All Rivers Flow to the Sea (10 page)

Joe says nothing. The last of the sun plays through the smeary windows, sinking fast.

“A slight one,” I say.

They turned the ventilator off and waited.

Waited.

Waited.

Waited.

And then she tried to breathe.

My mother, my thin, nervous, finger-tapping mother, carried my sister inside her for nine months and then pushed her into the world. My mother who spends her days righting bottles, bringing order to disorder in a twelve-foot-square patch of the Utica Club Brewery. Who cried to the doctor that she could not lose her daughter.

“They should’ve let her die,” he says.

Joe stands behind the counter, giving me that look. I had thought that walking to Gray’s Automotive, five miles north, would calm the waters. But no.

Ivy and Joe were moving water, and they moved together, and their bodies flowed toward each other, and they didn’t stop to think, they didn’t stop themselves, they wanted to move and move together, and they did. And Ivy came home late on summer nights and lay in her bed and fell into her easy sleep, her soft breath rising and mingling with the soft summer air, and I in my bed on the other side of the room was not free, was not part of the world the way she was, the way she always was. She was the Sterns Gorge, rushing and tumbling, dark shallow water in a hurry, and I am Hinckley Reservoir, contained and still.

Once there was a night when I watched Joe Miller bend over Ivy’s foot. It was another night in the hay barn, and Joe was teaching Ivy and me how to drink from a beer bottle like a guy. We were sixteen and seventeen.

“You don’t want to drink like a girl,” Joe said. “A girl tips her whole head up.”

He demonstrated. So? What was wrong with tipping your whole head up?

“You want to drink like a guy,” he said. “Watch.”

He tipped the bottle up while his head stayed put. One tan hand tilted the bottle, and the beer flowed steadily into his mouth. I watched him swallow. I watched Ivy watch him swallow. That’s the thing about Millers. You can’t not watch them, watch their bodies, watch their muscles and bone as they move their way through the world.

“Try it.”

He passed the bottle to me.

“No, you’re still tipping your head. It’s the bottle you want to tip, not your head. Let Ivy try.”

I passed the bottle to Ivy.

“Good.”

Ivy took another swig and smiled at him. Joe smiled back the way he smiles — only one side of his mouth goes up. I watched her watch him, and I watched him watch her back. He bent his head and then he picked up her foot. Her bare foot with the purple toenail polish she used to brush on. Every Sunday night: off with the old, on with the new. His fingers circled her foot and he held it in both his cupped hands, as if her tan bare foot with its chipped purple toenail polish were something beloved.

After the accident, Joe Miller went crazy. Crazier than the Miller boys go is where Joe went. I remember looking up from the green counter in the kitchen where I was making coffee for my mother and there was Joe, standing on the porch, looking in at me through the window in the door. It was early morning. It had been only three days. They had just done the tests.

He pushed open the door and came in and stood on the boot mat. Waiting. As if his body wanted to be on to its next movement but he must first wait for it to finish this one.

Joe looked at me. The kind of look a muskrat caught in a trap might have. Looking around at the trees and the grass and the creek, everywhere he wanted to be, and nowhere he could run to — and when he looked down for some relief from seeing all the places he couldn’t go, all the places he had taken for granted, there was the steel trap on his leg. You could see why the muskrat would want to chew his leg off.

Joe Miller would chew his leg off.

“How is she?”

He was waiting in the way that he waits, which is all muscles tensed, all muscles ready to move. He looked at me across the kitchen and didn’t blink. He waited. I stood there. For three days I had been sitting by my sister’s bed. I had been holding her hand; I had been smoothing her hair back from her forehead, the part that wasn’t covered with the bandage.

How is she?

Joe and Ivy had been together three years.

I shook my head. And then Joe Miller was gone, out the door and into his truck, body moving into the motion it longed for.

The bricks of Sterns High School are warm against my back. It’s almost the end of the last day of school. Almost time to go home. Almost time for William T. to pick me up. Almost time to drive down to Ivy’s room, where I will read to Ivy from the driver’s manual. I pull my knees up and clasp my arms around them. And the scream rises within me, electricity prickling up and down my arms and legs, stabbing my heart with its tiny exclamation points. How did I get here? How did it happen that time picked my sister and me up last March, and stopped for a while, and then set me down again, here in June, just me, Rose alone?

To live in this world you must drive.
But I don’t drive.

Down at the Rosewood Convalescent Home, a ventilator pushes air into my sister’s lungs:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.

“They should’ve let her die,” Joe Miller said. “They should’ve let her go.”

Sometimes I can feel it all, all the hurt of the world balled up inside me. And when it comes over me like this, I am my mother hunched over her potholders; I am Joe Miller, who would do anything; I am Chase Miller, who never found his way home from Vietnam; I am William T., who lost his son; I am a tiny untouchable garden; I am a girl hovering over herself down on the rocks of the gorge with the boys; I am a ball of girl held tight, clenched, and the water is rising within, overflowing. Nowhere to go, nowhere to spill to, no river to tumble down, no ocean to disappear into —

A flutter of white drifts up into the sky. The fifth graders down the hill in Sterns Elementary are releasing their balloons. Balloons with notes inside them, bound for wherever they will end up, in hopes that someone, somewhere, will wake one morning a few weeks hence to see a balloon drifting downward. The balloon will come gradually to rest on the windowsill of that someone, that foreign someone who will release the tired old air from the tired old balloon. Rest, balloon, you must be worn out from your journey.
What have we here,
the foreign someone might think in her foreign language,
and who might it be from?

Did the mother of the baby in his rush basket in Pompeii leave a note? Did she pause? Jot a few words in Latin for someone she loved to find later?

The white balloons tremble into the sky, higher and higher. At first they cluster together. Then the wind catches one, and then another, and off they go.

That night in the haymow, Joe Miller urged Ivy on.

“What are you, chicken? What are you, afraid?”

She jutted her chin out at him. This was years ago, when we were younger, when Ivy and Joe had yet to know what they came to know about each other, and about themselves together. Before I learned about the Higgs boson, and Pompeii, and the town of Hinckley, and dark matter. Outside the paneless window, the sky was nearly purple, a bruised plum. And the moon hung high and white.

“Don’t be a jerk!” I said to Joe. “She could break her leg if she fell!”

“Ivy,” Joe Miller said. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

And then she was running, and Joe was up and tossing the rope of the rope swing to her, and then she was swinging. She didn’t have to, but she did. How different Joe Miller and I were. How different Ivy and I were. How different, how different, how unfair, how unfair.

“Happy summer, Rose. You made it.”

Tom Miller stands before me, blocking the sun. I open my eyes. Unclasp my arms.

If I stood up and put my arms around him and kissed him, would he kiss me back? Would he meet me at the Sterns Gorge, shove himself against me? Is Tom Miller like Jimmy and Warren and Todd? His eyes narrow. There’s a look on his face.

“What’s going on with you?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

I hear my voice, sounding the way it sounds at the gorge, with the boys. Words coming out that I didn’t plan on saying.

“Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

I make my eyes big. We stand there like that. The un-bell screams from the speakers.

“SHUT UP!” I scream back.

“The bell?” Tom says. “Or me?”

The sound of the un-bell grinds inside me. Will I hear it for the rest of my life?

“The bell, you idiot!”

“Now I’m an idiot?”

“Yes. You’re an idiot.”

“Then I’m an idiot. But you’re still not answering me. What’s going on with you? What’s up with Jimmy Wilson and Warren Graves?”

I shake my head.
Quiet, Tom Miller. Silence. No more.
He stands in front of me, blocking the sun. Yellow buses grind up the school driveway, crowding up one against the other on this, their last day of the school year. Their final journey until the fall. One after the other they nose up to the curb, rumble to a stop, engines dying with a long shuddering sigh.

“Are you trying to prove something?”

I shake my head.

“Then why?”

Shake. Still he stands in front of me. This afternoon, Warren and Todd stood huddled by Todd’s locker. Something in the lines of their shoulders, their low voices. And Tom passed by them and stopped. Inclined his head toward them. And then he looked over at me and my broken combination lock, my locker, my hands clenching around my books.

The doors behind me open. Feet stampede past. Chatter and shrieks and cries and shouts spin off into the high blue sky above, invisible spirals of sound losing themselves past the green tops of the trees. Still Tom stands there. Voices call to him.

“Hey, Tom.”

“Millerrrrrrr.”

“Miller!”

He says nothing. Then he’s crouching on the ground in front of me.

“You going to talk to me?”

Shake.
No. I am not going to talk to you, Tom Miller.

“Is William T. coming, then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Vet. For the flock.”

“You want a ride home, then?”

Shake.

“Well, you better get on your bus, then, Rose-who-won’t-talk. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”

The voices and shouts and chatter are quieter now, contained behind the closed windows of the buses, closed windows that are being opened now, one by one, shoved up with a rasping clatter. I nod. Okay. Better get on the bus, then. Last time. Last school bus day of the year.

This time it’s not Warren or Todd or Jimmy — not Jimmy who still sits not looking at me, his head rigid every time I pass him in school. This time it’s Kevin. Kevin who sits by me. Kevin who puts his arm around me.

“What’s up, Rose?” Kevin says.

And the rigidity all around us. No one says anything. No one hoots. No one jeers. I stare out the window at the cornstalks. So green, the green of early summer, poor little cornstalks reaching to the sky.

“So,” Kevin says. “You thinking of skipping rocks at the gorge today?”

Silence.

“Or tonight?”

Silence.

“I could meet you up there,” Kevin whispers.

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong with me? What, they got something I don’t?”

“No.”

“Come on, Rose. It’ll be fun.”

“NO.”
I shove him. Straight into the aisle. He sprawls there, his face open with surprise for half a second. In that half a second something flits over his face, a feeling. Hurt.
Why them and not me? What’s wrong with me?
That’s what he’s thinking in that half second, and I think back at him,
It’s not you; it’s me.
But I can’t say that. The half a second passes and he turns dark with anger. A flush of rage starts at his neck and floods upward, slitting his eyes. He jumps to his feet in the aisle. Everyone’s watching.

“You’re really fucked up, Rose. Did you know that?”

His fist clenches. He’s holding back from hitting me.

“You’re one fucked-up bitch,” he says, and he turns around and walks up the aisle to where Todd sits and gazes back at me, the same slitted-eye look. And Warren. And Jimmy’s head held rigid to the front.

Sound and movement ripple from the back to the front of the bus, washing over me. A green pickup pulls up alongside the bus. The green pickup’s dulled by winters of sand and salt and snow, and it pulls alongside the bus on Route 274 up here in the foothills, where Katie disgorges us one by one by two. Tom Miller, flush with my window, keeping pace with the big yellow bus.

“Hey!” Katie yells, her voice a familiar grunt. “Get back! It’s a two-lane road, asshole!”

A hand in the window of the green truck waves, fingers tapping on the smeared glass of the driver’s window. I look down from my perch, the green vinyl of my seat the same green as the truck, at Tom Miller’s waving fingers. His mouth shapes silent words.

Rose?

He taps again. He drives with one hand and keeps even with my window. Katie’s angry, her arm wheeling in the air:
Out of the way!