All Rivers Flow to the Sea (5 page)

“You might be right, Younger,” he says after a while. “Tom Miller might be the Miller exception who proves the Miller rule.”

I once watched Tom Miller in the school hallway, like a beautiful young horse, muscle and thirst, bend over the drinking fountain and drink. He drank and drank and drank, as if he could never get enough.

“Tom’s father was crazy, though,” William T. says. “Even before the war, Chase Miller was a little bit crazy.”

Chase Miller had gone to Vietnam, to the jungle. Vietnam is the next war in our book of wars. When I try to picture the jungle there, I see color: green of trees, brown of bark, plants growing to the heavens because there’s no end to the sun and the rain and the warmth. Neon parrots squawking in the trees, snakes coiled around tree limbs. As far away from here as I can imagine a place being.

“That goddamned war did Chase in,” William T. says.

I don’t say,
You owe me a quarter, William T.

Chase died of cirrhosis before Tom was born, and Tom’s mother couldn’t take it and she left him with Spooner.

“She moved to Canada,” William T. told me once. “To get away from the sickness of America, she said.”

Tom’s always lived with his grandfather Spooner, in their log cabin on Deeper Lake. No electricity. No running water. You can walk to Deeper Lake from my house. You can walk anywhere in the world from my house. You might have to cross uncharted mountains, you might have to walk underwater for thousands of miles to get across the ocean, but, if you are determined enough, you can walk anywhere in the world from my house. You can walk to the jungles of Vietnam and lose yourself there.

I open the blinds and let the sunlight into Ivy’s room. May air is soft and sweet through the screened window. William T. sits in his blue chair, reading his bird book and expanding his knowledge of the birds of America. If Ivy and I hadn’t had our accident, William T. would be helping his girlfriend, Crystal, close her diner for the night. Right about now, Crystal is scraping down the grill. If William T. were at Crystal’s Diner, he would be wiping down each of the red counter stools in turn. Then he would turn to the booths and scrub each wooden tabletop and each red vinyl seat. By the time he was finished, Crystal would be finished prepping for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. They would leave together and get into Crystal’s truck or William T.’s truck, whoever had driven that day. Before the accident, I sometimes used to help them. Fill the sugar containers. Fill the salt and pepper shakers. Make sure there was plenty of ketchup in the ketchup bottles. Lots of people like ketchup with their eggs, did you know that? I didn’t, before I used to help out Crystal and William T.

Now William T. spends his afternoons in the blue chair, putting his time to good use while I read to Ivy.

Angel comes in on her silent sneakered feet. Her angel pin is at her waist today, a small change of pace.

“Angel, I have a question for you.”

“And what is your question, William T.?”

“It’s a concentration camp question.”

Angel doesn’t miss a beat. She never misses a beat. She’s like Crystal that way, takes William T. just as he is, concentration camp question and all.

“You’re in a concentration camp being given your ration for the day,” William T. says. “Three pieces of bread and one pat of butter.”

“Butter in a concentration camp, William T.? I think you’ve got your history wrong.”

“Don’t be so literal, Angel. Use your imagination. Your ration for the day is three pieces of bread and one small pat of butter.”

“And?”

“And, how do you eat the butter? Do you (a) spread it thickly on one piece of bread and eat the other two plain?, (b) spread it on all three pieces, evenly but so thinly that you can barely taste it?, or (c) save the small pat of butter and add it to the other days’ small pieces of butter until the end of the week, so that you can have three pieces of bread all spread very thickly with butter?”

Angel tilts her head, considering the possibilities of butter and bread in the concentration camp. Deep in thought.

“Ha!” William T. says. “It’s a trick question. I already know how you’d eat it.”

“How would I, then?”

“B. Spread on all three pieces, evenly but so thinly that you can barely taste it.”

“You’re right! That
is
how I’d eat it. Are you psychic, William T.? Tell the truth.”

“I am,” William T. says. “I cannot lie. I already know how Younger here would eat it too. Younger would save her little lumps of butter all week long. And then she’d spread her three pieces of bread with an inch of butter, and eat them all at once. I’m right, aren’t I, Younger?”

Yes. He’s right.

“Do I get the bird of the day free, as a bonus?” Angel asks.

“Indeed you do, Angel. The bird of the day is the black-capped chickadee.”

“A chickadee? Did you choose that just for me, William T.?”

“Perhaps,” William T. says. “Perhaps I did.”

He and Angel smile. They like to flirt with each other. It’s safe flirting, because Angel loves her husband and William T. loves Crystal. I don’t flirt with anyone. I don’t know how to flirt, unlike Ivy, who flirted with Joe Miller all the time. Are some people just born knowing how?

“‘Little roving flocks of black-capped chickadees,’” William T. reads from his bird book, “‘are often the brightest spark of life in bleak winter woods.’”

Outside Ivy’s window the bleak winter is gone. The grass is green now, so much greener than when they first moved Ivy here in the beginning of April. That makes me angry. Grass, how can you be so green, when my sister can’t see you? Stop. Stop being so beautiful, so alive, so goddamned green. Stop growing. Stupid, idiot, beautiful grass.

William T. was with me when the doctor showed me the x-ray.

“It’s an enormous intraparenchymal hemorrhage,” the doctor said. “She cannot recover from this.”

“But she was talking to me,” I said to the doctor. “She was talking to me, right after it happened.”

“Yes,” he said. “The swelling hadn’t yet taken over. We call that the lucid interval.”

She was almost brain-dead but not quite. That’s what they said. She didn’t open her eyes; she didn’t move her eyes when they opened them for her and brushed them with the cotton swab; she didn’t gag; she didn’t look toward the ice water in her ear. They turned the ventilator off and we waited.

Waited.

Waited.

Waited.

And she tried to breathe.

“She has a very slight respiratory drive,” they said. “But you must understand: she will never recover from the brain trauma.”

Then the woman with the curly hair came into the waiting room and asked about Ivy’s heart. Ivy’s liver. Ivy’s kidneys.

“No,” my mother said.

And so they kept Ivy alive. My mother couldn’t let her go.

Could I have let her go? If someone asked me to make the decision instead of my mother —
Tell us what to do: keep your sister’s heart beating or let her go
— what would I have said? My mother’s face was set, the way it gets sometimes. She doesn’t let anything behind that face. She listens to no one. She’s a wall. If you stood on the walkway above the conveyor belt on the floor of the brewery, looking down at my mother darting back and forth, righting the fallen bottles, you wouldn’t know that about her.

“No,” my mother said. “No.”

Her hands were over her ears at that point.

When I think of my sister Ivy, my heart aches. My heart aches, my heart that is contracting and pumping in my chest right now, contracting and pumping, pushing and pulling my blood, my rich red blood, throughout the rivers and islands and gorges of my body.

Doctors could take away my sister’s heart and put it inside someone else’s chest, and connect all the tubes and stitch it up and prescribe medicine to make the strange person not reject my sister’s heart, not reject it, not say,
What the hell is this, this thing, this unfamiliar thing beating away inside my chest,
and,
Get the hell out of here.
And my sister’s heart would keep that person alive.

But where would Ivy be? Sometimes I think about that. It’s a mystery. It’s an unknown world. I think about the Higgs boson that opens the door to another, as yet completely undiscovered, realm. When I studied the Higgs boson for my project, I read that only 4 percent of the universe is made up of atoms with known forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, the ordinary stuff that makes water and rocks and potholders and scalpels. The other 96 percent is dark matter. Dark energy. And no one knows what dark matter and dark energy are.

“No,” my mother said. “No. You can’t understand. I can’t lose her.”

That’s what I remember from the night of the accident, after Tom and Spooner and William T. and Crystal — where did they come from? — got us to the hospital. Ahead of the ambulance.

Fluorescent lights. A long tiled hallway. People dressed in blue, people dressed in white, standing in a circle around my mother.

“No,” she said.

They turned to me when my mother stopped listening, when she put her hands over her ears.

“Your father?”

That’s how they said it, as if they had already figured out that
your father
wasn’t part of the picture. As if there were a single-word multiple-choice question.

Father? Check all that apply:

____Missing in action

____Hasn’t seen wife or daughters in nine years

____Living in New Orleans last we heard

I shook my head. No. The one doctor had a look of frustration on his face, and he turned back to my mother.

“No,” she said.

Eventually everyone disappeared, and my mother was alone under those fluorescent lights. That’s what I remember, even though I know that William T. and Crystal and Spooner and Tom Miller and I were there too. I still can see my mother’s face that night, the way her cheeks hollowed under the long ribbons of fluorescence. After a while William T. reached out and placed his hands over her hands over her ears and gently pulled them down.

“Home, Younger?” William T. asks me once we’re in the truck, headed north.

I shake my head. I don’t want to watch my mother rocking and listen to her not talking about Ivy. It tires me out, the effort it takes not to talk about Ivy.

“Eggs, then?”

I nod. And we drive past my driveway, past the house where my mother is home from the brewery, and on up Jones Hill to William T.’s house. Back in North Sterns, back from Ivy’s room, back from Angel and her concentration camp bread and butter and the black-capped chickadee bonus bird of the day.

William T.’s making me scrambled eggs the way he makes them for me. Slow and patient, that’s his method. Other people can make scrambled eggs in one-quarter the time it takes William T. to make them. But other people’s scrambled eggs taste nothing like William T.’s. He makes them for me quite a bit, whenever I’m up at his house. Which is more and more.

“You were right,” I say. “About the way I’d eat the bread and butter.”

“Of course I was right,” he says. “I know my Younger.”

“William T.?”

“Younger?”

“What was my father like?”

“Your father?”

“Yeah. My father.”

I wait. William T. pours the eggs into the hot butter in his special egg pan.

“He was a man of bad decisions.”

It sounds as if he’s read a book and memorized it for the day when I would come to him, asking about my father.
Fathers of North America.
Who else can I ask? Not my mother. Since that time, that long time when she stayed in bed, neither Ivy nor I have said a word to her about our father.

A man of bad decisions. Okay. I wait.

“Yes,” William T. says, as if I’ve asked a question when I haven’t. “Bad decisions.”

Sometimes William T. makes eggs for me in my own house, when he comes down to check on my mother. My mother is not big on food in general, but she’ll eat William T.’s scrambled eggs. William T. shakes his head.

“Not good choices,” he says.

Not good choices. A variation on the theme of bad decisions. Okay. I wait.

“What do you want to know exactly, Younger?” he says, finally. I knew that if I waited long enough, even William T. wouldn’t be able to bear the silence. Like most people, he would want to fill it with words. Most people hate silence. They want to fill it, cover it up, make it go away. Down with silence, and its endless unspoken questions.

“Anything I can.”

“He lives down in Louisiana, last I heard. He went down there after he left Sterns.”

“No winters in Louisiana,” I observe.

William T. stirs the scrambled eggs. Around and around he stirs with his wooden egg-stirring spoon. The flame is so low you can barely see it, tiny blue tongues licking the bottom of the cast-iron pan. I sit on the stool and watch him. Finally he speaks again.

“Younger, the thing about your father is that he didn’t like himself in his natural state.”

Okay —

“He preferred a little embroidery on his reality. Let’s put it that way.”

Okay —

“He loved your mother. I know that he loved her — you could see it. But he loved that embroidered reality more.”

Okay —

But what about me and Ivy? Did our father love us too?

The eggs are finished. Quivering pillows of buttery yellow. William T. spoons them onto a saucer instead of a plate. He knows I like to eat them from a small saucer rather than a big plate, and with a spoon rather than a fork. I picture my father, a young man in Louisiana. Lying on his back in the middle of a small park in New Orleans. I saw a picture of such a park once.

“If he’s not dead,” William T. says, “then he’s almost forty years old.”

In my mind, jazz musicians play softly about him. Tourists with hot beignets from a hot beignet store wander by, powdered sugar drifting down upon my father like the snow he left behind.

“Imagine that,” William T. says. “Forty years old. Time marches on, doesn’t it, Younger?”

He wipes his special egg pan dry with a dish towel and shakes his head. Forty years old. I don’t even know what my father looks like.

“They’re talking about Ivy in school,” I say.