All Rivers Flow to the Sea (11 page)

Rose?

“Rose, it’s Tom Miller,” Tracy Benova says importantly. “Rose, it’s Tom! He wants you!”

Then Tom’s tapping fingers are gone. The smeared glass of the window clears, the pane pushing itself down into the recesses of the pickup’s green door. Now his fingers are real, long and strong, his brown hair falling into eyes that aren’t brown or blue but are a dark green with flecks of yellow. His voice takes shape, words floating clear in the blue stillness of the sky. Everyone on the bus can hear him.

“Rose!”

Up front, Katie shakes her fist. Angry Katie. Kids shift from the other side of the bus to crowd into the ones on my side: drama on the school bus, not to be missed. A one-act play being acted out right there on Route 274. Their faces press against windows, where dust coats the glass in a light brown film.

“Rose!”

I duck and bend and move to the empty side of the bus to crouch out of sight behind Katie, who’s cursing, her face red. Turn away from the sight of Tom Miller’s reaching hand. The driver’s manual says it’s better not to make eye contact with another driver when conflict is possible.
Stay calm and relaxed. Make every attempt to get out of the way safely. Do not escalate the situation.
Why? Because an accident may happen at any time. I stare out the new window at the green of cornstalks waving in the June breeze. Across the aisle North Sterns kids point and jabber, laughing and waving at Tom Miller driving half in the ditch, his fingers trying to pull a summer sky into his truck. Up the aisle Jimmy and Warren and Kevin sit like stone, not saying a word.

Then the bus stops.

I can’t stop crying.

A hand.

I can’t breathe.

A hand pulls me down onto a seat. Tom Miller. He pulls me down. I’m sitting. Someone says something I can’t understand. My ears are full. Tom half rises out of the seat.

“Fuck off,” he says.

The bus is quiet, and then there’s sound. Normal sound, bus sound, talking, whispering, arguing, high-pitched shrieking, murmuring. I sit for a long time and concentrate on taking a breath and letting it out, taking a breath and letting it out.

“Here we are,” Tom says. “Get up now.”

He follows me down the stairs.

“Asshole,” Katie spits. “You shouldn’t be on this bus.”

“But I am,” Tom says.

“Don’t ever pull that shit with me again.”

“I don’t plan to.”

Together we walk up my driveway. Into my house. It creaks the way a house does when it’s empty of people. You can tell. The air of a house changes when there is even one person in it, one person locked away in an upstairs bedroom, for example, taking a nap. A house knows when someone is in it and changes accordingly, shapes itself to fit the spirit and mood and presence of the person within. But when a house is empty, then it’s the house’s turn. It holds all the emptiness and all the fullness of the years it has known. The footprints of all the people who have ever walked its rooms gather themselves. The air is expectant, waiting. Hushed. Hush. Listen to the house. What is it telling you?

“Why are you doing this?” Tom says again.

We stand in the kitchen of my empty house, him facing me, my backpack slung over one shoulder and heavy, heavy, heavy. Tom carries nothing.

“Why are you doing this?” he says again. “Answer me.”

I shake my head.

A dark night, and the stars shine thickly in the heavens.

The storms are up and the screens are propped up with sticks. Night fog comes stealing into my room from all sides, cross-ventilated from the three open windows. Sometimes, before dawn on a summer morning, the clouds come down to earth and the mist that rises from the grass rises to meet it. Sometimes a tendril of white curls through the mesh of my screened window. A finger. A hand, cupped and beckoning to me:
Come out and play. Come out and play.

I can’t sleep. Propped on my elbows, staring out at the darkness, listening to the owls. Headlights make their silent way down William T. Jones’s hill, and I watch them as they approach, hear the familiar whine of its engine. Tom Miller, driving past in Spooner’s truck. I watch him from my bedroom window, and I rise in the darkness and put on my T-shirt and shorts.

The road to the village glimmers in the darkness, as if mixed in with the rock and gravel and tar that made it is something luminescent. Fireflies flicker in the air around me. The pines and maples and oaks that line the road are silent, sap stilled in their veins.

I walk. Behind me my mother sleeps. Our house is dark, a dark shape in the darkness. I walk through waves of warm air and waves of cold, an early summer night and a girl alone on the road.

In the village I stop at the stop sign and turn right. I know where Tom Miller is, where he must be. The gazebo stands white and silent in the village green.

Chase Miller.
And Tom, his son, leaning against the stone.

I sit beside him. Crickets scrape wings across backs and fill the night with song. Bats fly overhead and somewhere in the darkness a barred owl calls. After a while Tom closes his eyes and leans into the stone. The stone is always cool. Even in the heat of the day, when the sun beats on it for hours, its warmth is a surface warmth.

“Tom?”

He looks at me.

“Does it give you comfort, to have that stone?”

He nods.

I wish I had a stone. The churning begins inside me and rises. Tom Miller leans against his father’s stone and I can feel how it would feel if I too were leaning against that stone. Stone beneath me and Jimmy Wilson on top of me. Stone against my back. Stone, skipping across the dark water of the gorge.

“Rosie?”

Tom Miller has never called me Rosie before, not even when we were little kids, back when all our little kid names ended in “y”: Rosie and Tommy and Ivy and Joey.

“Can I sit next to you?” I say, and then the tears come. And the stone is warm behind my back, and Tom Miller’s arms are around me. Tom sits and I sit until the sounds become part of the night sky, until the images in my mind become part of the darkness of the mountains rising up, until my skin is one with the stone, until I stop crying. Tom’s arms are around me and we lean against polished rock. Our breathing softens and slows until it reflects the stillness of the night air. Then we rise and walk across the grass made wet by dew, into the truck, and he pushes open the passenger door for me, and we drive back up into the foothills.

“Come with me tomorrow,” I say.

My mother folds a square of newspaper into a smaller square, into quarters, bends and folds and creases and smoothes and pushes, gently, gently. Delicate plucks and pushes.

“In Japan they believe that if you make a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true,” she says.

Thirty miles south, a ventilator pushes air into my sister’s lungs:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.

“Come with me.”

“Miracles have been known to happen.”

She folds another square of newsprint. Will she make a crane out of anything? Before she went to the brewery in the morning, she’d made a little pile, and when William T. took me back home after making me scrambled eggs, it was a big pile.

“You should have let her go.”

Had I known I was going to say that? My mother looks up at me with those eyes of hers.

“You don’t know. Someday they might be able to fix her,” she says. “You don’t know. Nobody knows.”

“Someday? What about today?”

I spit the words. So angry. So angry. All I can think, all I can feel, is anger surging hot and strong like strong black coffee, strong and black through my veins and arteries, pulsing in and out of my heart.

“You don’t know! It’s
you
who doesn’t know!”

My mother looks at me.

“You have not once been to see her! You are the one who doesn’t know! You know nothing!”

My mother shakes her head.

“She would’ve hated this!” I scream. “She would’ve fucking hated this!”

“I hate this!” my mother screams back. “I hate this! I hate this!”

“I hate
you
!” I scream.

She keeps shaking her head. Her hands run over the surface of her paper cranes, quivering as if they were one animate creature, a trapped being, seeking refuge from the light of the lamp. I am still water. I am water trapped inside the cage of my body. I am water that wants out, that wants escape, that cannot stand the pressure of its own self, pulsing inside me.

She shakes and shakes and shakes her head.

If you want to live in this world, there is no way not to drive.

That’s what William T. says.

The red Datsun is parked in the corn field. After a while of trying to move forward, then trying to move backward, and listening to the shrieks and groans of tortured metal, I turn the engine off and roll down my window and the passenger window too. Soft summer air blows through the open windows, and the sound of crickets rises about me. Under the hood, the engine ticks.

I sit in the corn field a long time.

Do I want to live in this world?

“Rose?”

Tom’s voice. William T. Jones’s hill is a big hill, half a mile long, and steep. If you’re trying to drive up it in winter, do not stop. That’s what I’ve heard the boys on the bus say. I didn’t hear Tom driving down. Didn’t hear him drive into the corn field, turn off Spooner’s truck, open the rusted door, and climb out.

“Rose?”

His voice, coming through the open window.

“Rose.”

His voice is no longer a question. A question has become a statement. I look up. His face, his Tom Miller face, peers in my window. He bends down outside the truck. His hair is sun-streaked already, brown turned dark blond by the long June days.

He taps on the window frame with his fingers. Tap tap.

“Stuck?”

I nod. Yes. I am stuck. Young cornstalks wave around us, green and leafy in the late afternoon sun. If I get out of the truck, the ground underneath them will be spongy. It will give beneath my feet, which are bare, the better to feel the pedals with. The better the feel, the easier the shift. That’s been my philosophy, but my philosophy hasn’t been working.

“Are you in neutral?” Tom asks.

He reaches in through the window and puts his hand on the gearshift. Wiggles it.

“Neutral,” he says. “Turn it on.”

I turn the key in the ignition and the truck starts up again with a quiet, patient sound. Maybe it doesn’t mind that I keep putting it through grinding-of-gears torture. Maybe it knows that I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Tom walks around the front of the truck and holds his hand up, as if his hand alone will be enough to remind the truck that it’s in neutral and can therefore slip forward, and that it shouldn’t slip forward when a person is walking in front of it. The passenger door opens and then he’s next to me.

“Okay, Rose.”

He puts his hand over my fingers that are still wrapped around the knob of the gear stick.

“Come on.”

He unpries my fingers, one at a time, from the knob. Then he drapes my hand back over the knob and wiggles each finger.

“You want your hands to be loose,” he says. “Driving stick is one of those things. If you think about it too much, you can’t do it. You have to go by instinct.”

His hand over my hand is warm. Around us the young green leaves wave in the breeze and brush gently against each other, and cricket song rises into the twilight sky until it disappears.

“Easy in with the gas, and easy out with the clutch,” Tom says.

The sun is beginning to set. Long shadows from the cornstalks lie over the hood of the truck. In little bits, I drive forward to the end of the field.

“Stop, slow.”

And I stop, slowly.

“Go ahead, slow.”

And I go slowly ahead.

It’s a whole different ball game down at the end of the field. To back up, you have to push the gearshift all the way to the right and then up. The diagram on the knob doesn’t do it justice.

“Don’t look at that diagram, Rose. Go by feel instead.”

He tells me to close my eyes.

“Go ahead,” he says. “There’s nothing to run into anyway, down here at the end of the corn field. Just close your eyes and feel where the stick needs to go.”

I close my eyes. I push the stick around a little bit, up and down, back and forth. I listen to the long brushing leaves of green, cornstalk leaves, arching down upon the hood of the little red truck as we stutter along.

“Go ahead and test it out on the corn itself,” Tom says. “Drive down a row.”

I open my eyes. The rays of the setting sun filter through the corn, stretching ahead of us. We’re at the end of the field, the woods behind us and the green waving stalks in front. The sun has sunk below the level of the highest leaves, and the air is bathed in soft pink and orange and blue, the colors of an ending day.

“Give it a try, Rose. Take a walk on the wild side.”

Tom smiles at me. It’s William T.’s corn. He grows it for the hell of it, he says, the sheer hell of it, because he likes the look of the tall waves of green. I know that he grows it for more than that, though. He feeds it to his flock, his flock of lame birds, the chickens and the geese and the ducks that he keeps in his broken-down barn.