Meet Me at the River

for cassie wright

october 25, 1966–november 26, 1998

in dazzled memory

My mother doesn’t know that Luke comes through my bedroom window. How could she? He never makes a sound.

My room is on the third floor. There’s no trellis, no neighboring oak tree for him to scale. It’s not logical to think he would appear, his hands on my windowsill, followed by an ankle, and then his whole entire self. He leaps through the window as clear as morning, exactly the way I remember him. He lands on my carpet and glides across the floor to sit on the edge of my bed. If there’s moonlight (and when he comes there’s always moonlight) it shines cleanly, without ever casting shadows across his face.

Carlo lifts his sleek head and thumps his tail on the wood floor in greeting. My poor pup used to sleep
beside me, on the bed, but these days he’s too old and creaky to haul himself up. So there’s plenty of room for Luke.

In the early days, when Luke first reappeared, we would try to touch each other. I could see my hand pushing his hair behind his ear—it’s always too long—but I couldn’t feel the impossible smoothness except for in my memory. I could see his hand, the uneven knuckles wide across my knee, but there was no warmth, no sense of skin on skin, only the painfully lovely sight of it.

So we’ve stopped trying to touch. It’s just too sad, seeing without feeling. And it’s the opposite of sad, the two of us together again, cross-legged on my bed, facing each other. Our own hands on our own knees, talking through the night.

There’s never any noise from downstairs—no stirring footsteps, no water rumbling through the pipes. When Luke appears, every anxiety disappears. There’s only me. There’s only him. There’s only us. I never recall that exact moment when he exits and sleep enters. I just open my eyes minutes before the alarm sounds, and I know everything else—his presence, his words, his promise of return. I don’t feel tired, though I can’t have slept more than a few hours.

I feel, in fact, wide-awake, far more alert than after nights when he hasn’t been here. I can still see Luke’s fingers, hovering tactfully above the paper-thin skin on
the inside of my wrist, and I know that he’ll be back. I know exactly what’s brought him here, and I don’t feel afraid or ashamed. What I feel is alive, and in love, and I am almost ready to start remembering.

It may feel like I’m back, and I am, sort of. I can tell you anything you want to know about the past. But when it comes to now, or the time just after? I don’t get it, not at all.

Tressa and I try to talk about it but that never works. There’s no problem when she talks about the past. I can understand her fine. Then all of a sudden she must be talking about now, what I’ve taken to calling the after-Luke, because everything gets muffled.

“Tressa,” I have to say. “I can’t hear you.”

When Tressa talks about the after-Luke it’s the same as trying to touch her. I see her lips move but I don’t get the words. She might as well be speaking French. Tressa actually
can
speak French, and back in the day I used to like that. Sometimes I’d even ask her to speak
French, and I would sit there listening without knowing what she said. But now everything’s different, and if I’m honest it drives me crazy. I want to know what she’s saying but I can’t, just like I can’t feel her cheek or her hair or any other part of her body. It’s funny, because when I reach down to touch the dog I can feel him lick me, and I can feel his fur. Maybe if Carlo told me about now I’d understand what he was saying.

I know it must bug her, too, but she never acts like it. Probably she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. When we were little kids, her grandmother was always saying, “Tressa, gentle!” Not that Tressa
wasn’t
gentle. It was just the kind of thing you say when a kid tries to touch something breakable. But her grandmother said it so much, I thought that was her name.

“When will I see Tressa Gentle?” I was always asking my parents. At some point I figured out it wasn’t really her name, and I stopped calling her that for a long time. But then when we got older, and things got different, I started again. I called her Tressa Gentle when we walked by the river. Back when I could feel her skin and hair.

These days when I come through her window, I want things to be the way they used to. So I smile and say, “Tressa Gentle,” and she smiles back. I can see the old maps she drew, tacked on the wall. I try not to think about the blank spots, where new ones must be. If I don’t worry about what I don’t have, maybe I can just be glad to see her, and be here in her room, talking about the past.

I can’t visit anyone else, not my dad, or my sisters or my mom. I want to visit them but I don’t know how. I can only get to Tressa.

When I’m not with her I must be somewhere else, but I can’t tell you about that, either. I can tell you about my life, and I can tell you about Tressa’s life, because she pretty much told me everything. I know what happened to both of us from the second I was born right up until those last seconds in the river.

I wish I could tell my mom that those last seconds weren’t so bad. But I can’t tell Mom anything. Not anymore. All I have left is me and Tressa, so I come back to her every chance I get.

I, of course, can tell you about now. It’s everything else I don’t like thinking about. Not that now is so terrific. It just happens to be my only option—a concept that concerned doctors, therapists, teachers, and most of all my mother have worked very hard to impress upon me. So for their sake I am here, in a bizarre limbo, living with Mom and her husband in the southwestern part of Colorado.

Rabbitbrush is a tiny little Christmas card of a town nestled in the San Juan Mountains. My mother grew up here and then spent most of her life—and most of my life—trying to escape it. The town is very pretty, but it has a bit of an inferiority complex. Although we’re not far from Telluride, we’re not quite close enough to share its tourists. Local developers and the town council are
always trying to dream up new ways to entertain visitors, especially in the summer, since building our own ski area isn’t realistic.

Paul, my mother’s husband, wants to build a drive-in movie theater on the parcel of land near town that my grandfather deeded to my mom, years ago, so that one day she could build a house there. Now of course she has Paul’s house, but Grandpa says Paul will use that land commercially over his dead body, and then he looks over at me apologetically. I shrug to tell him it’s okay. Nobody likes to say the word “dead” around me anymore, as if avoiding the word will help me forget the concept. I never realized how often some version of “dead” appears in everyday expressions until people tried to stop saying it. Last week my mother used the word “mortified,” then clapped her hand over her mouth, as if that Latin root might send me running for the medicine cabinet, or the graveyard, or wherever they think I’m going.

Certainly not to the graveyard, where Paul had half of Luke’s ashes buried. The other half belongs to Francine, Luke’s mother. It used to bother me, this weird division of something that used to be whole. Used to be
Luke.
But now that I know those ashes aren’t Luke, not at all, I think: let them do whatever they need. My sister Jill told me that Francine plans to scatter her share from the top of the Jud Wiebe Trail in Telluride on the anniversary of his death. This sounds much more like Luke than the
quaint but lonely graveyard, which I haven’t visited since Luke—the real, whole Luke—started coming back. If anybody notices I’ve stopped going, I hope they find it comforting.

But truthfully, nothing could be comforting enough to stop my mother from worrying about me. This afternoon she stands waiting for my school bus at the end of Paul’s driveway. Ordinarily it’s Carlo who waits there, and with a sinking feeling of dread, I wonder where he is. The past few days he’s seemed more sluggish, not at all his usual self.

I can see my mother from where I sit in the very back row. It’s late November, the week after Thanksgiving, and I know I should probably feel embarrassed. I’m eighteen years old and riding the school bus for my second shot at senior year, which I am repeating, not—thank you very much—because I didn’t finish that last month but because the school officials, like Mom and Paul, are determined to keep a close eye on me. Even though I took all my exams and passed them, nobody could stand to let me graduate and go to CU the way I was supposed to. And even though I’ve had my driver’s license for more than a year, nobody wants to let me touch a car. Nobody ever
says
I’m not allowed to drive; they just come up with some very good reason why I can’t have the car when I ask. So I’ve stopped asking, and they all seem relieved.

All this means that what was supposed to be my first
year of freedom has turned into a thinly veiled version of house arrest, which actually is fine with me. “This isn’t meant to be a punishment,” my mother said back in the summer, when I was still at the hospital and she told me that I couldn’t graduate. I nodded, not because I didn’t want to be punished but because if I were to be—and if I could choose my own punishment—it would be a whole lot graver than an extra year of high school.

“Hi, Mom,” I say as I step off the bus. She smiles and presses a steamy mug of hot cocoa into my hands. I look down into the mug and see a fat marshmallow bobbing and floating. That marshmallow looks so hopeful, refusing to be dragged under or melted by the thick, hot liquid surrounding it. Mom must have timed it out very carefully for the cocoa to still be hot and this marshmallow un-melted. This kind of domesticity is new to her, and it always makes my heart hurt a little, especially when it’s directed toward me.

I glance at my mom, who wears maternity jeans and a baggy, wheat-colored Henley shirt that probably belongs to Paul. She’s got one hand resting on her huge, blooming belly. Her hair is long and tousled and bleached almost the color of her youth. Mom has always been a wiry, athletic woman; her collarbones still protrude and her arms are corded and toned from prenatal yoga. She has a good face, my mother, with wide blue eyes and high cheekbones, a face that moves without creasing. If I squint, I can block out the weariness
she still carries from last year, and the loss of elasticity along her jaw. I can almost believe the illusion of young mother-to-be.

In reality my mother is forty-five years old with three grown children. Almost as soon as she and Paul remarried, they decided they wanted another baby. This meant a long stretch of fertility drugs and in vitro, followed by two miscarriages, followed by an egg donor and this about-to-be sibling who shares exactly zero of my DNA. My sister Jill says she finds it ironic: our mother, at this late date, having a child she actually intends to parent, and it’s not even related to her. Mr. Tynan, my English teacher, says that “irony” is the most persistently misused word in the English language, but I know that in this case Jill’s using it correctly. Every time my mother turns down a cup of coffee, I picture her pregnant with me—a joint in one hand and a shot of tequila in the other. With Jill and Katie, Paul’s daughters, she was more conventional—probably a cigarette and a glass of wine.