Meet Me at the River (14 page)

I can feel the air whoosh out of her parka as we hug hello. Even at my thinnest Isabelle always made me feel like an elephant. She is naturally skin-and-bones, breast-less, built on a narrower scale than the rest of us.

“
Bonjour
, Tressa,” she says, kissing me on each cheek. She’s so fluent in English and French that both are almost without accent.

“Hi, Isabelle,” I say, wanting to speak English. These days the whole world feels enough like a second language.

Isabelle looks just the same, with blunt-cut brown hair and pale freckles across her nose. She’s a year younger than I am, and those three years of close quarters coupled with her own vagabond history make her
feel more like a sister than either of the twins. Nights on the boat, we would lie on the deck and stare up at the stars, searching for the Southern Cross. Isabelle barely remembered her mother, who died when she was three; we would imagine the departed Madame Delisle gazing back down at us. We talked about anything and everything. So it doesn’t take me aback now when she reaches for my wrists and pulls them toward her.

“Let me see the scars,” she says.

Isabelle pushes back the sleeve on my left arm, then peers down, squinting. “Ooh la la,” she says. “It looks worse than I imagined. Did it hurt?”

“I took a lot of Vicodin when I did it,” I say. “But it hurt afterward, when I woke up. Quite a lot.”

She lets go and hooks her arm through my elbow. Without either of us mentioning a destination, we begin walking up toward Colorado Avenue.

*   *   *

Armed with Hugo’s MasterCard, Isabelle hits a few stores where she stocks up on winter gear. “You won’t believe how cold it gets in New England,” she says. “It’s worse than here. Very damp.” She insists on buying me two sweaters and a pair of jeans. “Hugo would want to get you something,” she says with a wave of her hand. Eventually we make our way to The Steaming Bean and sit down across from each other, shopping bags piled up high around us.

“So,” Isabelle says, as if she’s been waiting to say it
these past couple hours. She takes a moment to blow delicately on her café au lait. Not so much a purist as Isabelle, I have a sugar-free vanilla latte.

“Ça va?”
Isabelle says. “You’re all right now?”

“Oui,”
I say automatically. “
Ça va.
I’m fine.”

She narrows her eyes at me, not quite believing. I try to make my face look honest, convincing. I remind myself that saying “I’m fine” does not constitute a lie, because in fact, I do feel fine, and hopeful, and—most important—willing to stay in this world. As long as I can keep seeing Luke at night.

“I didn’t hear about what happened until nearly a month later,” Isabelle says. “Hugo forwarded a letter from your mother that said you were okay. I sent you an e-mail, but you didn’t answer.” She looks down at her coffee. For a moment I take her pause as an apology for the complaint, but then she says, “When you didn’t answer, it made me feel like you were gone. Like, gone as in really gone. You know? Even though I knew you weren’t.”

“I’m sorry.” There’s never anything else to say.

She picks up her spoon and gives her coffee a few needless stirs. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m just trying to tell you what it was like for me. Hugo and I spent the summer on the boat, and I would lie on the beach and look up at the stars, and I would imagine you up there looking back at me. Even though I knew in my head you were safe and sound in Colorado.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again, wondering if the words sound as stale to her as they do to me. If she wants me to know that what I did affected people other than myself, she can rest assured that that has been taken care of. I don’t say this, though. I understand that Isabelle needs to do this, chastise me, and my job is to let her.

“Don’t do it again,” she says, clanking her spoon back to the saucer. Her voice sounds stern enough to settle the matter. I look out the window of the café. The snow piles along the side of the road in dirty clumps. The sky looks flat and gray. I remember being on the boat with Isabelle, how her company eased that time away from Rabbitbrush. I take a sip from my fake-sweet latte, staring longingly at Isabelle’s huge piece of chocolate cake. Half an hour ago she ordered it enthusiastically, but as far as I can tell, she hasn’t had a single bite, only taken it apart with the side of her fork and spread the crumbs around on her plate. I remember this style of non-eating from our years on the boat and decide if she can be forthright, then so can I.

“I’ll tell you what,” I say. “I promise not to commit suicide again if you promise to take five bites of that cake.”

Isabelle mashes her fork down on a piece of cake heavy with frosting. She frowns at her food. Even though I’ve been dying for something authentically sweet, I wouldn’t want to eat her cake after the mess she’s made of it. But then I realize it’s my wording that has thrown her off, not my command. She reverses the direction of
her fork and places it into her mouth, her brows knit together in concentration. She wants me to amend myself, say “attempt” instead of “commit.” But I don’t do it. If all these mini lectures have taught me anything, it’s that suicide is something that’s committed whether you succeed or not.

A week ago the book about Assia Wevill, the one Evie was reading, arrived from
Amazon.com
. Assia Wevill killed herself, successfully, along with her four-year-old daughter. Though I find this information frightening, it’s also a kind of perverse relief. Somebody did something worse than me. I understand there’s no way to commit suicide without taking others down with you, but at least in my case the others were only metaphorical.

As Isabelle attempts my demanded five bites, she looks so pained that I do the only thing a real friend could: take my spoon out of my coffee cup and help her out. I close my eyes to savor the exquisite, melting frosting, and when I open them, I am immediately punished for this brief second of earthly pleasure.

We have been here, sipping our coffee drinks and not eating cake, for nearly an hour. I sit with my back to the door, which has opened and closed twenty times or more, always with a jingle. I don’t know that I have turned around once at this sound. But the breeze that enters with Luke’s mother alerts me somehow, a shift in the room’s atmosphere, the bell shaking differently—with a
slight tone of warning. Isabelle has never seen Francine, or Luke for that matter; she wouldn’t detect the resemblance. But she lets her gaze follow the sharp turn of my head that Francine doesn’t register at first. She strides past our table, down jacket zipped to her chin.

Isabelle follows my gaze, looks at me questioningly.

“That’s Luke’s mother,” I say. I could swear my voice comes out in a whisper. But Francine’s head swivels as if I shouted the words across the room. She looks at me, blinking, almost as if she’s forgotten who I am, then puts her hands into the pockets of her jacket and walks toward us. It is the first time she has made eye contact with me—let alone approached me—since before Luke died.

My hands slide off the table and into my lap. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to look back at her. I refuse to let myself hope for any sort of olive branch as Francine stops just beside our table.

“So,” she says. Her face looks uncharacteristically pale, her strong jaw set. I see that the gray is gone from her hair. She has rinsed it out, and for some reason I feel a slight jolt of relief, as if this might be a good sign. She stands there, hovering over me. Then she says, “Do you have something you want to tell me?”

I stare up at her, completely flummoxed. My mind flashes to Silver Lake, and Luke’s new hockey skates. The two of us, slamming the puck across the frozen white surface. Could someone possibly have seen us?

“No,” I say, my voice cracking slightly on the word. I think that I have never sounded more like a liar.

Francine bends one knee and scrapes the toe of her boot across the floor. “I ran into your mother this morning,” she says, “at the Safeway. She’s looking very pregnant.”

My brows contort, and I nod. This can’t be what Francine means. Everyone knows my mother is very pregnant.

“She told me about your dog,” Francine says. “She seemed to think I already knew.”

Isabelle reaches across the table and takes my hand. Francine makes a motion that mimes batting her hand away, though she is not bold enough to actually touch a girl she doesn’t know.

“Don’t hold her hand,” Francine snaps, then looks surprised that she has said it out loud. I’m surprised too, not that she thinks I don’t deserve any kind of comfort, but that she feels it so strongly that she can admit to it. Isabelle doesn’t reply, but tightens her grip around my fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, easing my hand out of Isabelle’s so Francine can see that I agree with her. I don’t deserve this café, this friend, or even this wrecked chocolate cake. I don’t deserve the air around us.

“Tressa,” Francine says. Her voice shakes with the effort of achieving balance. “I know you’re hurting. Don’t you think I know that? But couldn’t you have told
me yourself? So I wouldn’t have to find out like that, all of a sudden, in the middle of the supermarket?”

It hasn’t occurred to me until this moment, but of course I should have told her. I should have at least written a note, even an e-mail. A stale, floundering survival instinct wants to argue with her.
But you won’t speak to me
, it protests.
How can I tell you anything if you won’t speak to me?

Instead I say, “I’m sorry.” The same old stupid, useless words.

Francine brings her hands up to cover her face. She says something, muffled, behind them. “What?” I say, not because I want to hear but because I want her to take this chance—this anger allowing her to look at me—to say whatever she needs.

She doesn’t take her hands away but opens her fingers so her words might be more audible. “I don’t want to be cruel,” she says. Her eyes fill up with tears.

Isabelle speaks up in her sharp colonial voice. “Then don’t be. Can’t you see she’s sorry? Tressa lost him too, you know.”

Francine drops her hands. Her face looks so pale, so drawn and conflicted.

“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “You’re not cruel.”

She nods her head and looks toward the window, out at that slushy snow. Wipes a tear away. I want to cry too, but use all my might not to. Because even though my regret could fill a lake, an ocean, and a very
particular river, all it can do is hurt Francine more. She lost the one thing in the word that can’t be replaced. It seems unfair that Luke comes back to me and only me. I wish I could tell Francine,
He’s not really gone,
and invite her to join us, but of course I can’t. So I just sit there, silently, until she says, “The flowers.”

I raise my eyes to hers, tense with endless apologies.

“Thank you for stopping,” Francine says. Then she walks away from my table, out of the coffee shop, whatever she came in for unclaimed, her hands returned to her pockets and her eyes to the cold winter ground.

*   *   *

“How did Isabelle look?” my mother asks at dinner. “Has she gained any weight?” She passes me a bowl filled with rice pilaf, which I push across the table to Paul. The questions about Isabelle come fast and furiously, but Mom doesn’t mention running into Francine. I don’t know if this omission is for my benefit or Paul’s.

“She looks the same,” I say, trying to imagine the confrontation between the two Mrs. Kingsburys, whether it
was
a confrontation or just a strained, polite exchange. I picture the two of them facing each other in the harsh lights of Safeway’s produce aisle, the automatic sprinklers buzzing intermittently with their summery spray. I hate that in addition to everything else Francine has to endure bumping into the woman who is her predecessor and successor—my mother with her three living children and another on the way. If only Mom had run away and taken
me with her after Luke died, Francine would never have to see either of us again.

After we eat, I clear the table and wipe down the counters, then walk outside. Clouds gather overhead as if the sky is gearing up for another big snow, and in my heart I feel low and lonesome. Something tells me Luke will not appear tonight. And if he
does
appear, I won’t be able to talk to him about what happened with his mother at the coffee shop. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is Luke, his face in front of mine, the tips of his fingers on my wrist. The sorrow in Francine’s voice continues to rattle in my brain, jarring all my nerve endings.

I walk through the kitchen and into the garage to grab my mittens, jacket, and skates. “Mom,” I call when I come back inside. “I’m going to walk out to the lake and skate for a bit.”

In about two seconds Mom appears in the kitchen, the world’s fastest middle-aged pregnant woman. “Now?” she says. “It’s already dark. I don’t think that’s safe.”

“I’ll bring a flashlight,” I say. “And I won’t be long. I want to get some exercise.”

Mom sighs, not ready to agree to this but not wanting an argument. Then she says, almost to herself, “Maybe we need to get you another dog.”

I frown, thinking uncharitably of all the various replacements she has provided throughout our life together. Reading my expression, Mom holds up her hands, defensive, and stops me before I can say anything.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know we can’t replace Carlo. I just meant that I always felt so much safer when he was with you.” She pauses, then adds, “I miss him too, Tressa, and I worry about you.”

Mom’s voice sounds breathless. Her skin looks mottled, and I know the “him” she misses is not necessarily Carlo.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. I reach out so that my fingers just barely brush her belly. Then I promise for the millionth, zillionth time, like my body isn’t my own but some vessel I’ve been unwisely trusted with, “I’ll be careful.”

Mom’s face doesn’t merely cloud; it contorts. It crumples as if she might cry, not only at the thought of me out at night but at the thought of arguing with me about it. Understanding how it feels not to be able to face what’s just around the corner, I take off my mittens in surrender and throw them onto the counter. If I’m living for her benefit, it makes sense to comply with her wishes.