All Rivers Flow to the Sea (6 page)

I didn’t know I was going to say that. William T. stiffens the same way that Jimmy Wilson does whenever he sees me now, unlike Warren, who after I lay down with him at the gorge that night just looks at me with a lazy, knowing look. And smiles. A lazy, knowing smile that I hate. But given the choice between Jimmy Wilson’s rigid not-looking at me, I will take Warren Graves’s knowing smile. William T. looks at me with searching eyes.

“They’re talking about Elder?”

“They are.”

“What are they saying?”

“That she’s a human vegetable. That she can’t open her eyes. That she’ll be like this forever. That she’s only alive because my mother won’t let them pull the plug.”

Words, tumbling out. Tracy Benova and Todd Forrest, standing together at Tracy’s locker. Bits and pieces of other people’s conversations.

William T. is quiet. I watch his face. All I see is sadness. After a while he picks up his truck keys and clears his throat.

“You ready, Younger?”

“No.”

The egg pan is dried and put away; the sun has set. It’s time, but I don’t want it to be time.

“Your mother needs you.”

“My mother doesn’t visit her own daughter.”

William T. looks at me. I see his mind at work. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know how to say it.

“Well, she doesn’t,” I say when he keeps looking at me with that look on his face. “You know it as well as I do.”

“Don’t underestimate your mother, Younger,” he says, which is what he always, finally, says.

Every night I watch my mother’s fingers moving. She can’t keep still. She, too, is moving water that wants to keep moving. She’s like the cascading water of the Sterns Gorge, dipping and eddying around rocks. Once in a while you can find a pool by the side of the bank, a still, deep pool where the water rests before giving in again to the tumble. On the hottest summer days, I sometimes lower myself into that pool. Spread my arms on the surrounding rocks and hang there, suspended. Cold seeps through my skin, cools my entire body. The top of my head is warm from the sun, and the rest of me cools and cools and cools until suddenly, I’m cold, and then too cold, and I haul myself out and lie on that long flat rock and wait for the sun to warm me again.

Would I give up the Sterns Gorge to get my sister back, back the way she used to be?

I would give it up. Goodbye, my rock and my water rushing by, so busy, so full of purpose, rushing by on your way, on your way to where you’re going. I give you up willingly, that I may have my sister back.

“Your mother doesn’t have an easy time of it,” William T. says, which is something else that he always says.

What I want to say is,
Who does? Who the hell does have an easy time of it?
Not Ivy. Not Ivy, who lies in bed with her eyes closed, the ventilator pushing air into her lungs through her tracheotomy, the faintest of sounds:
wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.

Not my mother, whose fingers are always in motion. “You have no idea how noisy it is inside here,” she said once to Ivy and me, and pointed at her head.

But I do. I do know. I know all about noise and electricity, silent screams running up and down the waterways of my body. I know about walking, rhythm, the cadence of footsteps that tire my muscles and bring me peace, bring me peace, bring me peace.

“I try not to think,” my mother said in her Utica Club Brewery Employee of the Month interview. “The less I think, the better I am at my job.”

She’s good at her job. She should be; she’s been at the brewery more than twenty years.

All my life my mother’s hands have talked for her. Look down at her from the tour walkway, down on the assembly floor. See her thin hands as she rights the fallen and tipped bottles. See how graceful and quick they are. At night sometimes, when I was little, before the long time when my mother stayed in bed, I would wake to feel her hands on my forehead, stroking, stroking, stroking back my hair.

“I like to work hard and be all tired out,” she told the interviewer. “Keeps me out of trouble.”

Give her a garden and she’ll weed it. Give her a barbed-wire fence and she’ll fix it. Give her a sinkful of dirty dishes and she’ll wash them. Give her a pile of laundry and she’ll fold it.

Give her a daughter in a hospital bed and what does she do?

Nothing.

My Pompeii book, in my backpack, is two months overdue. Silently I read to myself, there at William T.’s kitchen table. I read about Pliny the Elder, who witnessed the disaster at Pompeii. He saw the thick black cloud advancing behind him like a flood. He heard women shrieking, children crying, and men shouting.

William T. stands up and stretches his arms above his head, the sure sign that I have to go now. That it’s time.

“They’re saying that she wouldn’t pull the plug,” I say.

“That’s true.”

“She won’t let her go, but she won’t visit her either.”

“Your mother does the best she can.”

“William T.?”

“Younger?”

“Can you pick me up at school from now on?”

He regards me. I can see the questions chasing themselves around in his brain.

Why does Younger want me to pick her up? Does she not want to take the bus? Did something happen on the bus? Should I ask her if something’s wrong? No, because so much is wrong that she wouldn’t even be able to answer such a stupid question.

If William T. asks me about the bus, will I be able to keep quiet about Jimmy and Warren and the gorge? I watch him and will him just to say
yes.

“Yes,” he says.

“Thank you.”

And he drives me back down the hill to where my mother is sitting and rocking and not talking about Ivy.

I rise in the early morning and walk into the kitchen in my bare feet. The floor is wooden. Be careful. Step lightly on the old boards. Splinters.

Make the coffee. Pour it into the daffodil mug and add the cream and stir in the sugar and bring it upstairs. Give it to Mom. On Thursdays she doesn’t go into work until nine.

“Here you go, Mom.”

And out the door I go. School. At 8:10 the un-bell will rip its way out of the speakers to find release in the corridors and hallways of Sterns High. No more un-bell for me. No more noise that splits my ears. No more bus. No more green vinyl seats. No more Katie the bus driver telling me to
get the hell back there and sit your butt down.
No more Jimmy, who won’t look at me anymore, and no more Warren, who will.

I walk.

I time my walk to get there after the un-bell has shrieked. In time for science, and history, and trigonometry, and the looks, and the silences, and the whispers.

Before I start my walk, I turn around and look up William T. Jones’s hill toward his white house and his broken-down barn. William T. is probably at his girlfriend Crystal’s diner, where he goes every morning. He meets his friend Burl Evans there for breakfast, and Crystal pours them both coffee, and William T. organizes the jam packets in their holders. I beam my thoughts to William T., sitting on his stool at the counter at Crystal’s Diner:
Hi, William T. I’m off. I’ll see you this afternoon. Don’t be late.

That’s my good-luck ritual.

What if I tell him what I did last night, when the still water rose within me, overflowed its banks, and I walked to the gorge because I had to go to the gorge, and Todd Forrest was there, and he asked if he could kiss me, too, and I said I didn’t care and he put his arms around me and picked me up and he asked if he could unzip my jeans and I said I didn’t care and he had a condom, too, and he asked and I said I didn’t care and then it was happening again and it hurt again and stone was beneath me, stone all around me, the rushing water that I want to
be
rushing behind me where I couldn’t see it, flowing fast and free over more stone. I closed my eyes until it was over, and then I lay there and it was Ivy I saw, Ivy, silhouetted against the moon, standing in the paneless window of the hay barn.

No. I can’t tell William T. about that. What would I say?

William T., help. I’m in trouble.

No.

What I do instead is walk. I walk, and most days, before I get to the intersection of Crill Road and 274, the rhythm of walking is upon me. My brain relays signals through the nerve pathways of my body, and my feet do their bidding. Unlike Ivy’s brain, which doesn’t work anymore. When the doctor showed me that x-ray of Ivy’s brain, I didn’t think it looked so bad. Fuzzy, gray, a few faint blurry lines here and there. Isn’t that what an ordinary brain looks like? The doctor stood there, gazing at Ivy’s brain, and I stood there gazing too.

“That’s what an intraparenchymal hemorrhage looks like, Miss Latham.”

The doctor nodded slowly, and I nodded too.

Then he put up an x-ray of a normal brain. It too was fuzzy and gray, but the lines . . . the lines were lines. They were sharp and clear; you could see both hemispheres, and the ventricles ran true throughout. It was symmetrical, that normal brain, and it was beautiful in its symmetry.

The doctor stood looking, and he didn’t nod. I didn’t nod either. I stared at the lines in that stranger’s brain, so clear and sharp, so unlike the lines in my sister’s brain.

“Can you see, Miss Latham? There’s a huge amount of bruised brain in your sister’s head.”

They drilled a little hole in her skull to suck out a blood clot and to take out her cerebrospinal fluid. They kept her calm. They kept track of the electrolytes in her blood.

“And that’s about it. It’s primitive, Miss Latham, but it’s about all that we can do.”

Then they did the tests, and Ivy was a no, a no, a no, a no, and another no — and then she tried to take a breath.

“So she’s not brain-dead,” my mother said to the doctor. “She tried to take a breath, so she’s not brain-dead.”

The doctor closed his eyes.

“She’s not brain-dead,” my mother said. “Right?”

“Not officially,” he said. “Not legally.”

Now the blood flows in her body because they keep her breathing with the ventilator. They feed her through a tube in her stomach. My sister who used to be moving water is now still water.

Route 365 north out of Sterns leads to Hinckley Reservoir, which before it was a lake was a town, the town of Hinckley. People used to live there, in houses, in trailers. There was a school and a post office and probably a store or two. No one remembers for sure.

The town of Hinckley flooded when they put the dam in. I think about that sometimes. I think of everything that happened in those homes, all the thousands of moments that make up the lives of the people who live there. Then the water came. The water came and washed away the fingerprints and footprints that marked all the places where people had ever been, had ever touched, had ever laughed and lived.

Hinckley is our own Pompeii,
I say silently to Ivy as I walk.

Hinckley is nothing like Pompeii,
I imagine her saying back to me.
Those Hinckley-ites had plenty of time to get out. I have no sympathy for anyone who drowned in the Hinckley flooding, if anyone even did drown in the Hinckley flooding. So there.

That’s what I imagine Ivy would say. If she could say anything. If she could think anything. If she could hear anything.

Hinckley is
your
Pompeii, Rosie. Yours, not mine.

Hinckley Reservoir is a placid surface. You’d never know that you were swimming on the graveyard of a town. All those houses, all those sidewalks, that school even, way down below. Goodbye, town. Goodbye, footprints, and goodbye, fingerprints.

Walk.

Keep walking.

For God’s sake, Rose, do you want to be late for science? Or history? No. Certainly not.
God forbid I should be late for history, and the book of wars, and the vast wisdom contained therein.
Rose, are you being sarcastic? No, Rose, I’m not being sarcastic.
Everyone needs to know everything possible about war.

Sometimes I hold conversations between myself and myself.

But at the intersection of Crill Road and Thompson Road, halfway to school, I stop: Help. I’ve walked for miles and the waters are not quieted. Will they overflow this time? Where’s Todd? Where’s Warren? Where’s Jimmy Wilson with his rigid not-moving eyes that won’t look at me anymore?

Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks, and a light blue truck came around the curve —

“Younger.” It’s William T. He’s rapping on the side of his truck, idling next to me. How long has he been there?

“Younger! Snap out of it!”

There’s a look on his face.

“Hop in.”

My feet won’t move. I’m stuck.

“Now.”

I get in. He drives me the rest of the way, into the high school drop-off semicircle, and sits there with the truck still idling.

“Listen to me,” he says. “Get out of the truck. Point your feet toward those doors and walk on in. Walk to your class. Walk to your next class. And walk to the class after that one.”

That look on his face.

“Fifteen minutes at a time,” he says. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all you’ve got to think about.”

But I’m tired. So tired. William T. leans across me and opens up the door and gives me a little push with the heel of his hand.