Twisted River

by Kelsey Gietl

  “Certainly not to me. I don’t dredge up dead people because I’m a little sad.” Hazel rolled her eyes. “Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?”

  Yes, Reuben thought. He was Exhibit A.

  But instead, in response he tilted her chin and pressed a gentle kiss to her lips. “I can understand it, yes. But blimey, can’t you believe I’m only with you?”

  Hazel finally smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck. “You could charm anyone with that accent, you know?” She ran her fingers through his damp hair and curled a lock around her finger. “I think I might love you, Reuben Radford.”

  She kissed him then, but he barely felt it. His lips—and the rest of him—had grown cold with her words. She loved him. Sweet Hazel with her innocent smile and ability to be so wonderfully forgiving loved him. Finally, he had exactly what he always wanted.

  Only heaven knew why he didn’t say it back.

  TWENTY-THREE

  For three days snow continued to fall. A thick blanket covered the yard and sparkling multi-dimensional ice crystals clung to the edges of every window while sharp icicles hung from the eaves. All the while Maggie’s stomach twisted as the snow accumulated along with Molly’s temperature. The road was inaccessible to all except the bravest traveler or one wealthy enough to own a sleigh; a physician would not be. Without transportation of her own, she only had her legs to carry her. There were too many miles between home and the hospital; it wasn’t worth the risk of freezing in the snow.

  For now, Maggie was alone.

  She glanced from the storm outside the living room window to Molly asleep on the sofa. Thank goodness she can finally find some rest in this, Maggie thought. She herself hadn’t slept well since the evening she found Molly writhing on the floor from fever seizure. The girl’s slender limbs had flapped like a broken sparrow, and Maggie had never experienced such terror. Once the tremors dissipated, she was able to drag Molly the few feet across the room to the sofa, but no farther in her current condition. So she transformed the living room into a quarantine and confined Isa’s playthings to the study. The younger child still seemed relatively ignorant of her sister’s true condition and was currently sleeping soundly upstairs.

  Ignorance, however, could prove fatal; even without medical training, Maggie knew Molly’s temperature had been elevated too long. How many days were too many? she wondered. Four? Five? Was she already too late?

  No. There must be a manageable solution if only she could discover it.

  Except there appeared to be nothing left to try. Of the few home remedies she remembered, none lowered Molly’s fever more than slightly or afforded her comfort. Most foods roiled the child’s stomach. Too much water had the same effect. Maggie scrubbed every surface and washed each piece of linen twice in an effort to purge the house of disease, but even that proved disastrous.

  Rather than create an ice slick by emptying the wash basin near the door, she dragged the full tub through the snow to the cliff’s edge. The baby flipped over in protest, jutting against Maggie’s pelvis and every nerve from hip to ankle. Crying out, her legs buckled, and her knees landed hard on frozen earth. At the same time, she dropped the washbasin. It clanged against the ground and rolled off the side of the ridge. Banging once upon the cliff face, she heard it splash into the river.

  Tears stung while bitter wind cut her face and chapped hands, the promise of another winter’s storm in the air. More snow. She finally knew how those flower girls in London felt, slowly freezing while they begged for a sale and knew no one would help. If she could go back to those days, she would buy them all. Every pound would go to help those children, and her room would be filled with beauty even in the dead of winter. Her own garden here was similarly lifeless now, barren beds surrounding the buckled patio blocks. With her luck, none of the bulbs would germinate come spring. It would be as hollow and desolate as she felt right now.

  Drawing the curtains closed against the cold, she turned down the living room lights and closed the pocket doors to shut herself into Hugo’s study alone. She settled herself behind his desk and swiveled to face the bookshelves. Interspersed between framed portraits, half-constructed cameras, and dated photo boxes sat a liberal number of books. Their layers of dust would have made her father shudder even more than his favorite volumes being lost on Titanic.

  Hugo’s collection differed from Laurence Archer’s in every way it could. Not a single title or author could Maggie recognize. Stevenson, Twain, Hawthorne, Alcott. Multiple volumes on photography, a few related to the American Revolution and the War of the Rebellion, and a copy of the 1910 St. Louis City Directory. Not a single medical book.

  But why would there be? Hugo was not a learned man; he told her once that his father whisked him away at the age of ten to be a photographer’s assistant and that was when his schooling ended. Even so, he was terribly intelligent; she sensed it by the way he spoke. Life had been his teacher. He would have known enough not to let his daughter die.

  She swept her arm along the shelf, spilling all the books onto the floor, and sighed. Now she would need to pick those up. As she bent, another group of novels caught her eye from the bottom shelf and she finally located what she hadn’t even realized she should be searching for.

  Stacking a fire in the hearth, she settled in to read while the wind whistled and snow drifts rolled across the garden. When she finished, she flipped to the beginning and began again. Those words passed night back into dawn and snow lay calm and sparkling in a new day’s sun. She read until her eyes hurt. Reuben had believed this book held all the answers. He believed time had the power to change things. How desperately she needed an impossible change right now.

  So she vowed to read it until she saw what Reuben did. She would read The Time Machine until either a miracle occurred or she died of fatigue.

  ~~~

  Maggie woke to insistent knocking at the front door. The firebox lay cold, the room layered in late-evening’s frozen darkness. She shivered and rubbed her arms to drive away the chill.

  An unpleasant crick seared her neck. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but after two full days without any, she supposed it had been inevitable. Her baby bounced with her awakening, throwing arms and legs against her mother’s insides like a frolicking foal.

  “Quiet, you pest,” she scolded. Pushing herself up from the chair, she stepped her way through the trove of Isa’s toys littering the study floor, checked Molly’s forehead—still hot—and turned on the entry lamps. Immediately, the knocking ceased.

  Her hand paused against the lock. Hugo wasn’t due home until weeks after Christmas. He hadn’t wanted to stay away so long, but she insisted.

  “I’ll only be away a few weeks,” Hugo assured her as he packed his traveling case. He folded each item carefully, the crease between his eyes lengthening. “We’ll return before Christmas.”

  Stooping to retrieve his boots from the floor, Maggie set them inside the open trunk. “No need. The baby has until January, so you may as well spend Christmas with your sisters. California is bound to be warmer than what we’ll have here.”

  He turned mid-fold, pressing her with troubled eyes. “I will be home in time.”

  As much as she could force a smile with her fate hanging in the balance, she managed to offer him her best. “Do not surrender your commitment to Emma over an impetuous promise to me. Stay as long as it takes.”

  Emma. The woman who provided Maggie’s baby a chance by her absence and would quite possibly ruin its only chance at legitimacy if she returned. Mr. Frye’s kindness had made her forget she didn’t belong and never would. She was merely filling in until Emma reclaimed her place. The hired help.

  After all her careful planning, it was difficult to accept defeat.

  This is why, she reminded herself, why she needed distance from love, from marriage, from additional children of her own creation. Spare herself the aggravation and the pain. For as afraid as she was of hurting someone she loved, she was equally
afraid of being hurt. For two weeks, her heart had encouraged her to dismiss that fear until her head—that rascally devil of logic—smacked her with the sense that nothing was worth the pain Hugo endured. No one could take the ache away once it had been inflicted.

  Securing the latches on the traveling case, Hugo picked up his Brownie from the writing desk and settled the case strap over his shoulder. “There’s about twenty minutes of light left. I want to take a few before dark hits.”

  He slipped from the room, and his steps faded away on the stairs. A minute later the bang of the kitchen door followed. From their bedroom window, Maggie watched him at the river’s edge, a silhouette against the eastern sky, his amber hair taking on the glow of smoldering irons as the sinking sun set it ablaze.

  Not once did he reach for his camera.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Reuben could have said he had no inclination to visit the Fryes, only he would have been lying. After three days insisting to Hazel—and himself—that his mind wasn’t a jumble of uncertainty, there had been only one person he believed could truly set everything straight. If Karl thought Maggie held the key to the chains that shackled him, then he needed to ask her to use it.

  This feud between the sisters needed to end as much for their sake as his own. Once Reuben restored Tena and Maggie’s friendship, he could cease worrying about them, focus on righting his relationship with Hazel, and drown that kiss in the Grand Basin where it came from.

  Snow-soaked to his knees and damp socks frozen around his toes, his trouser cuffs dripped into a puddle on the Fryes’ stoop. Another blizzard emerged the day after Rosalea’s party and barely relented since. With the lesser used streetcar lines frozen and many roads still covered, he had to abandon city transportation at Broadway and Jefferson and walk over a mile through the drifts. Reporter attire was definitely not fashioned for such a trek.

  Entry lamps suddenly illuminated, flooding the portico with light as the door eased open.

  “Reuben?”

  He wasn’t prepared for the heavily pregnant woman who opened her front door to him on that cold snow-driven night in late December. Even though he understood the mechanics of childbearing, he couldn’t have primed himself for the extreme swell of her stomach, the quick movements nestled beneath it, or the alarming sensation rising within him. There was one thing for which Maggie genuinely hadn’t lied.

  “May I come in?”

  “Please.”

  He stepped past her and hung his wet overcoat and hat on the entry rack. Dropping his satchel on the floor, he made for the living room without speaking. Something sharp had wedged in his throat. It grew thicker as he took in the feeble child asleep on the sofa before the dimming fire.

  Maneuvering around the dish-cluttered coffee table, he moved the mending basket from the floor to kneel beside the little girl. The back of his knuckles barely made contact with her forehead before pulling back. The child simmered with fever. He eased the stack of blankets down, and she shivered when the cool air hit her sweat-soaked nightgown.

  He pressed two fingers to Molly’s wrist. Her pulse fluttered. “How long?” he asked.

  “Three days. I tried to carry her upstairs, but that’s not an option in my state.”

  “Why haven’t you rang a doctor?”

  “How would he find his way? The roads are impassable.”

  Reuben craned his neck to peer up at her. Her always impeccable brown locks hung in limp strands and deep purple rings stained her eyes as though she hadn’t slept in days. “Maggie, it’s ten at night. Where is your husband?”

  “He’s on a photography trip with his son in Utah.” She raised a trembling hand to her lips, and he noticed a plain finger where a wedding band should be.

  Following his gaze, she quickly wrapped her right hand around the left. “My fingers are too swollen to wear it,” she explained, although her voice held an edge he had heard before. It contained a host of words she wouldn’t say.

  “Right, well let’s get to work.” He stripped off his jacket, wet shoes and socks and tossing the pile into the entryway, rolled his sleeves up. He nodded to Maggie. “What have you been using to reduce her temperature?”

  “Snow from the yard and—”

  “Too cold,” Reuben interjected. “The fever’s too high; we need to bring it down gradually. Do you have any apple cider vinegar?” When Maggie nodded, he rattled off an additional list of supplies. A few minutes later, she returned with a bowl of lukewarm water, clean washrags, and a round brown cider jug.

  “Thanks.” Pouring the cider until he thought the measurements were correct, he set down the jug and swirled the mixture together. Then he dipped the first washrag into the bowl and gently laid it across the child’s forehead. Molly released a slight moan, and he gestured for Maggie to dim the lamps so only the low fire’s light remained.

  “Where did you learn this?” Maggie asked as she walked the room.

  “It’s what I did for my father—what the doctor told me to do—when he was sick.” He dipped two more washrags, and easing the blankets from Molly’s feet, wrapped one around each sole of her feet. “If this treatment is unsuccessful, we can try the same method again with garlic. Maybe a warm bath and some broth come morning.” Although, judging from Molly’s tapered breathing, he didn’t know how much good it would actually do.

  “You said ‘try.’ You think Molly might die then?”

  Yes, he thought. Only a cruel world killed children right before their parents’ eyes. Even after all the harm Maggie had done, he still couldn’t wish that for her.

  “Maybe not.”

  Maggie nodded and walked from the room. He heard water run and dishes rattle down the hall.

  Reuben released the sigh he had been holding in. He had to follow her. He came here on a mission—to convince her to reconcile with Tena and in turn hopefully rid himself of any residual affection for either sister.

  Rinsing the washrag, he resituated the cool cloth on Molly’s forehead. Then, after he poked the last embers of the fire, he closed her into silence and carried the cider jug and washbowl to the kitchen. A kettle simmered on the stove while Maggie dispersed tea leaves into two saucered cups. She barely glanced up as he emptied the washbowl down the sink.

  “Tell me how to believe the impossible,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” He reached around her for the drying towel.

  Turning, she butted her hip against the counter. “The Time Machine. You told me that book made you believe in the impossible. Well, I read it, Reuben. Then I read it again. There is nothing in it to convince me anything will get better. If anything, it did quite the opposite.” Her eyes lowered to her stomach then upwards through her lashes. “How did you survive it, Reuben? When your mother was sick then your father ...? I never realized how strong you were until now.”

  Reuben set the now-dry bowl on the counter. “You lost your father, too.”

  “I didn’t feel it the same way. I loved my father, and I miss him every day, but Molly ... I can’t describe it. She’s different.”

  Tears fell then. They drew uneven lines through her usually flawless features and dotted the dark cotton of her mourning dress. She wiped at them furiously and only managed to create more. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and turned back to the tea kettle.

  Maggie is crying, he thought in shock. Maggie didn’t cry. She was a fortress, and her unexpected emotion caused his own blockades to tremble. He needed to rectify the situation, and he needed to do it now. “No tears, Maggie. This isn’t the end, you know. We’ll see them again.”

  She spun, her bright blue eyes flashing dangerously. “Don’t lecture me on heaven, Reuben Radford,” she spat. Another solitary tear trickled down her cheek, and she swiped it away. “Nothing you say makes it any less unfair. Mr. Frye lost his wife while he was traveling. How can he lose Molly in the same way? He’ll loathe me.”

  “Maybe he’s the one who should think twice about leaving.”

>   “You can’t blame him. This time, I browbeat him into it.”

  “Why?” Reuben waited for her to expand on what reason she could possibly have for sending her husband away so close to the birth of her child. The decision was irresponsible, yet he supposed Maggie always had been too.

  The tea kettle whistled. The shrill melody cut through the air, but neither of them moved to silence it. “How did you accept it when Mira died?” she asked quietly.

  Reuben hesitated. In truth, he couldn’t accept it then. He would have liked to sit in that cemetery forever, wasting his life away in mourning until the grass grew over his body and suffocated him. His heart raced with the memory of those eternal lonely days and the one that made time finally step forward again—when he met her.

  She wanted an answer and he didn’t have one that would help. He mustered the only semi-truth he could. “I don’t know.”

  Maggie seized his shirt, wild as a hurricane while the tea kettle continued to wail. “Yes you do,” she insisted. “Tell me. When Mira died, how did you accept it? How?”

  “Would you silence that blasted thing?” He reached around her for the towel and slammed the kettle onto the side burner. “I don’t know how I did it, Maggie. I just did. You think Molly’s death will be unfair? That’s how I felt with Mira, only worse. You have a chance to say goodbye. I didn’t.” He uncurled his fingers from where they were digging into her shoulder. He couldn’t even remember placing them there.

  “How did you manage with all that pain inside?”

  Another loaded question. For Reuben, he resorted to a psychotic remnant of his sister’s memory trapped inside him rather than lose her forever. It had driven him to madness, nearly to his own demise. Maggie had seen him in that weakness; she knew the cost. “I made my fair share of mistakes.”