Riley Park

by Diane Tullson

  Kick.

  Her face vanishes and reappears.

  Kick.

  I feel her fingers on the back of my collar.

  Kick. Help her.

  She’s gone. My eyes are open. I feel water in my eyes. But it’s black. I blink, trying to see, but I can’t see. My air is gone. My blood is water.

  I close my eyes.

  Something warm covers my mouth. I wait for water. But it’s not water. It is air, warm air, rolling into my lungs. I’m underwater, but I’m breathing air.

  My eyes fly open. I can see in shades of gray. Rubee’s fingers close my lips and she retreats, her hair flowing away. It was Rubee—her air is in my lungs. I feel the strength of the air, and it begins to fade. I need more. I hold Rubee’s breath, willing my cells to wring from it every bit of oxygen.

  Rubee appears again. She covers my mouth with hers. Her lips are closed. I’m hungry for her air, but she won’t open her mouth. I reach my hands to her face, and if I could move my fingers, I would lace my fingers in her hair.

  Breathe for me, please. I cry the words, and air bubbles pour from my mouth and nose.

  Then I feel her fingers pinch my nostrils. She opens her mouth over mine, and now I understand. She had to wait for me to breathe out.

  She exhales, and her breath fills me. My vision clears. Again she retreats, and I think she won’t appear again. I hold her breath in my lungs, imagine her breath weaving into my body, becoming mine.

  Above me, I see another face, a man. He drops a loop of webbing around my chest. I feel it tighten, and I’m being lifted. I feel hands on my shoulders. My face breaks free of the water. I suck a breath, and another. I hear dogs barking. My back scrapes over the edge of the ice. I hear voices. “Pull!” I’m sliding on the ice. It’s a dog leash around my chest, a purple dog leash.

  Rubee huddles on the shore. Someone wraps a blanket around her. Cold pours into me and suddenly I’m shivering. My bones clatter. People strip off my clothes. They cram my arms into a dry jacket still warm from its owner. Someone covers my head with a hat.

  Rubee kneels by my side. Her wet hair freezes in dark icicles. Around her face, fine hair frosts white. She’s wearing someone else’s jacket too. She wraps her blanket around my legs.

  I say, “You brought him roses.” I can hardly speak for shivering. “I saw roses here before—you brought them too.”

  She says, “Every day, I brought roses.”

  “For Darius,” I say.

  She nods. “Yes.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The man who pulled me out of the ice won’t let Rubee drive. He says that I have hypothermia and I’m lucky to be alive, like I haven’t heard that before. I’m beginning to believe it. Rubee and I are sitting in his van with the heater going full blast, waiting for the ambulance. He’s outside with his dogs. I’m still shivering. It seems like a long time that Rubee sits without saying anything, just looking at her hands in her lap. Then she says, “I had no idea he would go after Darius.”

  “Your boyfriend.” I’m shivering, so it’s hard to talk.

  “My ex-boyfriend, Quinton,” she says. “I knew Quinton was jealous—he wouldn’t let me go anywhere by myself—but he was the one who broke up with me. He didn’t want to go out with me, but I guess he didn’t want anyone else to either.”

  I say, “You were here? You saw what happened?”

  “No. He must have followed me when I came here after work. He must have seen me with Darius. I think he came back later and waited for you guys.” She pauses. “Corbin, I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought you might have been here.”

  “I wasn’t. He was parked outside my house when I got home. He said he was sorry, that he was an idiot for breaking up with me.”

  “And you took him back?”

  “I agreed to go out with him the next day, and I did. We went for ice cream. Ice cream! I hadn’t heard about Darius. We sat eating ice cream, and Darius was dead.” She wraps her arms around herself. She says, “I knew Quinton was in a fight—his face was pretty messed up. He’s been in fights before, never when I’m around. When we were going out, he’d drop me off and then go out and party or do whatever he did. Anyway, I didn’t give it too much thought. But then I went to work and I heard there was a fight at Riley Park—that Darius had been killed. I didn’t believe it, but then it was on the news. So I asked Quinton if that’s where he got in the fight.” She lowers her eyes. “I still couldn’t believe he had anything to do with it. He was always so nice to me. But he got mad.”

  “And then you knew.”

  “He told me that no one would believe me. He said that I wasn’t there and how could I know anything.” She starts to cry. “He said if I talked to the police, he’d make me pay.”

  I touch her cheekbone. Under her eye, I see a red line where her skin has split open.

  She says, “Now I think back on things that happened when we were going out, stuff I just ignored because it didn’t have anything to do with me. I just didn’t know who he was.”

  I say, “It’s not your fault.”

  “I feel so bad,” she says. “Every day I come here, put my flowers on that pile and remember Darius. I didn’t know him long, but he was so full of life.”

  I nod. He made me feel alive.

  She says, “I saw you head out on the ice. People were walking their dogs and they saw you too. The man who pulled you out, he told me that it was too soon to be on the ice, that where the water flows, the ice is still thin. So I called you. You didn’t hear me.”

  “I did hear you,” I say. “I thought I was imagining it.”

  “Then you broke through the ice. I crawled out on the ice on my belly so I wouldn’t break through. The man too. He hung on to my ankles so that I could reach you. But I couldn’t lift you.”

  I say, “But you could breathe for me.”

  She says, “I saw you drowning, and it was like Quinton was holding you under the water, and me too. That’s when I knew it had to stop. I couldn’t be afraid anymore.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I stand at the boards, watching the team of six-year-olds do their best to skate from one side of the ice to the other. Officer Rex’s kid, Ben, can actually skate. Ben is a nice kid. If he knows he’s the star, he doesn’t show it. I play all the kids the same. All of them think they’re going to the nhl.

  Who doesn’t?

  I skate a loop around the team. Coaching this level is a bit like crowd control. One of the players face-plants and slides on his belly, laughing. I lift another player out of his way.

  “Okay, guys,” I call, “that’s it for practice. See you Sunday for the game.”

  I skate over and open the gate. The players tumble off the ice.

  Jason waits on the other side of the boards for the kids to clear the gate. He’s in his skates, no pads. He says to me, “I heard you were coaching.”

  “I’m not playing much hockey these days,” I say. “And coaching counts for community service.” That was my sentence for resisting arrest.

  Jason nods. “The kids look like they’re having fun.”

  I say, “You’re here early. Your team isn’t booked on the ice for another two hours.”

  He says, “It’s your team too.”

  I rub the back of my head. “Maybe you didn’t hear. I lost my spot in the lineup.”

  “I heard you were on the injured list.”

  “Same thing,” I say.

  The last kid clears the gate, and Jason steps out onto the ice. He says to me, “Let’s skate some laps.”

  He doesn’t give me a chance to say no. He skates away and I follow. I have to skate hard to keep up. I say, “I used to be faster.”

  He finishes my thought. “You used to be faster than me. You had a better shot too.”

  “I hate not playing.”

  For a time, he’s quiet. Then he says, “It’s not right, what happened to you.”

  I think about Darius’s mom answering his ce
ll phone. I think about the pile of flowers at Riley Park that keeps growing, and the girls at school who still cry.

  I say, “It’s not right, what happened to Darius.”

  “Manslaughter and aggravated assault.” Jason shakes his head. “The guy should be going to jail for murder.”

  I think about Rubee, and how she and her family moved away. She said they needed some distance from the boyfriend, from everything. Rubee’s testimony placed Quinton at the scene. The prosecutor couldn’t prove Quinton intended to kill Darius, but Rubee’s testimony was enough to get the manslaughter conviction. I have to go to court one more time for the sentencing, to give a victim impact statement.

  I say, “At least Quinton won’t walk.”

  “We can hope he gets the maximum sentence,” Jason says. “What about the other two guys?”

  “Officer Rex says he’s working on them. Apparently I tried to kill them and they were just defending themselves.”

  Jason laughs. “You probably did almost kill them.”

  “I used to be good at fighting.” I think about that day at Riley Park when I took a swing at Jason. I say, “I used to be good at fighting you.”

  He says, “Fight me for your spot.”

  My shirt is stuck to my back with sweat. I say, “Nice thought. You know I’m not coming back. I’ll be lucky if I play hockey with old men.”

  Jason looks at me. “So don’t fight me, then.”

  I motion for him to stop skating. I lean over with my hands on my thighs and try to catch my breath. I say, “Fine. I’ll stop fighting you. Maybe now you can stop pissing me off.”

  He says, “I don’t really think you’re an asshole.”

  I say, “I still think you are.”

  He play-punches me in the arm, and it actually hurts.

  He says, “I liked Darius.”

  Darius was everyone’s friend, but he was all I had.

  I say, “Everyone liked Darius.”

  He nods and smiles. “We had some good times.”

  I say, “I miss him.”

  I wait for Jason to say how he misses him too. But he says, “You and Darius.” He shakes his head. “I can’t imagine how this is for you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The courtroom is packed. Officer Rex stands with me at the microphone, holding a piece of lined paper. It is my victim impact statement. I wrote it out and asked Officer Rex to read it for me. Jason and kids from school stand along the back wall. I wipe my hands on my pants. Quinton sits at a table with his lawyer, waiting for his sentence. He won’t make eye contact with me. Officer Rex studies the paper. He starts to read but stumbles on the words. He says, “I’m sorry. I can’t read it.”

  He can read it. He just can’t understand what I wrote. My face feels hot.

  Officer Rex hands the paper to the judge. The judge looks at it. Her eyebrows lift, and she hands the paper back to me. She says, “Corbin, can you tell us what this paper says?”

  From the back of the courtroom, Jason gives me a thumbs-up.

  I say to her, “Sometimes I can’t remember words. I know what I want to say, but I can’t seem to put the right words on the paper.” I clear my throat and try to read. But I give up and let the paper drop to the floor.

  I say, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  I take a breath.

  “I used to be a hockey player. I was pretty good even. But I’ve got a new normal now, and I can’t play hockey.”

  My dad looks down at his lap.

  “I used to have a car,” I say, “but I sold it. I had to sell it to pay for the damage I did to someone else. But I don’t want to drive, not really. I’m afraid to drive. I’m afraid I’ll forget what exit to take and that I’ll get lost.

  I’m afraid I’ll have a seizure and drive into someone. My mother takes time off work and drives me to physio appointments and medical appointments.” I swallow. “Every day is a personal best, just because I get through it.”

  I look at the back of the courtroom, at the line of kids standing because there are no seats. I say, “I used to have a best friend. At Riley Park, I lost him. He died in the hospital.”

  I look at Darius’s mother. She blinks back tears.

  “But that’s where I lost him, at Riley Park. That’s where he was when he was last alive. He and I, we jumped the gap and he was alive.” I point at the kids at the back of the room. “At Riley Park, we all lost Darius.”

  I look again at Quinton. “I almost died at Riley Park. Not when Quinton hit me in the back of the head with the bar, although part of me died that night. But I broke through the ice at Riley Park, and a girl saved me. Her name is Rubee.”

  Quinton looks down.

  “None of this is Rubee’s fault, but she felt she had to move away. She’ll graduate with a bunch of people she doesn’t even know. And she lost Darius too. Quinton didn’t own Rubee. He tried, but she’s better than that.”

  I turn to Officer Rex. I say, “I used to fight because it made me feel strong. Now I fight for my strength.”

  I extend my hand. He smiles, and I notice the splint is gone from his teeth. He takes my hand and shakes it.

  Finally, I turn back to the judge. “Every day I fight what happened to me. It’s supposed to get easier, but I don’t see it getting easier, not yet. I don’t know who I am, not yet. All I know is what happened to me isn’t who I am. I don’t know if that even makes sense.”

  The judge leans forward. “You’re doing fine,” she says.

  “Yes.” I take a big breath. “Maybe I am.”

  Diane Tullson is the best-selling author of Red Sea, Saving Jasey, The Darwin Expedition and Lockdown. Diane lives in Delta, British Columbia, and is working on an mfa at the University of British Columbia.