In the River Darkness (10 page)

I looked outside at my tree. For a good climber, it wouldn’t be difficult to get into my room by clambering across its wide branches. But if there had ever been wet footprints on the stone path in our yard, the sun had long since made them disappear.

I didn’t say anything to my parents to keep from worrying them even more. But from that day on, I always kept my window shut when I wasn’t in my room.

While the cherries slowly ripened on the other side of the glass panes, I tried to forget the whole thing. It worked pretty well, and that was mainly thanks to Alex.

The smell of freshly mown grass and ozone filled the air, and the riverbanks were pink with blossoming spring herbs. In the June sunshine, I strolled past Mia’s house on my way to meet up with the guys at the bridge. Suddenly, a cherry pit skittered across the dusty path in front of me.

“Hey, Alex!” a voice called.

I looked up and saw Mia sitting in the crown of the tree. If my grandmother had been sitting on that thick branch, I could hardly have been more astonished.

“What are you doing up there?” What an idiotic question! Cherries dangled from her ears, juice ran down her chin. She looked downright cheerful! That’s a word I would never have expected to associate with her.

“I’m following a friend’s suggestion,” Mia replied, peering down at me. “Eating cherries is supposed to feel like music.”

“And?”

She plucked a dark red cherry from its stem with her lips, closed her eyes, and chewed thoughtfully. “Mmm . . . yeesss.”

“Will you throw one down for me?” I called, opening my mouth wide. From among the leaves came a sound that sounded awfully close to a giggle. Then a cherry landed on the path, three steps in front of me. Somewhat bruised, but still perfectly edible. I popped it into my mouth. “You missed—amateur!”

The second one hit my shoulder, the third even landed on my nose. Mia was a quick study. “Not bad. But wouldn’t you rather come down from there? Then you might even get one in!”

“Nah. Not really,” Mia grinned. The sun shone through the leaves and glistened on her hair. The coloring was slowly growing out, and you could see that her natural color was a warm chestnut.

The sight of Mia perched up there reminded me of a children’s riddle that Grandma annoyed us with every summer: “A young girl sits in a tree wearing a red skirt. In her heart is a stone. Now what can that be?”

“That’s easy! A cherry!” Mia laughed.

“Wrong, it’s
you
!” I teased her. “With a stone heart that won’t soften enough for you to come down and share your cherries with me! Alright then, I’ll climb up to you.”

I started climbing up the tree, which wasn’t so hard. The smooth bark felt like warm skin under my fingers. While I swung from branch to branch, a bombardment of cherries rained down on me. The fruits burst on my body and left blotches on my T-shirt and bare arms. Small, blood red marks. Like tiny wounds.

And then, finally, I reached her branch. I think we were both surprised by the sudden intimacy. Our faces were almost touching; out of breath, we stared at each other.

I studied her face: the pale, delicate skin; the narrow nose; her dark brown eyes with the long lashes. Her softly curving lips. From her earlobes dangled her shell earrings. My heart was pounding in my chest. “You have thousands of freckles,” I finally said.

That was the wrong thing to say! Mia’s face, still warm from the exertion of throwing, began to set in its old, familiar, closed expression. Like water freezing over. It made me cold to see it happening.

“If you can’t get one in now, you’re totally blind,” I said quickly to counter it, squeezing my eyes shut and opening my mouth as absurdly wide as a wide-mouthed frog.

Then I felt Mia very gently place a cherry on my tongue. The full sweetness exploded in my mouth.

The ground was no longer firm. The wind rustled in the leaves of the cherry tree. Everything around us was in swaying motion, as if the two of us were alone on a green ship.
Like somewhere on the high seas,
I thought.
It must feel exactly like this.

Shadows of leaves trembled on her face. Oh, God, I wanted to kiss her.

And then, I had no idea how it came about, but I did it. I kissed Mia!

Immediately, I felt her body stiffen.

Oh, no, I had misread the signs!
You blew it, Alex, you idiot!

I wanted to pull back from her and frantically wracked my pathetic brain for apologies, when I noticed it. Her tongue tentatively nudged me, made the acquaintance of mine. She tasted like cherries, a little bit like chocolate, and buried underneath that, very faintly, of Mia.

I always closed my eyes when I was kissing. But when I opened them again, I noticed that she was observing me with a fixed gaze, sizing me up, somehow.

“My heart isn’t a stone,” she said in a serious tone.

“No,” I whispered, confused by the odd expression on her face. Only much later would I realize that her words had been a warning.

Mia exhaled deeply and relaxed. Her breath caressed my skin warmly like a fleeting touch. Yes, it felt like music. It felt like summer.

“Kiss me again, Alex,” she whispered.

The bedsheets Grandma had attached to the clothesline with clothespins fluttered in the wind like white clouds. I captured their crackling on my voice recorder before they could fly away into the summer skies again.

But there was some kind of annoying muttering in the background. I peered past the sheets toward the river, where Grandma and Papa had nothing better to do than ruin my recording.

“And what do you want to do now, Eric?” Grandma’s voice bored into my father’s back as he sat on the dock and played hide-and-seek with the old pike.

“About what?” Papa grumbled back. But I heard in his voice that he knew exactly what she was talking about.

Grandma put her hands on her hips. “About the pictures, of course! We talked about it already last year, that it can’t go on this way. . . . Alexander is almost grown up now!”

She slammed him into the ground with her words. I saw how Papa shrank into himself on his camping stool. He probably would have been glad to trade places with Old George, the pike, right then.

“But Alex is always so happy. Those pictures are important to him!” he protested.

“It was a mistake from the very beginning to agree to this whole thing. I thought it would make it easier for the boys. But instead, everything has just gotten more complicated.” Grandma muttered something like, “When something like that gets to be a habit. . . . I told you right off: a lie is a lie and can only bring unhappiness.”

“All right, I’ll call her and explain it to her,” Papa finally said with a sigh. “There won’t be any more photos coming.”

I didn’t completely understand what they were talking about, but I knew one thing for sure: it would be a sad birthday for my brother.

Papa’s line jerked, and he quickly started to reel it in. He clearly thought the conversation was over.

It was just as obvious that Grandma didn’t think so. “Good, then that’s settled,” she said, but made no move to leave.

My father grimly worked his fishing rod. Hanging from the bait at the end of the line flapped not Old George, but a small silvery fish.

“Damn, too small,” Papa grumbled, in a foul mood.

“Will you talk to the boys, too?” Grandma continued the topic. “They’re both old enough for the truth. Sometimes I’m not sure how much they still remember. Not so much Alexander, but Jay. He’s never asked about her, not a single time. As if he . . .” A sad laugh rattled in her throat, like the boiler of an old steam engine. “He was so young then.”

My father didn’t answer. Carefully, very gently, he released the fish from the hook and threw it back into the river.

But I knew as well as he did that it wouldn’t help. That’s how it is with the fish. They swallow the hook because they see what they want to see. When you try to free them from it to put them back in the water, they die anyway. Papa always said they never recovered from the injury. Something in their mouths is damaged so badly that they can’t eat anymore. That’s why they die.

But I think they die of disappointment over this world riddled with hooks.

Grandma hobbled back up to the house, past the clothesline, without noticing me. But my father sat out there for a while longer. He looked at the fish blood on his hands, glistening in the sun.

The bedsheets didn’t sing for me again that day. At some point, I gave up and wandered a ways upriver. There, I crouched in the grass at the riverbank.

I felt so strange. My belly hurt as if I had a millstone in my stomach. Miserable, I stared into the water flowing by.

“What should I do?” I asked my reflection, which trembled in the current like a candle’s flame. Should I tell Skip what I had just heard? Strange, until now I had never had to ask myself this question. Skip took care of Skip. And Skip took care of Jay.

Could it work the other way around, too?

My face hovered before me in the water, a blurry oval with two different-colored eyes.

Monster eyes, Wolf and Matt used to call me when Skip couldn’t hear them. Suddenly, I had a strong urge to throw a rock at my reflection to see how it broke apart.

I quickly searched for a stone, drew back . . . and my eyes became her eyes. Her features replaced mine as she slowly surfaced.

I lowered my fist clutching the stone. Alina stood before me in chest-deep water.

“Where did you come from?” I asked, astonished.

“You called me, didn’t you?” Alina turned onto her back in the water, as agile and quick as an otter, and sprayed me in the face with a splash of water.

In a way, I had. “Yeah, well, I have a problem and could use your advice. It’s about Skip,” I stalled, not sure how I should start. “His birthday is coming up and . . .”

Alina made a face as if she had a toothache. “I don’t help pick out birthday presents if I’m not even invited to the party! Skip doesn’t want to see me, you know that.”

“But it’s not even about a stupid birthday present, it’s something much more important!” I protested indignantly. “Let me finish explaining!”

Alina pouted. “Oh, stop talking and get in the water already, Jay. What do we care about other people’s problems? The only important thing is you and me.”

I didn’t say a word.

“Let’s go for a swim, Jay.” Alina drew her fingers through the water and smiled at me.

I felt myself nodding. I had just enough time to peel the clothes off my body before Alina grabbed my arm and pulled me into the river with her.

Alex wasn’t at home.

“He’s still behind the counter at the snack bar,” his grandmother called to me from the porch. “But if you can make do with Jay and I for a change, you can come join us for a piece of cake.” There was a hint of an accusation in her tone. I immediately felt a twinge of guilt. I had pretty much given up our chats recently.

“I’d be happy to join you!” I quickly responded.

A few minutes later, I sat next to Jay at the dining room table as his grandmother piled enormous pieces of redcurrant tart on our plates. I was thinking that she had never continued her story and told me what happened to Katarina next. But there wasn’t any room in my head for other people’s stories right now, anyway.

There was only room for Alex and me.

I still didn’t know exactly how I had slipped into this “relationship,” but we’d been together for about a month now. Alex made me laugh, and I had been laughing a lot the past few weeks. It had been months since I had felt so lighthearted, even happy, and I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted. I had forbidden myself to brood about where this thing inevitably had to lead.

The currant cream melted on my tongue like a wonderful, fleeting dream. “Mmmm!” Jay agreed, starting to help himself to a second piece.

“Nothing doing, young man!” his grandmother protested, slapping his fingers. “That’s Alexander’s birthday cake! He should at least get a decent piece of that, since there won’t be any mail for him.” She moved a hand across her face, as if to wipe away the words she had started to say. Then she abruptly began clearing the table.

Jay walked me to the door. “You won’t forget Skip’s party tonight, will you?”

I rolled my eyes. “How could I forget his birthday? Alex has been talking about it nonstop for days! I’ve never met anyone who was so excited about his birthday.”

Jay sighed quietly. “That’s because . . . well, Skip’s parties are always the big event of the year here,” he continued with a crooked grin. “After all, he has the keys to the swimming pool!”

It seemed to me that he had wanted to say something else.