JESS
Opening the door to Suzie’s bedroom, Jess stepped quietly through the mess of clothes on the floor and sat heavily on the side of the bed, shaking her friend’s arm, knowing that it would take a lot to wake her. She didn’t care that she might startle Suzie, not now.
Suzie rolled over slowly and squinted. “Oh, hey, Jess.” She pulled the covers more tightly around her.
“I called. You didn’t get it.”
“No, I was sleeping. What’s going on? Why aren’t you at work?”
“They found the engineering specs for the dam in Mink’s backpack, and I got fired.”
“Oh my God—are you okay?”
“No. Shit, Suzie, do you know what this means?”
“Not really—not all the way.” She rolled onto her side and grabbed a T-shirt off the floor. “I thought you wanted out—away from the bullshit of the settlement agreement. I need some coffee. Want some?”
“No, thanks. This is the end of my career, my relationship . . . Fuck.” She turned and walked into the mess of Suzie’s kitchen, where she turned on the electric teakettle. She looked out the window. The sun had come out, and the wet trees glistened in a surreal, animated way. Jess wanted to walk out among them, to float above them and vanish into an arc of sunlight.
Her cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans, and she didn’t look at it. Maybe Jeff again, maybe the investigator, maybe her mother.
Suzie came in, buttoning the top button of her jeans. She looked ruffled, her short, dark hair sticking out at sharp angles, as if she had just been really scared. “Hey, Jess, I know this is some kind of weird trip for you, and it will feel shitty for a while, that’s for sure, but I really believe you’re going to be okay.” Suzie absentmindedly picked up her marijuana pipe, then put it back down. Jess just stared at her, suddenly feeling small and vulnerable. She knew that it would be a long time before the pain would dissipate.
There was a knock at the door, and Suzie looked up. “God—who could that be?”
Jess knew and looked over at Suzie’s marijuana pipe. For a moment, she just wanted relief, a way to escape.
Suzie opened the door. “Hey, Jeff.”
Jeff stood there, backlit by the morning sun and looking comically angelic. Suzie turned to one side, and Jeff pushed into the room without looking at her.
“Jess.” His eyes looked surprised and confused. Jess thought of a salmon caught in a net—or running into the concrete wall of a dam.
“What the fuck is going on here? I just heard from Mack.”
“I just got fired. I’ve been involved with Earth in Mind—”
“Did you give them the specs? Your career is ruined. For what?”
“You know what for.” The bathroom door closed, and she could hear the shower running.
“But, sweetheart, my God . . .” Jeff stopped himself, and she knew the old argument they had had so many times was beginning.
“Jeff, I really don’t want to talk about it right now. You should just go. Maybe someday we can talk about it.” She felt herself fading in his eyes as he looked over her body—they had enjoyed each other so much that even now Jess felt the warm push of her desire for him.
“Why don’t you come by later and get your stuff? I’ll go for a walk up the river. I really want some time to myself anyway.”
Jeff looked down, and the space between them filled with a weird uncertainty that she hadn’t expected.
“Okay, I guess I can do that, but I don’t know . . .”
“Jeff, don’t. I’m on the other side now—actually, I’ve been there all along, and we both know that. This is all just too much right now.”
For an awkward moment, Jess thought they might hug goodbye, but then she turned and sat back down at the small table in the dusty corner of Suzie’s kitchen.
“I’ll leave the key in the kitchen,” Jeff said.
“Fine.”
She put her head in her hands and listened until she heard his footsteps turn heavily and recede through the still-open door.
When it clicked shut, Jess let gravity pull her into the chair. It was cold, so cold, and she wrapped herself in her jacket, against a wind blowing from deep inside her, from a time very long ago.
“How’d that go?” Suzie asked, as she came into the kitchen, drying her hair roughly with a towel.
“Not well.” Jess was having a hard time breathing, as she felt the familiar hand of betrayal take the blade in her chest and turn it, hard. “I can’t believe this is all happening. It seems like my first day at work was just last week. How can so much happen in such a short time?” Closing her eyes, she sensed all of her publications, predictions, studies, plans for the future dissolving into a haze.
Suzie sat down next to her with her coffee and said, “Hey, I told you, it’s going to be okay. We didn’t try to blow up the dam. We just gave some people some information. They aren’t going to send us to jail, I don’t think. I hope Martin’s okay. I’ll call him later. Too bad we live in such a paranoid time—goddamn government stealing people’s cell phone data. Jesus, you would think someone would get fired over that one.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that right now, I’m feeling so many things. I think I’m going to get Miko and go up the river today. I need to figure out what to do.”
“Sure, Jess.”
Jess thought she saw Suzie smiling and wondered what was up.
“I’m just going to go. Sorry I woke you.”
“Naw, it’s good. Call me later, though, and let me know how you are.”
“Sure. See ya.”
As she stood to leave Suzie’s, her body felt heavy and stiff. It was the weight of grief, a sensation born of love torn away and left just out of reach. The only refuge she had was her dog, and she longed for his simple, uncomplicated presence. Her mind kept trying to construct what to do next, but all the familiar structures of her work and her future were falling apart, and she couldn’t imagine how to hold it all together anymore. Her work. She was a scientist who had been violated by the system she trusted most. She was also a scientist who had made a bad decision.
Earth in Mind was such a tenacious, renegade group of young people. She had been one once. And now, as she thought of Mink’s crumpled body—he had seemed so small—a shadow of her sister washed over his image, like a passing cloud.
JEFF
Walking up to the small blue-and-white house, Jeff felt the weight of what he had to do in each step up the gravel driveway. He took a breath before using his key, a key he knew he would leave without. He expected stillness when he opened the door, but Miko came out from the back bedroom, his large woof nearly sending Jeff jumping off the ground. Jeff’s throat caught at the thought of a world without this dog and his girl.
“Hey, buddy.” Jeff roughed up Miko’s head and scratched behind his soft black ears.
Miko twirled and loped into the other room to get his ball to play. Jeff stood up and scanned the living room. Where to begin? “Damn,” he said, under his breath. He went over to Jess’s desk and picked up a photo of the two of them on the Nesika just above the Green Springs dam, their arms around each other, blended like the lovers he had imagined they would always be. Holding the photo, he sat down in Jess’s chair, gazing into the picture, the feelings from that day mingling with the floral-incense smell in the house. He put it back in a different place on her desk, with an awkward sense that maybe she would notice. The report on the Nesika Watershed study that they had worked on sat squarely in the center of her desk, their names as coauthors something that would not change.
There wasn’t a lot for him to pack; he had moved in from his own place, bringing just what he needed and putting the rest in storage until they could get a larger house. He grabbed his old gray duffel from his side of the bed and threw in his clothes and books from the nightstand. Miko watched from the doorway like a sentinel. Jess’s jeans and one of his favorite light green T-shirts lay crumpled by her side of the bed. Tears rose in
his eyes, and he felt his heart breaking for her, for them.
Why had she done this? It was so hard to imagine that she would have compromised her work, her career. Suzie—Jeff knew that she had talked Jess into it. Not Martin—he wouldn’t have pressured her—but Suzie cared only about Suzie’s agenda. He had never liked her; she was too shifty for him to trust her.
He moved from the bedroom into the bathroom to get his few things. Jess’s earrings, blue-gray stones set in silver that he had given her for her last birthday, were sitting on the edge of the sink. He picked them up and held them for a moment, remembering her delight, her sincere, grateful smile as she put them on without even looking in a mirror. And later that night, they’d been all she had on in the dim light, and her back had undulated under his hands as she’d taken them off and rolled over to put them on the nightstand. He felt a stirring in his groin as he remembered her softness, her body rising to meet him, her hand guiding him into her. She was always so ready to make love, with a mixture of desperation and delight that Jeff craved constantly.
Yet now he was unweaving his life from hers, unraveling the small threads of him that ran from room to room in this house. Miko followed him expectantly as he packed, and, when Jeff had finished, looked up at him with what seemed like a question.
“Okay, boy, I’m going now,” Jeff said to him in a seeming answer. “You take care of Jess for me, okay?” Miko’s curled tail swirled in response. He would—Jeff knew that. He patted the dog’s broad head, left his key on the kitchen table, and walked out.
JESS
Jess startled awake. She reached over to the other side of the bed and found only the vacant space where Jeff had been for the past year.
“Miko!” she called out into the dark. Miko came shuffling in from where he had been sleeping, next to the cooling wood-stove, and climbed onto the bed.
“Hey, how’s my boy?”
Miko thumped his tail and curled up next to her. The darkness seemed wider, more open, without Jeff, and their fights these past weeks kept echoing in her mind. She had come home that evening to find his key on the kitchen table and all his stuff cleared out.
Jeff was gone, her job was gone, and tonight her life felt like an open bowl holding her in its dark curves. She turned to Miko, holding on to him. He wouldn’t leave. His breathing was steady, and she could feel the drumming of his heart just below her hand. Her throat tightened, and grief took her like an undertow into its swirling depths, where she cried.
A memory of her mom the night of the accident came flooding back. It was dark then, too. Jess was in her room with her friend Leslie, still shivering from shock, from the cold terror of seeing her sister’s small blond head slipping beneath the river’s surface. Because the search party hadn’t found her body yet, they claimed there was still hope. Jess knew there was none, but the people around her were still waiting. She remembered someone shouting, “Someone saw something moving across the river!” There were search dogs running along the tangled banks, divers swimming slowly through the current, and a man in a boat with a large hook, which he kept throwing again and again . . .
Jess shuddered, recalling her mom curled up on the couch, the Catholic priest stoically petting her arm, calming her. Then, later, when it got dark and Monica still hadn’t come home, her mother started screaming.
It took them twenty-one days to find her body. Jess went back to school, feeling like someone from another planet. In ninth grade, her social life had been stratified according to carefully drawn social lines; now, those lines were blurred and in some cases disregarded. She walked through the halls, and kids who had once ignored her or shunned her socially were suddenly smiling and acknowledging her with obvious sad looks. Jess felt self-conscious and wondered whom they saw her as, so freshly and deeply torn and wounded. Even the teachers who had once made her feel invisible now asked her questions.
When they found Monica, Jess took more time off from school for the funeral. She could only imagine what her sister must have looked like after those three weeks, what the river had done to her eleven-year-old body. Her mother insisted on seeing Monica; she needed to touch her daughter’s body one last time. Jess knew why, and remembered the hysterical crying when her mom came home that day—a wrenching, horrible sound.
After the funeral, Jess tucked her grief inside her chest and hid it there, refusing to share it with her friends, her parents, or even herself. Now, the memory of that day was coming up again, and it was impossible to ignore the grief echoing within her. As the searing pain from her old wounds began to surface, for a moment all she could see were bodies lying by the river: her sister, her dad, Mink, the doomed salmon.
Miko stretched out next to her, and the images of dying fish, the impenetrable dam, and the corporate smirk of Mack from PowerCorp spun in the darkness around her. It was several hours until morning. She would wait for the certain light that would come, while the uncertainty of the next day waited like a wild animal in the corner of the room.
Jess got up stiffly after having fallen asleep for what seemed like only a few minutes. Miko jumped off the bed and trotted into the kitchen to drink noisily from his water bowl. Jess made tea, then sat down at her desk and held her mug against her chest, allowing the warmth and the sweet smell, familiar and unchanged, to ease the tightness within her. She hadn’t checked her email since she had left her job the day before. And she should call her mother—but what would she tell her? Hey, Mom, I got busted, I lost my job, and Jeff left. At least the dog is still alive . . .
Miko came in and curled up on his bed next to her chair. She noticed the rearranged photos on her desk; Jeff’s cell phone charger was gone, his computer. She put her tea down next to the glowing screen of her past life. “Fuck,” she said out loud in the room. She tried to piece together the memories of everything that had gone on, but the meetings, the fights, the reports all seemed to tangle like fishing line backed up on a reel.
Her back tensed as she reached forward to open her email. The first one was from her uncle Robert:
Jess,
I’m forwarding along some reports from the Union for Concerned Scientists. I think you might be very interested in what they have to say about the falsification of scientific reports. It looks like you aren’t the only one! One interesting thing that I’m including a link to is a memo to the Forest Service directing them not to respond to the survey the union sent out to them, asking about falsifying reports. Damn, girl, this is something! I hope it helps you out. You know you’re fighting the good fight, and I’m sure they’ll come around. There’s no way they’ll get away with asking you to change your results.
Love you,
R
Jess clicked on the highlighted link and read aloud to herself:
“When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions. This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts or on scientific advisory committees, by censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists, and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice.”
Damn, she thought. Reading this helped her feel less alone. The certainty she worked from, the care with which she used to document her research, had meant nothing. The only important thing was the resulting agreement with the power company. And now that she was seeing this email from her uncle, a part of her knew she had never been safe. Her naive beliefs that scientific answers were really what were important, really mattered, had been destroyed by that decision—which had also almost murdered a young boy.
Jess read through her other emails, mostly from political organizations clamoring to get her attention. She sat there for a moment and tried to find her focus. She thought of calling Martin but felt protective of him, of his family. Her throat was sore from crying, and part of her wanted to go back to bed, to the safe covers
where she could tend her pain and find ways to let it slide from her body. But she had to know.
“Okay, Miko, I’m going to take my shower now. Then let’s go wake up Suzie.”
Jess pushed open the door to Suzie’s house, and Miko bolted in ahead of her.
“Suzie, you here?” There was no answer, and Jess moved slowly through the house. Suzie’s car wasn’t out front, but Jess figured she must’ve loaned it to someone—Suzie would never have been out this early in the morning. Miko went to his water bowl—they spent so much time here that he had his own space. Jess walked quietly into her bedroom, but the sheets were pulled back and Suzie was not there. Jess opened the closet—Suzie’s clothes were gone. She opened the drawers to the dresser—no clothes. In the kitchen, the refrigerator had been cleaned out, its contents thrown into the garbage can outside the back door. There was no note.
Jess called out one more time: “Suzie! You here?”
No answer came. Suzie was gone.
PIAH
Piah was breathless when she got back to her home. She crouched down, leaned against the cool mud wall, and closed her eyes. The man’s face seemed to be waiting for her behind her closed eyes. What does he want? She wondered. The image pressed into her, and she opened her eyes. She knew she needed to tell someone, share this terrible vision and have it interpreted. Her visions had always given her solace; they were steady and predictable. Who these spirits were and what they were trying to say to her seemed frightening.
The evening was cooling, and the others were beginning to emerge from the forest with their wood for the community fire. Piah moved away from her home and toward the low-lying lodge where they would gather for the evening meal and stories of the day. Was she prepared to share her story? She wasn’t even sure her language had the words to tell it. But maybe there were others who were familiar with this spirit, who had also seen it?
The Same River Page 9