Authors: Karen Harter
TJ looked up at the worm man like he was God. “Right!”
I
HAD NO VALID reason for parking my Jeep against the curb beneath the spreading branches of a Japanese cherry. The house across
the street was painted green now. Someone had done a sloppy job on the trim, splotching white onto the green siding. The tiny
laurel hedge had grown thick and tall. There was no tire swing hanging from the maple tree, no red Chevy truck with a lanky
young man reaching beneath its hood.
Sometimes revisiting the past is a mistake. Some things are better left in your mind the way they were, or the way they seemed,
anyway.
Every time a breeze blew, pale pink blossoms wafted across my windshield and onto the seats of the Jeep. They stuck in my
tangled hair. I had pulled off the road between Carter and Darlington to roll back the canvas top. It was a warm day and the
air was saturated with the sweet scents of new green grass and flowers. Like the spring when I fell in love with Tim. But
he didn’t live here anymore. He and I had left town in his shiny red Chevy seven years ago. I thought maybe his mother had
moved on also. The house was just too different. She would never have let the gardens go to weeds or leave that hedge untrimmed.
There was no sign of life in the house, no vehicles in the drive. It was a hauntingly lonely sight.
I don’t know what I would have done if Mrs. Weatherbee had poked her head out the door and waved. Not that she would. If she
recognized me sitting out there like a stalker staring at her house, she would be more likely to turn away and close the drapes.
But then, she would have heard only Tim’s side of the story. I would have liked the chance to explain.
I drove around Darlington for a while, past the Dairy Barn Drive-In and my alma mater, Darlington High. A cluster of students
sprawled on the lawn with books open. They looked so young. Was I really that young when I left? I had felt so much older.
I thought I was ready to run my own life. I thought I understood everything there was to know about life and death, but on
both concepts I was wrong.
My stubbornness had been my downfall more than once. It was one of the things I got from my father. But in our final contest
my bulldog tenacity had won over his, or lost, depending on how you looked at it. I packed what I could carry in a duffel
bag and my backpack and walked right past the Judge. He didn’t stop me. In fact, he opened the front door. My mother followed,
trying to reason with me, but he reached out his hand and held her. Before I was all the way off the steps and onto the walk,
the porch light went off. My father would no longer be a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. He made that clear. I
could find my own way through the dark.
It wasn’t until after TJ was born that I started admitting how much I missed them. Mom especially. I always wondered what
she would do about this and that. How do you soothe a colicky baby? Is this diaper rash or the plague? I reached for the phone
sometimes but always stopped myself. My life was way too complicated to explain. What if the Judge answered the phone? I was
sure he was finished with me and I certainly had nothing to say to him. I did send short notes with selective information
on occasion, but I feared that once I heard my mother’s voice, I might spill my carefully guarded secrets like dirty motor
oil and never be able to clean up the mess.
Coming home to the river had been TJ’s idea originally. All those nights as we cuddled in our big chair back in that dreary
Reno apartment, I told him stories. Sometimes I made up bizarre creatures that lived in stumps or distant lands, but more
often than not the characters were my sister, or our friend Donnie from down the road, and me in any one of our true adventures
by the river. In TJ’s mind the river valley of my childhood was more magical than any elfin kingdom, more glorious than victorious
knights on stately white horses. “Tell me about the bad boys that killed the big salmon, Mom,” he would say, and I would tell
it as if he had never heard the tale before.
I described the moods of the river, the sounds and the smells, the great blue heron poised like a statue in the shallows,
waiting for fry. I told of the small creek that cut through the ravine beyond the barn. Every summer salmonberries hung faithfully
over its banks—orange, yellow and red, like the bright jars of salmon eggs lined up on the shelves at Carter Store. Where
the creek swept wide around a meadow of wild grasses with hitchhikers that stuck to my socks, blue forget-me-nots flocked
at the water’s edge. Crawdads hid in the silt beneath the creek banks. Periwinkles in homemade shells clung to the rocks and
sticks in the shallows until I pulled their hideous bodies out to use as fish bait, their spidery legs flailing in protest.
TJ listened wide-eyed to the recounting of the dams Donnie and I built on the little creek and forts made with woven boughs
and bracken ferns, where we hid undetected during pinecone wars.
And then there was fishing. Fishing was the thing that intrigued TJ the most. Maybe because I could not speak of it without
a wistful longing, nor could I separate the Judge, his grandfather, from this inherited passion for the pursuit of fish. I
couldn’t pinpoint the nucleus of our common fever if I had to. Was it the challenge of developing the perfect cast or of landing
a fly exactly where I meant it to go? Was it the thrill of the hit, or of playing the fish, or of finally seeing it roll exhausted
onto its side as I pulled it ashore? I don’t know. I only know that a glistening trout is a thing of beauty to me, as moving
as standing before an original Renoir might be to some. But the trout itself is nothing without the river; nothing but seafood
destined for a pan. The river—that rushing, gurgling ribbon of light that swirled at my ankles, its sweet breath in my nostrils—was
essential. And as strange as this may seem, the river was nothing without my father. The two had been to me somehow one and
the same.
My son often interrupted our story time with questions, which as he grew older became harder to answer. Once he had asked
only things like
Do fish have mothers?
and
What do frogs eat?
But after he deduced that my having parents meant that he had grandparents, I sometimes felt that he was a prosecuting attorney
and I was a reluctant witness on the stand. “Why don’t we ever go there?” he would ask.
“Because it’s too far.”
“We could take a airplane.”
“Plane tickets cost money.”
“Or we could drive our Jeep. How long will it take if we drive our Jeep?”
I explained that driving costs money too. I said I couldn’t get off work for that long and changed the subject as skillfully
as I could, but he would always bring it up again.
The truth was a horse pill, too big for a five-year-old to swallow. He had never known shames that caused him to avoid mirrors.
TJ had scraped his arm and bumped his head, but so far he didn’t know the kind of pain that Band-Aids and ice packs couldn’t
cure. And I certainly didn’t want to tell him of such things. There really was no one to tell. I had estranged my family and
my husband, and I had no real friends. My pain was the closest thing I had to a friend. It was constant and dependable, by
my side all day and lying on my chest like a Saint Bernard until I finally slept at night.
It was physical pain that eventually caused me to consider TJ’s plan. Both TJ and I had caught a flu bug that winter. I took
time off from my job to care for him, and in a few days he was back to normal, flying around the apartment making jet engine
noises. My initial symptoms (including a fever of 104 degrees) lingered a few days longer than his. After that I had a cough
for weeks and very little energy. I did go back to work at the Starlight Room, bartending and waiting tables, but found it
increasingly hard to work a full eight-hour shift. There was this heaviness in my chest that just wouldn’t go away, and I’m
not talking about sadness now. That, I had learned to live with. But this—well, some days I just couldn’t cope. I would be
exhausted before I got TJ dressed and fed and off to day care. I have to say my boss was patient for a long time. But one
day, when I had to ask if I could leave early, he just said to go home and don’t bother coming back.
I didn’t have medical insurance. After paying the rent that month, I had exactly $172.58. My roommate was in about the same
financial condition, only she still had her job.
Hard times were not new to me. When things got tough, I just had to get tougher. But this time I didn’t have the strength.
I worried myself into a dither. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t get any answers from my doctor until I paid my overdue
bill. If I paid the bill, I would have nothing left. How would I feed my son? When would I be well enough to work again?
TJ found me crying in my room one night. I had thought he was asleep until I felt his soft hand rubbing my cheek. “What happened,
Mommy? Did you get hurt?” I immediately swiped at my tears and sat up on the edge of the bed. The lamp was still on and he
could see the red blotches on my face that always resulted from a good cry. TJ had never seen me in this condition before.
“No, I’m not hurt, baby.” I managed a sheepish smile. “I just felt like crying tonight. I feel better now.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. I guess grown-ups cry sometimes for the same reasons kids cry. Remember the first time I left you at the new
day care?” He nodded. “That was a brand-new situation for you. You weren’t comfortable with it and it made you cry.”
“I wanted you to come back.” He climbed onto the bed. I put my arms around him and we fell back against the pillows. I sighed
and stared at the ceiling while his finger idly explored the paths of my outer ear. “Maybe you want
your
mommy.”
I rolled my head to look at him, astonished. One whack and he had driven the nail home. His beautiful dark eyes blinked. He
was so right. I needed someone to take care of me. I desperately wanted to find healing. I certainly hadn’t found it anywhere
else.
“Let’s go home, Teej,” I finally said. “You’ve got a grandma and grandpa to meet.”
Eight days later and here we were, back in the familiar home of my childhood. I didn’t mention my illness to Mom or the Judge.
It might have seemed presumptuous after a seven-year absence to show up out of the blue just because I had no other conceivable
plan to take care of my son, nor, for that matter, myself. I was as helpless and dependent as a toddler again, only not so
naive. I could never crawl up on my father’s lap again as I once did, believing that he was my daddy and I was his own flesh
and blood and that his love was as constant and binding as the law of gravity. I wished I could have remained a child forever,
living and playing along the river’s edge in innocent bliss without knowing what I knew now. Love, it seemed, had its limits.
And I had a knack for charging beyond them.
My shames were stacked stone on stone now, a wall between the Judge and me. A monument to the lines I had crossed.
Oh, he tolerated me. What else could he do? Cast me from his back porch into the pit of hell? Besides, I had brought my angel-faced
son, his grandson, an offering that seemed to please him, and we were a package deal. If nothing else, TJ had bought me some
time.
Just after lunch that first day back at the river, the Judge and TJ had headed for the creek with a can of worms and spinning
rods. TJ had to half run with a little skip in his step to keep up with his grandpa’s huge stride. I had declined their invitation
to come along, stating that I hoped to run into Darlington to look up some old friends. That was true, though my primary reason
was that I was not sure I could make it down the steep ravine and back in my weakened state. The creek was actually high on
the list of old friends that I wanted to see.
The old friends were gone, of course. Married and moved away. I wished I could have warned them that there are no greener
pastures than those in the Stillaguamish Valley. Trudy (according to her mother, whose bread-loaf breasts almost smothered
me when she hugged me on her front porch) had married a stockbroker and lived in New York, along with two kids and three Persian
cats who had all won awards at cat shows. Mrs. Simpson wrote Trudy’s new name and address on a recipe card and tucked it in
my pocket. I apologized for not keeping in touch. How could I have been so thoughtless? I had left town without saying good-bye
to my best friend.
The friend I missed the most was Donnie. I had assumed he was a big-city lawyer by now, married to some svelte lady, frequenting
operas and live theater. That was until the Judge told me otherwise. Donnie was once my best friend—I have to say even better
than Trudy, though I would never have admitted that to either one of them. It would have hurt Trudy, and Donnie—well, he didn’t
need his ego puffed up, that was for sure. I drove past the Duncan ranch for the third time on my way home that day; it was
only a quarter mile down the road from our driveway, on the opposite side of the road. But for some reason I was not ready
to go down that gravel lane yet. He was a boy when I left. I did not know the man, Don Duncan. If he had changed as much as
I over the years, we were nothing but strangers now. I guess you can’t leave your treasures scattered along the roadside and
expect them to still be there when you come back.
It was late afternoon when I pushed through the back door and into the kitchen, where I saw TJ standing on a chair pulled
up to the counter, watching the Judge gut a trout in the sink. Déjà vu. It used to be me watching wide-eyed as the tip of
the knife was poked into the hole in the fish’s belly and the sharp blade slit the white flesh up to the gills.
“Mom, look! We caught two fish!”
They were small cutthroats, barely legal keepers. The big trout were mostly in the river, but TJ was not old enough to fish
beyond the creek yet. “Wow! They’re beautiful.”
“We’re cooking them for dinner!”
The Judge looked over his shoulder at me. “Want to see what they’re eating?”