Dead River

by Cyn Balog

  “What can I say? You’re hot. Especially in that getup.” I start to look down at my boring North Face jacket, which is the exact opposite of hot, but he pulls me back and hugs me tighter. Hugging him feels right, comfortable, like my pillow. “Besides, he’s a guy. And I know what guys are thinking.”

  “Oh, right.” I’ve heard this one before. “Sex, twenty-five hours a day.”

  “Yep. We basically want to nail anything female. Especially when she’s hot.”

  “This is very comforting news, coming from my boyfriend,” I mutter. I might be alarmed if he didn’t tell me this anytime I get any attention whatsoever from a member of the opposite sex. Usually with a nudge-nudge and a See-I-told-you-so smirk of satisfaction. “So why aren’t you trying to get some right now?”

  “Because duh. I am a gentleman. Obviously.” He pats my butt to show me just how chivalrous he is.

  “Oh. Obviously.”

  “Well, the important thing is not that we’re thinking of sex with every girl in the world. Because, trust me, we are. The important thing is that we don’t act on it.”

  “Ah, I see,” I say, as if we’re discussing the theory of relativity. “So this is proven? All guys? Sex all the time?”

  “Ask any guy. Go ahead. Ask Hugo.”

  I cringe. If Hugo is thinking about sex with me, I really would rather not know. “I’ll just take your word for it.”

  We both turn toward the large picture window. I can make out the black water through the trees. It’s not far away. For a moment I’m in my old pink bedroom, watching the ripples dance on the walls. Then I think of that little girl, the one dressed in pink. She opens her mouth and the filth begins to ooze over her bottom lip just as I’m jolted back to reality.

  “You okay?” Justin asks. When I look at him, confused, he says, “You’re shivering. Come on, Hugo’s not that bad.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “What, then? Look, you don’t have to spend the night outside with me,” he says, stroking my cheek softly with the calloused pad of his thumb.

  “No, I wasn’t—” I begin, but it’s better he doesn’t know what I was really thinking. About that life that he knows nothing about. It’s not worth explaining anyway. The past belongs in the past. This trip is all about moving on, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

  Chapter Three

  My cell rings while I’m pulling on my long underwear. I check the display and see a familiar number. “Hey, Dad,” I say, watching Justin do a little jig by the window. He’s so excited by the river, he’s gotten dance fever.

  “Hey,” my dad says. “Where are you?”

  “Just got to Baxter,” I lie as Justin turns to watch me. I plant my butt on the edge of the bed. “We’re setting up our tents now.”

  “Cool,” my dad says. “How’s the charge on your phone?”

  “It’s fine,” I say as Justin twirls around the room like he’s Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Totally sexy.

  “Mount Katahdin is breathtaking! The hills really are alive up here!” Justin shouts. Then he falls down on the ground. Then he pretends that something is attacking him. He gets up, runs, and falls, and by then I guess the imaginary thing is on top of him because he collapses onto his stomach and screams. “And they’re … going … to eat me!”

  Shut up, I mouth, but my dad must have heard. “How is Justin?”

  “Um, he’s …,” I begin, watching him miraculously revive.

  Justin calls out, “Going to wait until after dinner to murder your daughter.”

  I reach over and smack him. “… good.”

  “Are you okay? Do you need anything? If you do, just call. Just call me anytime. Let your old man know how things are going.”

  I sigh. That’s my dad. By now Justin is making funny faces at me, trying to get me to laugh. He almost succeeds when he rolls his eyes back in his head and pushes up his nose to look like a pig. “Everything’s fine. And I’ve got to go. We’re going to the store. We forgot …” I look around but can’t come up with anything. I’m terrible at thinking on my feet like this.

  Justin offers, “Beef jerky?”

  I’m about to say it, but I catch myself in time and smack him on the shoulder again. “I mean, we’re going on a hike. And we want to get up there before it gets dark.”

  “You’re a beef jerky,” I whisper at Justin.

  “Now?” my dad says. I can just picture him in the living room, looking at the kitchen clock through his bifocals and shaking his head. “It’s awful late for that. Bring flashlights in case you’re not back by nightfall.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Levesque. Everything’s fine,” Justin calls, starting to make faces again.

  I smack him again as I disconnect from my father and sigh. “I hate having to lie to him.”

  “He’s being irrational. People who don’t know the facts are quick to condemn it, but white-water rafting is completely safe,” Justin says, sounding like a public service announcement. Then he grins. “Now let’s go outside!”

  We don’t get to ditch Hugo after all. While we’re gathering our bags and trying to sneak down the stairs, Angela comes out of her room, her eyes big and round. She has eyes that would make the most hardened criminal confess and beg for mercy. They should be surrounded by a nun’s wimple. “Where are you off to?”

  “We were just, um …” Justin looks at me. He’s terrible at confrontations.

  “We thought we would camp outside. Just for tonight,” I explain.

  “You?” she says to me, incredulous. When I nod, her eyes get wider yet. “But you can’t leave me alone with Hugo!” she whispers. “That would be so … awkward.”

  “You invited him,” I point out. “What happened to ‘He’s kind of cute’?”

  “Yeah, well, he is, but …” Pleading, she looks at Justin. “I don’t even really know him that well. Being alone with him all night, would be totally awkward, with a capital A.”

  “This is a little plusher than I thought, Angela,” Justin says. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice. I just thought that …”

  She clamps her hand around mine. “We were going to make popcorn and s’mores and tell scary stories and stuff. Please.”

  Right. Angela was a Girl Scout. She lives for s’mores and scary stories by firelight. I look back at Justin. He clears his throat. “Well, why don’t you guys come with us?” he asks.

  “Really?” she asks. “Okay! That would be cool!”

  She scampers off to gather her things as I glare at Justin. He has this way of caving under the slightest amount of pressure. He squeezes my hand. “It’ll be fun,” he whispers.

  “But … Hugo,” I say, since that name alone is an explanation as to why it won’t be.

  He doesn’t answer, just takes my sleeping bag from me, as if carrying it is his way of apologizing. Then he leads us out to the backyard. Angela points the way to an old campsite and we set up there. There’s a fire pit, and Justin, the master woodsman, finds a way to get a fire burning within a few minutes. When we lay out our sleeping bags, Angela begins to divvy up the marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars.

  When I sit down on my bag, my butt thuds painfully against the hard ground and some insect skitters across my nose. Even with the fire burning and my hands in the pockets of my jacket, my fingertips feel numb. I immediately regret being so sweet to Justin. Not only that, but tomorrow we’ll be on the river, instead of getting ready for prom. I was already being nice to him by agreeing to come on this trip. What made me agree to sleep outdoors?

  “Scary story time,” Angela says. “I am so going first. I’ve been practicing this one ever since we started planning the trip. It’ll totally freak you out, Ki.”

  I stare at her. “Thanks?”

  “No, you’ll appreciate this one.”

  I think she’s saying this because I’m a horror movie junkie. But that’s indoors, in a well-lit room. Even with Justin to protect me, it’s spooky, and we’ll be s
leeping here all night. Outside the circle, the forest is black. The rushing river sounds like eerie whispers. No, no. The river is fine. The sound is relaxing. The river has no hold over me.

  “Once upon a time,” she begins as I nibble on a marshmallow. She leans forward so that the fire casts strange shadows on her face. “There was this boy.”

  “Ooooh. Scary,” Hugo says.

  Nobody bothers to laugh or even to look at him, not even Angela, who is too absorbed in her story to notice him. “His name was Jack McCabe. He grew up in a home with his father, who was a lumberjack. His father was also a very evil man who blamed Jack for the death of his wife in childbirth. So he would beat Jack every night if he didn’t do everything he was told. He made Jack clean the house, make him meals, tend to the animals, everything. The father would sit there at night, sharpening the blade of his ax on a stone, watching his son. That was all he ever did. Sleesh … sleesh … sleesh.”

  Angela makes a high screeching noise, like nails on a chalkboard. I start to roll my eyes but stop when a shiver touches my shoulders.

  An owl hoots. There’s a chill in the air, a breeze blowing off the river. I hug myself tighter. It certainly isn’t Angela’s attempt at scaring me that’s making me quiver. It’s just numbingly cold. But I can’t stop. I move closer to Justin and pull his arm around me.

  “So as he was growing up, Jack did whatever his father told him to do, or else he knew he’d be beaten or even killed. One of the things he had to do every night was go down to the river and fetch water. This river.” She points in the general direction of the Dead. “He had to go every night, several times, to fill his bucket with water. It was a worn path, lit only by the moon.”

  “So … where was Jill during all this?” Hugo asks.

  “I’m trying to tell a story!” Angela says, pouting.

  I look up at the moon, the pine needles crisscrossing over it like cat scratches. And then something catches in me. Something familiar. The moon isn’t full now, but then it was.

  Something happened by the light of the full moon.

  I swallow, but my throat is dry. The sense of déjà vu creeps over me entirely and for a moment I feel like I’m falling. Get ahold of yourself, Ki! I shake it away, steady myself against Justin’s broad frame, and try to concentrate on the flames licking at a charred log in the fire pit.

  Hugo smiles smugly and pretends to zip his lip as Angela continues. “Anyway, one night as he’s walking to fetch water, he sees a girl on the other side of the river. She’s crying. He thinks it must be a ghost, as it disappears right away. But then he sees her again, calling to him, always crying and calling to him from the other side of the river. So he follows her. And then he loses sight of her, fetches the water, and goes back home. Every night, he sees the crying girl and follows her, trying to find out what she is, why she is so sad, but every night she disappears, and every night he ends up spending more time outside. His father decides something is going on and so he follows him one night. And as Jack is walking down the path after the girl he hears it. Sleesh … sleesh … sleesh. His father sharpening his ax.”

  The shivers again. But why? It’s a stupid story. And Angela’s voice is way too perky and cute to pull it off.

  But the moon. That full moon. I can see it now.

  And now I can hear the sound of the bucket swinging in Jack’s hand. I hear a body moving through the brush, and the footsteps trudging down that worn path to the river. To the Dead.

  Sleesh … sleesh … sleesh.

  Now my entire body is alive with tingles. That sound. That slicing sound. I’ve heard it before. Somewhere.

  It’s not just coming from Angela. It’s everywhere, all around the woods, echoing in my head.

  He looks up. The blade is silver, glistening in the moonlight slashing down through the leaves.…

  “He looks around but doesn’t see anyone, so he runs to get the water.”

  Why? Why did you … I did everything you asked of me.

  Angela pauses for dramatic effect and then whispers, “The last thing he saw was the blade of the ax—”

  “Stop!” I say, jumping to my feet. The three of them stare up at me. Hugo has a satisfied expression on his face, like a wuss. I point to a crumpled plastic bag by Angela’s feet. “Um. I mean, are there any more marshmallows?”

  Amused, she kicks the bag over to me. Like she knows she scared the crap out of me. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t have, except … “Sure,” she says. “Knock yourself out.”

  I grab a handful and snuggle closer to Justin. “That was a lame story,” Hugo says. “I give it a C for creativity.”

  Angela says, “What? It’s not creative. It really happened! I read about it in an old book. Ghost Stories of the Rivers or something. Jack McCabe supposedly still haunts the river where he died, with the crying girl he was following that night.”

  Their laughs, dulled by the sound of an ax being sharpened, echo in my head. I try to clamp my hands over my ears but it doesn’t help. Justin says something that I can’t hear and Angela nods. “It’s an old legend from around these parts. They say that when you’re about to die, the dead will call to you from the other side of the river. And then when your time is up … they come to take you away.”

  Hugo says, “I’ve heard that. Kind of like Charon and the river Styx.”

  “Exactly,” Angela answers.

  I try to find some moisture in my mouth but it feels like sandpaper. “Um. Can we do something more fun? Maybe sing songs? Fall face-first into the fire?”

  “No, wait,” Justin says, oblivious to me. Maybe it’s a good thing that he doesn’t notice what a scaredy-cat I am, because it means I’m playing it off well. But then he says, “I have a good story. One that we told in fifth-grade camp.”

  “Fifth-grade camp stories are never good,” Hugo says with his annoying laugh, only this time it doesn’t sound so annoying. In fact, I think I want to kiss him.

  “True,” I agree, maybe a little too readily.

  “This one is classic,” Justin says. “Trust me.”

  “But I thought we could talk a little about the rafting trip tomorrow. You know, so I’m prepared,” I say.

  Justin squints at me. I know what he’s thinking. I haven’t wanted to talk about rafting at all, when it’s been his favorite topic of conversation for the past three months. So why this sudden intense interest?

  “I am a little nervous,” I tell him. Which is the truth. Plus, it hides the bigger truth: that something really weird just happened. When Angela was telling her story, I could hear all the sounds in my head: the blade being sharpened, the rusty pail swinging as the boy walked. I could see the ax. Well, maybe not the ax, but an ax. But worse than that, I could see the boy lying on the ground, gasping for breath as the blood coursed over his lips, asking, “Why?” I did everything you asked of me, he’d choked out before his chest went still. Angela hadn’t said anything like that in telling her story. She didn’t have to. And yet I knew. It was like I’d been there.

  “All right,” Justin says. “It’s Class Four and Five rapids, meaning it’s pretty fierce. But you’ll have a blast. Believe me.”

  I suck in a shot of cold air. I’m not really in the mood for anything fierce right now. I want a teddy bear.

  He massages my knee. “It’s nothing to be nervous about. Like I said, more people—”

  “I know, I know. More people get injured going bowling than they do on white-water rafting trips,” I say.

  “Right. And Ange and I have been on this river a hundred times. We know what to expect.”

  “Smooth sailing,” Ange says. “Totally.”

  It’s true, Angela’s and Justin’s parents have brought them up here, together, at least once a year since they were in preschool. If any two people know the river inside and out, it’s them. Of course, them knowing the river isn’t going to save me if I do something stupid, like lose my balance, which is a pretty frequent occurrence. “But what if I fall out of the
raft or something?” I ask. “Does that happen?”

  He nods. “Sure it does. Sometimes. Rarely. I’ve been on the river a thousand times and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve fallen out. It won’t happen to you.”

  “But if it does?”

  “You’ll have on your life jacket. And I’ll keep you safe,” he says, voice firm. “Don’t worry.”

  I nod, because I believe him. Justin doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean. He’s a simple guy, which is probably the reason I like him so much. Too many of my friends are in relationships with guys who say one thing and do another. And he’s completely protective of me, always. One day he’ll be a Maine State Police officer, I know. Most people stiffen when they pass a police vehicle because they’re afraid of getting a ticket, but he stiffens because he wants to look responsible in case the future officer in charge of hiring is in that police car and might remember Justin five years from now when he interviews for the job.

  Just when I think that my efforts to change the subject have worked, Angela pipes up.

  “So, Justin. About that story from fifth-grade camp. I want to hear it,” she says. I no longer love her. She leans forward. “Go ahead.”

  I pull my blanket around my body as he begins. I’m hoping I can tune him out. Hoping that he won’t choose now to prove that he has the creativity to be a good storyteller. But it’s almost as if I’m wearing headphones and his voice is being piped right into my ear. And his voice, which is always kind of soothing, drops to this low, breathy whisper that I’ve never known him to possess. “Once there was this kid named Trey Vance. He was walking home from school. He wasn’t a very big kid, smaller than me … maybe Hugo’s size, just average. He was taking the shortcut through the woods and there he saw two boys with their backs turned to him. He knew they were older kids from his school who had given him trouble before, so he meant to walk past them quietly. But they turned and saw him, and they suddenly looked all nervous. A few days later the body of a young girl was found at the same location he’d seen the boys, and Trey realized that the older kids must have killed her.”