Meet Me at the River (2 page)

Still. When I see my mother trying so hard—putting so much heart into this latest transformation—I can’t help wishing her well. I know what it feels like to long for last chances, even when you know you might not deserve them.

The bus pulls away, and my mother still stands there, looking hopeful and expectant. I want to ask about Carlo, but I’m afraid of her answer. So I bring the cocoa
to my lips and sip. To my surprise, it tastes amazing: rich and chocolaty and exactly the right temperature.

“Thanks, Mom,” I say. “This is delicious.”

“Do you like it?” she asks. “I made it from scratch. I got the recipe off this great food blog.”

I stare at her. There are times, lately, when my mother seems completely foreign, as if some alien being has entered her body and turned her into the exact kind of mother I used to think I wanted. In these moments I perversely want the old one back, and luckily, she has a way of obliging. For example, right now she sees the expression on my face and realizes she’s gone too far, so she laughs—like the old transient Mom making fun of this new Happy Homemaker.

I want to laugh, too, but worry about Carlo prevents it. Mom must suspect this, but she doesn’t say anything, just hooks her arm though mine. We start walking up the hill to Paul’s house. It’s a big place, not too over-the-top but still impressive. Paul made a lot of money buying land in Telluride before its big boom in the late eighties, right after my mom left him the first time.

“Where’s Carlo?” I finally ask. For a second the words hang in the air, and despite everything I learned last year about worst-case scenarios, I can’t stop hoping for a happy answer.
Carlo’s sleeping upstairs in that sunny spot by the window.
Or,
Look, there he is, waiting on the porch.

But Mom says, “Carlo’s at the vet.”

I stop. She stops too, and I try to read her expression.
“Why? What happened?” I force my voice to stay calm, then ask the hardest question. “Is he going to be all right?”

“Well,” she says carefully, “he looked very bloated this morning, and he wouldn’t eat, so I brought him in. Dr. Hill said he had a lot of fluid in his belly. He drained it, and now he’s running some tests.”

“Why would he have fluid in his stomach?”

My mother looks at the ground for a minute. She does not love facing reality. For example, she’s had an amnio and a million ultrasounds but will not find out the sex of her baby. She says she wants to be surprised, but I know the real reason. She is hoping against hope to have a boy for Paul and can’t bear being disappointed a moment too soon. When you have three girls, you probably think your body’s not capable of producing anything else. So I know it’s a feat of strength on my behalf when Mom looks me in the eye and tells me the truth. “Dr. Hill thinks it’s congestive heart failure.”

“Congestive heart failure,” I echo. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds so ominous. We start walking again. Mom puts her arm around my shoulders, and we go through the front door in silence. Inside, my eyes travel past the foyer into the dining room, with the long table and its multitude of chairs at the ready for a big holiday gathering, and the sideboard crowded with family pictures. It’s exactly the sort of room I thought I’d never have in a house where I lived with my mom.
Most of the pictures are of Jill and Katie, my older sisters, but crowded in there somewhere are one or two of me. There are no pictures of Luke. I wonder if Paul would like to retrieve old ones from wherever they were stashed, years ago. Probably he does want to but doesn’t do it, because of me. If he thought about it for even a second, he would realize that upstairs my computer files are crowded with hundreds of pictures of Luke. I wish I could bear to open them. I could print one out and sneak it into a frame. Place it here with the rest of us.

Even though Mom just told me that Carlo’s at the vet, I realize my ears are waiting for the
click clack
of his nails across the wood floors. Mom sees the look on my face and says, “Tressa. Dr. Hill didn’t say anything. He didn’t offer any prognosis. But Carlo is old, he’s very old, especially for such a big dog.”

My heart constricts in a panicky way. Carlo is twelve years old, half-Newfoundland and half-collie. I know my mom is right. I also know, standing there in the foyer with the infantile school bag over my shoulder, that I don’t care how old Carlo is, or how long a dog his size is supposed to live. I just want him with me. I want everyone I love with me, well and safe, right where I can touch them. In my head I make a quick and terrible calculation. If Carlo dies now, it will be just about exactly six months between them.

I put down the mug and twist my ring—the pearl ring Luke gave me—around my finger. “Remember,” I
say to Mom, my voice verging on wobbly, “when I was a little kid, how whenever I drew a picture of myself, I’d also draw a picture of Carlo standing right next to me? I couldn’t draw me without drawing him.”

My mother hesitates for a fraction of a second, and I can tell she doesn’t remember this at all. My grandmother would remember. Her sewing room is decorated with pictures and maps I’ve drawn; the oldest ones are going yellow and crinkling around their thumbtacks. But Mom just nods, her face completely blank.

“Hey,” she says, steering me toward the kitchen, toward the consolation of food. “Let’s not be all doom and gloom. Maybe he’ll be okay.”

I think—I don’t
want
to think, but can’t stop myself—how Paul will feel, how he’ll look at me if Carlo dies so soon after Luke. But my mom is staring. She has arranged her face so carefully. She wants so badly to be optimistic, and young. I know exactly how many cracks in that illusion are my own doing. I know this, and I understand that I am far from blameless, and that the least I can do—apart from staying alive—is pretend to believe in her version of our life together.

*   *   *

We go to Dr. Hill’s before closing and pick up Carlo. I don’t want him spending even one night in a cage on cold linoleum. While Mom talks to the girl at the front desk, I go in back where the dogs are kept, half expecting someone to stop me. But nobody does, not the techs
or the assistants. It’s a very small town, and everybody knows my story. I imagine they want to sneak peeks at my wrists, which are covered, as always, by long sleeves pulled up to the middle of my palms, but when I accidentally meet a tech’s eyes, she’s not looking at my arms but at my face, and her eyes are full of sympathy. And it has nothing to do with my wrists. I look away, not meaning to be unfriendly, just not wanting to cry. Not here, in public.

Carlo lies splayed out in a large wire cage. As I approach, he thumps his tail and then lifts his head. He knows the sound of my footsteps. He has always been a pretty dog, with the shiny black fur of a Newfoundland and the same breed’s floppy ears, but slender and sleek like a collie, with a long narrow nose. When I open the door to his cage, he pulls himself out and crawls into my lap. He’s too big for this—his limbs spill over mine awkwardly. I can feel his bony ribs and hips pressing into my legs, and I stroke his glossy head.

My grandfather gave me Carlo one summer when I stayed with them. I was six years old, Carlo was six weeks old. Grandpa said we were both puppies. He put Carlo into my lap and the dog flopped down in the circle of my legs. At the time, Grandpa still taught English at Rabbitbrush High, and he chose the dog’s name. He said that Emily Dickinson’s father gave her a Newfoundland named Carlo to protect her on long walks in the hills. I remember nodding as Grandpa told
me this. I had no idea who Emily Dickinson was, and I didn’t care what we named the puppy. I only felt so glad to have company—someone who might come with me wherever I went.

“That’s the point,” Grandpa said, “to have someone with you wherever you go.”

“What if Mom won’t let me keep him?” I asked Grandpa, keeping my eyes on the tiny black puppy, the sleek silk of his head.

“Oh, she’ll let you,” Grandpa said, his voice a firm and insistent growl. “She’ll let you, all right.” And I knew that it was settled.

*   *   *

When we get back from the vet, I tell Mom I’m not hungry for dinner and go upstairs with Carlo. Last summer, during my stay at the private hospital in Durango, I received talk therapy in addition to medication. I felt too awkward questioning the psychiatrist, but Dr. Reisner, the therapist, promised me that Prozac was a weight-neutral medication. I have no idea why I packed on so many pounds in the five months I took Prozac; maybe because I just stopped caring. But with Luke coming back, it feels important to look as much like my old self as possible, so now I’m medication-free, and I try to skip meals when I can. Yeah, I know, not the healthiest way to go. So on school days, instead of eating the lunch my mother packs for me, I pick tansy asters behind the baseball field and leave them on the
front porch of Luke’s house. Francine, his mother, used to complain that those flowers grew everywhere in Rabbitbrush except her front yard. Midday, when I’m supposed to be in the cafeteria, Francine is safely at work. I like to picture her, later in the afternoon, coming home to the bouquets. I imagine her bending down to scoop them up and arranging them in the lopsided ceramic vase Luke made for her at summer camp. Sometimes I hope she knows it’s me who leaves the flowers; other times I hope she thinks it’s someone else.

Now Carlo and I sit upstairs in my room, the room where—I suddenly realize—I have never been alone, because this dog has always been with me. There’s a bandage across his belly, but I can see already that the bloat is coming back. I kneel and curve my arms around his body to lift him onto the bed. I expect him to be heavy, cumbersome. It surprises me how easily I can manage.

I crawl into bed next to him. I have been curling up beside this dog forever, since he was barely bigger than my head, and since he was nearly twice my size. This dog has lived with me summers at my grandparents’ house. In winters he has lived with me and my mother in tepees and yurts and tents. He has lived with me in what seems like hundreds of apartments, shacks, houses, and trailers that my mother moved in and out of. He even came with us the four years we lived in the Marquesas on a fifty-foot sailboat.

I don’t remember ever facing the world without this dog. “Sometimes I think you love Carlo more than you love me,” my mother used to accuse, and I would duck my face in apology because I didn’t want her to know that she was partly right. I could count on him to always put me first. Now I am terrified to tell Luke about Carlo, even though he won’t be able to grasp it, and I am heartbroken to face Paul. I lie on my bed, curled around my dog, tracing the extra dark lines surrounding his brown and watchful eyes.

My stomach growls, mournful and deprived. Familiar dog breath envelops my face. Carlo’s nose feels cracked and dry, and I recognize the expression on his face, grim but loving. And I know that tonight—for however many nights—he works hard to stay alive, for one reason, for me. I know I don’t deserve his devotion, any more than I deserve Luke—coming back to me, through my window. But come back he does, which must mean something. Right? Maybe it means I have the right to small hopes, like my dog getting well.

Last year at this time I was a girl with things to do. I took pictures and drew maps. I played guitar. I babysat three afternoons a week for Genevieve Cummings. I found ways to sneak out and meet the boy nobody wanted me to see. Now it’s all I can do to move through the day, waiting and hoping that same boy will make the unlikeliest and most welcome appearance. It’s been more than a week since I last saw him, and tonight the
moon is on the wax. My window stands open, and the air carries in the first thin strands of wood smoke, and the barest hint of snow. I run my hand over Carlo’s rib cage, treasuring its rise and fall, willing that movement to continue. I know what it feels like to stick around because you don’t want to cause someone else pain, and I almost want to tell him that he can go. But then comes a flood of sadness. And I see Luke, running alongside that rushing river.

Downstairs someone turns on a faucet, and from the way the water gushes—not turned off at intervals—I can tell it’s Paul. I tighten my grip on Carlo, and even though I have sworn to give up everything that brings me happiness, I can’t tell Carlo what he needs to hear.

The first time I saw Tressa, a hundred butterflies landed on her head. We were four years old, lurking in my backyard next to the bush with big purple flowers. Usually the butterflies hung out on the flowers, but I guess they liked Tressa’s white-blond hair.

Land on my head too! I thought. But they didn’t. It made me jealous, so it was hard to like the way Tressa looked under all those butterflies. But I did. She looked like a girl from a Disney movie. I half expected bluebirds to start flying around her head too. Or maybe a fawn would come out of the woods so she could pet it. Our moms were there talking, but I didn’t listen to them until my mom said that Jill and Katie were Tressa’s sisters too. “But Tressa’s not your sister,” she said.

Looking back it seems like complicated information
for a little kid. I remember that Tressa and I looked at each other and frowned. We felt exactly the same thing, which was weirded out but also kind of fascinated.

The butterflies started flying back to their bush. Our mothers kept on talking. It turned out Tressa and I were born on the very same day. This is the kind of thing a kid thinks is amazing. Right?
We have the same birthday.
Tressa was much smaller than me, barely up to my nose. She had blue eyes. I looked like my mom, which is to say I looked like an Indian. Black eyes, black hair. But me and this little blond girl, we had the same sisters. We had the same birthday.

Before I met Tressa I wished I had a twin like Jill and Katie. Then Tressa showed up and I felt like I’d gotten my own, different kind of twin. I just wished her mom wouldn’t keep taking her away. It bugged me to think of Tressa out there in the world. For some reason I always felt like she needed me, even when we were little.

*   *   *