Flat Water Tuesday (28 page)

My father saw me and nodded, then looked at the cop. “He’s my son.”

“We can’t get prints off of him,” was all the sheep-head cop said to my cop.

My father’s thumbprints on the sheet were black smears. He actually smiled at me and said, “No ridges at all in these fingers, Rob. Nothing.”

I looked at sheep head. “He doesn’t have fingerprints?”

“See them every week. There’s no oil in them anymore. No contours. No ridges or whorls. Nothing.” He gave up and jerked the sheet of paper away. “Go on. Get out of here. Drive him home. And take that bag with you.” The duffel was full of his old clothes and a wet patch was spreading through the side from something he’d put in there. My father picked it up when I reached for it.

My cop lifted his chin. “Tell him to stay off the roads. He’s the BAC high score for the night.”

My father turned around and said tiredly, “I can hear you just fine, Officer.”

The cop didn’t even look at him, just at me. “You make sure and tell him.”

*   *   *

I tried to sit up in the early morning dark. The pain in my head felt like I’d been pasted good and hard with a socket wrench and I lay back down with a groan. I was in the infirmary and I was sweating. The river and snow and ice were still out there, but the room was cloyingly hot. A sauna. I sank back into feverish sleep.

*   *   *

I dreamed I saw Wendy on the boardwalk watching me and Connor staggering along, dripping wet, frozen, covered in blood. My head was throbbing, my lungs filled with needles of ice. I reached out to hug her, tried to talk, to ask her to help me.

She shook her head and turned away from me.

*   *   *

The ice had done a pretty good number on me. My scalp had been sliced open and enough blood had poured down the front of my face and shirt so that when the nurse on duty took us in, she thought that my skull had been bashed in. I had hit my head hard enough to pass out and had inhaled water. When Connor dragged me into the infirmary, he had been laughing hysterically.

We had both been treated for hypothermia. Connor had been sent back to the Rowing Cottage to recover after they had bandaged up his cuts and ice burns. The gash in my head had required ten stitches. I lay there thinking that I had blown it.

*   *   *

When Channing came to check on me two days later I was feeling well enough to be thinking about getting out of the infirmary. I had a plan to find my clothes and sneak back to my room. I was alone in the ward and figured I could make a break for it. Channing stood at the edge of the bed and looked me over like I had been caught stealing drugs from the place. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.”

“I’m not going to ask why you thought you could get across that river.”

I blinked, moved up in the pillows. He looked at me expectantly.

“It was my idea. I thought I could make it.”

“It was an
exceptionally stupid
idea.”

“I know. Connor told me the water might not be frozen solid—”

“Connor saved your life, it seems.”

“How many hours of work do we get for this?”

Channing sighed and shook his head. “How do we punish you for being reckless and stupid? Should we advertise that you two have obviously decided to compete to see who is the bigger fool? We do not punish students for accidently falling into the river, Carrey.”

“Coach, I didn’t think the ice would break. I thought I’d know if it was unsafe.”

“Carrey, losing a race is nothing. Losing an ergometer competition is less than nothing. But losing my respect is something you cannot afford, and you are close to it.”

“All right. I’m sorry. I am. It was my fault. He didn’t want to run across.”

“I asked you at the start of the year to watch yourself. To be careful. You do not seem able to do this. I could suggest that you be sent home. For your own good. Fighting. Reckless behavior. Threatening the welfare of my rowers and yourself. The pressure at Fenton might be too much for you, Carrey.”

“It isn’t. Mr. Channing, I swear I can handle whatever you have. It was a hundred feet across and it looked
easy
! I know it was stupid.”

“Understand that you have proven
nothing
to Connor. Or to me.”

“I know it.”

“And you
will
lose some more in life. I regret to tell you this. More than a simple test on a rowing machine. You will lose things. People. Jobs. And everything else there is to lose. When you do, there will be no river to run to. There will only be the loss. You will lose far, far more than you will win, in the end.”

“But not now.”

“Had you died, it would have been for nothing. It would have been a source of humor for some. Had you brought Connor with you, it would have been even less amusing.”

“Why? Because he’s the captain of the God Four? Because people like me die every day?”

“No, you arrogant fool. Because he would have died trying to save your life. You may hate him, but he is the only person on this team with wits and courage enough to rescue you, and I am not sure how he managed to do it.”

“It’s something I’m trying to forget.”

“You shouldn’t forget it. He shouldn’t let you forget. I certainly will not.” He stepped away from the bed, put his hands behind his back and cleared his throat. He made as if to add something else, then thought better of it.

“Coach, do you know where my clothes are?”

“You can get your clothes from the front desk.”

“I don’t really remember how I got here.”

“You two walked in here soaking wet and partly frozen. Connor was delirious. You were half-conscious. You both were duly tested for drugs and alcohol.”

“I don’t remember it.”

“Learn to take better care of yourself, Carrey.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

22.

On the day I left New York for Perry’s service at Fenton, I got up early to get over to my parking storage on Eighth, a dubious long-term garage with what I had thought, back in the winter when I parked the car and flew to South Africa, had the best rates. For the first time in I did not know how long, Carolyn and I had breakfast together: omelets, toast, and bacon I thawed in her microwave. Even fresh orange juice. Sitting in the open kitchen, where so many things had transpired between us, I felt our past like a physical presence at the table. I looked at her eating and felt the same feeling I once had with my parents; the inability to speak, a crushing, silent weight on my heart. I had the same divided feelings I suppose every couple that breaks up endures, the feeling that something might yet be done. We’d had five years together. She was no longer the same luminous woman she had been when we met. Her face showed the effects of the work, and the loss and the craziness after. It was a face that had seen pleasure and pain, and some small recovery. It was a face you could still fall hopelessly in love with. But we were at the wrong end of our youth.
In media res
.

She was perched on her stool, gazing through the cracked open window at the sky and morning clouds, at the haggard SoHo pigeons already up and calling to each other beyond the glass. I took her hand and she flinched but she didn’t move it away. We sat there for a long time before she stood up, claimed her fingers back from mine and gathered the plates.

It took me almost two hours to get the Jeep out of its dusty storage, pay for the months it had been there, and drive it back to Broome. I was frankly surprised it started, and I had to fight through the morning traffic to make it back to the apartment, the entire time listening to the radio blaring because I had taken all of my CDs out of the car when I had left it there.

The Jeep smelled old, disused, muggy. A layer of steamy grime had settled over it, and I was sure that there was a manifold problem that would cost to repair. I pointed the car down Seventh Avenue with the air conditioner breathing on my knees, the sun raging down on me as I crawled with the maddening traffic into the West Village. Past the fire escapes and the old tenements of Varick, the congested entrance to the Holland Tunnel, the tangle of impossible audio and electronics stores and fast-food joints on Canal Street; the shops crammed together into a cacophony of cheap advertising, a mother lode of video equipment and sound equipment and blank digital tapes and rip-offs and slashed-price sales that I could never resist. It took me almost ten minutes to drive up from Centre to the converted police building across from the loft, where every day I saw a new supermodel stalking though the doors. I was forced to park the Jeep in the first free gallery loading bay, yards away from the entrance to our building. I was sweating, swearing at the traffic, dead set on the job at hand. I had piled up my boxes, the dusty computer equipment, my tapes and the hard cases of camera equipment next to the freight elevator before Carolyn had woken up.

Two brutal trips up and down later and the car was full. There was nothing left save for one awkward chair that didn’t fit and a suitcase full of winter clothes I would not need any time soon sitting by the elevator door up there. I was winded by the effort, and angrier than I had been when I started, knowing that the anger didn’t come from the impossible, steamy traffic of the New York summer but from the fact that the day had begun as innocuously as any other. I gave half a thought to slipping behind the wheel, twisting the car into the traffic and leaving all this behind without a look back. I sat in the driver’s seat instead and slammed my head against the headrest, grit my teeth and pushed open the door. There was nothing else to do but go. I’d just ride the elevator up one last time, say good-bye to her, leave.

But she was already on the sidewalk in front of the graffitied door, shading her eyes to see where my car was. I caught my breath, hands on my hips, my shirt sticking to my shoulders. And then walked to her, hugged her gently, formally. She placed her palm on my shoulder, patted me as if she was making sure I had been something real and alive.

“Bye, Rob. Call me when you get to the school. Please. Okay?”

I nodded, and then thought of kissing her. But I just touched her shoulder back, a mutual acknowledgement of love and loss and five years. I turned away and walked back to the car, fast, ripped open the door, slid inside and twisted the key. Reversed hard out of the loading bay into the one way traffic, glared into the morass of cars and taxis and filthy trucks and then, despite all efforts, glanced back up the sidewalk to our door to see her still standing there, hugging herself in the merciless sun as if an arctic wind had blown down around her.

Ground the gears. Shoved the car back into its space, threw it into park, pushed open the door and scowled back at the guy in the
Art NY
T-shirt looking critically at the obtuse Jeep hanging over the yellow lines into the cars, strode back down the sidewalk under those same lamps I had banished myself to all those months ago to see her looking away from me, her hands up by her throat, palms out, eyes down, already gently shaking her head. And I had her by the arms. “I miss our little girl as much as you do. Do you hear me? Are you listening? I know I wasn’t here for you. But I loved her, too. And I love you.”

She still wasn’t looking at me but she held firm, smaller in my hands than I remembered. And I knew this was a last minute appeal and doomed to failure but the words kept coming out. “I know I left you. After. To work. To escape. You can blame me for it. But the whole fucking world is full of people who need each other and babies and then there’s you and me.”

And she was just shaking her head and tears were dripping down her face and I knew there was a right thing to say if I could only think it up and I dug my fingers into her arms and bent down so my eyes were level with hers. “Whatever happened, I can fix it. I can fix it for you and for me. And she wouldn’t want us to do this.”

Carolyn looked up at me sharply. “You tell me how you know that, Rob.”

“You tell me how I know anything.”

“What was in that stupid African ocean that was so
important
?” She balled her hands into fists and mashed them into my shoulder, drew back and then battered them into me again, hard enough to make me take a step back. “And why didn’t you protect me?”

I looked away, back at the car, realized the front wheel was edged up on the curb, that I had somehow pushed it in at an obscure, impossible angle. Lowered my hands from her shoulders and waited for her to hit me again, but she had simply turned away. I opened my own palms. “I tried to. I thought I did.”

Then she shook her head. “You were wrong.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? That I don’t live with it?”

“Why are you only saying all this now, Rob? It’s too late. I’ve been waiting for you to stop running away from it, from me.”

“It’s not too late. I don’t need to keep traveling. I can stay here. Wherever you want. Whatever it takes.” It was the wrong thing to say.

She smiled vacantly. “You need to move that poor vehicle, Rob.”

Tears running down my own face now, I stared into her anguished eyes and knew I could not bear losing her. “Can you forgive me?”

23.

I ran into Connor on the boardwalk the day after they let me out of the infirmary. I had dreaded seeing him but when he recognized me he grinned. “He lives. Nice head wound, Carrey. Nice. Very nice.” He was bundled up against the cold in a long blue coat, a plaid scarf, mirrored sunglasses.

“Channing visited me. He read me the riot act.”

“He’s not a happy camper. I got the same treatment. He blames me for your being such a dumb-ass.” He smirked. “I was going to come visit you, bring flowers. It was at the top of my to-do list.”

“Thanks, Connor.”

He looked at me blankly. “For what?”

*   *   *

I trained alone through the first weeks of February. There was a sudden break in the cold before we were plunged into frozen weather again, but the unexpected flash of warmth was enough to thaw that tenuous layer of ice on the river. Cracks formed along its surface and ruptured chunks rested upon one another.