In the River Darkness
Page 1
About this Book
Will this be the day I die?
The question bolts through my mind as I hear the ice breaking beneath my ice skates, an odd sound, like the high-pitched whining and complaining of a living creature. I cannot move. I don't even have time to scream.
The very next instant the whole world seems to fall away: Our house, the riverbank, the pale winter sky . . . everything disappears with a loud splash. . . .
Did it have to happen like this? I ask myself, and my thoughts fly back to the day when everything began . . .
"Maybe it's better if some things are left in the dark and forgotten . . ."
Mia arrives at the small town by the river protecting a secret. Her new neighbors, the Stonebrooks, immediately draw her interest. Soon, she meets brothers Alex and Jay. Mia is attracted to Alex, the older handsome brother. They begin dating, but Mia remains guarded, hiding behind an invisible barrier. She also befriends Jay, the gentle dreamer, who spends most of his time at the river, with his mysterious friend, Alina. As the three teens spend more and more time together, strange things start to happen.
This brilliantly crafted story—told from the alternating perspectives of Mia, Alex, and Jay—creates a web of secrets. And secrets buried deep below the dark surface are the hardest to uncover.
About the Author
Author Marlene Röder was awarded the Hans-im-Glück prize by the city of Limburg, Germany, for her debut novel, Im Fluss, the German edition of In the River Darkness. For her second critically acclaimed novel, Zebraland, she received two more awards, including the Hans-Jörg-Martin Award for Best Youth Crime Novel. She has also published a short story collection and currently lives in Limburg, Germany
About the Translator
Award-winning translator Tammi Reichel studied theology and women's studies before moving to Germany for ten years, where she got involved in the publishing world. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family. Her most recent literary translation, My Family for the War, received the 2013 Batchelder Award from the American Library Association.
Contents
Cover
About this Book
About the Author
About the Translator
Title Page
Dedication
* * *
Introduction
LA PRIMAVERA SPRING
Chapter 1: Mia
Chapter 2: Alexander
Chapter 3: Jay
Chapter 4: Mia
Chapter 5: Alexander
Chapter 6: Jay
First Intermezzo
L'ESTATE SUMMER
Chapter 7: Mia
Chapter 8: Alexander
Chapter 9: Jay
Chapter 10: Mia
Chapter 11: Alexander
Chapter 12: Jay
Chapter 13: Mia
Chapter 14: Alexander
Second Intermezzo
L'AUTUNNO AUTUMN
Chapter 15: Jay
Chapter 16: Mia
Chapter 17: Alex
Chapter 18: Jay
Chapter 19: Mia
Third Intermezzo
L'INVERNO WINTER
Chapter 20: Alexander
Chapter 21: Jay
Chapter 22: Mia
Chapter 23: Alexander
Chapter 24: Jay
* * *
Acknowledgements
Note to Our Readers
Copyright
More Books from Scarlet Voyage
I listen to the river
as it tells me of its life.
As I move on I recognize:
it was my own story.
Michael Schlaadt
Introduction
Will this be the day I die?
The question bolts through my mind as I hear the ice breaking beneath my ice skates, an odd sound, like the high-pitched whining and complaining of a living creature. I cannot move. I don’t even have time to scream.
The very next instant the whole world seems to fall away: our house, the riverbank, the pale winter sky . . . everything disappears with a loud splash.
The sudden cold hits me like a punch, presses the air out of my lungs. Wildly flailing my arms and legs, I fight my way to the surface. My clothing is soaked through within seconds, and the heavy skates drag my legs downward like lead weights. If I don’t get rid of them right away, I won’t be able to hold myself above water for very long.
Water in my eyes, my nose, my mouth. . . . I can’t breathe. I can’t think clearly. In a panic, I gasp for breath.
Finally! I don’t know how, but I manage to kick a skate off one foot. Now, with half of the heavy weight on my feet already gone, it will be easier to lose the second one.
I am not going to die today!
Greedily, I suck in deep breaths of the clear winter air. Now I just need a plan that will get me out of this damned hole in the ice.
With great difficulty, I paddle my way over to the jagged edge of the ice. It grins at me mockingly, like the zigzag teeth of a jack-o’-lantern. Hold on tight, pull yourself up, I order my body. Come on, you can do it!
But my body doesn’t want to obey me. I scream at my arms, which are too weak to hold my weight, to press me upward and back into life. My numb fingers slide off the slippery broken edge. I curse as I look for a place to get a grip, in vain.
“I . . . will not . . . die . . . today,” I mutter to myself, gritting my teeth together tightly so they don’t start chattering. I will not die today!
Again and again, I try until tiny black flecks flicker before my eyes. Again and again, I fail.
There is blood on the ice. My blood. My hands are cut, but I don’t feel it.
I hold tight to the edge of the ice. Staying above water is the only thing that matters right now. Just take a little rest before I try again. . . . What’s that noise? My teeth have started to chatter, I can’t stop. . . . I’m so terribly cold. Apathetically, I look at my blood, red, so red in all the white surrounding it.
For a fraction of a second, an image of our oath flashes through my mind, the oath we sealed with blood, yet each of the three of us still broke it in our own way.
For the thousandth time I ask myself if we could have done something differently, or whether everything was leading up to it all along. . . . Damn it, even here, even in this situation, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Maybe I’ve even earned it, to die here, because of what I did. Maybe I deserve to drown in the water of this river. I don’t know.
Did it have to happen like this? I ask myself, and my thoughts fly back to the day when everything began . . .
LA PRIMAVERA
SPRING
Chapter 1
Mia
“We’ll be there soon, sweetie,” my mother said in a cheerful voice, twisting herself around in the passenger’s seat up front to face me. I ignored her and continued to stare out the window at the landscape rushing by outside: yellow-brown fields, an occasional small town, a cluster of houses huddled too close together. The naked trees and bushes seemed to duck down under the gray March sky. Could you smell the coming of spring outside? Here in the car, it just smelled like car.
For a moment, it seemed like the posts alongside the road were racing past us, while our car actually stood still. I wished my father wouldn’t drive so fast.
I didn’t want to get there.
“You’ll see, you’ll like the house,” my mother said for at least the hundredth time. I was starting to wonder who she was trying to convince.
“It’s right near a river, surrounded by nature . . . didn’t you used to want to live in the country, Mia?”
This was true, although at the time I had been ten years old and wanted n
othing more in the whole world than to have my own pony. I was just about to let her know that I could imagine something better now than rotting away in a miniscule town in the middle of nowhere, but I bit my tongue just in time. It wouldn’t change anything, anyway.
It was hopeless.
A few months ago, I had ranted and raved, trying to get my parents to abandon their plans to move. I remembered my mother’s tears, her plea: “Could you at least show some understanding for our situation?” And my father’s silent, worried looks. He was unhappy because he was making me unhappy.
I remembered my desperate, subconscious, helpless rage. That the two of them could completely dismantle my life, just like that, any way they liked, made me raging mad. But now, after the thing with Nicolas, I’d given up the fight.
I was driftwood.
At least now I won’t have to see him anymore, I thought. I didn’t want to think or feel anymore. That was working really well.
My fingers played with the earplugs of my iPod. I wished we could just keep driving. Not from anywhere, not headed anywhere.
With each mile, I left my old life in the city farther behind—playing cello in the youth orchestra, meeting my friends and hanging out at the mall, or sneaking into parties thrown by cooler people that we weren’t even invited to. Okay, it might not have been fabulous, but it was my life!
But then one day, my father was offered this amazing job as head of an advertising agency. He wanted the job. My mother agreed, under one condition: we wouldn’t live in the city but in a small town outside it instead.
“A little house in the country, Mia,” she said with gleaming eyes. “I’ve always dreamed of it.”
My protests had no weight against my parents’ ideas. I was young, after all, and would get used to our new life in no time.
No one asked what I dreamed of.
Driftwood.
The clouds hung low in the sky, and soon it would start to rain. My father turned into a smaller street.
“Have I already told you that two boys around your age live in the house next door?” my mother asked, attempting to break the silence again. “I met them recently when your dad and I looked at the house one more time. They seemed nice, didn’t they?” She put her hand on my father’s shoulder.
He nodded obediently. “Hmmm.”
I swallowed the bitter lump that suddenly stuck in my throat. They have no idea . . . they don’t know anything!
The idiotic tears burned in my eyes. Again. I bit my lower lip until I tasted blood. I would rather suffocate than cry now in front of my parents!
Dad gave me a sympathetic look in the rearview mirror. I quickly stuffed the earplugs of my iPod back in my ears and turned up the volume. Vivaldi’s Springtime from the Four Seasons resounded so loud it almost hurt. But it drowned out the sounds of the tires, my mother’s voice, everything, until nothing was left but the music.
That must be it, I thought, twenty minutes later as our car rolled into a gravel driveway—my new home. It stood outside the town, as if it couldn’t quite decide if it should join the other houses or not. In front of the house across the street, the only other one around, an old woman was working in the garden. She looked us over suspiciously as we got out of the car.
My mother was right. It really was a pretty house: two stories high with shuttered windows and a well-tended garden all around it. The first crocuses were even poking their colorful heads up through the earth. A few hundred feet behind the house I could even see the river shimmering like dull metal in the afternoon light.
“Well?” my mother asked in an expectant voice. Her eyes were beaming.
I didn’t answer. All I could muster was a weak nod.
“Please don’t look so gloomy,” she pleaded, pressing her lips together.
“You can’t expect me to find everything wonderful here right away, okay?” I hissed back. My voice cut through the spring air like a knife, and the old woman in the garden across the street looked up at us in surprise.
“No, and no one is asking you to,” my father reassured in a calm tone. “But it would be nice if you would at least try. That makes it easier, you know.” Then he put one arm across my mother’s shoulder and the other across mine and drew us in the direction of the house. “Let’s take a quick look inside first. . . . I’m famished. And then we’ll see if we can’t find just the right room for you. What do you think of that, Mia?”
I picked the nicest room. It was upstairs, large, with a big window overlooking the garden. This was what it looked like, then, the efforts of my parental units to reconcile me to my forced relocation. A bribe, so to speak. Not so bad.
The furniture and the rest of our belongings wouldn’t be delivered until morning, but we had brought the essentials with us. The first thing I got out of the trunk was my cello.
“You wouldn’t let anyone else touch it, would you?” my father called after me, as I pressed the instrument to my chest like a shield . . . or a lover.
In my new room, I unpacked the cello and leaned it again a wall, then sat on the wooden floor in front of it. Its red body looked so beautiful in the empty room. The walls were entirely white. There was something comforting and pure about them. Everything was yet to be determined—no photos of a previous life, no memories.
Maybe it actually was possible to start over again . . .
The branches of a tree cast filigree shadows on the walls. I observed how the shadows slowly moved and changed the walls and decided not to hang anything on them.
I had no idea what I should do next. Finally, I stood up and opened the window. A large tree stood directly in front of the house and stretched its budding branches toward me, as if it wanted to welcome me with a handshake. “Hello,” I said to the tree. When I leaned out the window as far as I could, I could just touch the tips of the tree.
As I did that, I noticed that I had a perfect view of the house next door from here. I studied it critically. It stood closer to the river than ours and was built of wood. It looked a little run down, somehow. I searched my pockets for a cigarette while I continued to look the house over. Not that I saw anything interesting over there, but the house had some kind of fascination for me, for whatever inexplicable reason.
The old woman with her housecoat was still standing in her front yard. Her back was as straight as the handle of the rake she held in her hand. She just stood there and stared over at the bank of the little river. Even when it suddenly began to rain, hard, she stayed rooted to the spot and didn’t move.
“Now that’s strange,” I thought. She was probably a little senile. I wanted to turn away from the window, bored, but there was something about her stance. Something like . . . watchfulness.
The woman peered into the bushes and vines at the edge of the river as if there were a dangerous animal crouched there that might pounce at any moment. I craned my neck—but there wasn’t anything there, was there? Nothing and no one, except that slim figure in the streaming rain.
I asked myself what on earth she saw. What was she thinking about?
Rain rolled down my neck. I was so busy looking, I almost fell out the window! Out of fear, I made some noise, because the old woman suddenly turned her face in my direction. In spite of the distance between us, I couldn’t help but notice her light blue eyes, like forget-me-nots. Could she see me through the branches? Hesitantly, I raised my hand to wave to her.
In that moment, someone wearing a hooded shirt and carrying an umbrella came around the corner of the house. Must be her grandson, one of the “nice boys.” Shaking his head, he talked with the old woman. Then he took her by the arm to guide her, while his other hand held the colorful umbrella above her. The two of them disappeared into the house.
I put out my cigarette and closed the window.
The first night in our new house, I lay awake for a long time, listening to my breathing, which got lost in the darkness. It seemed so foreign to me. I stretched out a hand and touched my cello, still standing against th
e wall next to me. Carefully, I plucked a string. The A tone vibrated for a long time in the otherwise empty room.
Only when the note faded away with a sigh did I finally fall into a dreamless sleep.
One well-aimed kick and the Coke can skittered over the edge of the riverbank with a satisfying clatter and splashed into the water.
I hated that river, babbling as it wended its way through town. I hated the fields with their first smatterings of green. This whole backwater idyll made me sick! It was so damn quiet here. Apart from a few squealing children playing soccer somewhere in the distance, the only thing you could hear were the birds, singing their hearts out.
Where were the cars? Where were the people? Even if there was nothing more than a bakery, a tiny outpost of a grocery store, and—wow, the high point of entertainment and culture—a small outdoor swimming pool (where nothing was swimming at the moment but last year’s leaves), there still had to be at least a few people around here! But the houses stood silent in the sun as if the whole village had died out. Or had everyone left? It wouldn’t have surprised me.
But anything was better than schlepping moving cartons as heavy as pianos and having to listen to my parents’ upbeat commentary. My arms felt like they were as long as a gorilla’s by now, and I was in dire need of a cigarette break anyway. That was reason enough to steal away and explore this hick town.
On the other hand, I hadn’t seen much yet that would have been worth exploring. Even the dogs here seemed to be bored—a particularly ugly specimen trotted along behind me for a few minutes. I threw it a few of my chocolate-covered raisins, which it ate with a teeth-smacking grin. The motley stray seemed to be the only life-form to take any interest in me. I shook my head so that my favorite earrings jingled, the ones with the tiny shells that Dad had brought me from Greece.
If you closed your eyes and held your face up to the spring sun, you could almost believe you were somewhere else, in the south. . . . I could actually feel the first summer freckles of the year starting to sprout.