Riverine

by Angela Palm

  Back then, when my mom asked if he’d like to go to his sister’s grave, he’d nod and we’d all get into the car. We’d park on the gravel road near the cemetery, and he’d get out without saying a word. I saw the headstone up close once, a tiny picture of her wearing a pink shirt, framed and mounted in the slab of granite. I couldn’t imagine it, losing a sibling, and so I didn’t even ask him about it.

  When Corey was fourteen and I was eleven, we would sit on top of the swing set my father had built for us and all the other neighborhood kids, long after we were too big and too old to enjoy its primary function. Once a place for hanging by the backs of our knees and looking at the world upside down, it had become a retreat as we grew older. A higher-up place to sit and feel away from the world. Our feet dangling below us, Corey told me he’d been taken to a psychiatrist. “I see things, then I have to do them,” he said. “Compulsion. That’s what it’s called. Or compulsive behavior.” He spoke softly, as if saying it out loud confirmed something.

  I was never comfortable with serious talks about death or love or what was inside another person’s mind. “That must be tough.”

  We swung our feet, and our ankles collided gently. I thought of my own behaviors—watching him in his window on nights when he slept at home, lit up like a drive-in movie, until I fell asleep; tapping my fingers in patterns on my thigh; repeating something someone had said over and over in my mind until I’d found a rhythm that made my skin stop crawling. Maybe, I thought, I have compulsive behavior too.

  Later, I misremembered what he’d told me. I told my mom he’d gone to the doctor for a heart condition. “Something’s wrong with his heart. It’s compulsive.” It felt true enough. I worried about it. I thought his heart would forget to pump his blood. I would wake up in the middle of the night, look across the grass at his dark window, and wonder if he was still breathing.

  Things had started to go really wrong for Corey when he got in trouble for taking a gun to school and stashing it in his locker. He’d taken it to give to someone else, on loan. Guns were allowed in our school’s parking lot and plenty of teenagers owned their own guns, so it wasn’t outlandish. Before we were ten, my brother and I each had our own .410 shotguns for messing around out back. Target practice. The unspoken rule was that guns could be kept in kids’ cars if the kids had been hunting in the hours before school started. The mere mention of a gun was not, at that time, cause for the local news station to arrive. The important thing was that the kids came to school, not that guns didn’t. But Corey was the first kid to get caught with one inside the school. Now the school would have to rethink whether guns in kids’ cars would still be all right. At the same time, gang violence had reached frightening heights in nearby Chicago, and rural outcasts idolized gang life. Fear was on the rise, and knee-jerk reactions to the potential for violence rapidly became common. Almost overnight, rules and regulations seemed to increase in severity tenfold.

  The school made an example of him. Corey was expelled and put on probation. His next infractions—stealing his mother’s car, marijuana possession, and running away from home—would earn him time in juvie. When he ran away from there, he’d be sent to a special boys’ school, where he would eventually get a GED. His crimes were not entirely out of the ordinary for teenagers with troubled home lives, teenagers in general, even. But it seemed that only the ones from the “wrong side of the tracks” were punished for it. I’d known several kids who regularly carried knives in their socks or kept them in their lockers, and kids who kept brass knuckles in their back pockets and wore swastikas or anarchy symbols on chains that hung beneath their T-shirts. I’d seen both boys and girls beat each other bloody. The pulse of violence was nothing new.

  After the expulsion, Corey came over less and less. As I boarded the school bus in the morning, he’d show up looking sleepy and disheveled, smoking a cigarette. We’d look at each other until we were out of sight. Strangers passing. I had no idea where he’d been sleeping, but I missed him. Once in a while he would call from wherever he was, and it would make my day.

  The next time we sat on top of the swing set, Corey, then seventeen, told me he’d found out the father he’d known his whole life wasn’t his father at all. That he had another family in Arkansas. His brothers had taunted him for years, telling him he wasn’t their real brother, forcing him to do things that they themselves would never do—fight his own friends even though he didn’t want to, stand still while they pegged him with baseballs. Now he had no choice but to believe it—he really was adopted. He decided he wanted to meet his real father, whom he didn’t remember at all. He planned to find his new family, get a job down there, and live with them. I hoped he would, though I hated to see him leave again. I hoped the new family would love him and make him whole and feed him and let him in at night. But he had only been gone two weeks when he returned to the river. He never talked about his father again.

  I had watched Corey come and go, missing him, so much in envy of his freedom and wishing he would take me with him, while I stayed, confined to whatever terms my parents set for me. Usually, home and yard, for my own good. Restraining me nearby, in the vicinity of the place they perceived as safe, was the only way they knew to protect me. It was successful on some fronts—I had never seen a drug more serious than weed, and I had only once been to a party where alcohol was available to me.

  After the game of corn tag, I spent three hours choosing the perfect CD from Walgreens for Corey’s birthday: Guns n’ Roses, Use Your Illusion I and II. Emboldened by that first kiss, I called him on the phone and asked him to come over. I told him I wanted him to be my first. We would be moving soon and time was running out. He’d do one more stretch of time at the juvenile center and then he’d be moving out and getting a job, and we’d be living three miles down the road in the cornfields. He came over while my parents were out, knocking softly on my window. I was jumpy, and my eyes refused to settle on his face like I wanted them to. We talked for a while, and soon he was tickling me and we laughed ourselves into another kiss, which lasted for the better part of an hour. But when he upped the ante, unbuttoning my pants and touching me lightly between the legs for a second, I stopped him. I didn’t want to stop him, but I was scared. My brother was home, and I couldn’t risk being caught. Corey said that he had promised my father to stay away from me anyway—I was too young and he was too much trouble. His body betrayed the promise. I felt him hard against the flat plane of skin between my hip bones, but he left anyway. I was angry that two men had negotiated this experience without my input, before I’d even thought of the question. I wanted to be with Corey and I wanted him to wait for the timing to be right, to fight for me, to stand up to my dad, but he wouldn’t.

  In retaliation, I invited another boy over to do the job instead, with a plan to leak the information to Corey the next time I saw him. If he thought I was too much a girl still, I would force him to be wrong. I kissed this boy, too, but when things seemed to be going too far I said no—I didn’t know him like I knew Corey, and it wasn’t worth it, even if it would mean getting back at him. This replacement boy wasn’t the one I’d intended and no one else would do. I tried to back out, but it was too late. The boy had already decided on an outcome. Throughout the brief ordeal, I looked out my window, into Corey’s window and through another window beyond that.

  The week we moved, I helped my father cut lilies and hostas at our old house by the river, preparing them for transplanting at our new house. We were moving half our yard from one place to the other—everything but the grass itself. I disliked this idea and thought it in poor taste, bringing the old purposely to live in the new. At fifteen I was quickly gathering regrets, and this was not a clean start. There had been plenty of good times at the river, but there was also enough bad to make this a legitimate concern. I felt similarly dissevered, leaving half of myself rooted by the river while my other half would grow afresh down the road. And where would Corey go next? What would happen to him? He was moving t
o another nearby town, leaving the river too. It wasn’t the future I’d imagined for either of us.

  We cleaved the hostas between growth points at the root, dividing them into old and new. “First you cut, like this,” said my father. “Right between the notches. Then you loosen the two portions apart, gently. See that?” His voice was thick and slow, purposeful, like Bob Ross’s demonstrating on PBS how to paint a waterfall.

  It was harder than it looked, to cleave the growth. I watched how he cut the roots before trying it myself, eyeing his precision with the tool and the ease of his pull. I made a single chop into the plant’s root bed and wiggled the severed portion away from the old growth, trying to minimize the damage to the root hairs, jumbled up like old phone cords, only far more delicate. I looked up at him. “Like this?”

  “Not bad. Little less off the tip, if you can.” He showed me again. I liked working with my dad. When he was teaching me something he knew how to do and I was quiet and obedient, things were all right.

  I attempted the maneuver again, without much improvement. He didn’t seem to notice. When we’d cut all the plants that the yard could spare, we packaged the spliced roots of the new-growth plants in wet dirt. We wrapped them in flimsy plastic bags, loaded them into my father’s truck, and drove away. The plants slid up and down the length of the truck bed for three paved miles to our new yard.

  When Corey finally got out—done doing time, at last, for his juvenile crimes—I had my license. Our incident of sexual misconnection was a year behind us, and we had never spoken of it again. I picked him up and drove him over to our new house. On my map of home, we were still in the patch of yellow between the pink dots, but the new home was three miles due east and a half mile due south of our river house. Mapwise, we’d barely moved below the blue wavy line, but it felt farther.

  We sat across from each other at the table, and I asked Corey what it was like where he’d been—the detention centers, the boys’ school. “I’ve seen a lot of things I shouldn’t have seen, and I’ve learned a lot of things I shouldn’t have learned,” he said. “Criminal things.”

  But what I heard was, “Nothing you need to know.” The window of time in which he would share things with me had passed. Our easy bond had taken a new form, in which withholding was the only language we would speak.

  I didn’t ask him anything else, but I knew that what he told me was not good news. We sat at my parents’ kitchen table eating store-bought cookies, smiling, happy he was home. I tried not to be distracted by the questions forming in my head about what he had seen and learned, questions about what he felt for me, if anything. I was anxious to be out of my parents’ purview, so I took him for a drive in my new car while they waited nervously for me to return, their standard fears—safety, boys, etc.—etched across their foreheads. Corey wore his seat belt and leaned toward me, letting his shoulder rest on mine as he turned up the radio. A void swelled between us, but neither of us would be the first to touch it. He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re driving. Little girl, all grown up.”

  I saw a flash of light in his eyes. I thought it was a promise that he was back, that the future I’d imagined between us might become real despite his silence. That the night we had almost spent together had meant something. Did he even remember it? I wrote headlines about us in my head: Window Boy Falls in Love with Girl Next Door. Couple Runs from River, Chasing Happiness. But he confirmed nothing. He offered nothing. We said nothing. We exchanged a quick hug and a casual good-bye. He would probably be bedding someone else by dark, and I hated him for it. Hated myself for my own muteness.

  When I dropped him off at his house, I had no idea it would be the last time I saw him. If I could have done it differently, I would have put my hand on his knee and kissed him. I would have cracked a window and let the air out. I would have gone upstairs with him, closed his door behind us, and stayed.

  Bifurcation comes to mind when I think of Corey. As in the division of the common carotid artery. As in the shape made by the branching of the Kankakee River and the Illinois River. As in me going one way and Corey going another. As in the way people lose themselves, splitting further and further from their origins. As in the roots of hosta shoots, separated by mutation or by force. As in young flower buds arrested in early development that never bloom. What confluence of time and geography can split roots?

  I didn’t hear from Corey for a few months after that visit at the new house. He could have called, but didn’t, and he had no phone at the new place he was staying. By then he’d been in enough trouble that dating him would have been out of the question—my parents wouldn’t have allowed it. When it became clear that nothing would happen with Corey, I dated the first boy I came across. I’d been hanging out with a girl named Kelly, and Trevor was her boyfriend’s best friend. It was a convenient match. He was cute and nice, so sure. Fine by me. I would project all that Corey love onto him. He even looked a little like Corey. I still wasn’t allowed to really date, but I could hang out with him in groups or when parents were present.

  Four months went by. I heard nothing about Corey or from Corey until I heard the news of the murders. Our old neighbors had been stabbed and everyone thought that he might have done it. When I heard this, I felt myself divide further. That part of me that had held fast to my idea of him—so much better than he really was, so out of touch with who he was becoming—split and split again. I was at work, back at the River, so hysterical that my mother had to pick me up and take me home. Then I ran. I had no heart, no head. The horizon tore, directing me away from my home, away from the river, only to be met with mile after mile of land that was indifferent to me. The land was so flat that when I stopped running, standing in a field, I could still make out our house as a blip of color on the horizon. It seemed the world would have its way with me no matter which direction I fled. Stabbed? Like with a knife? How could that be true? I’d hopped an irrigation creek and my ankle bled, cut open by barbed wire. I didn’t care. I wanted it to bleed out, run the whole river red in protest against what was happening. I wanted to stay in that field until he was home, cleared of all accusations.

  I had to bring myself back from the field, eventually, and give in to the truth. I was unable to look my parents in the eye as they hugged my shaking shoulders, because they had known, all along in their heavy hearts they would tell me later, that it was so. He had done it. He had been on a bad path for a while, and now he’d made his own dead end. But by then, Corey was in another cornfield, four towns away, throwing gasoline on the sedan owned by the couple he’d killed in an attempt to erase what he’d done. He had stolen their car afterward and set it on fire in the field, like some bad television crime show. It made no sense to me why he would do this, except as an act of panic, indicating to me that whatever had happened in that house had not been planned. They sent dogs after his scent: spearmint gum, shampoo, cigarettes, and sunshine. Corey was fast, but the dogs were better runners.

  People all around me, at work and at school, discussed motives and the possibility of drugs playing a role in Corey’s actions. Was it a drug-fueled robbery gone bad? Did he have an unchecked mental illness? Was he involved in a gang? Or was he just a thug, some punk who’d lost all respect for life? Everyone had a theory, the small town shaken by the crime. I had no answers and no guesses. I found myself hiding in bathroom stalls, compressing all the noise into my clenched fists. Today, when kids experience trauma or violence in their towns or schools, adults thrust grief counselors on them. There are vigils and public attempts at closure. But not then. For us, there was crime scene tape, a double funeral, and the front page of the weekly newspaper. Nobody asked if I was all right. My government teacher used Corey’s case as a conduit for discussing opposing views on the death penalty. I excused myself and threw up in the bathroom.

  The worst I had heard before the murders was that Corey had been huffing gasoline, and that was a far cry from murder. At work, I tried to catch bits of information when the regular
s talked about it, but they all hush-hushed when they noticed me listening and smiled at me, shielding me from whatever news they had uncovered. I internalized a new label for myself: girl who had kissed a murderer. Or, worse, girl who had possibly loved a murderer. And what did that make me?

  . . .

  The most mundane of all that happened that week stuck with me: The sting of the dry corn leaf fibers that had rubbed against my calves as I ran. The rash that stippled the skin of my shins the morning after they arrested him, right after I’d said, “He’d never do this. Not possible.” Not someone I’d kissed with my own mouth. I remembered that itch, how it hung around for days.

  I didn’t see the slit carotid arteries, the open necks of our two elderly neighbors or the blood that must have poured from their severed viscous tissues. I didn’t see how it must have spread, thick and terrible, across their linoleum floor, where I’d stood on half a dozen Halloween nights and held out my pail in hopes of full-sized candy bars. I saw, instead, only two purple lines that had been fashioned across their necks by a mortician in an attempt to blur the evidence of their deaths. To conceal the aftermath of a vicious death, for the deceased and all who mourned them.