Two Rivers (12 page)

I
gave Maggie my room. It didn’t seem right to make Shelly share the first bedroom she’d ever had to herself, and I was sleeping so little, I figured I hardly needed my bed anyway. She arranged the few things she’d brought with her on the top of my dresser (which I emptied for her): a photo of herself and two other girls, leaning against a red Chevy Monte Carlo. There was a giant willow tree in the background, a gray house. A clothesline with white sheets. The girls were all wearing short shorts and halter tops, posing, puckering their lips. There was a small painted wooden box with a gold clasp and tiny padlock, a bleached sand dollar, and a pack of matches from some place called Joe’s. I didn’t look inside the box, but I did strike one match. Just one, and held it until the flame tickled the tip of my thumb.

All week, I tried my best to pretend that none of this was out of the ordinary, secretly hoping the problem would somehow take care of itself. I kept waiting for her father to show up at my doorstep and just take her home. At work when Henry said that Stan told him I’d hired some help for Shelly, I stuttered but stuck to my story about my mother’s college roommate’s daughter. And each night as I fought my futile battle against insomnia, I vowed that I would contact Maggie’s father. When dawn broke each morning, I rolled off the couch, resolute in my decision to send her home, and then I’d make my way to the kitchen, where she had already fixed bacon and eggs, ironed my clothes, and packed Shelly’s lunch. The smell of starch and freshly squeezed orange juice worked like some sort of magic antidote to my resolve, making all of my late night ruminations seem somehow ludicrous. It also didn’t help that Shelly had fallen head over heels for Maggie. Several times I had to shoo her out of Maggie’s room at night, where she sat cross-legged at the edge of the bed, chattering on and on as Maggie painted her nails or braided her hair. This was the true rub. Just when I felt confident in my decision to turn her in, to throw her back into the water so to speak, I’d see the joy in Shelly’s face. This child-woman with confused eyes, this stranger, had something to offer Shelly that I simply didn’t.

“Can I go to the fall dance at school on Friday?” Shelly asked.

We were eating dinner. Maggie had made homemade macaroni and cheese, fried chicken. Biscuits that melted buttery on my tongue. My fingers were slick with grease, my stomach grateful.

“Aren’t you a little young for dances? We didn’t have dances in school when I was a kid.”

Shelly rolled her eyes and speared a pile of macaroni with her fork.

“In my town, we started having dances in the fifth grade,” Maggie offered.

I had to bite my tongue to keep something mean-spirited from coming out, willing myself to look away from her belly, which seemed to be growing exponentially each day.

“Do you have a
date
?” I asked, chuckling a little without intending to.

“Yes,”
Shelly said, exasperated.

I lost my grasp on the piece of chicken I was holding, and it flew onto the table. “I’m sorry, that’s out of the question. You’re twelve years old.”

“Exactly,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”

“I didn’t say you were a baby. I said you were
twelve
. How old is your ‘date’?”

“He’s thirteen,” she said softly. “In the eighth grade.”

“Yep. Sorry. Forget it. Out of the question.”

“What if she goes to the dance
without
a date?” Maggie asked, spooning another helping of macaroni and cheese on my plate.

I glared at her.

“Please, please?” Shelly asked. “I’ll call him right now and tell him I can’t go with him. I’ll let you listen. You can tell him yourself.”

“What’s his number?” Maggie asked excitedly. She stood up and went to the phone.

I felt duped. I hadn’t wanted Shelly to go to the dance at all. Now here I was, backed into a corner.

“Sit down, Maggie. And Shelly, you listen,” I said, realizing that I had never ever talked like this to her before. Like somebody with rules to enforce. Like the father of a twelve-year-old girl. “I don’t like this, but I suppose I don’t have much of a choice. I trust you. That’s all I’m going to say. Please don’t disappoint me.” I felt like a fraud.

Maggie told me that she and Shelly would clean up, sent me to the living room to watch the news with a bowl of hot peach cobbler in one hand and a cold glass of milk in the other. In the kitchen, their whispers and giggles mixed with the tinkling of dishes and water, and I knew I’d only been politely dismissed.

The wreck had created all sorts of havoc not only in my personal life but at my job as well. In addition to my normal workload, I’d had to act as a human shield protecting Lenny from the media, the railroad, and the victims’ families—fielding calls from newsmen and TV stations, negotiating my way through the literal mountains of legal paperwork from the railroad, and intercepting angry phone calls from grieving family members. I spent most of each day convinced that Maggie’s father would be the next voice I heard on the other end of the line. I figured that by now someone from her family must have gathered that she didn’t make it to Canada. The train wreck had been on the
national
news. I knew that somebody would be looking for her. Soon. And that I’d better be prepared to explain how a fifteen-year-old girl wound up living in my house, pressing my clothes and taking care of a child only a few years younger than herself. It wouldn’t look good. I was sure of that.

As I rode my bike home the night of Shelly’s dance, I formulated exactly how I would broach the subject of Maggie’s impending departure (first with Maggie and then with Shelly). I was exhausted, starving, my legs shaking from the ride as I climbed the steps two at a time to our apartment. Inside, Maggie was not in the kitchen as she had been every other night since the wreck. I could hear laughter coming from the end of the hall though, and after unloading my stuff and kicking off my work shoes, I went down the hallway and knocked softly on my own bedroom door.

“Who is it?” Maggie asked.

“It’s me,” I said, mildly annoyed.

“Just a minute.”

It was time. This was ridiculous. I’d made a huge mistake.

The door creaked open slowly, and Maggie emerged, shutting the door quickly behind her.

“What’s going on in there?” I asked.

“She’s almost ready,” Maggie said, pushing me gently back down the hallway. “I made some chicken and dumplings tonight. My auntie’s recipe.” She ushered me to the kitchen table. I sat down, rubbing my temples.

“Listen, Maggie,” I said. “About your staying here…it’s time we talk about…” I started.

“What do you think?” Shelly asked. She stood in the doorway, her hands hanging awkwardly at her sides. In the pale blue dress, she looked like a child again. A child playing dress-up. The dress was short, barely covering the tops of her skinny legs. She was wearing makeup, her eyes lined in the same blue as the dress. Her cheeks were flushed pink with rouge. “Maggie found this in your closet. She hemmed it up for me, ’cause it’s not so much in style anymore. But it’s pretty, don’t you think?”

The dull pain in my temples became the sharp, blinding pain of a migraine. I was angry,
furious
, and before I could think about what I was doing, I was holding onto Maggie’s shoulders, shaking her hard. “What makes you think you had any right to touch that dress? Did you cut it?
Did you?
”

Underneath my fingers, Maggie’s shoulders trembled violently.

Shelly screamed, “Stop, Daddy! What are you doing? You’ll hurt her!”

And then everything went numb. The searing pain behind my eyes was replaced by a thick and familiar humming. I shook my head, as if I could shake that awful droning from my ears. I stepped back, still gripping her small shoulders tightly, and forced myself to look into her mismatched eyes, which, despite their differences in hue, were both filled with terror.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she cried.

And shaking, I let go.

I
asked Betsy to go to the prom with me in the same casual way I might have asked her what the capital of Montana was. I had to pretend like I didn’t care one way or another and that this was just the polite thing for a friend to do when another friend’s date canceled at the last minute—which is exactly what had happened to Betsy. In March of our senior year, Peter Heinrich had asked her to the prom, jumping the gun by more than a bit, I thought, and to my dismay, Betsy had agreed. But Heinie, who was as fickle as he was hasty, changed his mind in May, leaving Betsy stranded with only three weeks before the big day. This fortuitous rejection was exactly what I’d been hoping for, especially since I’d failed to have any sort of backup plan.

I asked her right after she beat me at our tenth straight game of badminton one Saturday afternoon. My father had suspended a net between two trees in our front yard, engaging my mother in a nightly match. My mother had played competitive badminton in college and had been bugging him to set up a net for years. With her impending departure, he gave in to a lot of her requests: badminton tournaments at dusk, freshly baked croissants with dinner every night, which they ate on a blanket outside. You’d have thought she had a terminal disease the way he gave in to her whims. Mint juleps and midnight bike rides.

Betsy was slapping a mosquito that had landed on her thigh.

“Why not?” she said with a shrug after I managed to get the question out. “Not like I have plans.”

“Great.” I nodded, slapping a bug that had slowly been draining the blood out of my neck. Cool as a cucumber.

We had never spoken about what happened at the Heights during the storm after Betsy’s mother’s suicide, but there wasn’t a single day that passed that I didn’t revisit that afternoon in my mind. I replayed it over and over again, like a favorite song. Every moment memorized: each excruciating and thrilling detail. I still didn’t understand it, but that didn’t matter. The mere fact of what had passed between us was enough to sustain me. I was waiting, just waiting for the next time, and I hoped it wouldn’t take another tragedy to make it happen.

Meanwhile, Betsy Parker had been on exactly five dates since her father allowed her to start dating boys. She recalled all of the details to me, spinning the nights into what she thought were funny anecdotes about bumbling boys who tried to shove their hands up her shirt or who got so drunk at the drive-in that she wound up having to drive them home. Each story was agonizing, but I listened. I always, always listened, because I knew that if I didn’t pass judgment, didn’t let her know how much each of these stories killed me, then she would continue to tell me everything. I hoped that my receptiveness would keep her from keeping her secrets to herself.

I had only a few of my own stories to share with her. There was one double date with Ray and his girlfriend, Rosemary, who brought along her best friend. The girl’s breath had smelled like mothballs, and she’d been so shy we barely said three words to one another all night. I’d also taken out a girl from my Physics lab who talked about Paul McCartney all night. And, most recently, was one miserable night spent with a girl Brooder insisted I take out. She pulled her bra out from underneath her shirt not five minutes after she got in the DeSoto, and panted like a hot dog in my ear for almost an hour, as I fumbled around with her breasts. I tried, I did. But I didn’t want these girls. I wanted Betsy.

I knew it wasn’t a real date, but still, I wanted to do things right. I rented a tuxedo from Moore & Johnson’s in St. Johnsbury; it had a white jacket and bow tie, black pants. After I brought it home, I tried it on a dozen times trying to decide whether I looked handsome or idiotic. It seemed there was a fine line when it came to tuxedos. Hanna convinced Betsy that they should go to Boston to find a dress, despite Betsy’s insistence that she could find something in town. If Mrs. Parker were alive she would have sewn Betsy’s dress herself, but Hanna was a novice seamstress compared to Mrs. Parker, and so she took Betsy to Filene’s. Hanna was more excited about the prom than anybody I knew. She arranged for us to have dinner at the Oyster Shell, the only fancy restaurant in town. She also suggested I rent a limousine, but it would have cost me every dime I had. The DeSoto would have to do.

At dusk that night, it was still nearly eighty degrees and humid outside. Clouds hung low in the sky, motionless and thick. In my tuxedo, I felt wooden, like a breathing Charlie McCarthy, as I walked across our lawn to pick Betsy up.

Hanna answered the Parkers’ door, beaming. She seemed to be dressed for a formal occasion herself, complete with high heels. I gripped the gardenia corsage, which had wilted in the short time it had traveled from our refrigerator to Betsy’s house.

“How lovely,” Hanna exclaimed, grabbing the corsage from me, and sniffing it deeply, though its smell was so powerful you only had to breathe the air around it to become nauseated. “Harper, you look so
handsome
. Betsy!”

Betsy came out of the downstairs bathroom then, wearing a dress the color of a robin’s egg. It was an impossible blue. The blue of dreams. Her hair was half up, half down, curlers and bobby pins evidence that she had been working at this. Her efforts made my heart quicken.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she said, like an apology, but I wasn’t sure if it was meant for me or for Hanna.

“Come here, sweetheart,” Hanna offered, and sat Betsy down at the kitchen table, where she unpinned and unwound and sprayed and coiffed until Betsy looked like she’d stepped out of a beauty parlor. Hanna beamed.

“Where’s Daddy?” Betsy asked.

“He’s on his way home. Lots of appointments today. With the prom and everything.”

I ran my hand over my own head, suddenly aware that my father had forgotten last month’s haircut.

“Do I look stupid?” Betsy asked, twirling in front of me like a little girl playing dress-up.

I shook my head. Couldn’t speak.

Betsy’s father took a photo of us with Betsy’s Brownie Starflash when he came home, just one. I felt my eyes close as the shutter clicked, the moment preserved forever this way, as if I were asleep. Only dreaming.

Ray and Rosemary were doubling with us. Ray lived outside of town in a big crumbling farmhouse. When we pulled up the long driveway, I could see his sisters all milling about on the porch. With less than a year between each successive sister, I never could tell one apart from the next. They all had dirty blond hair and beady little eyes. Ray looked like them too; if he’d been a girl, he’d have blended right in.

The Gauthier sisters made a big fuss as Ray emerged onto the tilting porch wearing a tuxedo just like mine. His big ears reddened as he made it through the mob, their identical hands straightening and tugging and adjusting. His mother stood in the doorway, waving and hollering, “Allo, Arper. You boyz, don’t you geet yourselves in de mischief.”

Ray got in the backseat and sighed.

Rosemary Ludlow and Ray had been a couple since the sixth grade. Rosemary came from a large Catholic family as well. They’d met at church. She lived in town though, near the high school, in a two-bedroom apartment with her family of seven. She looked shy and embarrassed in her homemade dress when she saw Betsy’s Boston-bought one.

“You look so pretty, Rosemary,” Betsy said. “I always wished my mother would make my prom dress.”

Rosemary smiled, a small, crooked-toothed smile. She touched her hair self-consciously and sat down next to Ray in the backseat.

I was sweating terribly inside that tuxedo. I think in the confusion of cufflinks and tying my tie and shining my shoes I’d forgotten to put on deodorant. The humidity wasn’t helping the matter either. By the time we pulled up to the Oyster Shell, I was drenched. The restaurant was equipped with only one ceiling fan, which was nowhere near our table. I suffered through a shrimp cocktail, the uncompromising shell of a lobster, and a chocolate parfait before I excused myself and went to the bathroom, where I took off my coat to assess the damage. Fortunately, my undershirt had taken the brunt of my excessive perspiration. I tried my best to let things air out, splashing some cool water on the back of my neck. In the mirror, I stared at my mop of hair and thought,
You’re going to lose her before you even get her.

The Tuesday Inn had served as the prom site for thirty years. It was a rambling old hotel perched on the hill above the river, the front porch wrapping around it like an embrace. It was built as a resort hotel in the mid-1800s, but by the 1920s, the only “guests” were rum runners, and they rarely checked in for more than a few hours. It got the nickname “Madame Tuesday’s” sometime in its less reputable days, and the name had stuck despite its having been converted from brothel back into hotel in the last several decades. By the time we got to Madame Tuesday’s, I was sweating again, and this time I knew it had penetrated all my layers.

It had gotten darker but not cooler. Inside wasn’t any better. The prom was well in progress by the time we arrived, and all those sweating bodies coupled with the absence of a single window in the ballroom made for a virtual steam bath. Betsy pleaded with me to join her on the dance floor, and I relented, dancing to two or three fast songs before asking for a moment of respite on the porch. I took her by the hand, and we made our way out of the crowded ballroom, through the lobby, and onto the porch.

“Why don’t you take off your jacket?” she asked, starting to tug at my sleeve.

I yanked it back up onto my shoulder a little harder than I had intended to.

Betsy scowled. “It’s
hot
,” she said. “You must be drenched.”

“
That’s
why I’m not taking my jacket off,” I said.

“Oh jeez, Louise,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Like you’re the first guy who ever sweated before. I’ve been to a few football games in my day. Guys are supposed to be sweaty. Stinky.”

And so I peeled off my wet suit jacket, holding my arms out in defeat. Betsy laughed as I stood there like Jesus with my arms outstretched, waiting to be crucified. And then in a movement so quick and startling, she came close to me, leaning into my chest. I hesitated only a moment before I let my arms close around her. When they did, she looked up at me and smiled. “Not so bad,” she said. And I wasn’t sure if she meant the smell or the sweat or the embrace. Betsy smelled like lilacs.

We sat down in a pair of Adirondack chairs that faced the river. Betsy slipped off her shoes and put her feet up on the railing. Her toenails were painted pink, like little seashells.

“I can’t believe school’s almost done already. Are you looking forward to college?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Oh, I almost forgot! I got something for you in Boston,” she said, reaching for her purse. “While Hanna was taking a nap at the hotel, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. It was
amazing
. They had this Paul Klee exhibit, you ever heard of him? One of those Bauhaus guys. Watercolors mostly. Tissue paper collages. Anyway, they were
so
beautiful. Oh, Harper, they were so beautiful it could make you cry. These tiny little worlds, perfect little worlds, made of paper. I didn’t even make it to any other exhibits. And so I went to the gift shop to try to get you a print of one of the paintings. There was this one of a tree filled with houses, the background was this beautiful red. It made me think of you, our fort in the woods. But they didn’t have a poster, and so I was looking and looking, and just when I was about to give up and go back to the hotel, all of a sudden I saw
this
.”

She reached into her little purse and pulled out a postcard, edges curled.
The Tree of Houses
.

“It’s different than seeing the real painting, but isn’t it beautiful?”

She handed it to me, and I touched the little houses, the branches. I didn’t have any words for her, for what this meant to me.

“We can see each other all the time, you know,” she said, nodding. “There’s a bus that runs between Middlebury and Castleton. On the weekends and stuff. And there’s always Christmas. And summers.”

It was too much. I didn’t want to talk about taking a bus to see her. I didn’t want to think about winter. Winters in Vermont were long enough already, even when you weren’t waiting for anything but spring mud on the other side.

Below us the river rushed loudly, though it was too dark to see it.

“Betsy?” I started, not sure what I wanted to say, just overwhelmed with the moment. But before I could finish what I had started, Betsy reached for my hand. She wasn’t looking at me but out toward the dark river.

“You’re my best friend, Harper Montgomery.”

I held onto her hand, overcome with both affection and sadness.

“We’ve still got the
whole
summer.” She smiled, squeezing my hand. “And I have some big plans for us.” I didn’t know what she meant; I didn’t care. I just wanted to kiss her. I was
leaning forward
to kiss her when Rosemary Ludlow came running out onto the porch, her hair wet and sticking to the sides of her face. “Betsy, you’ve got to get inside! They just called your name for the court.”

“What?” Betsy asked.

“The royal court!” Rosemary said. “Jennifer Paquette and Jason Wesson are king and queen, but you and Howie Burke are duke and duchess.”