Twisted River

by Kelsey Gietl

  Why not now? she thought. She raised her face in the direction she thought to be upwards. Why can only the gods of old grant wishes? What could I have done to change it?

  Nothing, came the reply. Trust me, liebe, there is nothing you could have done.

  Charles’s face appeared above her, his dark dishwater blond hair floating around the eyes of an angel. Her angel.

  His hand reached out and beckoned her up. It swirled through the water, and Tena raised her arm. Her fingers brushed his, but her gloves had fallen off on impact, leaving her bare skin too slick to hold on. A single bubble passed through her lips, the last bit of breath before she could bear it no longer. Clutching her chest, she kicked upwards with the last of her strength and Charles’s face dissolved in a cloud of silt.

  Panic fell as she grasped wildly for his hand. Her lungs were spent. This would be her end too, the same as him.

  Charles, no, she pleaded. Don’t leave me. Please, save me one more time.

  And then her fingers landed again on his, and she was hauled from the lake, out onto the snow and into wind no warmer than the water she came from.

  Tears clouded her vision and her lungs choked bitter air as she tumbled into Charles’s arms. His ragged breath warmed her cheek, and she realized he was weeping as much as she. Was she dead? Or merely dreaming? If dead, then he was hers forever, and if a dream…? Well, she prayed she would never wake from it.

  “You kept your promise,” she whispered. You found me. Then, giving in to the closing darkness, she kissed him with everything he left behind.

  For all the dreams they lost, the moments they would never share. For the second chances she didn’t deserve and the remorse in her heart. She kissed him for all he was and would never be. This moment would never be enough to satisfy her.

  She was either dead or dreaming. But she wouldn’t wake up.

  Not until she must.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When Tena crashed through the Grand Basin, Reuben had felt the ice crack inside him as much as he heard the noise. Ten feet from his sled, he sat up in the snow and stared towards the Grand Basin. The water was only thirty feet in front of him; even so, he still couldn’t tell what had caused that sound.

  He quickly performed a count of the dim silhouettes scattered across the hillside. “Who’s missing?” he called.

  “Whatta you mean?” Earhart asked. The silhouette farthest on the left.

  “I only see nine of us,” Reuben returned. “Is someone missing?”

  “Tena!” Emil shrieked—the silhouette closest to the ice.

  No. Not her.

  Abandoning his sled where it lay, Reuben stumbled down the hill and slid out to where Emil stood staring into a dark jagged hole. Space filled with perfectly calm water and no movement beneath it.

  God, no, he prayed. No. No. No. This cannot be happening.

  “Emil, help me.” He drew himself onto the ice, Emil beside him, and both men lunged their arms into the frigid darkness.

  “Fetch a lantern,” Reuben shouted over his shoulder. “I can’t see a blasted thing.”

  “Earhart’s gone for one,” Rosalea confirmed.

  Frigid water displaced onto Reuben’s chest and down his coat as his arms circled helplessly. He couldn’t reach more than three or four feet and the basin had to be at least ten deep. Without Tena reaching for them, they would never save her.

  “This is my fault,” Emil said. He pulled his arms from the water and sank back on his heels. “Fred’ll say it serves me right for cheating.”

  “This isn’t your fault, and Fred’s an imbecile.” Reuben pulled himself up and forced his heart to keep beating normally. “She isn’t gone.”

  He peeled off his sodden overcoat, tossing it towards the bank. His damp Oxford clung to his torso and the wind bit in a sensation too familiar to the night he fell off the Höllenfeuer. If Maggie hadn’t been there then, he would have died. If Tena died tonight, he might as well have.

  Appearing from nowhere, Stanley grabbed Reuben’s wrist when he stooped to remove his shoes. The rest of their friends stood ten feet away at the edge of the ice. “Stop it, Reuben. You’re not leaping in there. It’s too dark; you’ll never find her.”

  “I have to.”

  “What good will it do to drown yourself?”

  Reuben yanked his wrist free. “Then I drown myself! I can’t lose her, Lee. I can’t.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Shut up!” Emil dove at Stanley and the latter, not expecting the gesture, fell flat onto the ice. Emil pointed a finger at him and leered. “You stand in the way of my sister’s life again and someone will write a column about your demise.”

  “Emil, stop.” Reuben pressed a hand to his friend’s chest and stared down at Stanley. “Hold my feet then. Keep me from sliding in.”

  Stanley shook his head. “It’s a lost idea, man. She could be anywhere under there, and you’d never find her.” His voice was a mere shadow. “Don’t you think if she was going to come up by now, she would have?”

  Emil began sobbing then, terrible gut-wrenching cries that broke the night wide open while precious moments ticked away. The rest simply remained silent. Stanley on the ground. Earhart running down the hill with a brightly lit lantern. Tyler with his arms around Phoebe while the other girls huddled together.

  Reuben turned towards the deep black abysmal pit that was stealing a piece of his soul.

  “Reuben,” Hazel breathed. “Don’t.” But he didn’t look back.

  He knew she didn’t mean for him to leave Tena for dead. She just couldn’t chance him doing something reckless when Plan A didn’t succeed. Except Hazel didn’t understand the ties that bound him and Tena together or his broken promises to Laurence to keep his daughter safe. Hazel could go on living without Tena. He couldn’t. He had tried and apparently failed.

  She was his light, his hope, this beautiful part of his life he could never put into words. What had he accomplished by distancing himself from her? Not a bloomin’ thing.

  He dropped to his chest, forearms suspended over the water. “Someone hold my feet or I’m going in the blasted lake.” He drew in a deep breath then exhaled. Emil latched onto his ankles. He would save her. Or else he was dead.

  “Please, God, if you never help me with anything, help me with this.” Then he plunged his entire upper body into the water.

  In a darkness so penetrating, he could only pray Tena would take hold of him. Once he thought he felt her, the ghost of an impression, but then the water swirled and anything he might have felt disappeared.

  Seconds passed. Above him, a second set of hands clasped his ankles. He stretched until his shoulder tendons strained. Please, Charles, help me find her.

  Miraculously his hands found hers. Her grip was weak, but he held on for her dear life as Emil, Stanley, and Earhart towed them from the water. In a heap on the ice, Reuben clung to her, crying as much as she was, while her hair froze around her shoulders and his own turned to ice against his scalp. Soaked through, the wind burned his skin, yet the comfort of her safety made it so he barely cared.

  It startled him to the core when she caressed his face between her hands and whispered, “You kept your promise.”

  Before he could ask, “Which promise?” her lips met his with a passion he never imagined could come from her modest form. Call it relief over her safety, call it male stupidity, call it being a first-rate scoundrel when he was already more than spoken for, but he didn’t immediately tear himself away. He kissed her back.

  Blimey, did he ever.

  And wouldn’t he figure if that didn’t open a whole new can of emotions. Ones he thought about before and a whole ball of ones he hadn’t.

  But somewhere between the cold of the water and the cold of the air, she hadn’t seen Reuben, she saw Charles and that was who she kissed. He figured it out when she blacked out seconds later and asked where her fiancé was twice on the eternally long drive back to the Kischs’.

 
; “He saved me,” Tena whispered to Emil. Her head rested on his shoulder with her legs across Reuben’s lap, and all three buried under a mess of blankets while Earhart sped them home. Tena’s fingers played over her engagement band. “Charles saved me. Where did he go?”

  Emil’s eyes flashed at Reuben in steely silence, and Reuben had never felt like more of an idiot. He saved Tena’s life, but at what other cost? Sitting in an icy puddle, the frost on their bodies crackling as he claimed a desire meant for someone else?

  Whatever his feelings, Tena’s were clear. If Reuben chose to think past his own nose, he would be competing with his best mate, and he wouldn’t have done that in real life, much less with Charles’s ghost.

  Back at the Kischs’, Reuben stepped from a tepid bath, water sluicing across the smooth tile floor. He yanked the plug and reached for the towel, quickly drying off before pulling on a set of Friedrich’s spare clothes. It was strange being back in this place he used to call home. The scent of Elsa’s soap emerged as he rubbed the soft towel over his damp hair. He missed this place. Even after so many months with the Vines—even after courting their daughter for almost as long—he still felt like a visitor there.

  He hung up the towel and padded down the hallway, passing Tena’s closed door on the way and forcing himself not to check on her. There would be time later.

  Voices met him outside the door to his old room. Karl and Emil in tense discussion.

  “He’s a lousy cad,” Emil spat.

  “Language,” Karl warned. “When someone in this family makes a mistake, you forgive them.”

  “He’s still a cad,” Emil shot back. “Charles is barely buried and—” His lips clamped when he noticed Reuben standing in the doorway. With a glare certain to burn bridges, he pushed past, banging into Reuben’s shoulder on the way out.

  “Need to warm up?” Karl held out a steaming mug to Reuben from where he perched on Emil’s bed. The rich scent of coffee beckoned.

  Reuben nodded in thanks, the warm liquid soothing to his soul. He wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink after, but he probably wouldn’t have slept much anyway.

  “Emil’s upset with me.”

  “Yes.” Karl crossed his legs and rolled his hand across the air. “I want to bring it right to the point. I know what happened tonight and I have a few opinions on it.” He held up a hand to deflect Reuben’s interjection. “Drink your coffee, son. You will have your chance when I am through.” Reuben nodded and remained silent.

  “It does not take a learned man to see how you have carried a torch for Maggie as long as you have known her.”

  “What’s Maggie to do with this?” Reuben interrupted. Karl shot him a glare. “Sorry.”

  “What I have not figured,” he continued, “is what happened between the two of you on the Höllenfeuer—and I don’t need to know. But you have allowed it to addle you too long. You have allowed your unresolved affections to latch onto someone else.”

  “No. I haven’t. I’m still with Miss Vine.”

  Both of Karl’s bushy blond brows raised. “I know. Who else would I mean?” He folded his hands on his round stomach and stared, his brows never lowering as they waited for a response.

  “No one,” Reuben coughed. The china mug was too warm in his hands. He would not initiate a conversation about Tena with her almost-father-in-law. The embarrassment would know no boundaries. Bury it, Reuben.

  “I want to be happy, Mr. Kisch. Miss Vine makes me happy. Isn’t that what we all want?”

  Karl nodded. “It makes sense that you want to move on; however, taking up a home with your sweetheart, well, it is not right.”

  “I haven’t ‘taken up a home’ with her … well I suppose I have, but only in residence.” Reuben squared his shoulders and faced Karl with a blaze of annoyance. “We don’t have an intimate relationship, I don’t intend to, and frankly I believe it isn’t your business if I do.”

  Karl extended both hands towards Reuben. “Come home, son, please.” His gesture pleaded more than his tone and both troubled Reuben. He removed himself a distance and gulped the remainder of his coffee.

  Downstairs a telephone rang. Karl stood, then apparently thinking better of it, shook his head and lowered himself back to the bed. “Elsa is concerned about you and so am I. We worry that your life will pass by lost in wants while refusing to recognize what you truly need.” He paused, eyeing Reuben carefully. “Or perhaps you have, but are too afraid to trust it?”

  Reuben had trusted that Maggie’s marriage to Hugo would free him from her betrayal, only it hadn’t. He thought his relationship with Hazel would fix his feelings, except it didn’t. He thought Tena was his friend and only that, but maybe she wasn’t. Once people thought the world was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth. They believed Zeus threw lightning and the plague was punishment for sins. Until one day they knew better.

  Afraid? he thought. He was bloomin’ terrified.

  He handed the mug back to Karl. “I should go. Thank you for the coffee.”

  “Reuben?” Karl’s voice stopped him at the door. “Thank you for saving Tena.”

  He turned only to meet a gaze full of disappointment. Karl expected better from a man he called his son.

  Reuben nodded. “I couldn’t not.”

  Unfortunately, Emil blocked his path to a quick exit. He sat on the middle of the evergreen-wrapped staircase, twirling an unlit cigar between his hands. Hair still damp from his own plunge into the Grand Basin, Emil’s usual platinum strands had darkened to nearly the coloring of his eldest brother’s dishwater locks.

  “Earhart rang,” he said without looking up. His voice was gruff. “Everyone returned to his place after the incident. They’re all in agreement. Given the circumstances, we won’t tell Tena about the two of you canoodling. Let her think it was all a dream.”

  “Canoodling? Who says that?”

  “Would you prefer we call it what it was? Having a poorly timed flirt with my brother’s fiancée?”

  Accurate, Reuben thought, but hearing his actions spelled out still stung. He sank to the stairs with his elbows on his knees and stared at the worn carpet runner. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  Emil continued to flip the cigar across his fingers. “Listen, I know I’m a jokester and usually I can’t keep a serious face—frankly, why would I want to—but tonight was just so flipping unbelievable. All I wanted was my older brother, and that’s when it hit me ... holy happy baby, Charles will never be here again. It’s only me and Fred left. But, he’s away at university and that’s that. So I rail on you instead because really truly you’re the only brother I’ve got left.”

  “You think of me as your brother?” Reuben had always considered the little troublemaker as his baby brother from that first day Charles injected him into the Kisch household. He watched Emil grow from an outrageous child to a wise-cracking young man and loved him as much as he had Mira. But he never assumed the reverse to be true. He always thought Emil viewed him as his eldest brother’s friend and five years of difference.

  Emil finally faced him. “’Course I do. You were best mates with my brother ergo you’re my brother too. You sealed your fate the day you sidled up to Charles in the schoolyard.” His lips curled with mischief. “My brother didn’t speak English. You really should have messed with him more.”

  “I’m not a complete miscreant.” Reuben tossed him a simple smile and ran his hands over his knees. “Thanks for making me face myself.”

  Emil laughed. “That is something you can always count on.” He held up the cigar. “Want to join me for a late night smoke?”

  “Emil.” Elsa’s quiet reprimand brought their heads around to the living room. Reuben paled at Hazel standing beside her.

  Blimey! Hazel! In all the chaos that followed Tena’s rescue, he had nearly forgotten about her. She stood mere feet away when Tena kissed him and had been only silent after. He already told her goodnight at Rosalea’s auto, but she hadn’t gone home; sh
e was here waiting. Why? To ensure Tena was well? To be with him? To dump his sorry self out on the street?

  The clock on the mantel read quarter after one in the morning.

  With a low whistle, Emil slid the cigar into Reuben’s front pocket then patted it for good measure. “I think you’ll need this more than I will.” A shudder tingled Reuben at the gesture. Charles had done the same once.

  Elsa joined them on the stairs with an obviously forced smile. “Feeling better, Reuben?”

  “Much, thank you.”

  “Sehr gut.” Her thick arms enveloped him and she pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Gute nacht, liebe. We will see you for Christmas, ja?”

  “Ja. Gute nacht.”

  Elsa clasped Emil’s elbow, and without a word, the two disappeared up the staircase. Bedroom doors closed seconds later, leaving Reuben and Hazel to stare helplessly at one another. She was still buttoned into her winter coat, her knitted cap pulled low against her ears where windswept copper ringlets played over her left shoulder. Those hazel eyes, circled dark from crying, followed him as he walked down the stairs and claimed the space before her.

  “I still cannot believe it of you,” she cried. Her hands flew into the air, her intent as infuriated as it was disbelieving. “I’ve tried not to imagine your actions into something unpleasant, but how can I not?” She paused with a short gasp. “Please tell me you aren’t having an affair.”

  “Never,” Reuben barked.

  Hazel frowned. “Your response was a little too quick.”

  “I’ve known Tena for years. She was engaged to my best mate; she’s closer to being my sister. You know this.”

  “Egads, your sister? With a kiss like that?” Hazel snatched at her collar as though it might choke her. “You barely even kiss me like that.”

  “Hazel, someone almost died tonight. Can’t you understand—”

  “Why did you move to America? You never told me. Was it for her?”

  “Technically, yes, she asked me. Oh Hazel, be reasonable!” With a clap of her wrist, he pulled her down to the sofa beside him. He needed to convince her as much as himself. He was not—could not be—attracted to Tena. “Hazel, Tena loves Charles, not me. That’s who she thought I was tonight. I didn’t ask for it; I didn’t want it. People act strangely in the cold. When they grieve, sometimes things happen. It happens to us all.”