if it’s been tossed off another planet. A meteor with plastic streamers on its white handlebars. An oily chain. A silver garbage can of rain. A shiver of trees around the river, and the sound of water slipping, down there, through earth—very close, the river sounds like a body, bleeding, but alive.

I run toward that, through the back yard, until the mowed grass turns to long, dead weeds. I run until the light from the house flickers in branches behind me and goes out.

Then I slide down.

The river’s there. Quiet, but it smooths over a few white stones, and I can hear those stones.

Mud, crossing the river.

Beneath my feet, the stones feel smooth, and they don’t cut. The muck is sweet, and something with warm blood, greased fur, passes between my ankles, kisses them, and a tree reaches down to take my hand and help me up, out of the water, to the other side of the river:

Strange, I think, how all of it has become human since I was last here—when it had all gone by barren around me, dragging its dead deer away, along with its fish—suffering, winged, or tumored in the chemical dark. Its styrofoam cups and beer bottles.

I run along the other side of the river, stumbling but strong, leaving a bloody trail of footprints behind me in the mud.

As if the glass has cracked in my glass slippers.

As if the river were a mother I should have trusted.

L
OOK UP
.

The moon is a clean sickle, and only now and then a shred of cloud passes through its claw. When you hold your hand out in front of you, it fills with silver, like something filched. You give it back to the darkness when you make a fist, and even the stars hiss. A few of them fall when you stare at the sky. A handful of planets slip into the river—too quick to catch, even with a net. Now, each breath you take is a fast stab between your ribs, and your heart pushes water up through your lungs, through the moon slice across your throat:

This is what the river says as it gets wider.

It gets wider, the farther I walk, but I can hear footsteps on the other side.