River Road

by Carol Goodman

  The Sea Witch. She was the ship’s figurehead Troy had described in his story, above the bar he called Circe’s Den. This bar was called Noah’s Ark, but it had to be the same place. How many antique ships’ figureheads could there be in downtown Poughkeepsie? I stared at her through the swirling snow as if she were a landmark pointing the way home.

  But what home? The empty, haunted house I’d been rattling around in since Emmy died? What did I have there but a few frail memories of Emmy? I wouldn’t have a job much longer—my one real supporter lay in a stupor, unable to string letters into words. My reputation was ruined at Acheron—and even if it weren’t, what business did I have there? I’d prided myself on being a good teacher—on being the kind of teacher who cared about her students—and look what had come of that. I’d run Leia off when she came to me for help. I’d ignored the obvious signs that Troy was involved in a dangerous drug world—why, he’d practically drawn me a map of his downward spiral into hell and I’d treated it like a goddamned literary metaphor! I didn’t deserve to be a teacher anymore.

  I wiped my eyes with my coat sleeve, then swiped at the windshield, which had fogged over during my sobbing. Yes, the Sea Witch was pointing home—I could make out a sign for 9 North just beyond the bar. I put the car in drive and began to pull into the road . . .

  When a familiar-looking figure came out of the bar. Skinny legs, pointy shoes, vintage tweed coat, porkpie hat—it was the Aging Hipster I’d seen on the Loop bus and walking in the woods with Troy. He paused in the doorway, pulled his collar up around his scrawny neck, and lit a cigarette. I guess even Noah’s Ark obeyed the state no-smoking law. I stared at him, wondering how many drugs he’d sold my students. He was looking up and down the street, his eyes lingering on my headlights for a minute but then returning to the sidewalk. As if he were looking for someone. A drug connection? I had half a mind to get out of the car and tell him what I thought of him—

  But then two other men came around the corner, two teenagers in hooded sweatshirts, huddled against the snow. As they approached the doorway of Noah’s, Aging Hipster stepped forward to greet them. They exchanged a complicated series of hand gestures that ended in a power fist bump and then the three of them turned and started walking away from Noah’s. As he turned, Aging Hipster took off his hat to shake snow from the brim and I saw that the back of his shaved scalp was tattooed with a large, grinning skull, identical to the tattoo described in Troy’s story for the drug dealer he’d called Scully. I’d thought it was Troy’s invention but I doubted it was a coincidence that the same man whom Troy had met in the woods and who was hanging outside the bar Troy had described in his story had the same tattoo. This was clearly the dealer Troy had written about—the name even fit his skeletal frame and disjointed gait—and this was the neighborhood Troy had promised to take Leia to for “some real life experience.” What if Leia had seen something she shouldn’t have on that little field trip? What if it hadn’t been Troy’s secret she’d threatened but Scully’s?

  Scully and the two men were turning a corner. Before I knew I planned to do it, I pulled out and followed them. When I turned the corner I saw them halfway down the block. I let a taxi pull in front of me to make my pursuit less obvious. The neighborhood was sliding from slightly disreputable to downright derelict as I followed the three men down the hill toward the river, passing buildings that were only burnt-out shells. A group of homeless men stood at a corner warming their hands at a fire burning in a garbage can. The waterfront was cut off by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence I could see a brick tower with the words Blackwell Machine picked out in grayish ceramic tile that might once have been pastel blue. Below the tower was a tin-roofed building covered with large, colorful graffiti tags. Scully pulled back a loose flap of wire fence as if it were a flimsy curtain and waved the two young men to go ahead. One of them looked around nervously. I slid down in my seat, afraid he’d see me, but my car, with its dented hood, must have looked disreputable enough to blend into the neighborhood. As he turned back and followed his friend and Scully into the abandoned factory, a sharp rap at the window made me jump. A snow-covered figure, face obscured by a fur-trimmed hood, was peering through my window. Recalling the ice hag’s face at my window last night my heart raced, but then she pushed down her hood and I recognized Aleesha Williams. I lowered my window.

  “Professor Lewis, what in the world are you doing here? This is no place for you!”

  I started to point out Scully and the two men but they had vanished into the grafittied building. For a moment I wondered if I had summoned them up out of Troy’s story. But then Aleesha said, “Come on before that bastard Scully comes back”—she was looking toward the river. She didn’t look afraid, she looked angry—“and I kill him for what he did to Shawna.”

  * * *

  Aleesha got in the car and directed me back up the hill to a three-story gingerbread-trimmed Victorian house overlooking the river. “You’d better come on in if you want to hear the full story,” she said.

  I was happy to get out of the car and follow Aleesha up the peeling, uneven steps onto the front porch. There were six mailboxes lined up beside the front door. The fanlight over the door was painted over and missing several panes of glass and the molding in the front hall was chipped and dingy. Aleesha’s apartment was on the first floor. She unlocked three locks and let me into a light, airy room with a desk, a small television, and a playpen full of toys.

  “This is the study/playroom,” she said with a wry smile. “The only way I can get any work done at night is to put on a Dora the Explorer show for Isabel. But I read to her plenty.” She gestured to a stack of children’s books with library stickers on them. “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad mother.”

  “I once had the flu and my husband had to work, and I let Emmy watch Pinocchio six times in a row.”

  Aleesha laughed and then stopped abruptly. “That’s your little girl who died, isn’t it?”

  I nodded and looked away to a wall with a line of crayon pictures taped to it. “Did Isabel do these? Wow! She’s really talented!”

  “She loves to draw. This one’s of a trip to the park.” We followed the trail of Isabel’s drawings down a long hallway to the kitchen. Aleesha put on a kettle for tea while I sat by a radiator on which a pair of tiny pink mittens lay drying. The kitchen was freshly painted a bright, cheerful yellow. Yellow checked curtains hung at the window, which had a view of the Blackwell factory and the river. A large calendar with Izzy’s and Mommy’s chores written out on it hung on the refrigerator along with magnets that spelled out cat, hello, and Isabelly. The room smelled like coffee and pancake syrup and I felt safer than I had in any place I’d been in years.

  “Am I keeping you from picking up Isabel?” I asked.

  “Nope. My sister’s taking her and her cousins to the movies. I was just getting off my shift at Dunkin’ Donuts when I saw you. At first I thought you must be looking for me—then I saw you watching Scully.”

  “You know Scully?”

  “That scumbag? Yeah. He hangs out at the college trying to blend in with the kids even though he’s ten years older and hasn’t taken a class in years. Then he hangs out in the neighborhood acting like he’s a black dude.”

  “And rides the Loop bus between the two,” I added. “He’s dealing drugs, isn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.” Aleesha put two mugs of steaming tea on the table and sat down across from me. “But he prefers to use a go-between—a college kid to make the deals—calls it his ‘work-study’ program. He asked me to move some product since ‘I was making the trip anyway.’ ” She snorted and blew on her tea. “Like he was asking me to pick up a loaf of bread while I was at the Kwik-E-Mart. ‘Easy money,’ he said, ‘selling to white kids with their daddy’s money burning a hole in their pockets.’ As if he wasn’t white himself. Wasn’t like I didn’t need the money but what if I got caught? What would happen to Izzy then? I told him no.”

  �
��These college kids he used—was one of them Troy?”

  Aleesha took a sip of her tea and tilted her head at me. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I saw Troy in the woods with him and because Leia and he fought the night she died. He was seen in the woods with her later that same night. The police think he had something to do with her death.”

  She put down her cup and leaned toward me, fixing me with her large amber-colored eyes. “Do you think he did?”

  I looked away, out the window at the falling snow coming down as heavily as it had that night. “I think Leia knew something that Troy didn’t want anyone to know. If she knew he was dealing drugs to Acheron students and threatened to tell . . .” I thought of the deserted factory that Scully had just disappeared into. Blackwell Machine. I’d heard about it in that urban planning lecture I’d gone to. It was an old iron forge that specialized in dumbwaiters and elevators. The company had started failing after the Blackwells’ daughter died. Now the factory sat abandoned on the edge of the river, a haven for drug users, as if the Blackwell family tragedy was still spreading out, catching innocent victims in its web. I had read something about the factory recently—

  “Didn’t the paper say that the police thought Shawna died at an abandoned factory down by the river? Did Troy sell to Shawna? Did he get her hooked again?”

  Aleesha bit her lip and looked down into her mug. “No. That was Scully’s doing. Scully’s the one who got Shawna hooked in the first place.”

  “But I thought in your story— Oh.” Now I undersood. “Scully was Shawna’s boyfriend.”

  “Uh-huh. They got together when Scully was still taking classes at the college. She thought she’d really stepped up in the world going out with a college boy, but he brought her nothing but trouble. I thought she’d gotten clear of him, thought that was the one good thing to come outta her being in jail. But he was waiting for her when she got out. He told me if I dealt for him he’d leave her alone—” Her voice cracked. “If I’d’ve done it maybe she’d still be alive.”

  I scooched my chair closer and put my arm around her. “You don’t know that. How could you trust a creep like that? Once he got you dealing for him what would keep him from going after Shawna?”

  “I guess . . .” She blew her nose.

  “And you couldn’t have taken that risk with Isabel.”

  “Yes, but . . . I can’t get rid of the feeling I could’ve done more. Maybe if I hadn’t been so uptight with Shawna—but when she started bringing friends here, like it was a stop on the Magical Mystery Tour, showing off to Troy and Leia—”

  “Troy and Leia? Shawna was hanging out with them?”

  Aleesha nodded and took a sip of tea. “She dragged me out one night to Noah’s while Izzy was with my sister. Said I deserved a night out. Truth be told, I needed one, but I wished I’d never gone with her. We ran into Leia and Troy there. Troy was showing Leia the ’hood as he called it.” Aleesha rolled her eyes and I recalled what she had thought of white kids affecting black street language.

  “Was that after we workshopped Troy’s story in class?”

  “Uh-huh. Leia was all jazzed up to see some ‘real life,’ like what she’d been doing before was all pretend . . .” Aleesha paused, looking around her kitchen, at the pretty curtains, the crayon drawings, the paper Christmas garlands. “I never could get my head around that. A white girl like Leia from a nice family, not rich maybe, but I saw her parents at the vigil and they looked like good people, steady like. I’d kill to be able to give that kind of life to Izzy. That’s real. I understand why Troy was down here—he was showing off to Leia—but I don’t understand why Leia would want to hang out with scum like Scully.”

  “They were hanging out with Scully?”

  “Yep. He came into the bar that first night and invited them all back to his place—‘for a taste,’ I heard him say.”

  “You mean Scully was offering them heroin?” I felt like a sixty-year-old schoolmarm, but I couldn’t hide the shock in my voice. “Do you think Leia did it?”

  “Definitely. I could see it in her after that. That smug look Shawna and my uncle Teddy always got. Like they’d found the key to the VIP lounge in heaven.”

  I tried to picture Leia in class. There were times that she had a secret smile on her face—a Mona Lisa smile. I’d always thought she was thinking about the story we’d just read. How could I have been so blind?

  Because you were spending your nights drinking.

  “Do you think she was hooked?” I asked.

  Aleesha shrugged. “I don’t know. I think she thought she wasn’t. I think she thought she could play at smack the way she played at everything else. Maybe she thought only weak-willed people like Shawna got hooked. Maybe she thought she had it under control because she still showed up for class, got As, and had all her shit together— Sorry,” she added, seeing the look on my face, “for my language.”

  I shook my head. It hadn’t been Aleesha’s language that had shocked me, it was how much Leia sounded like me. The way I thought I didn’t have a drinking problem because I showed up for class with a lesson prepared and papers graded—all my shit together. “I think you put it exactly right.”

  Aleesha smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have cared what Leia did with herself but she drew Shawna back in—and now they’re both dead.”

  The smile twisted into a sob. I squeezed her shoulder and looked away, not sure what to say. It had all happened in my class, under my eyes. I’d told them that Margaret Atwood quote about making the risky trip to the Underworld to bring someone back from the dead but I hadn’t meant to give them a ticket for the boat trip to hell. Shawna had died because of my students and now Leia was dead—

  “Aleesha, did Leia know that Shawna OD’d?”

  Aleesha wrinkled her brow, thinking, then shook her head. “She couldn’t have. Shawna was found after Leia died. The only way she could have known—”

  “Was if she was with Shawna when she died.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Aleesha said I was welcome to spend the night rather than drive back in the snow. It was coming down pretty hard but I also saw that I would be crowding the small space once her daughter got home.

  “Thank you, but I should get home. The plows will be out on Route Nine and it’s a straight shot back to my place.”

  “Are you sure you’re not too upset to drive? I know I’m shook. If Leia and Troy were with Shawna when she died—well, I sure as hell would like to have a word with Troy about that.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I promise I’ll let you know whatever I find out.”

  Aleesha walked out on the street to point out the way back to Route 9. “Keep your doors locked and your windows up,” she told me. “This is not a safe neighborhood.”

  I told her I would. I looked over my shoulder when I pulled out and saw her standing on the porch, her hands tucked into her coat sleeves, snow melting from her thick black curls. She looked like a snow angel, the opposite of the ice hag.

  The route she’d given me took me back past Blackwell Machine. I kept an eye out for Scully but the site was deserted; the brick tower whipped by the snow could have been the abandoned watchtower of a vanquished people, the bright graffiti their ancient lost language.

  Route 9 had been plowed and sanded but it was snowing so hard the road was still slick. I crawled along at twenty miles an hour, hands clenched on the wheel, leaning forward trying to make out the road through the swirling snow and trying just as hard to make out Leia’s true face through all the whirling, contradictory pictures of her that had emerged since her death. The perfect daughter, student, promising writer morphed into seductress, shape-shifting trickster, heroin user. Saint Leia, Troy had sneeringly called her, because of the pedestal everyone put her on, but I had truly made of her a graven image—the girl my Emmy might have grown up to be. Had she come to my office that day to tell me about Shawna? She’d left me the story she’d written about working in th
e prison. Did she want me to understand how she felt about Shawna before admitting that it was because of her that Shawna had started using again? That she’d been with her when she died? Had she come to me to ask my advice on whether she should go to the police?

  But I’d turned her away that day, so she went to Ross and then I’d even interrupted that. She must have felt that fate was conspiring to keep her from confessing her sins. What was left for her to do?

  The next time I saw her she was with Troy. Laughing. How could she be laughing if she was thinking about Shawna—

  Unless she was playing another part. That’s what Troy said she did. So what part had she been playing with him that night? Why feign indifference over Shawna’s death? What did she want from Troy?

  I was so immersed in speculation that I didn’t notice the light changing at the intersection with 9G until it was almost too late to stop. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop, the brakes of the car behind me squealing in protest. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a hulking tanklike vehicle inches from my bumper. I couldn’t make out the driver’s face through the snow but I was pretty sure he was scowling at me. I could feel his angry glare on the back of my neck while I waited for the light. When the light changed I inched into the right lane, hoping the tank would pass me, but he tailed me instead, brights glaring in my rearview mirror. Only when I turned onto Orchard did he move on without me, gunning his engine and disappearing around the curve in a spray of snow and blue engine fumes.