Lord Tom released me, leaning to grab the bow, pulling it up onto the bank, and I stopped him with a touch. “I need to find them if I can.”
He nodded. “Get in.”
And so we did. There was only one paddle, laying on the floor beneath our feet, the other washed away. I sat in the bow and Lord Tom pushed us off and took up the paddle. The current was hard and fast, buffeting us, and I wiped away my tears and looked past my despair, searching for them, for any sign in the darkness. She had brought him for me, why give him and take him back? But I saw nothing.
“He promised,” I said desperately, to nothing, to her, who was gone now. “He promised.” And there, suddenly, as if my desire had given birth to it, I saw something floating, a white shirt, Daniel clinging to what looked like the front door.
“There!” I shouted, unnecessarily, as Lord Tom had seen him at almost the same moment, and we were moving toward him, not fast enough, and then we reached him. He was white faced, his hair dark and plastered to his skull, and Tom and I hauled him in, and I cupped his cold face in my hands and kissed him hard, my tears mixing with the rain and my relief, and he wrapped his arms around me and said, “I pulled him out, Lea. I did what I promised. He’s out here somewhere.”
But it seemed forever until we found him. There, unconscious in the flood, half-buoyed by a piece of siding, floating out to the bay. I thought he was dead, but when Lord Tom and Daniel pulled him into the canoe, he was still breathing. There was something clutched in his hand, held hard as a death grip.
My notebook.
CHAPTER 29
I STOOD ON the edge of the bank and watched the storm, the avenging spirit of the river rushing over my land, until Daniel came up beside me and drew me gently back into the nominal shelter of the trees. “You need to be warm,” he said, though his own teeth were chattering, and he looked like some gaunt spirit of the cold himself with his pale face and his hair stringing dark and wet and lank.
But I went with him. My sorrow over Junius’s lies, and my father’s, was a heavy, dark and freezing thing, a regret I could not lose, and that neither had realized what they’d cost me was something I could not easily forgive. My life felt unformed and new and raw, something unmolded that I was uncertain I could recast. How did one come to terms with becoming something else?
I remembered Daniel’s words—I’m afraid of what you’ll become if I leave you, and my own, back to him, Become? I am already become.
But I was not, after all.
Daniel led me deeper into the woods. The branches creaked and groaned in the wind above our heads, but they kept off the worst of the rain. The canoe had been turned upside down next to a huge nurse log, which crumbled beneath its burden of ferns and moss, a dark fuzziness in the night. Lord Tom had found Edna, lowing piteously in the forest, and brought her back, tying her tether to a tree, and now she was quiet. Junius was there already, huddled beneath the canoe. He watched wordlessly as we came up, and Daniel released me, squeezing my hand before he stepped away, leaving me to face my husband alone.
Junius rose and came to me. He was bedraggled, pale, white with cold. “I tried to save your notebook,” he said. “The translations. Your drawings. I grabbed it, but...”
“I have it,” I said, touching my pocket, where I’d shoved it. It was heavy and wet; I wondered if the ink and pencil had melted away, but I hadn’t had the time or the courage to look at it. “It was in your hand.”
“I remembered to save it for you. It was the only thing I tried to save. Does that make a difference? It’s not much, but we could use it to start over. You and me, Lea. We could leave this wretched place. Go north. You’ll have the Bela Coola talked out of secret society masks in no time.”
I said nothing. Silence stretched between us.
Junius said, “I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”
“I trusted you,” I said softly. “I loved you.”
He sighed. The sadness in it hurt. The loss of hope. But I could not forgive him, and I don’t think he really expected me to. He said in a quiet, stark voice, “I stayed, Lea. I didn’t want to. I’ve never stayed this long anywhere. But I stayed for you. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“It was the experiment,” I said. “You stayed for that.”
He shook his head. “For you.”
“I wish I could say it mattered,” I said, equally softly. “I wish I could forgive you. But I can’t, Junius. You and Papa...you took too much.”
He took a deep breath, then gave me a quick nod. He glanced over his shoulder, to Daniel, who sat watching, tense and pale in the darkness. When Junius looked back at me, he smiled a little, but his mouth was stiff with cold; it was awkward and sweet. “Well. I love you, Lea. If you believe nothing else, believe that.”
I didn’t know that to say—that it was enough, that it wasn’t. Both things were true. My vision blurred. I looked down at my feet.
He said, “Tell me not to go. Ask me to stay the way you always have.”
But it was a useless plea, and I thought he knew it. My throat was too tight to speak.
“Well,” he whispered. “Maybe I’ll go north. See the Bela Coola for myself.”
My tears came on full. I thought of everything we could have been, everything he and my father had taken from me, had given away. But before I could say anything, Junius said, “You’ll be a good mother. I always thought so. Good-bye, Lea.”
He left me without a touch, without a kiss. Just words, heavy with regret, that echoed in my ears. I looked up in surprise, but he was already moving into the darkness. I watched as he went to Lord Tom and murmured something I couldn’t hear, and then he turned to Daniel, who stood.
“You be good to her, boy,” he said.
And then he was gone, melting into the darkness and rain, into a forest loud with spirits, voices from a deep past, from my own, swallowing him as if he belonged there.
I might have stood there all night, but Daniel came to lead me over to the canoe, drawing me down beside him beneath its shelter, leaning back against the nurse log, wrapping his arms around me and cocooning me with his body the way he’d done the night I’d almost drowned.
He said to me, whispering against my ear, “When we were in the house, I heard...something. Some voice telling me to leave. Your voice.”
“Her voice,” I said.
He kissed my shoulder.
“There was a part of him that was good, Daniel,” I said. “In spite of everything.”
His arms tightened around me. I didn’t feel sorrow in him, or regret, or relief. I felt only acceptance, and I was sad for him, for the man he’d never known, the one who had so easily left him, who had not bothered or cared to share himself with his only child. But Daniel said nothing. Not until minutes later, when his voice came to me, uncertain, a whisper, “Is it true? What Bibi said about the baby? Is it true?”
“I don’t know. Would you be very disappointed?”
“I told you it didn’t matter to me.”
“I meant...if I was pregnant. Would you be disappointed?”
I held my breath, but he said without a pause, almost as if he were puzzled, “How could I be disappointed?”
“She would be...part Indian. You heard Junius. All his talk of...pollution, and...she might look...”
“She?” His voice was light with amusement.
I glanced to where Lord Tom stood, studiously ignoring us. “That’s what Lord Tom thinks.”
“Is that some Indian superstition? Or is he in direct contact with some all-knowing spirit?”
I laughed a little. “The latter, I think.”
Daniel went quiet. “I love you, Lea. All of you. I can’t separate one part from another. Whatever that must mean.”
I looked out through the dark sentinels of the trees, shadows against shadows, listening to the rushing wind and the rain and the roar of the river. And I wondered how much of it I’d put into motion. Unknowingly. Blindly. How much had been only the action of my own d
esires, the blood I hadn’t known was within me rising, making itself known? Had it truly been my mother’s memories and my mother’s dreams I’d seen, or some half memory of my own, something I’d fashioned from a scrap of cloth, something I’d somehow always known but never faced—these parts of me I denied and resisted, pushing past the walls of the life others had chosen, making themselves real until I could no longer look away?
And then I wondered, Did it matter how or why it had happened? Or only that it had?
His arms were hard and warm about me. The thing I craved that I’d never known I wanted. Beyond us, the river churned and swirled and sang. I heard it murmur in my ear. Start over.
Live.
CHAPTER 30
THE RIVER TOOK everything. The mummy, every skull and bone. But I found a few relics in the mess, some ruined by the mud—a mask and a few horn spoons, and a coiled tangle of hiaqua, things spread here and there, doled out like bits of candy, but little more than that. My father’s journals were gone, the Bela Coola masks, my collection. It wasn’t until days later that I dared to open the notebook to see how well it had fared. The pages were wrinkled and stuck together in places, the ink and pencil blurred here and there but still legible. I opened it to the drawing of her, caught forever sleeping. More than a memory now, and from it and my dreams, I drew her portrait as I knew her. Alive and walking through prairie grass. Something to show our daughter.
Because she was a girl, just as Lord Tom had predicted. A girl with skin just this side of copper, and hair the color of molasses taffy, and eyes so blue they looked like the piece of sea glass I found deep within a pocket, lost in the lining of my coat. Sea glass the color of the sky tossed and polished by the waves. Her father’s eyes. His father’s.
“But you have my mother’s hair,” I found myself whispering to her. “Funny, isn’t it, how things find their way down?”
The storm that night became a legend, the kind of thing that people talked about over bottles of whiskey on rainy, windy nights. The tide so high it flooded the streets of Bruceport and tossed boats onto the driftwood of the beach as if they were no more than toys. Waves that drowned two oystermen and a flooding river that washed away Junius Russell—(“Though his wife married his son and they have a baby already. Indecent, if you ask me,” which talk made Daniel laugh).
But none of that was what I remembered about that night. What I remembered was Junius disappearing into a wood dense with rain and spirits, an awkward, sweet smile. What I remembered was Daniel’s warmth as he’d cradled me tightly against the storm, and the last time I’d looked upon the trunk, how I hadn’t realized it would be the last time I saw her, how I hadn’t said good-bye.
There were no more dreams after that night. No longer did I hear her voice. After a few months it all began to seem like something I’d imagined, a power I could not possibly have known. Until the hour I looked into my daughter’s eyes for the first time and knew that I would reach through worlds for her.
It was only then I truly understood the gift my mother had given me. The gift of a life washed clean. Her hope for me manifest in rain and wind and a rising river, in a heron standing on the riverbank, in a pretty feather blown along a San Francisco street.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOME BOOKS HAVE a longer than usual incubation period, and Bone River was one of them. I’d like to thank Bruce Weilepp of the Pacific County Historical Society Museum, who spent a long and invaluable day with me several years ago, answering questions and providing numerous and valuable county records and oral histories. It paid off in the end! I’d also like to thank Melody Guy for her insightful and very helpful editorial guidance; Courtney Miller and everyone else at Amazon for their enthusiasm and hard work on my behalf; and Kim Witherspoon, Allison Hunter, and the staff at Inkwell Management for everything they do. Thanks also must go to Kristin Hannah, who has spent more hours talking with me about this book than can be reasonably expected of anyone, and who—as always—helped me find my out of a dark and swampy morass into the light. And finally, to Kany, Maggie and Cleo, whose support and love make it possible for me to tell stories for a living—I owe them more than I can say.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by M. C. Levine, 2008
Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Olympia, Washington, Megan Chance is the award-winning author of several novels, including City of Ash, Prima Donna, The Spiritualist, and An Inconvenient Wife. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, a criminal defense attorney, and their two daughters.
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