In the River Darkness

by Marlene Röder

  That’s exactly what Alex had said.

  “What’s the necklace supposed to protect me from?” I asked with irritation. “From the shadow that leaves behind wet footprints and dead fish? Hey, stay here!”

  But before I could press Jay for any more information, he had already rushed past me. As I watched him running off, it occurred to me that he had been more hunched over than usual in the past few weeks, as if something were bending his back . . .

  There was something strange about this family. I was becoming more and more convinced that there was some secret that all the Stonebrooks were entangled in like an invisible web. But where was the point where all the threads came together? There had to be some kind of explanation! Even if I hadn’t discovered it yet.

  Maybe you should just leave this alone, whispered a warning voice inside me. But I couldn’t do it. It was too late. Whatever it might be, I was already in way too deep to stop now.

  I turned and walked toward the Stonebrooks’ house. When you find a dead fish in your bedroom, you’re entitled to a few answers.

  I found Iris in the kitchen bent over a pot she was stirring with abandon, as if it were a magic potion. “Hello. Are you looking for Alexander?” she asked when she noticed me.

  “No, um, actually I wanted to talk with you.”

  “Well! That’s a surprise. I thought you had completely forgotten about me, old woman that I am,” she said dryly, but a seldom smile brightened her face. “Have a seat, then! Would you like to try my lekvar?” And immediately she handed me her wooden spoon, completely coated with a thick, black goo. Under her expectant gaze, I had no other choice than to try it. The pungent taste of plums seasoned with cinnamon and cloves filled my mouth.

  “Good, isn’t it?”

  “Mmmm, it’s delicious!” I said. “But actually, I’m here to talk with you about something, something important.”

  “Yes?” Iris studied me skeptically with her eyes squinted. My courage drained away. How could I dig so deeply into family secrets here in her cozy kitchen? How could I utter a terrible suspicion about the woman whose home I was visiting?

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, I took a deep breath. “Alexander and I saw you one night not long ago at the river. There was a full moon . . .” My words hung in the air, pregnant with meaning. But no reaction!

  “You . . . you dripped your blood into the water. I saw how you prayed for protection,” I dared to make another stab at it. “Protection—from who, or what?”

  Only the rattling of the wooden spoon broke the silence. The elderly woman had turned her back to me and stirred frantically in her pot.

  “I think it still needs a little anise, don’t you think so?”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Alex had told me that his grandmother just kept mum about anything that didn’t suit her, but that was the first time I had experienced it myself. She couldn’t pretend nothing had happened! But apparently, she could. There wasn’t any point in asking again. I hadn’t gotten a single step closer to solving the mystery.

  Frustrated, I stared at the kitchen walls covered with family photographs, where a bride and groom beamed at me happily. It was sheer mockery.

  “Weren’t they a beautiful couple?” Iris had stepped up behind me and gently stroked the silver frame of the picture with her fingers. That’s when I recognized that it was a photo of the newly married Katarina and Eric.

  Although I knew perfectly well that Iris had only guided my attention to the picture to steer me away from the unsettling topic of the blood, I was fascinated even against my will. The pregnant Katarina looked radiant in her white bridal gown embroidered with flowers.

  “So there was a happy ending after all?” I asked.

  “Happy ending!” she snorted, turning back to the stove with its blubbering pot of plum butter. “No, that was only the beginning. They always get it wrong in the movies. The real test isn’t finding each other—it’s whether they can stand everyday life together!” she declared with her spoon raised, and used the opportunity to proclaim one of her proverbs that she so often got wrong. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure! Even though they were so happy together at the beginning. We bought this house for them. And then Alexander was born not long after that. Katarina gave up her job to take care of the baby. Later Herman—my husband, may he rest in peace—and I offered to help so she could work at the photo studio again, but Eric wouldn’t hear of it. He was a very proud man back then, Eric. He thought he could take care of the family himself, and that his wife shouldn’t have to go to work.”

  Iris sighed. “I’m sure he thought he was doing her a favor. Lord knows, if it had been me, I would have been thrilled! Other women are content being wives and mothers. But not our Katarina, oh, no. She was always convinced she was destined for something greater than the rest of us. I can still hear her complaining: ‘There has to be more to life than changing diapers and scrubbing the house clean, Mom!’ When a letter from her friend Ruth had arrived, she would sometimes be insufferable for days afterward. Repeatedly, Katarina pestered Eric, asking if she could travel, too. The daily monotony was making her sick. Sick or not, where would the money for such foolishness come from? And then Katarina got pregnant again.”

  Lost in thought, Iris smiled as she filled ceramic jars with the plum butter. “Jay was an unusual child from the very first. He didn’t start to talk until he was three, and he clung to Katarina’s skirt hem all the time. And he only called her by her first name. After he was born, Katarina changed. She seemed to finally understand that the grand trips she had always dreamed about would never happen. She turned green with jealousy! Because by then, Ruth had become a successful photographer and was traveling all over the globe.

  “Dreams are dust, I always say. They only get you into trouble. But Katarina didn’t want to listen to me. She had always preferred to take pictures instead of doing laundry and cooking meals. But after Jay was born, everything spun out of control. The house looked like a pigsty because she played with the children all day long. Katarina often took both of them down to the river. They would spend entire days on the island. Sometimes they even went there in the middle of the night to swim naked!” Iris admitted under her breath, as if it was embarrassing to say the scandalous word out loud.

  “Of course people said the most awful things about her! I was so ashamed for her.” Her wrinkled face blushed at the memory of the disgrace. “I tried to talk some sense into Katarina. But she just laughed in my face!” The elderly woman shook her head, as if she was still trying in vain to understand. “That was the first time I had the feeling that I didn’t know my daughter anymore.”

  I waited eagerly for a continuation, but Iris fell into a brooding silence. Her watery blue eyes no longer saw me anymore but seemed to be looking into a past that had disappeared.

  “There’s no use. What’s in the past will never return,” she muttered to herself without any expression. “I think you should go home now,” she said finally, pressing one of the still-warm jars of plum butter into my hands.

  I was lying on my bed pondering all of this when there was a knock at the door. My father stood in the doorway. “Hi, Mia. May I come in?” It wasn’t very often that he made his way to my room.

  “Did Mom send you? Because of my nighttime escape the other night?” I asked in a suspicious tone.

  “To be honest . . . yes.” We grinned at each other. The bed creaked under his weight as Dad sat down next to me. “Is it getting serious with this young man?”

  “I think so,” I murmured, keeping to myself that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted that. The memory of Nicolas still lurked in the back of my mind, suddenly springing to the fore to push its way between Alex and me. Sometimes my past interfered with our being together so much that Alex’s face, his touch, seemed to merge with those of Nicolas. And then it was all I could do to resist the urge to push Alex away.

  But of course, I didn’t tell my dad any of that.

  H
is voice sounded conciliatory as he said, “We don’t have anything against you getting together with Alexander. But we do want to know where you are.”

  “Why don’t you just put one of those microchips in my ear?” I replied in a snippy tone.

  “Don’t be silly, Mia. You’re only sixteen. Your mother and I are just concerned about you.” My father tugged on his crooked tie. “I just want to ask you two to be careful as you try certain things out, you know. . . .”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, we had all that in sex education,” I took pity on him before things got embarrassing. “Don’t worry, I won’t go and get pregnant by mistake.” I thought of Katarina and shuddered inwardly.

  “Oh, alright then.” Relieved, my father let go of his tie (I had been afraid he would choke himself with it). “I know you’re my big girl and will do the right thing.” He looked at me with a pride and trust in his eyes that couldn’t possibly be meant for me. I could have started bawling.

  If you knew, I thought. If you only knew . . .

  “Good, then I’ll go . . .” My father seemed to hesitate, wondering if he should give me a scratchy good-night kiss like he used to, but then he didn’t quite dare. And I didn’t dare to ask him.

  That night, I thought long and hard about what Iris had said. “The first time I had the feeling that I didn’t know my own daughter anymore.”

  Did that happen to all parents? That they ultimately didn’t know their children at all? Can any human being claim to truly know someone else? Did I really know Alex and Jay, or just my image of them? The problem is that we can only look from the outside, but the secrets are buried deep below the surface.

  Why do some secrets have to hurt so badly?

  Chapter 14

  Alexander

  Mia and I lay next to each other on her bed and watched the play of the sun on the walls and on our skin. We tried to capture them with our hands.

  In those weightless moments it was almost as if the world outside didn’t exist. We were here in this light, fragile space that enclosed us like an eggshell. Where there was only the two of us.

  I don’t know how to explain it. The rest of the time, there was always this pull inside me, the urge to go someplace else. To the ocean, maybe. But when I was with Mia, it felt like I had arrived. Finally. As if I was exactly where I was supposed to be at that moment.

  My head in Mia’s lap. I had never felt so close to another person in my life.

  I have no idea what demon possessed me to make me destroy that.

  “Will you play something on your cello for me today, Mia?” I asked, although I knew it was stupid. But I couldn’t help myself.

  In the beginning, I had been curious. I tried to imagine how Mia embraced this bulky wooden thing to elicit beautiful music from it, but every time I asked her to play something for me, she put me off with some flimsy excuse: “I can’t find my music,” or “I’m tired, Alex—tomorrow, okay? I promise.”

  By now, it had become a compulsion for me to pursue it, again and again. Like some kind of test . . . of what, I didn’t even know myself.

  I sat upright. “Come on, Mia!” I tried again. “I’d much rather hear you play than listen to that classical stuff that’s coming out of your CD player! What is that again?”

  “‘Autumn’ from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, you buffoon!”

  “Oh, right, ‘Autumn,’” I mumbled.

  Outside, the Indian summer bathed the days in gold in a last illusion of summer. But the nights were already cold, and in the morning, drops of dew glistened in the spiderwebs like tears.

  “Alex, you know as much about music as an elephant does about tap dancing!” Mia declared, smacking me on the shoulder with her pillow—an obvious attempt to get me involved in a pillow fight. It was a hard blow, but I didn’t bat an eyelash.

  “Why don’t you just play something for me? Maybe I could learn something!” I held her gaze defiantly. She stared right back.

  Finally, Mia lowered the pillow. “Maybe later,” she muttered.

  “That means no, right?” My voice grew louder. I sounded like a sulky child, but I didn’t care. “That means never, doesn’t it, Mia?”

  The crazy thing was that I wasn’t even all that eager to hear her scraping and scratching around on the thing. But that wasn’t the point! The core of it was that playing the cello was an important part of Mia’s life. And she refused to share it with me, as if she still didn’t quite trust me.

  I shot a nasty look at the instrument. Gradually that red wooden box had become a symbol for everything about Mia I didn’t understand. That she always pulled away from me at just the moments when we were especially close. That she didn’t want to sleep with me.

  The cello stood there silently, hiding its mysteries from me. I knew it was capable of producing sounds! But it remained silent. Why ?

  Sometimes I felt the urge to jump up and down on the damn thing, to reduce it to splinters that would reveal all. While I was still staring at the cello, disgruntled, a wave of . . . yes, jealousy came over me. Stupid to be jealous of a musical instrument, isn’t it? But I had the feeling the cello knew Mia better than I did.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” Mia’s voice penetrated my dark thoughts, “I just can’t, do you understand? It doesn’t have anything to do with you!” As I looked at her sitting in front of me with her shoulders hunched and an unhappy expression stretched across her face, I just couldn’t be mad at her anymore. My anger melted away and before I knew what was happening, I was apologizing to her.

  “I guess I was acting like a pigheaded idiot. I don’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Just take as much time as you need, okay?”

  I pulled her toward me and thought that everything was fine between us again. Mia let my kisses wash over her like a rain shower, without reacting. She was as still as a statue. I tried to kiss her lips warm, kiss her alive.

  Her soft hair tickled my chest, and I stroked her freckled back. I kissed my favorite spot at the hollow of her neck. The skin there shimmered as translucent as the mother-of-pearl inside my shell. How delicate and soft she felt. So soft . . .

  I had to think of sex and how it would be to sleep with Mia.

  “But don’t make me wait too long!” I whispered.

  With a jolt, Mia shook me off, as if my embrace had suddenly become too suffocating for her. She stood up and went over to the window.

  “What’s up with you?” I asked with irritation.

  But Mia just looked past me and out the window.

  That was the image of her that would always stay with me in my memory: Mia there at the window, with her arms crossed in front of her breasts. Her nipples glowed red like wounds. Her face was as impenetrable as black water.

  Her eyes filled with sadness.

  Then Mia shook her head, and the water withdrew again. “Oh, it’s nothing! I was just thinking of something.”

  Later on, I saw this scene play out in my head over and over again. I wish I could have pressed the stop button like the one on Jay’s recording device, rewound, and done everything over again. And done it right this time. Please, Mia, talk to me! I can tell something is bothering you! You don’t need to play the superwoman for me—what’s going on?

  There were so many opportunities to ask! I should never have given up. Instead, I let myself be content with that meaningless answer.

  Was it cowardice? Was it just easy and comfortable? Did I not want to start up another fight right after we’d made up? Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no rewind button in life.

  The one thing that’s certain is that I didn’t keep asking, even though I had felt that something was deeply wrong all along. I wasn’t there for Mia when she needed me.

  And so our summer passed. Irretrievably. The first wilted leaves were already being carried away on the surface of the river like extinguished gold sparks.

  Did I already sense how close autumn was? Maybe. Because I do remember look
ing out the window and wishing I could magically put all the cherries back on the branches of our tree.

  In that night, I dreamed of Mia. In my dream, her body was a red cello. She plucked her strings and sang, but I couldn’t hear a sound, no matter how hard I tried.

  “Sing louder, Mia! I can’t understand you!” I called.

  And then she started to cry. The tears running down her face became a powerful flood that carried her away, still singing silently. Away from me.

  I ran alongside the river, waved, screamed her name. But she moved farther and farther away, relentlessly . . . she got smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the gray horizon.

  And I was left behind on the shore.

  Second Intermezzo

  My memories of sunny, golden summer days have left me. Probably frozen. Just like the dreams of a marvelous rescue. Maybe I just dreamed up my entire life, and this hole in the ice is the only true reality. It’s as if I were dissolving. All that’s still left of me is this tough strand of life that stubbornly clings to a jagged edge of ice. Like ivy on a stone.

  My fingertips are already completely numb. I can feel how my blood is gradually flowing more slowly, as sluggish as the river, until it finally freezes into ice, too. Do I still have feet? I don’t feel them anymore. I don’t feel anything anymore. Just cold, cold all the way through to my heart . . .

  I know the river will win in the end! Its black water laps at me; I feel the gentle, inevitable tug of the current that wants to pull me under the ice. Like strong, dark hands. Stronger than me . . .

  Dully, I stare at a wilted leaf that’s trapped in the reflecting ice in front of me and think that that’s my future.

  I broke our blood oath. Nothing can save me now.

  Soon, very soon, I’ll have to let go. Then I’ll slowly sink down to the bottom in a cloud of air bubbles. Down to the fish, where it’s dark and quiet.