Two Rivers (3 page)

“Down by da river,” he said, breathless. “Dere’s people everywhere. Some’s drowned. And the ones that ain’t drowned are bleeding half to death. You gotta come wid me.”

Though it was almost October, the air was muggy and thick, not the normal crisp prelude to autumn. I could feel the hot, wet air in my lungs as I rode behind Rene on my bike, following the tracks out of the train yard toward the river. In the woods, the scent of apples was thick, nauseating. Apples had ripened with the first signs of fall and then rotted in the heat, their small suicides leaving only sad remains, pulp and empty brown skin littering the ground beneath our feet. I dodged them like land mines while Rene plodded and plundered through the rotten mess. Rene, who had to have weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds, had to stop several times to catch his breath. I waited as he bent at the waist, clutching his chest.

“You okay?” I asked.

Too winded to speak, he nodded. But despite Rene’s obvious exhaustion, we kept traveling further along the river’s edge, early morning sunlight struggling through the thick foliage.

Teacups.
The first thing that I saw were about a dozen perfect china teacups floating along in the current, bobbing and dipping downstream: some with rims lipstick-kissed, some still filled with tea now mixing with river water,
all
of them disengaged from their saucers. In the hazy sun, it was almost beautiful, only a floating tea party. Before I saw the wreckage, I saw this.

Then, with a gesture that struck me as almost grand, Rene motioned toward the place where the woods opened up, where the train had jumped the tracks. It had derailed just after the bridge, and one of the rear cars had fallen into the river. The early morning sun glinted in the silver metal of the train, in the broken glass, and in the water. The other cars were tipped on their sides, bloodied people crawling out of the broken windows and doors. Some passengers sat stunned and silent on the bank of the river, while others screamed.

“My baby,”
a woman wailed, futile in her attempt to climb the embankment where a child lay motionless on the grass. Her feet kept slipping, her fingers clawing at the earth. She looked up at us and screamed,
“Why?”
Rene reached for her hand and, bracing himself, helped her up the hill. She staggered across the grass and then collapsed on top of her child, her whole body shaking.

I turned toward the river, paralyzed. I could feel my pulse beating in my neck, in my temples. I willed the other thoughts out of my head, the other disasters.

“Dere’s people stuck inside,” Rene said to me, grabbing hold of my arm, as if to wake me from sleep. “You got to go in dere.”

Rene went to a woman who was beating her fists on the window of a wrecked car, and I rushed blindly down the riverbank to the car that had tumbled into the river. The water was cold and smelled swampy. It soaked my work clothes, the weight of water like the weight of deep sleep. Remarkably, the car was still upright. I shielded my eyes against the sun and scanned the row of windows looking to see if anyone was trying to get out. I fought against the current, holding on to a fallen tree so as not to get swept away. There were several shattered windows; I made my way to the closest one and hoisted myself up into it. I swung my leg over the edge and lowered myself into the car, where I was waist-deep in the water again. Inside, I saw more teacups as well as white tablecloths floating in the water. Plates and soup bowls, water and wineglasses. I pushed through the water using the dining tables for leverage.

“Hello?” I hollered, but my ears were filled with the sound of the river. “Is anybody in here?” I made my way from one end of the dinette car to the next, my legs shaking with the effort and the cold. I could see the narrow serving area and the entrance to Le Pub, the lounge car. “Hello?” I said again, louder this time.

I fought my way to the far end of the car and looked for another open window. My hand throbbed with the beat of my heart. There was no one here. But just as I was about to hoist myself out of the water, I saw something through the window into the next car. I pried the doors open and stepped through into the lounge. An upright piano was floating in the water, bobbing and dipping in the current as the river rushed through the windows. Relieved, I turned to go back. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else.

The porter’s black and white uniform was fanned out like a nun’s habit; his head was immersed in water, his arms outstretched. The dead man’s float. Shelly had learned how to play dead at the public pool that summer. I’d watched all of the children in her swim class floating like toys in the water. It had given me a sick feeling in my stomach then. Now, my stomach turned again. I was shaking badly. It felt like the river was inside me, cold and wet. Unforgiving. I went to the man as quickly as the river would allow, and gently rolled him over.

His face was bloated, pale blue and swollen. At the sight of his face, I turned away, feeling bile rising in my throat, and I vomited into the river water. I turned back to the man and felt the shivering turning into something more like a small convulsion. I had the momentary impulse to give in to the current. I was so full of the river by then I could have just let it carry me away. But something inside of me pulled me out of the wreckage, back into the water, and slowly, slowly, up onto the muddy shore, where I could barely feel my legs.

The police and the town’s only ambulance had finally arrived. The emergency vehicles were parked cockeyed and tilted on the grassy shore. The red and blue lights swirling and humming reminded me of a carnival. Of a midway. Of some terrible ride.

There were other drowned people. Their bodies lay along the river’s edge, a morbid picnic. There was so much blood; the grass beneath my feet was slick with it. Children cried in their parents’ and strangers’ arms; the air was loud with the sound of sirens and screaming. I recognized faces but could not connect the faces with names. I concentrated instead on teacups, a hundred bobbing teacups, and I made my way out of the river. I climbed the bank, my boots and eyes filled with water, walking and walking until I couldn’t hear the sirens or see the train. About a hundred yards from the accident, I sat down under a great willow tree, exhausted, and put my face in my hands. I was fatigued, delirious. I blinked hard against the exhaustion and all of the pictures on the backs of my palms and on the backs of my eyes. But no matter how hard I tried, all I saw was the dead man’s face, and every breath reminded me of the other man I’d left for dead in this river.

I could have been there minutes or hours. The lack of sleep seemed to make time mutable. I could barely keep track of it anymore. Entire days went by sometimes without my noticing. Months could have passed while I sat at the river’s edge. Seasons changed.

I lifted my head only when I sensed someone standing in front of me. The sun was bright behind her, but I could make out the silhouette of a young girl, maybe sixteen, seventeen years old, her belly swollen like an egg. An apparition. A cruel trick of my mind, intent on its return, as always, to Betsy. Her name found its way to my throat but not through my lips. I squinted against the sun and quickly realized that this was not a ghost,
not Betsy
, but a real girl. A girl with skin the color of blackberries, holding a suitcase, her hair dripping river water onto my legs.

“What’s your name?” she asked, her accent jarring me, clearly placing her far away from home.

“Harper,” I answered, standing up awkwardly, as if I were only going to shake her hand.

“Harper,”
she said. And then she pressed her tiny hand against her swollen stomach, a gesture I could never forget. “Please,” she said. “You gotta help me, sir. My mama’s dead. I got nowhere to go.”

What happened after this (the moments that followed, the months that followed) I can only explain as the acts of a man so full of sorrow he’d do just about anything to get free of it. Here I was at the river again, with only a moment to decide.
Forgiveness.
For twelve years, I’d only wanted to say I was sorry, but before this there was no one left alive to offer my apologies to.

“Please,” she said again.

And this time, I didn’t turn away.

T
here aren’t
really
two rivers in Two Rivers, Vermont. There’s the Connecticut, of course (single-minded with its rushing blue-gray water), but the other river is really just a wide and quiet creek. Where they intersect, now that’s the real thing. Because the place where the creek meets the Connecticut, where the two strangely different moving bodies of water join, is the stillest place I’ve ever seen. And in that stillness, it almost seems possible that the creek could keep on going, minding its own business, that it might emerge on the other side and keep on traveling away from town. But nature doesn’t work that way, doesn’t allow for this kind of deviation. What must (and does) happen is that the small creek gets caught up in the big river’s arms, convinced or coerced to join it on its more important journey.

The girl was shivering, her arms wrapped around her waist, her hands clutching her sides. Her teeth were chattering. They were small teeth in a tidy row, like a child’s.

I peeled off my flannel shirt, which was the driest thing I had on me, and offered it to her. She accepted the shirt, awkwardly pulling it on. The sleeves hung over her hands; she almost disappeared inside it when she sat down.

“What’s your name?” I asked softly. She was like a wounded animal, knees curled to her chest and trembling.

“Marguerite,” she said, shaking her head.

“Your mother’s dead?” I asked.

The girl looked down at her hands and nodded.

“Was she on the train?”

She kept looking at the ground.

“Where were you going?” I asked.

“Up north,” she said.

“Canada?”

She looked up at me then, water beaded up and glistening on her eyelashes. She nodded. “Canada.”

“Do you know somebody up there?”

She looked toward the woods, chattering. “I got an aunt,” she said.

“Well, let’s get back to my house and you can give her a call. Let her know you’re okay,” I offered.

“It ain’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she don’t know I’m coming. My daddy…” Her voice trailed off.

“Can we call
him
?”

“No!” she said loudly, shaking her head. And then she reached for my hand. “He sent me away. My mama’s dead. I ain’t got nobody.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to sort everything out in my mind.

“We need to go to the station, let them know you’re alive. Then they can get in touch with your aunt and we’ll get you on the next train. And if she can’t take you, we’ll go to the police. They’ll talk to your daddy. He’s your father. He has obligations.”

“No!” she cried again, squeezing my hand hard. “
Please
. Maybe I can just stay a little while. I can’t go back there. I can’t.” Her eyes were wild and scared. One was the same color as river water, blue-gray and moving. The other was almost black. Determined. Like stone. “Let them think I drowned.”

“You can’t just pretend you’re dead.”

“Why not?” she asked, both of her eyes growing dark.

I flinched. “Two Rivers is a small town. People are going to wonder where you came from.”

“Maybe I’m your cousin,” she said, her eyes brightening. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Your cousin from Louisiana.”

I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t have any cousins from Louisiana.”

“From Alabama then. I don’t know. Mississippi,” she persisted, clearly irritated.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not sure folks are going to buy the idea that you and I are
family
.”

The girl looked square at me, studying my face, as if contemplating the possibility herself.

“I’ve got a little girl,” I said. “I can’t just bring a stranger into my house.”

At the mention of Shelly, the girl reached out and grabbed my wrist, pressed my hand hard against her pregnant belly. When I pulled my hand back, she held onto my wrist, and she moved toward me. She was so close to my face I could smell the bubble gum smell of her breath. Her eyes were frantic, and she quickly pressed her lips against my forehead. It was such a tender gesture, it made me suck in my breath.

“I won’t be any trouble. I promise,” she said.

She looked at me again, and I willed myself to look into those disconcerting eyes. I concentrated on the blue one, the one the color of the river, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t say anything else; she simply took my hand and waited for me to take her home.

“You can stay for a little while, just until we get everything straightened out.” And then, because she looked as if she might cry, “I promise, everything will be okay.”

“Thank you,” the girl whispered, though it could have just been the wind rushing in my ears. She was riding on the back of my bicycle as I pedaled away from the accident at the river, through the woods, and back toward town. She held on to my waist tightly, her heartbeat hard and steady against my back. I was careful to avoid anything that might jar her or send us tumbling. We didn’t speak; the only sound was of bicycle tires crushing leaves. I worried about what would happen when I stopped pedaling, when the journey out of the woods inevitably ended, and so I concentrated on finding a clear and unobstructed path through the forest, taking great care to slow down when the terrain grew rough. Too quickly, the woods opened up to the high school parking lot.

I stopped. “If it’s okay with you, I should probably leave you here and have you meet me at the apartment,” I said. “Not the best idea for people to see us riding through town together.”

She climbed carefully down from the seat. She set the small suitcase she had with her onto the pavement, straightened her skirt, and touched her wet hair self-consciously. When she took off my shirt and handed it to me, I thought for a moment that she was going to let me go. I imagined pedaling away as fast as I could. I imagined forgetting all about her, about the wreck, about the river. But instead, I stayed on the bicycle, unsure of what to do next. I gripped the handlebars tightly, ready to go, but immobilized.

The lot was full of cars but empty of students and teachers. We were bound to be discovered by some kid ditching class or sneaking a smoke.

“This a high school?” she asked, looking at the low brick building in front of us. At the football field in the distance.

“Yeah,” I said. It was
my
high school, unchanged in all the years since I’d graduated. I knew every brick in this building’s walls. Every vine of ivy clinging to them. I knew the smell of the cafeteria vent on a cold autumn afternoon, the sound of the bell announcing the beginning of the day.

“No one will think nothin’ of it if they see me here then?” she asked.

I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure what someone would make of this girl, this dark-skinned girl, dripping wet and pregnant in the high school parking lot. While it had its share of matriculated expectant mothers, Two Rivers High had seen all of two black students in the last two decades.

“Walk that way,” I said, motioning toward the road that would wind behind the school and ultimately down into the village where I lived. “I live on Depot Street. Upstairs, above Sunset Lanes Bowling Alley. Number two. I’ll be waiting. I’ll make you some soup or something. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

I stood up on the pedals and pushed off, looking over my shoulder at her briefly, and then rode away as fast as my tired legs would allow. I should have gone home. It wouldn’t take her long to walk from the high school into the village. I knew the apartment was in no condition for company, and that the folks at work were probably wondering where I’d gone. But my bike seemed to have a will of its own, carrying me away from the high school, down the winding road toward town, and then onto the little dead-end street I hadn’t visited in more than twelve years. As if Betsy would simply be waiting there, ready to help me figure out what to do next.