Getting up to put the rest of the groceries away, she reached for a vase in which to put some flowers she had bought at the market, but her hand was shaking and it fell to the floor. She put the vase back up on the shelf and steadied it; she noticed a small crack on one side and reached her hand back up to her face. She closed her eyes and could feel a crack widening inside her, opening to the awareness of something dark and full. She stopped trying to hold on, and let herself slip down the dark slide. She sat slowly down on the cold floor of the kitchen, sensing something waiting in the dark outside her door, stalking her, seeking her familiar scent.
When Jeff knocked on the door, Jess called out to him from the couch. “Come in!”
Miko jumped up and did his dog twirl-dance in greeting, then ran to get his toy. Jess stood up slowly and moved toward Jeff. The air between them was still and full of energy, like the darkness of an early spring storm. Jeff looked at her with kindness in his eyes, and she reached for his hand.
“I’m glad you’re here, Jeff. We have a lot to talk about . . .”
“Yeah, we do. I was glad to get your call, really glad. I have so much to tell you.”
Her hand in his began to shake. “Jess, are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’s so weird—Suzie just stopped by, and she freaked me out. I don’t know why she’s back.” Jess felt Jeff stiffen as he heard about Suzie. “Let’s sit down for a minute. I’ll be okay.” They sat next to each other on the couch, and Jess closed her eyes.
Her mind tilted, and she breathed carefully to try to slow the spinning feeling. She closed her eyes and saw Suzie’s face elongate into the face of a mountain lion. Then she felt Monica’s presence and saw the flash of her sunny hair as she swung out over the river on the rope swing. Jess smiled and felt the heavy rope travel into her own hands. She took another breath and opened her eyes. Jeff was sitting close to her, and she could feel him breathing with her. She rested and let her body sink into his, and he didn’t move away.
After a while, Jeff pushed back and asked, “Would you like some tea or a glass of wine? Maybe I should start dinner and you can rest here.”
She lifted her head off his shoulder and smiled at him. “Tea would be nice. There’s lemon-ginger in the pantry.” Jeff walked into the kitchen, and Miko followed him. Jess felt like she was seeing something that would happen again and again: Jeff feeding Miko, helping with the dishes, taking out the trash. They had found each other in the roar of the fast current and were now riding in the slow pools together. Off in the distance, Jess could hear the sound of a baby girl crying.
“Here’s your tea.” Jeff set a cup down on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” she said, looking up at him, letting the moment rest between them before she continued, “Jeff, my uncle is coming to town tomorrow, and we’re going to Eugene on Thursday to meet with Kathryn from Planet Justice about the lawsuit against PowerCorp. I want to ask for your help.” She paused, remembering the time a year earlier when she had gone to him. He had been through a lot since then, and she sensed that there was an opening for him.
“I know this could put you in a conflicted position with your job, but, Jeff, you’re on the inside and you have access to reports and information that could really help us. Part of what I want you to understand is that we’re trying to remove only one dam out of eight. Taking out this dam will restore just a small part of the Nesika. If you look at it like a typical corporate scientist, in the long run the amount of restored habitat isn’t that much. Or, from my perspective, you can view it as a turning point, like the beginning of an out-breath, a small turn of the tide.”
“I know that’s true. This has become a real David-and-Goliath kind of issue. I need to tell you that I did think we could work around the dam and restore some of the habitat, but now . . . the numbers aren’t there. What we tried to do isn’t working.”
Jeff stared at his hands; he looked defeated and hurt. She brushed his back with her hand, and he moved closer to her. She could smell his musky scent from working outside in the rain all day. She remembered the same scent from the hot springs that day.
“This issue for me really has to do with how we look at the world around us, at what’s going on,” Jess continued. “If we can for one moment begin to imagine the Green Springs dam breached, then maybe we’ll be able to hand our children a potential way out. They can continue the breath, and the momentum of this change can carry them and the salmon through the next generations.”
She closed her eyes and saw a river of color flowing fast and full of life. Children were dancing with brightly colored flags along the bank, celebrating the return of the salmon. Jeff was quiet.
“It’s kind of like the butterfly effect: a small change in one river valley, a small victory over corporate control, can have an impact that we may never see but that we can at least set in motion. I remember a teacher of mine saying once, ‘Do your work as if it matters one hundred and fifty years from now.’ Jeff, this is a really important time we live in. I know that job security means a lot to you, but there are other ways we can make money, other ways we can live. Please help us.”
Jeff reached out and pulled her to him. He buried his face in her hair, and she felt the warmth of his breath on the back of her neck for a moment. Then he sat back up and said, “You know, Jess, I know so much more about who you’re dealing with and how futile this all seems from where they stand. PowerCorp is strong and has a lot of industry supporters. It was voted one of the top ten companies of its kind in the country!” He kissed the top of her head carefully. “But I hear you. This has been tearing me up, too. Just today, Mack asked me to write a response to the reports that have just come out about the decline in the salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest. He directed me to contact PR and draft an announcement that reframes the research. He wants me to lie, Jess. He wants me to create the kinds of reports that were used to keep the Green Springs dam in place. We live in a world of contradictions and minefields. I don’t know if taking out the dam is the answer, but I do know that to misreport the decimation of a species is more than unethical.” He moved in even closer, and Jess sensed the same turning in him that she had begun to feel down by the river. They were both quiet for a while; then Jeff stood to go start dinner.
Jess could sense that he was thinking hard while he was in the kitchen. He finally came back into the living room with some apples and cheese and said, “Okay, I’ll help you. But we won’t have much time. Once I tell Mack that I refuse to falsify or misrepresent the reports, I’ll be fired or suspended. While I have the keys to the office and access to the reports, I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Wow, Jeff, that’s great, but I’m sorry, too. You know I know how that feels. I can’t believe those bastards would do that. Fuck them. And thank you. We can meet with my uncle Robert tomorrow if you can make it. He is so going to believe what is happening to you. And you’ll like our lawyer, Kathryn—she’s great and has been really helpful with all the legal stuff.”
Jess heard rain begin to fall on the roof. The house was warm, and what Jeff was making smelled good. They looked into each other’s eyes, and Jess knew that Jeff would be staying over, that the next day he would go to his place and pick up some clothes and bathroom supplies. He would meet Uncle Robert, and they would be able to design a strategy that could breach the Green Springs dam.
Jess got up to check on what was happening in the kitchen. The large poster of the dam seemed to gleam before her. For one moment, she felt as if the dam wanted to come out—something about how unnecessary it was, how outdated, from another kind of time, when the impact of progress had been ignored.
“So, why did you put the notes you got today into the river?”
His voice sounded taunting, and she smiled. “I don’t know. It was like I wanted to let go of something, of this fight, of trying to find out what to do, this proving to everyone how right we are. I guess on some level I decided that the direction I wanted to go in was just to say that
yes, this is the right thing to do, not because someone changed the reports and they’re bad and wrong, but because for the salmon and the health of the Nesika and the ecosystem, there is no other choice. I can’t keep trying to find the bad guy to put in jail. That’s too much like an old, boring Western. What I—we—are asking is to begin to live differently, to live as if it’s obvious that the dam should come down. If we can do that, then maybe some judge in San Francisco will see it, too. Maybe the order will come down through the tragic maze of this administration and we can be there, at the edge of the river, when the turbines are turned off and for the first time in fifty years there is only the sound of the Nesika.”
Jeff looked up at her, and she could see the new softening in his warm eyes. He had let go of something today, too: an ardent belief in a system that had betrayed him, a system in which he’d had a sincere belief and had made sacrifices for. Now he was moving toward her, toward a new way of being that was about more than taking down the Green Springs dam. Somehow she knew that they would see the dam come down, would see the salmon spawning in the gravel that came only from the natural banks and contours of the Nesika.
Jess reached up and brushed the hair from his face, then playfully reached down and unfastened the top button of her jeans. Jeff’s eyes brightened, and he smiled as he pulled her toward him. She nuzzled his neck like a young animal asking to play. This was new for her, a feeling that this was the way it was going to be for a long time, that this was the way they would be together. She pushed back from him and ran into the bedroom. She knew he would follow. Her body folded readily around him, and they rolled and laughed, tearing the covers off her small bed.
Their lovemaking was slow and tender. Jess shifted for a moment when Jeff moved her hair to expose her neck, but when he kissed her scars and she felt his tears on her skin, she pulled him closer to her and assured him that she was okay. She was alive in his arms and felt the seasons she had missed with him rush through her. For the first time, the light between them ran clear, like the river, wide and open, free of the constrictions that had held it in place. They lay together, tangled in each other, listening to the hard rainfall in the darkening night. They slept for a moment, and then Jeff tucked her in and went into the kitchen to finish making dinner.
JESS
Her cell phone vibrated with an incoming message, and Jess grabbed it and went into the kitchen. She feared it was her mother who had called; she was alone, and Jess worried that something could have happened. Her phone was always on her nightstand when she slept.
The kitchen clock glowed just after midnight. She could see it was Suzie and let it go to message.
“Jess, it’s Suzie. Um, sorry to call, but there’s something I need to talk to you about. And, it’s just that . . . okay, can you call me when you get this? Yeah, sorry again it’s so late . . .”
Shutting her phone, Jess sat in the darkness at their small kitchen table. What would Suzie want? After all they had been through, the deception with the plans and her guilty disappearance, it was hard for Jess to trust or believe her. But they had once been close, and Jess missed that, missed Suzie’s unpredictability and her straightforward, unapologetic edge. But it was that same edge that worried Jess. She knew that Suzie carried large, unhealed wounds from her childhood and that the pain drove Suzie into corners that Jess was never welcomed into. It made sense that Suzie would have come back fascinated by Jess’s bite wounds from the attack.
Jess shivered in her cold kitchen and made her way quietly back to the warmth of her bed with Jeff.
In the morning, she told him about the call from Suzie.
“It’s like she’s stalking me or something. I don’t really know what she wants. . .”
“I know. Suzie’s always felt a little sketchy to me, coming and going, like a cat playing with prey. But she could also be funny, in a quirky, Suzie kind of way, and she was one of your best friends.”
Jess wondered if Jeff was making excuses for Suzie. She took a long breath and waited for her thoughts to reorder themselves. She could smell fear, but this time it wasn’t her own.
Then she said, “I have to see her. I don’t know how I’ll be able to be with her without trying to find out how she got into my computer, if she was the one to give those kids the plans or if they got them another way.” She felt a little dizzy and put her hand on her neck where the thick, smooth bite scars were.
“I’m going to lie down for a bit.” She walked back into the bedroom and stretched out on the tousled bed. She drifted into a kind of sleep and could hear distant drumming and chanting around a campfire. She rolled onto her side, still half-awake, and let herself go into the dream.
In the vision she was looking at the back of her uncle Robert—he was holding a clipboard and seemed to be counting something. The Green Springs dam was just upriver from him, and the water coming out was a deep blue. Across the river was a small camp that the drumming and chanting were coming from. A young woman walked into camp and was met with a keening recognition. Uncle Robert turned around and beckoned to Jess to come to his side. He put his arm carefully around her, and they watched as the people welcomed this woman back into the camp. They washed her and put skin robes around her. Jess couldn’t move, watching the blue-light river and feeling a kinship with the woman being cared for. They sang into her wounds, and the words sounded like gentle falling water to Jess. Her uncle turned to her and said, “See, honey, this is how it was done—how you can heal and take what you know back to the river.” There was a rustling behind them, and Jess turned to see Suzie standing there, blood dripping from cuts on her arms.
These dreamlike visions had been happening to Jess since she had gotten home from the hospital. She had mentioned them to Jeff but no one else. Sometimes she wrote about them in her journal, and sometimes she kept them to herself. They were so real, like she was visiting another time. But this was the first time Suzie had been there, too, or Uncle Robert.
Jess got up and took a shower. She ran her hands over the scars on her neck, face, and leg. She had healed and become stronger and found her way back from serious damage to her brain. She thought of Suzie in her vision, and of her wounded arms—wounds that she had given to herself. When Jess had asked her about them, Suzie had said that the pain she felt from the cuts was something that was real for her and that she could control. Jess could only imagine what it was that Suzie couldn’t control in her life.
Stepping out of the shower, she dried herself with a rough blue towel. She looked into the mirror and saw her short hair and wounded face—her eyes seemed to be a darker blue, and the scar below them looked like a brand or tattoo. She thought about how the Molalla women had tattooed their faces after going through the passage into adulthood. Jess ran her hand through her wet hair and down her face, tracing the edges of the scar with her finger. It had taken a long time to heal. She could hear the echoes of the chanting from her dream vision and closed her eyes. We all have scars, she thought. Their resilient skin shapes us and makes us strong.
BARBARA
Cliff was an old friend of her husband’s who now spent most of his days fishing up on the Nesika. They had daughters the same age and had been close because of the two girls. Now they were both growing old in a quiet back eddy of loneliness. She had reached out to him many times, but he had kept his distance. Now, knowing what was happening with Suzie, Barbara had reached out in a more deliberate but gentle way.
Sitting in his living room with him, she wanted to start their conversation by staying close to what they had in common. “How’s the fishing going? Given all that’s going on, I’m surprised there are still even fish in that river.”
“Oh, you know, Barbara, there will always be some kind of fish, but it’s changed a lot since Jack and I used to fish up there. Seems there are times we’re catching more small-mouth bass than trout or steelhead.”
Barbara let the memory of her husband, Jack, settle in a sweet and tender place in her chest. She put her hand
over her heart as if she were making a pledge.
“I can’t imagine. It seems like just yesterday I couldn’t cook and clean the trout and salmon that Jack and the kids caught fast enough . . . I just don’t understand how it got to be so messed up. Anyway, it’s good to see you, Cliff. Sorry it’s taken me so long. With Jess and all her appointments, we’ve been pretty busy. But there’s something I need to talk to you about. It’s about Suzie.”
Sighing, Cliff straightened in his chair and put his large hands in his lap. He looked like a man at prayer.
“She’s back in town, working on a book project, a novel, actually, and in her book there’s a young woman who gets attacked by a mountain lion. I know she and Jess have been friends for a long time, but this is just a little creepy, especially after what happened for Jess at her job and whatever role Suzie might have had in that . . . I know you and Suzie aren’t close, and how hard it’s been for you since your wife died.” Barbara didn’t want to say “suicide” or “killed herself,” let alone bring up the fact that Suzie had found her mother’s body lying in a pool of blood when she was only four years old.
Cliff nodded and said, “Do you know Jess’s friend Martin? The guy who runs the Nesika Watershed Council? I see him from time to time, and I know that he talks with Suzie now and then. I think she was even working with him for a bit, just before all that stuff went down with those Earth in Mind kids. I can talk to him, find out more about Suzie’s plans. I’m really sorry about all this . . . How is Jess doing these days, anyway? I know she’s had a rough time. I just keep remembering when the kids were little—so innocent, so full of life—and now . . .”
“Jess is doing okay. You know her—she’s so persistent and cares so much about the river—but I worry about her. She’s still strong, but since the mountain lion attack . . . That was awful.” Barbara sank into the memory of the lonely, sleepless nights blending into exhausting days, each one like going into a dark cave, her grief walking by her side and never letting go.
The Same River Page 19