Two Rivers E-Book

T. Greenwood

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

T. Greenwood's new novel is a powerful, haunting tale of enduring love and destructive secrets... In Two Rivers, Vermont, Harper Montgomery is living a life overshadowed by grief and guilt. Since the death of his wife twelve years earlier, Harper has narrowed his world to working at the local railroad and raising his daughter the best way he knows how. Still wracked with sorrow over the loss of his life-long love and plagued by his role in a brutal crime, he searches for absolution. Then one fall day, a train derails in Two Rivers. One of the survivors, a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl with mismatched eyes and skin the colour of blackberries, needs a place to stay. Though filled with misgivings, Harper offers to take Maggie in; a chance of atonement. It isn't long, however, before he begins to suspect that Maggie's appearance in Two Rivers is not the simple case of coincidence it first appeared to be...

Leseprobe

Advance Praise for Two Rivers

“From the moment the train derails in the town of Two Rivers, I was hooked. Who is this mysterious young stranger named Maggie, and what is she running from? In Two Rivers, T. Greenwood weaves a haunting story in which the sins of the past threaten to destroy the fragile equilibrium of the present. Ripe with surprising twists and heart-breakingly real characters, Two Rivers is a remarkable and complex look at race and forgiveness in small-town America.”

—Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog and No One You Know

“Two Rivers is a convergence of tales, a reminder that the past never washes away, and yet, in T. Greenwood’s delicate handling of time gone and time to come, love and forgiveness wait on the other side of what life does to us and what we do to it. This novel is a sensitive and suspenseful portrayal of family and the ties that bind.”

—Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and River of Heaven

“T. Greenwood’s writing shimmers and sings as she braids together past, present, and the events of one desperate day. I ached for Harper in all of his longing, guilt, grief, and vast, abiding love, and I rejoiced at his final, hard-won shot at redemption.”

—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of Belong to Me and Love Walked In

“Two Rivers is a stark, haunting story of redemption and salvation. T. Greenwood portrays a world of beauty and peace that, once disturbed, reverberates with searing pain and inescapable consequences; this is a story of a man who struggles with the deepest, darkest parts of his soul, and is able to fight his way to the surface to breathe again. But also—maybe more so—it is the story of a man who learns the true meaning of family: When I am with you, I am home. A memorable, powerful work.”

—Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain

Turn the page for more outstanding praise for Two Rivers.

“The premise of Two Rivers is alluring: the very morning a deadly train derailment upsets the balance of a sleepy Vermont town, a mysterious girl show up on Harper Montgomery’s doorstep, forcing him to dredge up a lifetime of memories—from his blissful, indelible childhood to his lonely, contemporary existence. Most of all, he must look long and hard at that terrible night twelve years ago, when everything he held dear was taken from him, and he, in turn, took back. T. Greenwood’s novel is full of love, betrayal, lost hopes, and a burning question: is it ever too late to find redemption?”

—Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, author of The Effects of Light and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize–winning Set Me Free

“In the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, T. Greenwood’s Two Rivers is a wonderfully distinctive American novel, abounding with memorable characters, unusual lore and history, dark family secrets, and love of life. Two Rivers is the story that people want to read: the one they have never read before.”

—Howard Frank Mosher, author of Walking to Gatlinburg

TWO RIVERS

T. Greenwood

First published in the United States in 2009 by Kensington Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp., New York.

First published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus.

Copyright © T. Greenwood, 2009

The moral right of T. Greenwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 095 7

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Patrick

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1968: Fall

1980: Wreckage

One

Two Rivers

Betsy

The Girl

The Folding Machine

News

April Fools

Jumbo Liar

The Road Less Traveled

Rain

1968: Fall

Two

Lightning

Stations of the Cross

The Heights

Sunday Supper

Sliding

Eulogy

1968: Fall

Three

Freedom School

Alteration

Maybe Tonight

Comfort Food

Orientation

Missing

Freedom Summer

Forgiveness

Heat Lightning

The Montrealer

1968: Fall

Four

Inside the House of Me

Ray

1968: Fall

The New England Bell

Home

1968: Fall

Freedom Press

Mermaid

Things Spared

Ticket

Official Hair Styles for Boys and Men

Home Remedy

Valentine

1968: Fall

Five

Home Brew

Samurai

Lilacs

Broken

Midway

Acts of Contrition

The Heights

1968: Fall

Edges

Six

Exactor Extractor

Last Wishes

Bat in the Owl House

Night-blooming Cereus

Finding Snow

Epilogue

Nativity

May 1981: The Sunshine State

A Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to give thanks to the following people for their contributions both big and small:

First, to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, whose generous financial support enabled me to find both the time and space to write this novel. To my family, whose unwavering support has been nothing short of heroic. To Nicole Norum, Ann Marie Houghtailing and Jim Kokoris who read early versions of the novel and said to keep writing. To Penny Patch, who shared with me her remarkable personal experience during Freedom Summer. To Karl Lindholm for all things Middlebury and to Matt Van Hattem and David Warner, who answered all of my questions about trains. To Denise Johnson for dancing on the hood of her car. To Beya Thayer, who told me who Maggie was and what she was doing in Two Rivers (and for everything else too). To my father, Paul Greenwood, who helped me get all the important details right. To the folks at Newbreak Coffee Co. in Ocean Beach, CA, for the good bagels, endless cups of coffee and ocean view. To my students and colleagues at The George Washington University and at The Writer’s Center, who teach me something new about writing every day. For the readers of my Mermama blog, who continue to cheer me up and cheer me on. To my extraordinary agent, Henry Dunow, for holding my hand through every step of the revision process, and for believing in this story despite everything. And to Peter Senftleben, who made this all, finally, happen. Lastly, to Patrick for his enormous patience and gigantic heart, and to Kicky and Esmée, whom I love . . . to the bottom of the ocean and back to the top.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

—TONI MORRISON

PROLOGUE

1968: Fall

Blackberries. The man’s skin reminds him of late summer blackberries. The color of not-quite midnight. The color of bruise. This is what Harper thinks as he looks at the man they have taken to the river, the one who is half-drowned now, pleading for his life: the miracle that human skin can have the same blue-black stillness as ripe fruit, as evening, as sorrow itself.

Of course he also thinks about what you might see (if you were here at the confluence of rivers). Three white boys. One black man, begging to be saved. The harvest moon casting an orange haze over everything: just a sepia picture on a lynching postcard like the ones his mother had shown him once. He’d had to look away then, both because the hanged man had no eyes, and because it was the only time he’d seen his mother cry. And he knows that if she were still alive she’d be weeping now too, but not only because of the black man about to die.

It was anger that brought him here. After he understood that Betsy was dead (not wounded, not hurt, but gone), everything else—the grief, the sadness, the horror—became distilled, watery sap boiled down into thick syrup. All that was left then was anger, in its purest form. It was rage that brought him here. But somehow, now, in the cool forest at the place where the two rivers meet, as the man looks straight into Harper’s eyes and pleads, the anger is gone. Swallowed up by the night, by old sadness and new regret.

“Please,” the man says, and Harper thinks only of blackberries.

He will see this color when he closes his eyes tonight and every night afterward and wonder what, if anything, it has to do with the most despicable thing he’s ever done.

1980: Wreckage

People say we are defined by the choices that we make; some of them are easy, small, while others are more difficult. These are the decisions that keep us up at night, forcing us to weigh the pros and cons, to examine what is right and what is wrong. They require us to examine the options, scrutinize the possibilities and potential outcomes. But what about the split-second decision? What about the one made without the luxury of contemplation, the one made from the gut rather than the brain? Does this speak more loudly to who we really are? The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good. But what about the man who feels nothing? What about the man who stands at the edge of the well and does nothing? Who is he? Once, a long time ago, I made a split-second decision that has made me question who I am, what I am capable of, every day since. And this instant, this horrible moment, has haunted every other moment of my life. I don’t think I am a bad man, but sometimes I just don’t know.

What I do know is that, twelve years later, all I wanted was forgiveness. I just needed to make things right, to somehow make amends. Over the years, the sorrow of that night had settled into my bones. Deep inside my joints. In my shoulders. In my hands. I needed absolution. I needed a second chance. I imagined the guilt dissolving like salt in hot water. I imagined it lifting off me, taking flight like a strange and terrible bird. But what I didn’t imagine was that my one chance at forgiveness would find its way to me in a train wreck and a pregnant girl with mismatched eyes. But opportunities are often disguised. I know that now.

The night before the wreck, I didn’t sleep. After Shelly went to bed, I stayed up, making cupcakes for her to bring to school the next day for her birthday: sad chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting. My efforts at holidays always seemed to fall short of what Shelly really wanted, though she would certainly never say so (store bought Halloween costumes instead of homemade, homemade valentines instead of the glossy ones sold at the Rexall, and so many bad cupcakes). Hanna would have made a cake from scratch, inscribed Shelly’s name in sweet calligraphy on top. Shelly’s great-aunt had taken care of the first eleven birthdays; when my efforts invariably failed, she always quietly stepped in and saved me from whatever disaster I’d made. But now, I was on my own, frosting cupcakes whose middles were as soft as pudding, chocolate crumbs mixing with the pink frosting like gravel. In the morning Shelly would be twelve. Twelve years. And I still felt as incompetent as the day I brought her home from the hospital.

Our new apartment was above the bowling alley. We’d lived there since we left Paul and Hanna’s house at the beginning of the summer. This too was a temporary situation; I had to keep telling myself that. I wouldn’t let the years slip by here, not in a dingy apartment above a bowling alley. I wanted so much more for Shelly.

Moving in with Betsy’s aunt and uncle was a decision I had made twelve years ago out of grief and desperation. Alone, with a brand new baby to take care of, I needed someone to keep me from shattering into a thousand pieces. None of us had planned on this lasting forever. But Shelly was happy there, and the years had just sort of passed by. It wasn’t until she finished up the sixth grade earlier that summer that I knew it was time to move on. She was too old to be sharing a room with her daddy, and I couldn’t help but feel like we’d overstayed our welcome. Our room was drafty and smelled like other people’s things. In all the years we’d slept there, Paul and Hanna never managed to move out the broken bureau or the old clothes hanging in the closets, and I never felt right asking them. Of course they offered to let Shelly stay, wanted Shelly to stay, but the thought of giving her up too was more than I could bear.

When I found the apartment downtown, I raided my savings account and paid six months’ rent in one fell swoop. This was mostly for Hanna. She doubted me, I knew this, and I wanted to prove that I was capable. That we would be fine on our own. And though she adored both Paul and Hanna, Shelly didn’t seem to mind leaving much. She took only the clothes that would fit into a small suitcase. She even left some of her belongings behind: a pair of ratty old slippers, a magnifying glass she used to spy on things she found in the river, a piggy bank filled with coins. I guess a child who loses her mother the moment she’s born learns not to grow too attached to things.

Besides, the new place had two bedrooms: one of them just for her. The first night there, Shelly stood on the mattress I’d put on the floor in her bedroom with her arms stretched out and spun around until she got too dizzy to stand. “I love it, love it, love it!” she said. And I felt for the first time in a long time that I’d done something right. She fell asleep before I even had a chance to put sheets on the mattress. Below us, the rolling balls and the crashing pins were an odd lullaby.

Tonight, I knew that between the heat of Indian summer and the sounds of the bowling alley below, sleep would once again pass me by. And so I resigned myself to wakefulness, figured I’d spend the night as I spent most every night lately: sitting on the roof looking at the cool shimmering green of the public pool across the street, closed for the summer now, while Shelly slept in the other room.

I poked my head in to check on her. A few weeks earlier, when summer came back, I’d put our only fan in her room. It whirred in the window, making the curtains billow out like ghosts. She was flat on her back and fast asleep, wearing one of my old Middlebury T-shirts and the gum wrapper necklace she never took off.

I quietly closed her door and went down the hall to the window, which led to my rooftop refuge. Even at almost midnight, the tar paper still held some of the sun’s warmth, and the air was thick. Across the street, the water in the pool was still. Shelly’s birthday again, and here it was: another batch of sad cupcakes. Another week of restless nights. I was kidding myself blaming my unease on the heat. It wasn’t the heat at all but rather the passing of another year. It was that Shelly had outgrown another pair of sneakers, another winter coat. It was that she didn’t need me to tie her shoes or brush her hair: each small milestone a cruel reminder that life was going on. Moving forward. She was growing up. And each year she grew older, Betsy was that much further away. A child’s birthday should never be the anniversary of her mother’s death.

Betsy. Before this, before I knew the color of the sky at three A. M., before I knew the sound of a child sleeping—before I knew the fear of being entirely alone as the world slept—there was Betsy. Her name found its way to my lips on those waking nights, and I practiced their syllables as if I were reciting a poem or a prayer. She was always there. Before this, I had not known the world without her in it.

I looked for Betsy in Shelly. And sometimes I found her there: in the lazy blinking of her eyes, in a sigh, in a blush. But more often than not, in searching for Betsy, I only found myself. Shelly had my awkward long limbs, my pale skin, the same squinty blue eyes. She was almost twelve now—the same age that Betsy was when I first fell in love with her. But no matter how hard I looked at Shelly’s face, Betsy simply wasn’t hiding there.

Twelve years.

My rooftop reveries inevitably ended with thoughts of Betsy. It didn’t matter if I tried to concentrate on other things (the house for sale on Finney Ridge, the Sox’s recent loss to the Yankees, the John Fowles novel I was reading), my mind always found its way—no matter how circuitous the route—back to her. And as Shelly’s birthday approached, the journey back to Betsy Parker became less and less oblique. I’d start out considering what the mortgage might be on that three-bedroom Cape and wind up thinking about something Betsy once said about wanting to own a home that had an orange tree out front. (I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that oranges almost never grow in northeastern Vermont.) If I started out with baseball, I saw Betsy yanking Ray’s old Sox cap off his head and putting it on her own. It had covered her eyes, and we all laughed. And when I thought about that novel, the one where a collector of butterflies falls in love with a stranger and decides to first kidnap and then keep her, I began to wonder if Betsy ever felt like that: like a captured butterfly.

And here she was again tonight, curling up next to me on the roof. Waiting with me until the sun rose, insistent, over Depot Street. I left her only when I sensed that Shelly was stirring, that the day I’d been dreading had arrived.

Shelly came out of her room as I was making coffee. She rubbed her eyes and then spied the cupcakes sitting on the counter.

“I hope they’re okay,” I said. “The middles might be kind of soft.”

She smiled at me in that sad way she had and picked one of them up. She licked the frosting off the top and said gently, “Thanks, Daddy, but I’m kinda too old to bring cupcakes to school now.” And then, because she probably thought she’d hurt my feelings, she peeled the paper cup off the cupcake and popped half of it in her mouth. “Mmm. It’s really, really good, Dad.”

In my pocket was the gift I’d bought for her: a pair of glittery barrettes. I had planned to give them to her at breakfast, but decided then to wait, suddenly certain that the gift was all wrong. I didn’t want to let her down again. I’d have to stop at Kinsey’s after work. Maybe a charm bracelet would be better. A pair of earrings. A watch.

I was grateful for the morning’s rituals (making coffee, getting myself dressed and Shelly fed, packing our lunches) as well as for the morning’s unexpected events (a lack of hot water, milk gone sour in the fridge and a missing sock). Sometimes I felt like the mundane details of our lives were the only things tethering me to the world. I could hold onto them—distractions necessitating action. They gave me a sense of purpose. If not for the leaky faucet, the sandwiches, the bills, I might not know what to do with my hands.

Shelly kissed my cheek and then walked down the hallway to our neighbor’s apartment as I watched her from our doorway. Mrs. Marigold, an elderly widow, took care of Shelly before and after school, while I was at work. Shelly insisted that I not use the word “sitter,” and especially not “babysitter” when referring to Mrs. Marigold. But, whatever her job title, she made sure Shelly got to the bus stop. That she had a place to go after school. In exchange, I ran errands for her: buying groceries, depositing her husband’s pension checks at the bank, that kind of thing. She used to be a nurse, probably a hundred years ago, but this made me feel somehow safe.

“Happy birthday!” I called after her.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said over her shoulder, and skipped down the hall.

I had to leave for work earlier than I would have if I were driving, but as long as the weather permitted, I preferred to ride my bike. Most of the time, I left my car parked in the alley behind our building; I didn’t drive unless I had to anymore. After Betsy died, the world started to seem like a dangerous place. Every time I got behind the wheel, especially with Shelly in the car, I couldn’t help but envision every horrible thing that might happen. Every catastrophe. And so I’d opted instead for a bicycle, a J.C. Higgins three speed, which I knew had seen better days. I bought it at the Methodist Church rummage sale for five dollars and fifty cents. The spokes were rusted, and the seat was stuck at an elevation reserved for a taller man than I; even at 6 feet 4 inches, I had to stand on the pedals as I rode to avoid the unfortunate angle of the seat. But despite the inadequacy of the bike, there was something perfect about the two-mile journey to the railroad station each morning. In a month or so, when snow came and I had to negotiate my old VW Bug through the snow, I’d miss these mornings: the rushing air, the burning in my calves as I pedaled up the winding hill. The ride usually cleared my head, invigorated me, but today nothing could dispel the awful disquiet I was feeling.

By the time I got to work, I was antsy, like I’d had too much coffee. Too little sleep. I tried to look forward to the daily tasks, to losing myself in a stack of invoices, the bills of lading. I had been working at the freight office at the railroad station since I was twenty-two years old. I’d worked my way up, as much as you can in a place like this, and was now the freight traffic manager. It was hardly the job I’d thought I’d wind up with, but my ambition, like everything else, sort of flew out the window when Betsy died. I had never planned to make this job my career, but here I was. And I have to admit, there was a small but certain satisfaction when the numbers balanced out at the end of the day, the week, the month. At least there was order here. Predictability.

While I waited for the night shift to end, I sat at the grimy table in the break room thumbing through the previous Sunday’s Free Press and grabbed a doughnut from a box that somebody’s wife must have dropped off. It’s just another day, I thought. But just as I was about to take a bite of the doughnut and look in the sports section to see whether or not Boston had won Saturday’s game, Rene LaFevre, one of the French Canadian car knockers, came rushing through the door.

“Down by da river,” he said, breathless. “Dere’s people everywhere. Some’s drowned. And the ones that ain’t drowned are bleeding half to death. You gotta come wid me.”

Though it was almost October, the air was muggy and thick, not the normal crisp prelude to autumn. I could feel the hot, wet air in my lungs as I rode behind Rene on my bike, following the tracks out of the train yard toward the river. In the woods, the scent of apples was thick, nauseating. Apples had ripened with the first signs of fall and then rotted in the heat, their small suicides leaving only sad remains, pulp and empty brown skin littering the ground beneath our feet. I dodged them like land mines while Rene plodded and plundered through the rotten mess. Rene, who had to have weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds, had to stop several times to catch his breath. I waited as he bent at the waist, clutching his chest.

“You okay?” I asked.

Too winded to speak, he nodded. But despite Rene’s obvious exhaustion, we kept traveling further along the river’s edge, early morning sunlight struggling through the thick foliage.

Teacups. The first thing that I saw were about a dozen perfect china teacups floating along in the current, bobbing and dipping downstream: some with rims lipstick-kissed, some still filled with tea now mixing with river water, all of them disengaged from their saucers. In the hazy sun, it was almost beautiful, only a floating tea party. Before I saw the wreckage, I saw this.

Then, with a gesture that struck me as almost grand, Rene motioned toward the place where the woods opened up, where the train had jumped the tracks. It had derailed just after the bridge, and one of the rear cars had fallen into the river. The early morning sun glinted in the silver metal of the train, in the broken glass, and in the water. The other cars were tipped on their sides, bloodied people crawling out of the broken windows and doors. Some passengers sat stunned and silent on the bank of the river, while others screamed.

“My baby,” a woman wailed, futile in her attempt to climb the embankment where a child lay motionless on the grass. Her feet kept slipping, her fingers clawing at the earth. She looked up at us and screamed, “Why?” Rene reached for her hand and, bracing himself, helped her up the hill. She staggered across the grass and then collapsed on top of her child, her whole body shaking.

I turned toward the river, paralyzed. I could feel my pulse beating in my neck, in my temples. I willed the other thoughts out of my head, the other disasters.

“Dere’s people stuck inside,” Rene said to me, grabbing hold of my arm, as if to wake me from sleep. “You got to go in dere.”

Rene went to a woman who was beating her fists on the window of a wrecked car, and I rushed blindly down the riverbank to the car that had tumbled into the river. The water was cold and smelled swampy. It soaked my work clothes, the weight of water like the weight of deep sleep. Remarkably, the car was still upright. I shielded my eyes against the sun and scanned the row of windows looking to see if anyone was trying to get out. I fought against the current, holding on to a fallen tree so as not to get swept away. There were several shattered windows; I made my way to the closest one and hoisted myself up into it. I swung my leg over the edge and lowered myself into the car, where I was waist-deep in the water again. Inside, I saw more teacups as well as white tablecloths floating in the water. Plates and soup bowls, water and wineglasses. I pushed through the water using the dining tables for leverage.

“Hello?” I hollered, but my ears were filled with the sound of the river. “Is anybody in here?” I made my way from one end of the dinette car to the next, my legs shaking with the effort and the cold. I could see the narrow serving area and the entrance to Le Pub, the lounge car. “Hello?” I said again, louder this time.

I fought my way to the far end of the car and looked for another open window. My hand throbbed with the beat of my heart. There was no one here. But just as I was about to hoist myself out of the water, I saw something through the window into the next car. I pried the doors open and stepped through into the lounge. An upright piano was floating in the water, bobbing and dipping in the current as the river rushed through the windows. Relieved, I turned to go back. And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else.

The porter’s black and white uniform was fanned out like a nun’s habit; his head was immersed in water, his arms outstretched. The dead man’s float. Shelly had learned how to play dead at the public pool that summer. I’d watched all of the children in her swim class floating like toys in the water. It had given me a sick feeling in my stomach then. Now, my stomach turned again. I was shaking badly. It felt like the river was inside me, cold and wet. Unforgiving. I went to the man as quickly as the river would allow, and gently rolled him over.

His face was bloated, pale blue and swollen. At the sight of his face, I turned away, feeling bile rising in my throat, and I vomited into the river water. I turned back to the man and felt the shivering turning into something more like a small convulsion. I had the momentary impulse to give in to the current. I was so full of the river by then I could have just let it carry me away. But something inside of me pulled me out of the wreckage, back into the water, and slowly, slowly, up onto the muddy shore, where I could barely feel my legs.

The police and the town’s only ambulance had finally arrived. The emergency vehicles were parked cockeyed and tilted on the grassy shore. The red and blue lights swirling and humming reminded me of a carnival. Of a midway. Of some terrible ride.

There were other drowned people. Their bodies lay along the river’s edge, a morbid picnic. There was so much blood; the grass beneath my feet was slick with it. Children cried in their parents’ and strangers’ arms; the air was loud with the sound of sirens and screaming. I recognized faces but could not connect the faces with names. I concentrated instead on teacups, a hundred bobbing teacups, and I made my way out of the river. I climbed the bank, my boots and eyes filled with water, walking and walking until I couldn’t hear the sirens or see the train. About a hundred yards from the accident, I sat down under a great willow tree, exhausted, and put my face in my hands. I was fatigued, delirious. I blinked hard against the exhaustion and all of the pictures on the backs of my palms and on the backs of my eyes. But no matter how hard I tried, all I saw was the dead man’s face, and every breath reminded me of the other man I’d left for dead in this river.

I could have been there minutes or hours. The lack of sleep seemed to make time mutable. I could barely keep track of it anymore. Entire days went by sometimes without my noticing. Months could have passed while I sat at the river’s edge. Seasons changed.

I lifted my head only when I sensed someone standing in front of me. The sun was bright behind her, but I could make out the silhouette of a young girl, maybe sixteen, seventeen years old, her belly swollen like an egg. An apparition. A cruel trick of my mind, intent on its return, as always, to Betsy. Her name found its way to my throat but not through my lips. I squinted against the sun and quickly realized that this was not a ghost, not Betsy, but a real girl. A girl with skin the color of blackberries, holding a suitcase, her hair dripping river water onto my legs.

“What’s your name?” she asked, her accent jarring me, clearly placing her far away from home.

“Harper,” I answered, standing up awkwardly, as if I were only going to shake her hand.

“Harper,” she said. And then she pressed her tiny hand against her swollen stomach, a gesture I could never forget. “Please,” she said. “You gotta help me, sir. My mama’s dead. I got nowhere to go.”

What happened after this (the moments that followed, the months that followed) I can only explain as the acts of a man so full of sorrow he’d do just about anything to get free of it. Here I was at the river again, with only a moment to decide. Forgiveness. For twelve years, I’d only wanted to say I was sorry, but before this there was no one left alive to offer my apologies to.

“Please,” she said again.

And this time, I didn’t turn away.

ONE

Two Rivers

There aren’t really two rivers in Two Rivers, Vermont. There’s the Connecticut, of course (single-minded with its rushing blue-gray water), but the other river is really just a wide and quiet creek. Where they intersect, now that’s the real thing. Because the place where the creek meets the Connecticut, where the two strangely different moving bodies of water join, is the stillest place I’ve ever seen. And in that stillness, it almost seems possible that the creek could keep on going, minding its own business, that it might emerge on the other side and keep on traveling away from town. But nature doesn’t work that way, doesn’t allow for this kind of deviation. What must (and does) happen is that the small creek gets caught up in the big river’s arms, convinced or coerced to join it on its more important journey.

The girl was shivering, her arms wrapped around her waist, her hands clutching her sides. Her teeth were chattering. They were small teeth in a tidy row, like a child’s.

I peeled off my flannel shirt, which was the driest thing I had on me, and offered it to her. She accepted the shirt, awkwardly pulling it on. The sleeves hung over her hands; she almost disappeared inside it when she sat down.

“What’s your name?” I asked softly. She was like a wounded animal, knees curled to her chest and trembling.

“Marguerite,” she said, shaking her head.

“Your mother’s dead?” I asked.

The girl looked down at her hands and nodded.

“Was she on the train?”

She kept looking at the ground.

“Where were you going?” I asked.

“Up north,” she said.

“Canada?”

She looked up at me then, water beaded up and glistening on her eyelashes. She nodded. “Canada.”

“Do you know somebody up there?”

She looked toward the woods, chattering. “I got an aunt,” she said.

“Well, let’s get back to my house and you can give her a call. Let her know you’re okay,” I offered.

“It ain’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she don’t know I’m coming. My daddy . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Can we call him?”

“No!” she said loudly, shaking her head. And then she reached for my hand. “He sent me away. My mama’s dead. I ain’t got nobody.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to sort everything out in my mind.

“We need to go to the station, let them know you’re alive. Then they can get in touch with your aunt and we’ll get you on the next train. And if she can’t take you, we’ll go to the police. They’ll talk to your daddy. He’s your father. He has obligations.”

“No!” she cried again, squeezing my hand hard. “Please. Maybe I can just stay a little while. I can’t go back there. I can’t.” Her eyes were wild and scared. One was the same color as river water, blue-gray and moving. The other was almost black. Determined. Like stone. “Let them think I drowned.”

“You can’t just pretend you’re dead.”

“Why not?” she asked, both of her eyes growing dark.

I flinched. “Two Rivers is a small town. People are going to wonder where you came from.”

“Maybe I’m your cousin,” she said, her eyes brightening. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Your cousin from Louisiana.”

I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t have any cousins from Louisiana.”

“From Alabama then. I don’t know. Mississippi,” she persisted, clearly irritated.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not sure folks are going to buy the idea that you and I are family.”

The girl looked square at me, studying my face, as if contemplating the possibility herself.

“I’ve got a little girl,” I said. “I can’t just bring a stranger into my house.”

At the mention of Shelly, the girl reached out and grabbed my wrist, pressed my hand hard against her pregnant belly. When I pulled my hand back, she held onto my wrist, and she moved toward me. She was so close to my face I could smell the bubble gum smell of her breath. Her eyes were frantic, and she quickly pressed her lips against my forehead. It was such a tender gesture, it made me suck in my breath.

“I won’t be any trouble. I promise,” she said.

She looked at me again, and I willed myself to look into those disconcerting eyes. I concentrated on the blue one, the one the color of the river, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t say anything else; she simply took my hand and waited for me to take her home.

“You can stay for a little while, just until we get everything straightened out.” And then, because she looked as if she might cry, “I promise, everything will be okay.”

“Thank you,” the girl whispered, though it could have just been the wind rushing in my ears. She was riding on the back of my bicycle as I pedaled away from the accident at the river, through the woods, and back toward town. She held on to my waist tightly, her heartbeat hard and steady against my back. I was careful to avoid anything that might jar her or send us tumbling. We didn’t speak; the only sound was of bicycle tires crushing leaves. I worried about what would happen when I stopped pedaling, when the journey out of the woods inevitably ended, and so I concentrated on finding a clear and unobstructed path through the forest, taking great care to slow down when the terrain grew rough. Too quickly, the woods opened up to the high school parking lot.

I stopped. “If it’s okay with you, I should probably leave you here and have you meet me at the apartment,” I said. “Not the best idea for people to see us riding through town together.”

She climbed carefully down from the seat. She set the small suitcase she had with her onto the pavement, straightened her skirt, and touched her wet hair self-consciously. When she took off my shirt and handed it to me, I thought for a moment that she was going to let me go. I imagined pedaling away as fast as I could. I imagined forgetting all about her, about the wreck, about the river. But instead, I stayed on the bicycle, unsure of what to do next. I gripped the handlebars tightly, ready to go, but immobilized.

The lot was full of cars but empty of students and teachers. We were bound to be discovered by some kid ditching class or sneaking a smoke.

“This a high school?” she asked, looking at the low brick building in front of us. At the football field in the distance.

“Yeah,” I said. It was my high school, unchanged in all the years since I’d graduated. I knew every brick in this building’s walls. Every vine of ivy clinging to them. I knew the smell of the cafeteria vent on a cold autumn afternoon, the sound of the bell announcing the beginning of the day.

“No one will think nothin’ of it if they see me here then?” she asked.

I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure what someone would make of this girl, this dark-skinned girl, dripping wet and pregnant in the high school parking lot. While it had its share of matriculated expectant mothers, Two Rivers High had seen all of two black students in the last two decades.

“Walk that way,” I said, motioning toward the road that would wind behind the school and ultimately down into the village where I lived. “I live on Depot Street. Upstairs, above Sunset Lanes Bowling Alley. Number two. I’ll be waiting. I’ll make you some soup or something. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

I stood up on the pedals and pushed off, looking over my shoulder at her briefly, and then rode away as fast as my tired legs would allow. I should have gone home. It wouldn’t take her long to walk from the high school into the village. I knew the apartment was in no condition for company, and that the folks at work were probably wondering where I’d gone. But my bike seemed to have a will of its own, carrying me away from the high school, down the winding road toward town, and then onto the little dead-end street I hadn’t visited in more than twelve years. As if Betsy would simply be waiting there, ready to help me figure out what to do next.

Betsy

The neighborhood in Two Rivers where Betsy and I grew up was made up of row after row of crooked Victorians—crumbling monstrosities sinking in upon themselves. Each house on Charles Street had its own peculiar tendencies. The one next-door to ours had a widow’s walk whose railing had, unprovoked by either natural or unnatural disaster, collapsed into a pile of pick-up sticks on the lawn below one afternoon. The family who lived at the end of the street had the misfortune of owning a house that wouldn’t stay painted. No matter what pastel color they chose each summer, by the following spring it would have shrugged off the pink or yellow or lavender, the paint peeling and curling like old skin. My own family’s house was tilted at a noticeable angle; if you put a ball on the kitchen floor and let go, it would roll straight into the dining room (through the legs of the heavy wooden table), past my mother’s study, and finally into the living room where the pile of my father’s failed inventions inevitably stopped the ball’s trajectory. Most of the homeowners in our neighborhood had at some point given up, resigning themselves to sinking foundations and roofs. To the inevitable decay. There simply wasn’t the time or the money or the love required to keep the places up. This was a street of sad houses. Except for the Parkers’ place.

Though it was one of the oldest homes in the neighborhood, the Parkers’ house was meticulously maintained. Its paint was fresh: white with green shutters and trim. Its chimney was straight. The cupola sat like an elaborate cake decoration on top of the house. A clean white fence enclosed the front yard, which looked exactly as the town barber’s yard should. Rosebushes bordered the uncracked walkway, and other flowers littered the periphery of the yard in meditated disarray. A swing hung still and straight on the front porch, and the porch light came on without fail or flicker each night at dusk. On a street of forlorn houses, the Parkers’ made the other houses look like neglected children.

Of course, I knew Betsy Parker long before I loved her. We had lived on the same street since we were born. Our fathers nodded at each other as they went off to work each morning. Our mothers made polite small talk when they saw each other at the market. Betsy and I had knocked heads once during a game of street hockey, the result of which were two identical blue goose eggs on our respective foreheads. In the sixth grade, we had been the last two standing in a spelling bee (though I’d ultimately won with the word lucid). But in the summer of 1958, when we were twelve, our relationship changed from one necessitated by mere proximity into a full-blown crush—on my part anyway; she didn’t love me then. In fact, she didn’t love me for a long, long time. But that summer the seed was planted, and my unrequited passion, like all the other untamed weeds in our yard, grew to epic and tangled proportions by summer’s end.

When school let out in June, I’d taken up fishing, drawn by a local legend that, on a good day, the spot where the two rivers meet was teaming with rainbow trout. But by July I’d spent entire days with my line in the water, and I still had yet to catch a single trout (or any other kind of fish for that matter). The day I found myself smitten by Betsy, I’d also spent fishing, and, once again, I hadn’t caught anything but a cold. I’d meant to go home. I thought I might take a snooze in the hammock in our backyard. But instead of walking down the shady side of Depot Street to the tracks and then heading up the hill toward home, I crossed the street, into the sun. Once there, I stood in front of her, rendered mute.