Where the River Runs

by Patti Callahan Henry

  Remembrance poured in like the smoke I’d sensed descending while I’d lain across Danny’s shoulders. “Danny.” I thought I screamed, yet nothing came out but a pure, raw animalistic wail. I forced my eyes as far open as I could; I was belted to a stretcher next to an ambulance parked in the sand. Strobe lights flashed against the night. Figures moved back and forth whispering to each other. No one looked at me.

  I reached down and fumbled with the belt, undid its latch. A plastic mask fell from my face: oxygen. I was falling to the ground, jolted by sand and pine straw. The figures turned. Someone, I thought it was Karen, yelped and lurched toward me. My legs gave way beneath me when I tried to stand.

  “Stop, stop. You’ll hurt yourself.” A woman in a blue uniform came into view and knelt next to me. “You must be still. You’ve inhaled too much smoke. . . . Be still.”

  I rolled to my right as if I could escape this woman telling me what to do. I grabbed Karen’s ankle. “Danny . . .”

  Karen sobbed, buried her head in her hands and ran away. Nothing else needed to be said. I allowed the darkness to come again—settled willingly into the blank space where I wouldn’t face what waited for me in the light.

  I wasn’t able to attend Danny’s funeral—the doctor said I couldn’t. The smoke inhalation had turned to bronchitis, and the meds they gave me allowed me to slide down the long, narrow tunnel of darkness I craved.

  Whenever I emerged to the fierce light of Danny’s absence, the medication would take me back down and I went willingly, eagerly. In this place I found scattered, gentle-edged memories of Danny: on the boat teaching me how to hook a worm, in a hammock asleep as I lay against his chest, in the woods carving arrows out of broken twigs with his pocket knife.

  My favorite memory came as the pain medication drew me under slowly, evenly, to the softer parts of my dreams. Here Danny, Timmy and I played manhunt, hide-and-seek in the dark, with the other neighborhood kids. We were thirteen years old. I crouched behind a palmetto tree that had been shattered by lightning. The branches, dead and dry, hid me in their shadows. The night had fallen dark and moonless; the stars concealed above low clouds. The thrill of manhunt came when you hid alone, hoping you’d be found, and hoping you wouldn’t be found. I heard footsteps and held my breath. A body crouched down next to me. I whispered, “Hey, this is my hiding place . . . Move.”

  A hand reached out and touched my arm. “It’s me . . . shh,” Danny’s voice said. Somehow he saw better in the darkness than I did. He’d scooted up next to me, shared my hiding place. We didn’t say a word for the longest, most precious moments I’d known. We shared that one space under the leaves, below the blank sky. He reached up and ran his finger across my face where a piece of moss tickled. I couldn’t see him, but I felt him and it was all I needed.

  And it was all I needed as the pain medication drew me to him. I didn’t need to see him—just sensed he was there. Each time I thought I drew closer and closer to him in the haze, I’d realize he was gone. Completely gone. But by the time the next medication was given, I’d believe I could find him again or that he’d find me in the darkness as he once had, and would stay with me until we were both found.

  I lay in bed for three days, praying that whatever internal damage the smoke had done to my lungs would kill me. When I realized that it wouldn’t, I still refused to open my eyes and face the knowledge of Danny’s absence—a gaping hole I felt opening beneath me every time I came to consciousness.

  On the third day, Doc Hamm came into my room and sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re going to be fine, Meridy. Unlike some of the other kids, you’re going to be fine.”

  “Who else died?” I asked with my eyes closed.

  “What do you mean, ‘Who else’?”

  “Who else besides Danny?” My voice sounded monotone, depleted.

  Doc’s eyes lifted. His bushy eyebrows moved together as one. “How did you . . . ?”

  “I can feel it. He’s gone. Who else?”

  “Bill Murphy . . . I guess he’s the boy who threw the gas on the fire.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “Now that you’re talking, can you remember anything? Can you answer some questions?”

  How could I answer questions when there was nothing inside me but a black void? I had no answers, no questions, nothing at all. I shook my head; even words seemed too much of an effort in a world that made no sense, in a world empty of Danny, in a world that would allow a boy like him to die.

  Mother’s presence filled the room with a combination of cold and panic. I twisted away from her face. Then the bed tipped as Doc Hamm stood up.

  “She’s still not able to answer questions,” he said to Mother.

  “Give me some time with her.” Mother whispered as if I couldn’t hear her.

  The bedroom door clicked shut and I buried my face farther into the pillow. Mother was here and Danny was not. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to lift my head for.

  “Meridy McFadden, you need to listen to me.”

  Some younger, more obedient fragment of me rolled over and looked at Mother. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You need to know what happened. We have to talk. . . . You will have to leave for a little while.”

  It didn’t matter what Mother said or where I went in this new blank world, so I just nodded.

  “Danny and Bill Murphy died in that fire. These are the things that happen when children are irresponsible and foolish, Meridy. I’ve warned you about this for a very long time. You cannot run around testing fate at every turn, acting as if you have no responsibility or that there are no consequences. I’m going to tell you what happened. Bill Murphy died immediately when the fire blew up in his face after he threw the gas can in the bonfire. All anyone can figure is that either he wanted to die or he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. The flames spread quickly in the wind to the cottage. Danny pulled Tim and Karen from the cottage, where they were trapped in an upstairs bedroom. I’m sure Karen’s parents do not want to know what she and Tim were doing in an upstairs bedroom of a deserted, condemned cottage at one in the morning.”

  I rolled away, my emotions as flat as my voice.

  “Young lady, roll back over and listen to me. You were part of this and you need to hear what happened.”

  Yes, that would be the punishment I deserved. I turned over and stared at Mother. “Yes?” I sat up.

  “These are the bits and pieces of information that have come from your friends to the police. All of you trespassed, destroyed a town landmark—a historic landmark, for God’s sake. All that is left of Seaboro’s Keeper’s Cottage is the foundation and part of the rear wall to the kitchen.” Her face filled with a pained grimace—the look she had when a migraine arrived. “Anyway . . . Danny thought that some other kids were at the top, in the lighthouse tower. God only knows what they’d be doing up there. . . . That tower was threatening to crumble at any moment. All of you thinking that you’ll live forever . . .” Mother then stood and paced the room, touching my horseback-riding trophies, my collectible china dolls, then my diploma resting on my desk.

  The looming shadow I had avoided for three days now approached and smothered me in the darkening panic of the lost. Sobs rose. I clapped my hand over my mouth. If I started crying now, I’d never stop.

  Mother turned back to me. “Danny went to the top of the lighthouse, but no one was there. Whoever it was must’ve come down on their own. Only one person saw what happened to Danny . . . little Weatherly Jones. She said that Danny stood on the top deck of the lighthouse, screamed down for Tim . . . then turned around and went back in . . . then came out again. They assume he was trapped up there. . . . Then the tower tilted, broke off from the back. Weatherly said it dangled there for a minute before Danny tried to jump from the parapet to the sea. But, of course, the water there is shallow, because of the sand they’ve deposited.”

  “Then what?” I found my voice, found my grief, found my desperate need to know.r />
  “Well, it all gets a bit mixed-up after that because no one really saw what happened. Everyone ran from the falling tower.”

  “Who . . . found him? Where is Danny?”

  “Today, this morning . . . they found him, Meridy. He—” Mother’s hands fluttered around the air in an aimless, desperate attempt to tell me the unbearable. “His body washed up on Oystertip Island. They still don’t know whether he was killed by the fire, the fall, or . . . drowning.”

  “It was the fall.”

  Mother turned in a sharp pivot on her high heels. “How do you know that?”

  “I can feel it. I know. It was the fall. You can leave now, Mother.”

  “No, Meridy. I have some more—”

  I held up my hand. “Can it wait?” I wanted to descend into the sorrow washing over me, taste it, swallow it whole and pay for my own part in it. There was something I needed to do, couldn’t do until Mother left.

  “Listen to me. We are going to send you up to Mawmaw and Granddad’s in the mountains. You need some rest. It will be absolute chaos here. Everyone will try to find someone to blame. And we know you had nothing to do with it. But whoever took part in the bonfire will have to take responsibility for that. We don’t want you mixed up with any of this. You leave for college in three months and—”

  “You want to hide me. You’re ashamed. I understand.”

  “We want to protect you. We know that you had nothing to do with building the bonfire that set the cottage on fire. . . . We know you didn’t go in the cottage. You need to rest. We are protecting you, Meridy.”

  “I did go in that cottage and I helped Danny build that bonfire . . . and I set off—”

  “No, you didn’t.” Mother marched toward the door. “No, you did not!”

  I lifted an untouched glass of water on my ruffled lilac bedside table and threw the glass across the room. “Danny saved my life too. Mine too. I did go in there . . . looking for him. And I wouldn’t have left without him. He carried me out. I. Wouldn’t. Have. Left. Him.” Fear rose with the sorrow in a swelling silence. “He left me. I asked him to stay.” But I said these last words so quietly, I was sure Mother didn’t hear them.

  Mother stared at the shattered crystal on the flowered carpet, then at me. “We must get you to Mawmaw’s. I’ll get Tulu to come clean this up. You rest now.” She turned, left the room, closed the door behind her.

  I rose from the bed, walked toward my dresser and stripped off my nightgown. I pulled on a pair of cutoff jean shorts with the peace sign appliqués—Danny’s favorite—and a T-shirt. I looked at myself in the gilded mirror over my dressing table. Whoever the blond girl looking back at me was would soon be gone.

  The door clicked, opened. I turned to Tulu’s angelic face.

  “Lil’ one, whatchoo doin’ out of bed?” she said in a voice that sounded like a soft song.

  “There’s something I need to do.”

  Tulu walked toward me, dropped the dust pail and vacuum at the door. “My precious child, ‘Death is one ditch you can’t jump.’ ”

  “I’m not trying to jump anything.” I fled to the bathroom and locked myself in until the vacuum’s hum stopped and the click of my bedroom door signaled her departure.

  I walked toward my bedroom window. I’d been in and out of that window so many times I had used it almost more than the doors. I slid from the windowsill to the roof, scooted down to the side pillar to meet a trellis of jasmine vines. I climbed on the opposite side so as not to disturb the flowers, then landed on all fours on the manicured lawn behind the house.

  The grass felt alive between my toes. I didn’t understand how it kept growing, how the birds still flew. Shouldn’t everything stop? Even if the grass didn’t die with Danny, shouldn’t it stop growing? How could everyone and everything just keep blundering ahead? Mother was making plans; friends were being questioned; Danny’s body was . . .

  The pain was unbearable in a way I’d never known anything else to be. The only way to stop the grief was to get rid of my heart—abolish it. And there was only one place to take my heart: the sea.

  I ran across the lawn to where it sloped from manicured grass to a thin line of the gray Lowcountry mixture of sand and dirt; then I turned toward the sea oats and river, which ran to the sea. I stood at the shoreline, the river in a waiting stillness as if it knew what I had come to offer. I waded in to my knees, to the gradation of sand I’d known since I was a toddler, where the river’s firm floor sloped to greater depths. I dived in, allowed the water to surround my body, mind, senses and heart. The tide flowed out and I let it carry me. I’d heard that you could hold your breath longer underwater than above water, and I tested this theory to the limit.

  I wasn’t there for my body to die, only my heart. My lungs burned and I swam farther out, to a place where I intended to leave behind all I’d ever been. I blew out the last breath resting in the bottom of my lungs and sank deeper. My body ached to pull in a breath, shoot to the surface, but I fought the urge and imagined my heart joining Danny’s where I couldn’t yet allow my body to go. I said good-bye to all wildness and all unrestraint, all pain and all joy, then envisioned a childlike Meridy sinking to the ocean’s floor.

  I floated to the surface and lifted my head above the waves, turned onto my back as my lungs gasped for oxygen. I stared up to the sky of so many different shades of blue that it hurt my eyes to look at it. Why wasn’t it gray, overcast?

  I kicked my legs toward the shore, tasted the salt on my lips, inside my mouth: tears mixed with sea. Then a surge of anger rose and I screamed, against the sky, against Danny’s need to save the others. “Why didn’t you stay with me? I wouldn’t have left you!” I kicked against a dead love, a heaven I no longer believed in and a sea I would never again swim in.

  My voice became raw in the mixture of tears, salt water, smoke damage and screams. Then other voices joined mine, panicked voices yelling my name. I flipped over; Mother, Sissy and Tulu stood on the shore hollering, jumping up and down in absurd motions. A figure swam toward me; dark hair and swinging arms cut through the water. For half a breath I thought it was Danny, but it was Daddy.

  I moved toward him in a slow crawl until we came next to each other. Daddy grabbed me, pulled my arm, as our legs dangled and kicked below us to keep afloat.

  “Not you, Meridy. Don’t let this take you.”

  “I’m not, Daddy, I’m not.” I touched his face, unsure whether the wet was tears or sea. “Only my heart, not me.”

  “Swim in, Meridy . . . with me.”

  I nodded. “Daddy, don’t let Mother send me to the mountains. I won’t be able to breathe.”

  Sorrow wrenched his face in a way I’d never seen. There was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing anyone could do to stop anything.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You need to take care of the root in order to heal the tree.”

  —GULLAH PROVERB

  By the time I finished the story, Tim had wrapped his arms around me. He hadn’t spoken a word through the entire telling until I sagged against him and sighed. “Now you know. I’m telling you because only one other person knows and he can’t say a word—he gave his life so I didn’t have to tell. But the silence is killing me—just like the smoke killed him.”

  Tim whispered, “It was not your fault. It was a terrible accident.”

  “Well, I can’t let you keep the blame just because you gave the party, and I can’t live with the silence and guilt anymore.”

  “Danny ran into that cottage to save Karen and me and whoever else he thought was still in there. I’m the one who told him I thought someone was in the top tower. Please tell me you did not come here to confess . . . or take the blame. It was a stupid accident a very long time ago.”

  “I know what I did, Tim. And no, I didn’t come here to announce I set off a firecracker. It would destroy Mother, damage my marriage to a man I’ve hid all this from, a man who spends his life trying to uncover deception. But one of th
e reasons I came was to try and help.”

  Tim sighed. “Same sweet Meridy, trying to fix everything for everybody. I told you I don’t need help.”

  It was as if I’d laid down a terrible burden and my body rose; I glanced away from Tim and stared at the water, and then walked to its edge.

  He stood, but he didn’t follow. “Meridy?”

  I didn’t turn to answer him. Water licked the edges of my sneakers, splashed my shin. I lifted one leg at a time and removed my socks and shoes, tossed them backward without looking at Tim. I closed my eyes, tasted the briny air and absorbed the heat warming the top of my head. I lifted my face upward, walked into the water until it reached my knees and the hard surface of the cracked shells softened.

  Sand wrapped around my toes; a kiss of fish or moss tickled my shin as I moved forward until the water hugged my waist. I hadn’t put my head below the sea since that day. I took a deep breath and lowered myself into the water until the swell of wave surrounded me. I sank lower, pumped my legs, swung my arms in the even strokes of a rhythm I’d never quite forgotten.

  I lifted my head for a breath and glanced across the drops of sunlight scattered like jewelry on top of the water—nothing but water and sky. My clothes sat heavy on my body and I longed to pull them off beneath the water, yet I continued to swim. Something primal and young and discarded pulled me forward even as I knew Tim watched me from the shore. No fear enveloped me, although I waited for it. I turned and flipped on my back, floated facing the sky.

  Danny, poor sweet Danny. “I loved you, Danny.”

  “I know.” The voice wasn’t aloud, but it was as real as my sodden clothes against my body, as real as the sky floating above me in massive infinity.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” But nothing came back to me this time. I closed my eyes.