In the River Darkness (4 page)

“I will not allow my son to become a space cadet,” he said, breathing heavily, and it sounded as if wanted to justify his outburst. Then he said more softly, “I won’t tolerate him becoming like his mother . . .”

“Eric!” Grandma interrupted him. Her voice was as sharp as a kitchen knife.

The silence that followed hummed in my ears. Dad looked down at his hands as if he had never seen them before. They were shaking. Mine were trembling, too. I wished I could punch him, like I would Wolf or someone else. I wished our mother were here. I wished . . .

While we still sat there like manikins, Grandma took control of the situation again. After she had admonished our father, she then turned to Jay, who was absently staring out the window.

“And you will stop playing around during the meal, which your father worked hard to provide! You are grounded for the night!” Jay stood up, without saying a word, and shuffled to the door with his plate. I also stood up.

“You two always stick together, huh?” my father asked behind me. I turned around again, my hand already on the doorknob. I looked him straight in the eyes and hoped that he would notice—notice that I despised him at that moment and that I swore to myself I would never be like him.

Maybe he did get it. He pushed his chair back abruptly, but as he crossed the room to the porch door, I saw that his arms were hanging down as if his hands had suddenly become too heavy for him. “I have to get back to work. Might be late tonight, Iris,” I heard him say to Grandma before he stepped out into the yard.

Only the singing fish was left behind in the dining room—keeping Grandma company as she ate her vegetables in stoic silence.

I went up to my room. After that meal, I felt beat. This horror family really got to me. I wanted to get out of here.

The globe stood on my desk. When I turned it on, the globe’s oceans lit up in blue and, embedded in them, the continents in golden yellow, brown, and green. I had marked all the places my mom had sent me pictures of with red sticker dots. Over the years, they had added up.

Time for a little adventure trip. How long had it been since I had done that? Six months, maybe longer? I gave the globe a push and it began to spin on its axis. Faster and faster, the colored dots flew by. Ready, set . . . I closed my eyes and touched the globe with my index finger. The red dot closest to my finger was Mindanao. Of all places.

Mindanao is an island near the Philippines. That’s the place the shell came from—on my seventh birthday—the first place she went after she left us.

I rifled through the cardboard carton under my bed for the envelope of photos from her first report. Because I didn’t have enough room on my walls, I could only hang up the most recent ones.

There they were. I leafed through them. There weren’t any pictures of my mother among them. She only photographed other people, landscapes, animals: a man splitting a papaya with a machete, the glistening of the machete and his white teeth; a spotted snake gliding along the forest floor; the sea, gleaming turquoise blue. The colors seemed to hover in the air above the bay. That was it; that was the photo I wanted to travel with today. One of my favorite pictures, it had always faithfully led me to my destination.

I threw myself on the bed. With one hand, I held the photo in front of my face, and with the other, I pressed the conch shell to my ear. Its weight was heavy and good in my hand. The celluloid sea began to roar.

I tried to imagine I was sitting on that beach, digging my toes into the hot sand. How the air tasted! Like algae and salt. And the wind was spraying foam into my face so that even my lips tasted salty, and later in the evening, at home, I’d find tiny grains of sand in my clothes.

I had never actually been to the sea. We didn’t have money to travel.

Concentrate now! I gathered my thoughts—ocean, space. I sat on the beach, the waves crashing. Back there at the edge of the picture, where the cliffs were, a figure appeared. It was a woman with long blonde hair wearing a white sundress. She ran right along the water’s edge, where the waves break over your ankles and you can feel their pull as they withdraw back into the ocean.

The woman was my mother.

Soon, she would sit down next to me and ask, “How are you doing, Skip?” We would sit in the sand and just talk. About little things. Or just watch this glittering, endlessly moving water together.

I heaved an exasperated sigh. It just didn’t work! Had I forgotten how to do it by now? Maybe it was better that way. Grandma always said that you should keep both feet on the ground. I thought so, too. But then why did I feel so . . . crap!

My mother’s face was a blurred fleck. When I tried to fill in her features, it was always just the immortalized facial features from the old black-and-white pictures that hung all over our house. The little personal gestures that everyone has were gone. Forgotten.

Only one image remained:
my mother stood knee deep in the river and stretched out both of her hands toward me.

Wolf once asked me if I hated her. I told him no, and that was true. I could understand that she didn’t want to stay here, in this little town, with this man. The only thing I didn’t understand was why she hadn’t taken Jay and me with her.

I used to hope that no packet of photographs would arrive for my birthday; that instead, she would be standing at the door again, coming to pick us up.

It was strange that Jay had never seemed to miss her. I had never seen him cry, and he had never asked about her, either. But he was a lot younger than I was when she took off. He was only five. I was almost seven then.

And besides, he had me. I looked after him. Always had.

Damn it! I wasn’t one of those sissies who cried himself to sleep because his mama had up and left. But sometimes . . .

“Come,” I whispered into the sound of the waves, “please come!”

Grounded again! And just because of that stupid Spanish test. Grandma had studied the D on my paper for a long time, as if she could turn it into a B with the power of her gaze, and then growled: “This week you will not set foot outside your room after you get home from school, is that understood? You should spend some time seriously thinking about what you need to change in your life.”

I liked my life exactly the way it was, and I told her so, too. She just snorted. “I’ll make your life a living nightmare if you don’t learn that Spanish grammar inside and out!”

So there I sat, chewing on my pencil and looking outside at the rain. “Susan would write a letter if . . .”

I asked myself who this faceless Susan would write a letter to. She should write my brother a letter. He loved letters and photos.

Maybe Susan was writing to her mother . . .

Why weren’t those things ever in the Spanish books? They just left out the most important things!

“Susan would write a . . .”

The water gurgled in the gutters while I watched the path of the drops rolling down my windowpane and joining to form little rivulets, then streams . . .

I had never been able to resist rainy days at the river. Besides, Alina was sure to be waiting for me already. Hopefully, she wasn’t mad because I didn’t come yesterday. And the day before yesterday. Or the day before that, either . . .

“Susan would . . .” Oh, to hell with this Susan! Alina was waiting.

Quickly, I slipped into my rain gear and snuck down the stairs in my socks, rubber boots in my hand. Chrr, chrr went the steps, like sleeping dogs. I had to skip the fifth one from the top or it would wake up and bark.

I was already halfway down when a door opened upstairs. Skip always heard me. I guess that’s the way it is with big brothers. He looked down at me and then whispered, “Be careful not to fall in the river!”

Even though he was grinning, I could hear the concern in his voice. He always worried too much, even though I could swim better than him. Skip didn’t like the river.

“No need to worry, Skip, I can take perfectly good care of myself,” I said quietly. He muttered something and closed the door again.

Outside, the rain sang with a thousand voices.
Drip, drip
. . . it whispered in the new leaves, telling them stories of its travels. Just like spelling words into the hands of a blind person. The trees sighed then and were happy. I could hear it.

With squelching rubber boots, I ran across the wet grass, so fast that I almost fell. I didn’t look over at the neighbor’s yard. And what was more important, I didn’t listen in that direction, either. No.

But I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it: how I happened to be passing her house, the house of the crazy girl. And then I heard it, that sound, that sound that wrapped itself around my ankle like twine and pulled me over the fence. I couldn’t do anything else, I had to follow it. It sounded like a violin or something, but deeper, fuller.

Every stroke of the bow sank into my flesh, vibrated in my bones. How incredible that crazy girl could produce such sounds!

And then I stood under the window, beneath the cherry tree that blossomed whiter than white. I just stood there and listened. The sounds fell like cherry blossoms on my face, cool and soft. It was like snow and spring at the same time.

My heart contracted. Maybe it was fear, maybe something else I’d never experienced before that moment. I thought I would die. And I thought that I wouldn’t even mind, as long as the music continued.

I have no idea how long it lasted. At some point, the music stopped. I didn’t die. Instead, I went home.

That had been three days ago. I hadn’t told anyone about it, not Skip, not even Alina, and I told her everything. But that . . .
that
I wanted to keep for myself, somehow. Just for me.

I could already see Alina on the dock from a distance. She was waiting for me, even if she acted as if she just happened to be standing there because she felt like it right then. A slender shadow in the rain. Her long hair, her clothes, everything dripped with moisture, but she didn’t seem to be cold.

“Hello,” I lowered my voice involuntarily as I greeted her and was afraid she’d notice. That she could hear the new sound . . . deep within me. It might make her sad. Or furious.

Her face was serious as she turned to me, and she squinted her eyes. Raindrops hung from her eyelashes. “I thought you had forgotten me.” Every word was a pebble that stroked the water’s surface and then sank into the unfathomed depths.

“I was grounded,” I said, trying to convince myself it wasn’t a lie. We were quiet for a while and watched the seething river.

“Promise me,” Alina finally exclaimed. Her voice sounded like a willow rod then, lashing, hard. “Promise me that you’ll never forget me!”

I spit into my hand and swore like I had always promised her, even as a kid: “I’ll never, ever forget you!”

For a moment, she looked me over—scrutinized me. Then she smiled and climbed into the boat that was tied to the dock. “Come on!”

Our boat, the
Bounty
, was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. It had seen better times, back when my brother had still been Skipper, and we waged battles against the South Sea pirates with the other guys. Or fed the Nile crocodiles with wretched mutineers. It all depended on what books Skip had been reading, or where the last letters had come from.

The players changed; Matt and Wolf were often with us back then. But my brother was always in charge of the boat, the Skipper. And I was his exploration officer.

At some point, Skip became Alex. For everyone, except me.

Now he rarely used the
Bounty.
And never for adventure trips on the Nile. He didn’t like the river anymore.

So I had inherited the boat. I took it out often to meet Alina on the island. She sat opposite me, looking in the direction we were traveling, trailing a hand in the water and humming contentedly while I rowed. I put power into the oars and pulled all the way through. After a few strokes, I had found my rhythm. It was a good feeling to have perfect timing and to dip the oars so that they hardly splashed at all. The boat glided through the water like an arrow. On the surface were countless circles that ran together and became part of the river again, like tiny explosions. The river seemed to boil. All around us the rain pattered, tapped, drummed, rustled, murmured. And we were in the midst of it with our boat. I slapped the oars on the surface a few times, hard, so the water sprayed, and imagined we were the kettledrums in this orchestra.