Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

“Good-bye, lil’ one. I’ll see you next week. I knew someday you’d be coming.”

  “Bye, Tulu.”

  Now you’ll remember everything.

  I sat at the polished kitchen table with Chinese takeout tucked in the warming drawer. I sipped a glass of Silver Oak Cabernet and waited for Beau to come home. I’d spent the day in the most unproductive, loopy manner—wandering from room to room in my house, touching things, feeling them, staring out at the backyard, then finally ordering kung pao for dinner.

  The need to go back to Seaboro had grown exponentially since my phone call with Tulu, although I still didn’t quite understand why. Williams Prep had handed me an excuse today.

  The garage door’s opening, then closing, hummed through the kitchen. Beau walked in, dropped his briefcase on the barstool and opened the refrigerator. I made a small noise in the back of my throat; he turned and looked at me.

  “Oh, hey, honey. Didn’t see you sitting there. What’re you doing?”

  “Waiting for you . . .” I stood, took another sip of wine.

  “I told you I had a meeting with Harland tonight.” He glanced at the set table. “Didn’t you remember?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Sorry.” He came to me, kissed me. “Hope you didn’t go to too much trouble.”

  “No, ordered in.” I sat back down, patted the chair next to me. “Sit down a sec.” I poured him a glass of wine.

  He sat and looked at me. “Something wrong?”

  “No, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about my day. At the board meeting, I offered to write a curriculum for the Lower School.”

  “Okay.” He took a sip of wine. “Good for you.”

  I explained the Culture Week, my volunteerism. “It’ll mean I need to go to Seaboro for a little bit. I’ll stay with Mother because it’s the best way to do the research.”

  “Well, I guess this is a perfect time for you to be gone—I’m buried with work; B.J. is away.” He grabbed my hand. “But you know I hate it when you’re gone.”

  So it was a perfect time because they didn’t need me right now. I felt a nervous pinch in my chest as I searched for words to tell, or at least start to tell, Beau about the Keeper’s Cottage. “There is also this historic lighthouse—well, it’s not really a lighthouse as much as a cottage that had a light on top of it—and now Seaboro is restoring it.”

  Beau tilted his head. “What does this have to do with the curriculum?”

  “Nothing . . . it’s just another reason why I want to visit home. Anyway, it burned down when I was a senior in high school, and well, I was there and—” I took a deep breath.

  Beau stood up, ready to go. “Well, you can help out with that too, huh? That’s just like you—getting involved in all kinds of projects to help others.” He kissed the top of my head, stretched. “I’ve got to get out of this suit.” My mouth dropped open without words.

  The tenuous line of our connection disappeared in the still air of my unspoken words. An empty hiss filled the space Beau had just vacated. He didn’t have time to listen to me tell him about what had happened at the Keeper’s Cottage.

  I closed my eyes and attempted to find my original love for Beau, the emotion that had once grabbed me by the heart, then the soul. In those days before I met Beau, I hadn’t felt much beyond pale thrill, beyond thin joy. A few months after we started dating I knew I loved Beau. I awoke that morning after a date and became aware of the outline of the trees outside, the way the quilt felt heavy over my body—I was noticing touch and emotion. Since the fire, only small moments had carried this alertness to me: standing beside the ocean as the sun gilded its wave tips, river rapids that flowed over boulders as if nothing could stop the water from reaching the sea, the slant of a barn roof, or maybe freshly stacked hay along the road as if the earth had gift wrapped the bales. The awareness felt like butterfly wings against my ribs—and I understood I loved Beau.

  I’ve often searched for these slight wings in other moments—sometimes I’ve found them; other times I haven’t. I’ve thought that maybe this is what holds some couples together—finding that one moment, maybe two, where they feel those particular wings that allow them to know the promise of more between them.

  I also thought I knew how his love for me had started: admiration. I would not dare tell him that the integrity and character he saw in me were part of a facade. He’d met me years after I’d left Seaboro, and his vision of me had been formed after all I’d once been as a child and adolescent had been neatly packed away.

  I hadn’t deliberately deceived Beau—I had just hidden all those pieces of the past that seemed irrelevant to who we were together. The thought of attempting to explain all of the past, all of who I once was to Beau, exhausted me. I wondered when I had stopped really trying to talk to him, when had he really stopped listening, and which one had come first.

  I stood and reached for the phone to call Mother, let her know I was coming home. Beau moved in the back of the house; I felt his presence more than I heard it. After I spoke to Mother, I’d see if Beau was in the bedroom waiting for me. Sometimes, only sometimes, I could feel the wings if he held me and I knew he was really there.

  Mother answered on the first ring as if she’d been standing next to the phone—waiting.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Death is one ditch you cannot jump.”

  —GULLAH PROVERB

  Beau’s hug still sat warm on my back and shoulders—his strong squeeze and instructions to have a good time and hurry home lingered in the car. I drove with the radio off, the windows rolled down on the stretch of I-16 that bore nothing but exit signs signaling Dairy Queen parfaits at the next stop. I passed sloping farms with white homes, silos and red barns. Although, as Mother often told me, farm life was much more romantic in imagination than in reality, the carpet of fertile fields, the cows and the patient machinery waiting to be put to use did look idyllic.

  The rush of tires against pavement, the swish of cars passing, the thump of a bump or gradation in the road, made me feel more alive, more exposed, than if I’d closed myself up inside the Lexus.

  Beau had been agreeable and even slightly cheerful about my trip and I wished I could attribute it to his understanding of my need to visit Seaboro. But I couldn’t. Beau was too far down the rabbit hole of winning the negligence case, of earning the big promotion, to see or hear the feelings I could barely articulate. Beau’s long hours; his preoccupation; the junior lawyer with her long legs and adoring gaze; my best friend divorced and moved on; B.J. gone. Each thought was a punch to my mind and I didn’t want to dwell on any of them. Except B.J.—I longed to hear his voice.

  I picked up the cell phone and dialed his number. His slow drawl came across the lines, warmed me.

  “Hey, darlin’,” I said.

  “Hey, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Just driving . . . I’m headed to Grandmother’s for a few days. You?”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Just fine. It’s a long story. I’m just calling to check on you.”

  His words became garbled, drowned out by music and voices in the background.

  “What?” I said.

  “Sorry, Mom. There’s a lot of people here. Can I call you back?”

  “B.J., it’s five o’clock in the afternoon. What kind of big party can be going on this early? Aren’t you supposed to be at baseball practice?”

  “Practice ends at four o’clock and this is Nashville—there’s always a party.” He laughed and his voice sounded different, larger.

  “Be careful, honey.”

  “Always, Mom. Always.”

  “I love you, B.J.”

  “You too, Mom. Gotta go, ’kay?”

  I hung up the phone and turned on the radio to drown out the empty space inside me that reached for my son so far away—a nagging fear that any youthful wildness he’d tamped down for us was now coming to the fore.

  As I drew closer to Seaboro, the air grew moist and warm from
the nearby sea. Then the bridge over Seaboro River, a large pewter swell like the back of a dolphin rising from the water, appeared before me. Soon I was on top of the bridge, the water blue and aqua, green and sage, in islands of color, like multihued clouds hovering beneath a plane. Live oaks—older than the founding documents of our country—bent over the banks and corners of the river as if they were worshipping the flowing water.

  Cate’s words about rotten roots and fake lives came to me. Had I merely covered up B.J.’s problems, allowing everyone to believe that nothing ever went wrong in our family? In the many times I’d concealed his youthful foolishness, maybe I’d been protecting my own.

  I now wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t hidden B.J.’s mistakes, if I hadn’t placed my shield over him all those times. Maybe Beau’s love would have been enough, but I’d been too fearful to find out because maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t have been enough and the family’s equilibrium, which was meticulously balanced on the fulcrum of goodness, would collapse.

  The culmination of B.J.’s mistakes had come when he’d said he was spending the night at his friend Tyler’s house. I hadn’t checked if this was true. He was sixteen, and the team had a late baseball game; he’d be riding the school’s athletic bus across the county.

  And as is the mother’s curse of hearing everything, I heard the back door click open, then shut at five thirty in the morning. I opened my eyes and stared at the dark ceiling, heard the slow, even breaths that let me know Beau was asleep. He’d worked late and slept soundly. I walked into the hall just as B.J. opened his bedroom door.

  “Mom.” He held his hand on his doorknob. My name came as a statement. His clothes and hair were damp; drops of water fell onto the wool carpet.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  In a quiet blur of fatigue, B.J. told me the story. He and Tyler had left the baseball game with the team, but after they’d arrived back at school, they’d decided to stop by a party given by a friend whose parents were out of town. In a stunt inspired by a dare from one of the football players, the few boys from the baseball team at the party hot-wired the athletic bus and drove it into the lake in front of the school.

  As B.J. told me this story, I motioned for us to move into his room. By the time he’d finished, I’d sunk into his desk chair with my hands covering my face. “Where is the bus now?” I asked.

  “In the lake.” His voice quivered.

  “No.”

  He nodded. “I’m dead, Mom. It was a dare from the football team after we’d lost the baseball game. I wasn’t . . . thinking. We just took the dare and . . .” He sank onto his bed. “I’m so dead. The recruiter from Vanderbilt is coming to the game tomorrow and if I play badly or don’t play at all because Coach finds out about this . . . I’ll lose my chance to—”

  I held up my hand. “Let’s get some sleep, B.J. We’ll figure it out later—just try to get some sleep.” I stood, kissed him on the cheek and walked from his room. I curled back into my bed with numerous options floating above me and they all seemed to land on top of my culpability: I hadn’t called to find out if he really spent the night at Tyler’s or arrived safely after the game, I hadn’t gone to the game because we’d had a dinner party, and more importantly—he’d taken the dare because he was my child. I groaned and rolled over; then knowing sleep wasn’t returning, I rose and began the day.

  Morning arrived full and chaotic—a doubleheader baseball game, a luncheon and a dinner party for a friend’s anniversary. No moment, no impetus, remained to take this piece of our life and fit it into a puzzle where it did not belong.

  That afternoon I sat with Beau in the bleachers and we held hands while B.J. pitched a no-hitter for the first time in the school’s history. Beau ran onto the field, gave his son a high five and hugged him in front of the overflow crowd. The baseball recruiter from Vanderbilt met them on the field and I knew I’d made the right decision not to tell. Or had I?

  Eventually the blame for the destroyed bus fell on a rival school we’d beaten in football too many years in a row. After that, B.J. seemed to try even harder to be good. God, what had I handed down to my son in the DNA of my wild nature, then in teaching him the art of covering up?

  As I now crossed the river that divided not only the land, but also the separate pieces of my life, I remembered my longing to tell Beau about the incident, but I hadn’t. Maybe I’d ignored longing so many times through the years until eventually I’d just stopped feeling it.

  I wound the car through the streets of Seaboro in the early evening until I arrived in Mother’s driveway. I stared up at my old bedroom; the curtains were drawn as if the room slept with blankets pulled up tight. I hadn’t stayed in my childhood bedroom since the night before I left for Mawmaw and Grandpa’s, three days after the fire that had destroyed the Keeper’s Cottage on my high school graduation night.

  Although I’d visited my childhood home at least once a year—alternating holidays with Beau’s family—I’d never come without my husband and my son, and we’d always stayed in the guest suite. Every time I’d visited Mother, I’d had Beau to shelter me from both the memories and the old friends. I had run into Tim a few times through the years at the grocery store, a Seaboro Festival, or the five-and-dime, which still stood on the corner of Magnolia and Main, but I’d never talked to him—just nodded and smiled.

  I climbed out of the car and stared at the porch. The steps up to the front door had been recently painted and not a single scuff mark marred the surface. After all, a visitor’s first impression was the most important.

  I stood at the front door, ran my hand over the doorknob and suppressed a laugh at the impulse to sneak in the back window rather than walk into the polished front hall, which would smell of lemon and moist wood.

  The door swung open, bands of light fell onto the porch, and Mother stood in the doorway. She looked exactly as she had in the days when I’d ridden my bike up to the front porch, or jumped off the school bus at the end of the driveway. Her hair was now silver instead of blond, but the oak-filtered evening sunlight blurred the distinction. Her lips straight, her hands on her hips, she could have been frozen in time. But when I came close, I saw the slight stoop in her stance, the wrinkles set in the familiar facial expressions.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “So good to see you too, Mother. The traffic was terrible between Atlanta and Macon with the construction.”

  “You should have called.” Mother hugged me, but it was more a placement of her forearms around my shoulders than an embrace.

  “Well”—I smiled—“I’m here.”

  “I bet you’re famished. . . . Would you like something to eat or drink, dear?”

  “I ate dinner on the road. But I’d love some hot tea.”

  Mother turned and walked down the hall and I swore I heard her mumble, “That would be ‘yes, ma’am.’ ”

  I was thirteen years old again, grounded for forgetting my manners, and following Mother down the hall with my tail between my legs.

  No, I wouldn’t let it happen that way. I leaned my head far back and stared up the curved staircase. The ceiling twirled above me and I almost saw a pin-straight blond girl sitting on the top step, dreaming of floating down the stairs without touching the floorboard. The little girl who actually thought she could fly, until she broke her right arm trying to do so.

  I closed my eyes and sighed, leaned against the banister. When was the last time I thought I could fly?

  Mother came into the hall. “Are you coming, Meridy?”

  “Mother?” I opened my eyes.

  “Yes?” She walked closer, her eyebrows squeezed together.

  “Do you remember when I broke my arm and I had that terrible cast? . . .”

  “Of course I do. You scared me to death.”

  “I did?”

  “What do you think? I heard this banging and whumping in the hall and I came out, biscuit dough all over myself, and there you are, all twisted a
t the bottom of the steps. You weren’t even crying. . . . You had the silliest little grin.”

  “I was trying to fly. I thought I could go down the stairs without touching.”

  “You what?”

  “I thought I could fly. . . . I sure don’t feel like that anymore.”

  “Meridy, you couldn’t fly then.”

  I looked directly at Mother. “But I thought I could.”

  “Are you okay?” Mother lifted her chin; her wrinkles deepened as she furrowed her brow in worry.

  “Fine,” I said, sure that we weren’t going to truthfully answer the question in the hallway with tea on the stove, my luggage in the car. There wasn’t anything to answer anyway . . . except maybe why the past few days, I was remembering more of who I had been than who I had become.

  I walked down the hall behind Mother, past the portraits of family members, past the pine trestle table handed down from Great-grandma, past the sword on the wall from Great-granduncle Haywood’s last battle in the Civil War. So much behind me, so much contributing to who I was.

  Late, muted sunlight spilled through the floor-to-ceiling kitchen windows, scattered on the pine table. I sat; Mother’s prize peonies sprang from a Waterford vase in a wild mass of beauty. She placed a teacup next to my elbow and I lifted it, pinkie out, and took a sip. “Thanks, Mother. You want to sit on the back porch with me and have this tea? It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful night.”

  “Oh, you go ahead. My sinuses are bothering me and the pollen is terrible right now.”

  I held up my hand. “That’s okay, Mother. I’ll stay in here with you. So, tell me, how is everything here?”

  “Not much to tell.” She placed her cup so gently in the saucer that there was no clink of china. “Mrs. Foster—you know, down the street?”

  “Of course I know her. She’s only lived down the street my entire life. She never gave candy away for Halloween—only apples. Always.” I scrunched up my nose.

  “Have some respect,” she said, her lips tight, her eyes narrowed. “She passed away last week.”