I’m being pushed down, squeezed back into my bones. This time, I don’t fight it. The pain doesn’t come all at once. It starts as a memory, a low tide lapping at my bare feet. Mom flickers. Her sky blues turn gray, her cherry reds dim beige.
Is it lonely?
Never.
Do you miss us?
Always.
I feel pine needles now, under my hands, poking the skin at the back of my arm, and there’s something jamming into my side, the hard root of a tree. I smell burning oil and forest rot. The wind tugs my hair. Gray shapes move around me, whispering and brushing against me. My mother spins between the stars.
Forgive your father.
I already have.
Tell your sister I love her.
She knows.
Tell her anyway.
I don’t think I can do this.
You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for, Sam. Braver, too.
She sings me a familiar lullaby, though I can’t remember where I’ve heard it before.
There is a moment of bright pain and fireworks exploding, and I see the past and present and future ripping apart and then collapsing together again. There is a moment where I am nowhere and everywhere, nothing and everything. I am crushed and torn in half. I am pummeled by stones and lashed with barbed wire. It hurts, all of it; God, it hurts so much I want to die. And then someone squeezes my hand.
Her fingers are smaller than mine, but they are strong and warm and insistent. I squeeze back so she knows I am still here. I try to speak, but the words come out in a groan.
“We’ve got her!” a woman says, and there is a rush of movement and noise.
Faces I don’t recognize bend over me, tugging and pulling, sticking needles into my arm, strapping a mask over my face, pumping me with air, making it impossible to talk. My eyes dart, panicked, and then I see her, close to my left shoulder.
Her cheeks are red, her eyes puffy behind her purple glasses. One hand wipes snot from her nose, the other refuses to let go. The paramedics keep trying to push her away from me, but she won’t budge. They work around her, rolling me onto a backboard and lifting me off the ground onto a gurney. Ollie stays close, keeping her hand in mine.
“Did you see how beautiful Mom was? How happy?” She looks off into the trees and then back down at me, her eyes a little sadder than before but still smiling. My sister is smiling.
“She’s gone now,” Ollie says to me.
But I’m here. We’re here.
“She told me to tell you she loves you,” Ollie says. “For always.”
I know.
She leans in closer, whispers, “Thank you for saving me.”
If it didn’t hurt so much, I’d laugh. I didn’t save her, she saved me.
We move out of the trees toward the road where an ambulance waits with red and white lights flashing. The gurney wheel bumps against something, jostling me, screaming pain through my bones. Every single fragile one. I close my eyes. Just for a second.
“Sam? Sam!” Ollie shakes my arm.
For all her courage, there is still fear.
I open my eyes, stare into hers. I want to tell her it’s okay to be scared, that I’m scared too. I’m scared of so many things. I want to tell her we can be scared together. Let someone else be brave today. I squeeze her hand as tight as I can.
She squeezes back and says, “Does it hurt bad?”
I nod. I think I nod.
She says, “Remember when you were eleven and you were doing circles on your bike and you fell and broke your arm? Does it hurt bad like that?”
I haven’t thought about that day in a long time. How the circles got tighter and tighter, faster and faster, and the world became a blur of color and light and wind and for a second it felt like flying, and then the bike slipped out from under me and I was falling, falling. I remember hearing my bones crack before feeling any pain, remember staring at a strange lump forming, watching it turn red and purple, watching it swell, then become searing hot and all-consuming. I remember screaming and screaming and screaming and Mom and Ollie running out, helping me to my feet, taking me to the hospital. My cast was blue. Ollie was the only person to sign it. After six weeks the cast came off. My arm was fine. The bones healed exactly the way they were supposed to, and the pain that had once been so sharp and terrible faded into memory.
The pain I’m feeling now will fade, too. One day and soon. It has to. For us to keep on living, loving, being who we are, we have to forget how badly the worst parts hurt us. We have to heal.
We reach the ambulance. A paramedic says, “You need to step back now. You need to give us room.”
Ollie says, “I want to go with her.”
From somewhere close by, I hear Deputy Santos telling Ollie it’ll be all right, the paramedics will take good care of me. She says, “You can ride with me. I promise we’ll stay right behind them until we get to the hospital. Lights and sirens, the whole way.”
I hear Zeb now, too, asking the paramedics if I’m conscious, if I’m awake, if I’m going to live. And I think . . . I think I hear Franny off to one side praying. But I can’t see them, and I can’t see Deputy Santos either. My head is strapped down, my neck in a brace. Ollie’s face is the only familiar one leaning over me.
“They won’t let me go with you,” she says. “But you’ll be okay?”
I squeeze her hand twice.
She bends to give me a hug and then steps away from the gurney. The paramedics lift me into the back of the ambulance, buckle me in, and shut the doors. I close my eyes when the sirens start and think about my mother, wonder why I never noticed it before. Her smile. Ollie’s is exactly the same.
Bear says that in September the light in the meadow softens and the air turns crisp and tart. The days get shorter. The flowers die. Life is loss and nothing lasts. The leaves change green to red to yellow and dance off the trees like tiny ballerinas, and sometimes you wake to silver frost on the ground and your breath forming white clouds. “It’s a different kind of beautiful,” he tells us. “You’ll see.” But summer isn’t over. Not yet. There’s plenty of time left for us to walk barefoot in the grass, splash in the river, and talk to the bees, to fall asleep counting stars.
Acknowledgments
Profound thanks to the many wonderful people who had a hand in the creation of this book. Enthusiastic high-fives and fist bumps to Laurie McGee, Laura Cherkas, Ashley Marudas, and the rest of the team at William Morrow for your attention to detail as well as your care and dedication in making this book a book and bringing it to readers. Special thanks to my editor, Emily Krump, who saw into the heart of this story and drew out the best parts. And to my agent, Julia Kenny, whose determination, confidence, and unfailing support found this book its best home and whose business savvy makes it possible for me to write and keep writing: thank you and thank you and thank you.
Warm hugs and chocolate chip cookies to my family and friends who have been cheering me on since the beginning. To my parents, who indulged my book obsession and never once told me to get a real job, thank you for your boundless love. To my big sister, my cheerleader, my best friend, thank you for listening and sticking with me through the best and worst days. To Mike, Suzanne, Joyce, and Ralph, thank you for welcoming me into your family and for your enduring optimism. To Alisa, thank you for asking the right questions at the right time and helping me bring these characters to life. To Caroline and Kate, thank you for your invaluable feedback, continued encouragement, and gracious friendship—you two keep me sane.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to Ryan, my partner and biggest supporter, for reminding me all those years ago that “real writers write.” Thank you for giving me enough time and space and love, and for helping to make the impossible possible. Let’s keep this adventure going!
About the Author
Valerie Geary
is a full-time writer and a fair-weather gardener. Her stories have been published in The Rumpus and Day One. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Crooked River is her first book.
valeriegeary.com
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Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa. Cover photograph © by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images.
The bee image © by effrossyni/Shutterstock, Inc.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CROOKED RIVER. Copyright © 2014 by Valerie Geary. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-232659-1
EPUB Edition OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780062326614
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Crooked River: A Novel Page 31