The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “It’s here, Neil. This is happening.” He places the ball at the next tee. “The Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza. Obviously Herodotus would never have known about it when he was compiling his list of wonders, but it was certainly magnificent. Go ahead.”

  “Fuck me,” I hiss. I stand at the ball and give it a quick angry swat, and it jumps across a wooden barrier into another vignette. Alan nods.

  “You weren’t supposed to go for the Colossus of Rhodes.”

  “Fuck the Colossus, Al! Jesus fucking Christ!” I throw the putter with a sidearm toss so forceful it flies through the air with a helicopter sound, reaches the highway and bounces across into the opposite ditch. “Are you missing what’s going on here?”

  “My trying to help you out is what’s going on here.”

  I shake my head, let out a guttural cry of “Augh!” and run to the road and south toward the orchard. When I come to the trees, the sheltering regular columns of trees, I turn into them and sprint as hard as I can. It seems possible sometimes, if I press myself with enough physical effort, to forget about everything. But that mechanism in my running, or in my head, does not seem to be working. Taking in air with great sucking gasps, remembering everything, I come through to the field and sprint for my house. Alan rides up the drive on his bike as I get there.

  “What the hell?” I shout, throwing up my hands. “Can you give it a rest?” I can’t get away from anything, it seems.

  “I thought the mini golf would calm you down,” he says, panting.

  “No.” I stagger, and brace myself with a hand against my house. “No. It did not have that effect.” I drop to a seat on the steps to my side door and hold my head in my hands.

  “Obviously. I bet throwing the putter felt pretty good though.”

  I look up. “Alan?”

  “You destroyed it. So, what about Wendy?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what about Wendy?’”

  “Are you ready to let go a little bit?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Alan’s phone sings with a ringtone that sounds like a fugue, and he holds up his hand. “Just a second. Hi, what’s up?” He nods with the phone to his ear and says “uh huh” maybe fifteen times. “Okay. Okay. We’re at Neil’s house now.” He gives me a paternal sort of smile. “Kristin tracked down Lauren. She’s going to Lauren’s place, and they’re going to talk.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling relief wash over me like a cool running river. “Thank you.”

  “She’s upset, but I think she’ll get over it. She’s emotional. Give her some time.” I nod. “Now, Wendy. There’s paperwork you’ll need to do.”

  “I’ve looked into the paperwork.”

  “Christopher has let go, Neil. He’s beyond it.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “He has. Now it’s your turn. And one more thing. This is not a question. It’s a command, and I’m stating this to you in the most serious way.”

  “Okay? What?”

  “You need to tell Chris. Everything. You need to tell him tonight.”

  I nod, and return my head to my hands.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

  To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 11, 4:18 pm

  Subject:UPDATE

  _____________________________

  W-

  Everything is fine here.

  Really, everything is great.

  -N

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Alan encourages me to clean myself up, and he stays at my house while I go back to my room to shower and change into some regular clothes. Just this transformation is an improvement; I feel already like I’m better equipped to deal with things. When I come back out, I find Alan has made coffee and cleaned up my kitchen.

  “Thank you,” I say, and he holds out his hands in a supplicant’s pose.

  “It’s nothing. You’re old phone rang a bunch while you were in the shower. They didn’t leave any messages, though”

  “I get that sometimes. Beginning of the school year. Kids playing pranks. Little shits.” I take a seat at the kitchen table. “Were your kids planned?” I ask. Alan offers me a cup of coffee, and I shake my head to decline. I’m wired enough as it is.

  “As planned as they could be, I suppose. We actually had a pretty hard time getting pregnant. Both times. You’d think it would have been easier, for the amount of practice we got—”

  “Stop it. Really.”

  “You need to lighten up,” he says. “So how will it start? The talk, I mean. With Christopher.”

  I tap my fingers on the tabletop. “I’m going to try to be as direct as I can be. I mean, I do this with kids all the time at school. I just need to think of it that way. I’m actually pretty good at this stuff, you know?” This is good. If I can view the whole situation with some sort of professional detachment, maybe I can cope with it.

  “I know you are,” Alan says. He pulls his phone from his pocket to check the time. “When does he get home?”

  “He’s usually home by now,” I say. “But he’s got this leadership thing this week after school. Student Council—” I’m interrupted by a ringtone, and Alan lifts his hand to stop me talking.

  “Hold on. It’s Kristin.” He steps into the dining room, and I hold my breath. “Hey,” I hear him say. “Uh huh. Yep. Okay. See you in a bit.”

  “Are they coming over?” I ask as he returns to the kitchen.

  “No. Lauren is staying home for now.”

  “But what—”

  “She’s calling you in a little bit. She’s okay. She’s calmed down. You guys are going to be okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, thank Kristin.” Alan peers out the window over my sink, leaning forward so he can see down my drive. “Do you want me to hang around?”

  “You don’t need to. Thank you, though.”

  Alan takes his jacket from the back of the chair where it’s been hanging. “It’s nothing. You’d do the same for me. Of course, I wouldn’t be in a mess like this in the first place.”

  “Jesus, shut up. Don’t you ever take a break?”

  Alan shrugs. “You know I’m just messing with you. To lighten your mood.” I throw up my hands, and he points at me. “Look, it’s working!” I shake my head. “Call me after you tell Chris. I want to know how it goes.” Alan exits through the kitchen door, and I hear his bike bell as he rides off. I take my own phone from my pocket and check the display in the event I’ve somehow missed Lauren’s call already; there’s nothing. The battery shows just a hair more than half a charge, so I plug it into its charger by the answering machine and pace through the house, passing by to check the phone maybe every thirty seconds or so. After who knows how long—maybe just five minutes, maybe a lifetime—I’m too worried I’ll miss the call, so I take a seat in the living room recliner and stare at the phone on the shelf. My body will not remain still, though. I get back up, unplug the phone, and pace some more. Ten more minutes pass before vibrate mode shocks my hand. It’s Lauren, and I nearly drop the phone to the floor pawing at the screen trying to accept her call.

  “Maybe you should come over,” she says. “Right now.”

  I rarely speed while driving, but for this trip, I do. Many of the children of Port Manitou’s police forces have been students of mine, and I’ve been teaching long enough now that some of the cops themselves passed through my classroom when they were younger. If I get stopped, I figure, I’ve got enough pull that I’ll be able to talk my way out of it. Pull is not necessary, though; I tear through town and over the spillway bridge unmolested, and park behind Lauren’s open garage door. I bound up the stairs two at a time, and Lauren rises—red-faced and grasping a handful of tissues—from her futon couch as I enter. We come together and I close my arms around her, and we stand that way quietly for a long time before Lauren sighs deeply.

  “I think I’m calmed down,” she says into my chest.

  “Why didn’t
you call? You should have called.”

  “I was scared. I was freaking out.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “You can’t blame me for it.”

  “I’m not. I just want to know how.”

  “It happened, okay? It’s not my fault, and it’s not your fault. It just is. I’m not ready, and I don’t think you’re ready, but it happened, and here we are. Right?”

  “Okay,” I say. “It happened. What do we do? Do you want to be with me?”

  She nods, and sniffs. “Yes. I do. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Lauren wipes her eyes with her fingers.

  “All right. Are we going to have the baby?” Lauren gives me a shocked look, her mouth open, when I ask this, and I shake my head. “I’m not saying ending it is what I want. At all. But we need to talk about this. All of this. Do you want—”

  “If we end this pregnancy,” Lauren says, “that’s it. That ends us too. We can’t be, anymore, if we end this.”

  “Okay.” I say.

  “Okay what?”

  “Lauren,” I say, before taking a long breath to keep myself together. I’m staring straight ahead at a bookshelf I assembled only days ago. It feels more like an age. “If we can’t be….” I draw another breath, and reach for her hand. “I couldn’t take that. It would break me. I would break. Sometimes I feel like I am barely holding myself together. Most of the time I’m okay. But other times…If you weren’t there, that would finish me off. I’d break.”

  “It would break me too,” she says, in a voice I can barely hear.

  “Let’s not break.”

  She nods, and whispers: “Okay.” She sniffs again, turns to reach into her bag on the futon and lets out a half laugh when she straightens back up with a handful of pregnancy tests. “I guess we should get a second opinion,” she says. “I need to pee anyway.” She clutches the tests with both hands and crosses the room, but stops at the entry to her hallway.

  “Come on,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone for this one, okay?”

  I follow her and stand outside the door while she goes to the bathroom; she laughs at me and says I can come in but I wait in the hall until she flushes. We lean together over the sink to watch the test. The control line is there, solid and obvious, and we wait and wait with me looking over her shoulder until, like an old developing Polaroid, we see the second blue line fill into view.

  “There’s our second opinion,” I say.

  “I guess we’re having a baby,” Lauren says. She laughs, and starts to cry at the same time. “I don’t know if I’m ready! I don’t know what to do with a baby.”

  “We’ll be fine.” I wrap my arms around her from behind. “You love them, and take care of them, and hope they turn out okay. That’s all you can do.”

  “You love them,” Lauren says, and she turns around kisses me. “And all this time, have you loved me? I’m not just some secret of yours?”

  “I really do. You know I do.”

  “Okay. We’ll be fine then. What about Chris?”

  I step back from her, and my throat tightens. “I’m going to tell him.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Sometime soon. Tonight, I think. I really should tonight.”

  “Do you want me to be there when you do it?”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “I understand. Do you want me to move in?”

  “What, you mean now? Today?”

  Lauren laughs and sniffs, and gives me a poke in the chest. “No. But soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can wait, a little, if that would be better for Chris. Oh, my God, we’re going to have a baby.”

  “We are.” My stomach is tight, partially with excitement, and mostly with terror.

  “And the paperwork with Wendy….”

  “Stop. Can’t think about it right now,” I say. “I can’t. Let’s get out of the bathroom.”

  I step out and start down the hallway, but Lauren grabs the back of my shirt.

  “Come lie down.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, not for that. Let’s just lie down.”

  Lauren tugs me into her room, and I ease myself back on the bed. She climbs on top of me and presses her face into my shoulder.

  “We’re having a baby,” she whispers. “I’m glad I didn’t drink so much Saturday night. We’ll have to put all our things together. Will this be our bed? It’s not as big as yours. Most of my furniture can stay here—”

  “Can the paintings stay here?”

  “Stop it. I’m being serious. I’m thinking out loud. We should keep this place. We can rent it out. We should hang onto it. Can we set up your spare room for the baby?” She lifts her head to look at me. “I’m sorry, do you want me to shut up? I’m thinking all over the place.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. Like her words, my own thoughts are jumbled. Lauren’s weight feels nice on me, not suffocating, and I drag my fingers up and down her back. “We’ll figure it all out.”

  “I should call Kristin,” Lauren says, and I cock an eyebrow. “She wanted me to let her know that everything was okay.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I think so,” Lauren says. “It is. Other than some slight remorse over blowing off my clinical chemistry exam.” She smiles. “Yes. I think everything is okay. Are you ready to tell Chris?”

  I close my eyes. “I’m ready,” I say. But I’m not quite certain that I am.

  Racing back up my drive, I curse and smack the steering wheel when I see Christopher’s station wagon already parked in front of our house. I wanted to be home first. I wanted to make myself prepared. I also wanted to make sure the pregnancy test wrapper was gone from the bathroom trash. I can’t imagine he’d be rooting through the garbage, but then again, who knows what could happen? I don’t want him to find out that way.

  My son looks up from his homework spread across the kitchen table when I come through the door. He smiles and says hey, but he also looks perplexed by my arrival. Can he sense how nervous I am? Is it obvious to him?

  “Had to run an errand,” I say. “Your grandma needed something.” I hate how easy it is to lie sometimes.

  “There was no note,” Chris chides me, reaching up to tap the blank whiteboard. “I felt abandoned.”

  “Stop it. There will be no abandonment.”

  “What’s for dinner?” he asks.

  “What’s for…you aren’t cooking?”

  “Your night, Dad. You don’t remember? Is it old age?”

  “Man,” I say, doing my best to act genuinely clueless. “I totally forgot it was my night.” I consider, just for a moment, taking the seat across from him at our table so I can tell him everything. Right now. But he does need to eat, and it dawns on me that perhaps a neutral setting might be best for the bomb I’m about to drop on him. “Want to go out?” I ask. “Get a burger at the brewpub? I’m pretty beat, to tell the truth. Let’s let someone else cook.”

  “Sure, I guess.” He looks over his homework, as if my dinner suggestion will somehow be confirmed there. “That sounds okay.”

  We take Christopher’s car, and I’m mostly quiet for the trip into town while my son tells me about his after school activities. He catches me up on working out, student council, and the leadership meetings he’s been attending. He’s back and forth on culinary school, he says. I’m only half able to listen, because my stomach is in a knot. In the brewpub’s parking lot I pause with one foot out of the car to check my phone; there are two texts waiting for me, one from Alan, and one from Lauren. Both of them want to know how things are going with Chris. I don’t write anything back.

  Inside the restaurant we’re greeted warmly by the hostess; she’s a former student (whose name I can’t remember at all) and she seems to know Chris somehow too. She leads us upstairs to the family seating area, and I’m relieved to see that hardly any of the other tables are occupied. This is good. Th
is vacancy will help. A waiter comes and asks if we’d like anything to drink, suggesting to me a good IPA that they’ve just put on tap.

  “I….” It’s been a long time since I’ve had a beer, but I doubt it would help. “I’m okay,” I say. “I’ll pass.”

  Chris raises his eyebrows when the guy leaves. “Thought you were about to drink on a school night there, Dad.”

  “One beer would not be so significant,” I say. “Maybe one would help me rest. I didn’t get the best sleep last night.”

  “I didn’t either,” Chris says, and he laughs. “Maybe I should have gotten one.” I shake my head and try to act jovial, but the menu is trembling in my hands. Why does this have to be so hard? Here I am, I am having a fine, happy evening out with my well-adjusted son, knowing quite unhappily that it’s all going to go to hell in a few minutes when I finally get up the courage to tell him my not-so-good news.

  “Did you hear about those sophomores, Dad?” Chris asks as he glances over the menu. Our waiter returns with glasses of water and takes our orders.

  “What sophomores?”

  “I figured you would have heard about it from Mrs. Mackie already,” he says. “Some kid sent out pictures of his girlfriend blowing him or something.” This nearly makes me choke on the first sip of my water.

  “Chris,” I say. My heart, as if it couldn’t sink any lower, nearly bottoms out at the thought of the Mastersons getting this news.

  “What? I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “No, I don’t know anything about it.” What’s another lie? “And even if I did, that stuff is confidential and I couldn’t say anything anyway. You shouldn’t be spreading stories around. What if it’s not even true?”

  “You’re bullshitting, Dad. Everyone knows about it already. They’re all over the place. Sparks said two different people tried to show him.”

  “Jesus. Did he look?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He’s not stupid.”

  “Good,” I say. “I’ll say something to Peggy. I have to, now that you’ve told me about it. And if someone tries to show you—”