Dead River

by Cyn Balog

  Then he sighs. I am sure he was looking forward to “roughing it.” I’m feeling better already. I can keep my distance from Hugo. Maybe we’ll even have running water. A steamy shower would be so …

  She catches me smiling. “It’s nice, huh? But my parents turned off the water for the winter, so …”

  Of course. They only use the cabin in the warmer months. The pipes would have frozen and burst during the long Maine winter if they hadn’t turned off the water. I swallow the bad taste in my throat. “It’s cool.”

  We pile out and Justin begins pulling things from the bed of his truck. Groceries, a backpack of my clothes, my travel chess set, the liter of Absolut Justin took from his dad’s overstocked and underused liquor cabinet to celebrate our conquering of the Dead. Hugo starts snapping pictures of all the trees, as if we don’t have enough of them back home. From here, the river sounds like the gentle hum of an electric toothbrush. The sky is the somber color of castle walls, and the leaves turn out, welcoming rain. Shapeless heaps of dingy snow fight for survival in the new spring grass. Angela grabs a handful of snow and molds it into a ball.

  “Don’t you dare,” I whisper, shivering as I back away.

  But it’s obvious she has other plans. She launches it over to Justin. It breaks into pieces squarely at the back of his neck, making him jump. He turns to us, amused, but before I can point her out, I realize Angela is already pointing at me, an innocent expression on her face. “Dude, I know it’s you,” he says to Angela.

  He throws my pillow at her. It lands in the mud. “Justin!” I shout, annoyed, but I stop when I realize everyone else is laughing. Sometimes it bothers me how well the two of them get along. After all, they are best friends, and have known each other since way before I came into the picture. Justin once told me that Angela is like the sister he never had, and physically she’s not at all like the long line of fair, willowy blondes he’s been associated with, of which I’m the latest. She’s not fat, but she’s solid, with wild, curly black hair and dark skin that turns almost chocolate in the sun. Angela was afraid that she would feel like a third wheel on this trip, which is why she invited Hugo, but she and Justin have so much in common, sometimes I feel like the odd person out.

  I’ve heard the story a thousand times. They met on a skiing trip at Sugarloaf when they were both trying to learn the bunny slope. Their parents became friends and then they found out that they both lived in Wayview, so they kept in touch, going on vacations together sometimes in the winter and summer. Angela went to a private school in Massachusetts, but when I came up, my father insisted I go to the public school, mostly because we didn’t have the money. Justin was in my class, but I didn’t know him well. When we reached high school, Angela successfully convinced her parents to transfer her to public school by failing out of every class she took. Her parents thought that with my father teaching at Wayview High, maybe she’d be inclined to goof off less. Freshman year, she introduced me to Justin, but I didn’t think anything of it other than that he was really cute. He was dating some other blonde in our class, but we always seemed to get thrown together when Angela had parties. It wasn’t until junior year, when I had to do an article on the swim team for yearbook, that we fell for each other. He was the captain, and he came by the yearbook office one day after school to identify all the people in the group photo. He was leaning over me, really close, and then he just moved in and kissed me. We made out for an hour, right in the yearbook office. I remember constantly saying, “But Angela …,” and him whispering, “Angela has nothing to do with this.”

  I snatch the pillow up and dust it off. It’s not that bad. I feel stupid for overreacting. Hugo confirms the fact by snapping a picture of me and captioning it “Girl About to Explode.” He grins. “Not like there probably aren’t four thousand pillows in this place.”

  I push the camera out of my face. I’m about to explain that my pillow is hypoallergenic and my allergies are always worst in the spring and it’s the only pillow I’ve found that’s comfortable enough, but he’s right. I do need to loosen up. Funny, I’ve spent so much energy trying to convince my dad that he’d be okay if he took the shackles off my wrists that I never even thought about whether I would be okay once I finally got loose. This is my first trip away from my dad, away from home. And that is thrilling … but terrifying.

  I stifle a sneeze, then cross my arms over my chest, pinching my skin and mentally reciting my motto: You will be chill. Ice cubes will be jealous of you.

  I’m about to pick up my backpack from Justin’s feet but stop when I see something in the woods. The curve of an elbow, pale white against the lush green, still and stark among the new leaves as they sway in the wind. But the next second, it’s gone. I suck in a breath, exhale slowly. The last thing I need to be doing is seeing things. Again.

  The thing is, nobody here knows about my mother. Not even Angela. Hell, I don’t really even know. The mystery Nia Levesque became a part of is five hundred miles away, and I’d like it to stay there. Nobody here knows my history. And I’m going to keep it that way.

  Chapter Two

  It’s been almost ten years since I moved into the tall pines of Wayview, Maine, the last place on earth I’d have picked to live, if it was up to me.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

  So I guess that means it will be the tenth anniversary of my mom’s death. Not that I’m keeping track. We left New Jersey only a couple weeks afterward, and we’ve never been back.

  These are the facts I have: Nia Levesque waded into the Delaware River one fair summer’s night shortly after my seventh birthday. I know little else because how much a person’s mother hated life is not something people like to discuss with a seven-year-old. I remember things, though, like that her skin was always damp and clammy and that her hair always looked like it needed a comb run through it. Despite those things, she was my sun. When she was gone, it was like my whole universe went out of orbit, because I’d been so used to following three steps behind her.

  I’ve heard that after a suicide, the people left behind always look back and see signs in the victim, signs of pain or trauma they somehow ignored. I know I was only seven, but with my mom, there were no indications. Nothing. She was never distant; she smiled and hugged and kissed me all the time. When I look back at my mom, I can’t help but think there was so much about her I didn’t know, so much she must have kept hidden from me.

  I know that I have forgotten things: the slope of her nose, the color of her skin, the exact blue shade of her eyes, the little mannerisms she had. Pictures don’t convey a whole person, and I only have one of those. It wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but I didn’t know that my father and I would never return home. I would have taken my whole photo book, which had countless beautiful pictures of my mother, but he chose one picture, from my sixth birthday. In it, she’s not even smiling. She’s leaning over me as I blow out the candles on my birthday cake and she looks worried, probably that a lock of my hair might get caught in the flame. I don’t know what her smile looks like anymore. Every memory I have is just a poor reproduction, merely a shade of her. I worry that as days go by I will forget more and more, and the only thing left will be this overwhelming feeling of abandonment. That and the worried, uneasy woman she was in that picture.

  When we lived in New Jersey, we had a house right on the river. I had the best room, all pink, and the sunrise would bounce off the waves and create magical iridescent ripples on my walls. My father put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, but when the moon shone, it would splash the brightest white ripples right onto them. More often than not, I felt like I was sleeping underwater rather than under a night sky.

  Strange things happened around the time of her death. I can’t really explain it. I would lie in my bed, listening to the rush of the river against the rocks, and in time it would sound like voices. Whispering to me. Then the visions came. They didn’t start off frightening. I’d lie in the dark with my eyes open, watching them
parade through my room, oblivious to me, a series of who-knows-what—ideas or dreams or ghosts, playing on a movie reel. Redheaded boys in overalls, fishing. Girls in old-fashioned swim trunks, holding their noses as they plunged into the blackness. Men in waders, sleeves rolled up. Sometimes I’d have conversations with them, play games with them, but usually I’d just watch them quietly, all night long, wishing I could be part of their carefree, happy lives.

  Until the images … changed.

  I fight back the picture of the girl in the pink party dress and tight, stringy braids. I didn’t know her name, didn’t know anything about her except that her expression was hopeless and sad, she was covered in dirt, one of her knee-high socks was pooled around her ankle, and her knees were bloody. I think she wanted to tell me something, but whenever she opened her mouth to speak to me, mud poured from it. Mud trickled from her nose, covering the lower part of her face like a beard. Her cheeks were muddy and lined with tears.

  I stopped sleeping. My dad was stressed out enough teaching history to inner-city kids in Paterson, in a district two hours from our house, so he didn’t need me screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, like I so often did. He thought I missed my mom. And yeah, I did, but there was more. And I was afraid to tell him. Turned out I was as good at keeping secrets as my mom was.

  I lost so many things from that room. My fairy brush, my favorite blue hair ties, my stuffed zebra. And every picture of my mother, except for one. One day, my dad took me out for what I thought was ice cream but turned out to be forever. He’d hastily packed a bag with only a few of my clothes, and so I lost my brand-new Cinderella T-shirt and my comfortable jeans. I don’t know why we left so quickly. Luckily, he’d said, he had family up in Wayview, with a kid just my age, and he couldn’t wait for me to meet them. I knew my father was anxious, because when he is, he repeats himself. As we drove, he kept telling me, over and over again, how much I’d like Maine. How Aunt Missy and Uncle Jim and Angela couldn’t wait to see me. How I was his “everything.” That’s the thing I remember the most, “You’re my everything,” spouted out again and again until it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t care. I had to pee so bad but kept thinking we were almost there. With every passing mile, I became more and more certain I’d never see my things, my old house, again. And I couldn’t stop thinking that if Mom were here, she wouldn’t have agreed to this. She hated the cold. I realized then that this was the first of many things she wouldn’t be around to protect me from.

  That was when I started to hate her. Not long after, I stopped asking questions about why she did what she did. My father always changed the subject anyway.

  Last year Angela hooked up with this guy named Spee. Ken Specian, really, but everyone called him Spee. He was a big jock, totally full of himself, which tells you how much I liked him. Angela has the worst luck with guys; watching her trying to get on with a guy she’s really into is like watching a plane attempting to touch down without landing gear. Anyway, she was so into Spee, but it was obvious that he didn’t give a rat’s you-know-what about her, because, well, he never took her out in public. He never took her anywhere they might see other people from school. All they ever did was go to Frank’s Diner, ten miles out of town on this deserted mountain road. Angela would just mention Frank’s and I would know what she was up to. It was a place the toothless crowd frequented, so she and Spee brought the average age of the customers down to ninety.

  But then, after three months of meeting her there every week, he just stopped calling her. Angela never said as much, but I know she was devastated, because two months later she finally convinced me to go with her to Frank’s. “I need to see our place one last time. To prove he has no hold over me,” she told me. So we went. It was completely uncomfortable, sitting among dozens of people who had to put their dentures on the paper advertisement place mats to keep them clean while they nursed their free senior citizen coffees. But we did it, and there was no mistaking the look of triumph on Angela’s face when we paid our bill and stepped outside.

  That’s kind of what this trip is like to me. I think my dad thinks I’ll have a mental breakdown if I see another river. Maybe because that’s what he would do. But not me. This weekend, I’m proving that the river, that my mother, has no hold over me. She hasn’t been here when I needed her, so there’s no way I’ll let her dictate where I can and can’t go. She lost that privilege ten years ago.

  And seriously, I’m fine. More than fine, now that I’m out of the Monster. I inhale the crisp, clean scent of pine and feel just perfect.

  Angela bounds over to the front porch and pokes around in a snow-covered planter for the key. She and I never talk about my mom. I know Angela never met her, and I don’t think my aunt or uncle did, either, so there really isn’t anything they could say. I think someone told Angela my mom was sick. My mom sometimes complained of not feeling well. Headaches, usually. She tried to hide that from me, too, but I was lost without her, so I’d often sit outside her bedroom, waiting for the Excedrin to kick in. She had a giant green vat of headache pills in the medicine cabinet and a little matching one in her purse. I guess the whole illness thing was the way to go if you wanted to avoid the “uncomfortable truth.” Which, really, everyone did.

  Inside the “cabin,” there’s a three-story-high stone fireplace decorated with giant moose antlers. Uncle Jim loves the outdoors, too, but he’s no Davy Crockett. He is all about modern conveniences. Their place in Wayview, while full of big windows that bring the outdoors in, is crammed with all the latest gadgets: space-age coffeemakers that do everything but pour the stuff down your throat, wall-sized televisions, things like that. I should have known this place would be no different. Angela catches me looking and says, “The antlers are fake.”

  “Oh,” I say, wondering where people buy fake moose antlers. There are paintings of mountain and forest scenes everywhere and it smells like pine, not real pine like outside, but pine air freshener. Something about it inspires me. There’s a poem in here somewhere. I pull out my trusty notebook and scribble some notes: What is real? What is good about nature anyway?

  Justin looks around, his upper lip curled in disdain. It’s not exactly the great outdoors. He turns to me and laughs. “Well, aren’t we just glowing?”

  I smile. “Oh yes. I’m going to go pick out my bedroom. Do you think it has a fireplace? Maybe a robe and fuzzy slippers?”

  “What are you writing?” he asks.

  “Notes. Observations. ‘My boyfriend’s upper lip disappears completely when he is disappointed.’ ”

  He realizes what he’s doing and sticks out his lips, moving them up and down like a fish gulping for air. “This better? Ah, well. And here I thought we would get the chance to snuggle.”

  He’s mocking me. I’m always cold, so I’m the one usually trying to snuggle against him. I punch his shoulder as we climb the open staircase to the loft.

  Angela follows us upstairs and leads us to a giant room with another fireplace and a huge brass king bed. “You can have the master suite, if you want,” she says, giving me a wink.

  We throw our stuff onto the bed. It’s not really a big deal, having the master suite to ourselves for a weekend. Teaching AP history and supervising three extracurriculars, Dad can’t always be around to watch us. At my house, we could have wild monkey sex every afternoon on the kitchen table if we so chose. As it happens, we don’t choose that, ever. I know of people in my class who live under their parents’ thumbs, so the second they’re free, they’re going at it, in public restrooms, parks, wherever. Justin and I aren’t like that. We never were.

  Not that I have much to compare him to. Justin dated a bunch of other girls before me. I don’t think I ever saw him single. But Justin is my first boyfriend. So when we started dating, there were a lot of things I didn’t know. But we’ve been together since freshman year. Now being with him is like sliding into a favorite T-shirt.

  And yet somehow, I think as I pull my long underwear out of
my bag, I still couldn’t tell him I wanted to go to the prom.

  Maybe because, after three years, he should have just known.

  Angela walks back down the hallway, whistling something that sounds like a cross between “Let’s Get It On” and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Justin puts his arms around me. He looks around and sighs.

  “I know, you wanted to toast marshmallows over an open fire,” I say.

  He nods. “Yeah.”

  “Fine,” I say, thinking, Next weekend. Next weekend we’re going shopping, come hell or high water. And high water is definitely coming, whether I like it or not. He can handle a couple of hours holding my bag as I try on new clothes. “It’s pretty warm tonight. You and I can go out in our sleeping bags and light a fire and sleep under the stars. Okay?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “You’d hate that.”

  “No, it’ll be … fun.”

  He laughs, because I’m sure my face must be twisted in disgust. “I knew I loved you for a reason.”

  “Besides, Hugo’s really getting on my nerves. It will be nice to get away from him.”

  “He just makes fun of you all the time because he wants you,” he says matter-of-factly.

  I try to swat him away. Justin is always under the impression that anything with a Y chromosome is after me. This includes priests, dogs, and old men with walkers. “What? Oh please.”