Deep River Burning (9 page)

“Hello,” the woman said looking Denver directly in the eye.

“Hi,” Denver replied.

“I’m Madeline. Nice to meet you.”

“Hi, I’m . . . Joanna,” Denver paused only for a fraction when she thought of an alternate identity to explore.

“Where are you headed, Joanna?”

“North Carolina.”

“Well then, you don’t have too far to go. Are you visiting friends or family, or just on vacation?”

“I’m on vacation.”

“Great! What is it that you do? For a living I mean?”

“I’m training to become a prison psychiatrist,” Denver answered.

“Whoa! You must have some interesting stories to tell.”

“They would make your blood freeze,” Denver said, smiling wide.

“Aren’t you a little young to be a psychiatrist?”

“I’m older than I look. Good genes. But how about you?”

“Me?” Madeline paused. “You don’t want to know, Doc. Do you mind if I call you Doc?”

“No, I don’t mind, but I would like to know what you do. What could you possibly tell me that is worse than what I hear from the inmates?”

“Well. It’s not an ideal situation, but you probably have heard it all, haven’t you?”

“Definitely.”

“Well, Doc,” Madeline hesitated. “I’m actually running away from New York.”

“Running away? Why?”

“I’m a movie star’s wife.”

“Really?” Denver asked curiously, wondering for a moment if she wasn’t the only one having a little fun today with identity.

“Really,” Madeline replied with a tone of consternation.

“Go on,” Denver said completely captivated.

“Everyone is envious of my life. Women want to be me. Suddenly, everyone thinks I’m beautiful and miraculous, all because my husband’s movie that was predicted to flop at the box office became a surprise smash hit. My husband always had dreams of being famous.” She paused for a moment and then continued. “I dreamed of being loved. Oh, sure, he wanted to be loved too. I suppose the difference between us was that I wanted to be loved by a few while he wanted to be loved by everyone.”

Denver suddenly felt a wave of guilt for lying about who she was. This woman was wearing her heart upon her sleeve, and now Denver was the fraud and somewhat daunted at the woman’s unreserved willingness to unpack her personal problems and hang them over the bus seat as if to keep them from getting wrinkled.

“This twist of fate into the limelight for my husband brought about the end of our marriage. No, I’m not sure why the marriage ended. These things are too hazy. According to my husband, I’m an outsider, and the theatrical system is an intimate network, and it is perceived that if you break a link, the whole web falls to pieces. This is what he told me. Putting a face on and working a crowd is essential, kind of like a car salesman, although actors are much better at it and the product they are selling is themselves. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Denver said as she sank deeper into her seat of guilt.

“We really started having trouble during the making of his second film. Marriage, or any relationship for that matter, is just like a garden. You have to tend to it and nurture it. If you neglect it, it’s going to wither and die. Seems to me that so many people are willing to do whatever it takes to plant the thing and get it started, but they seem to have a mental block when it comes to maintenance. He was the only man I was ever madly in love with, you know, the kind of love you think you’ll never get over and then when you do, even a passing thought of the person makes your hair stand on end, and not in a good way. Have I used up my hour yet, Doc?”

“No . . . it’s fine,” Denver said, still fascinated. “So are you officially divorced?”

“Yes, we got the divorce. The lies had a lot to do with it. I mean, isn’t he trained to create illusions?” She looked at Denver with desperation on her face and began to cry a little, but she continued speaking through her tears.

“Anyway, the cruelty had nothing to do with his career. I can’t tell you where that came from, unless it came from some sort of a God complex. He knew your buttons and he pushed them. He wanted to enrage you. He wanted to make you want to kill him. He wouldn’t stop until you threw the first swing and then he knew he had you. Some people can do that, you know, make you crazy, even when you’re not. They want to do it. It makes them feel powerful. But it’s abuse, you know? I wasn’t this unraveled mess before I met him, and it will take a while for me to figure out who I am again. If you ever meet someone like that, run like hell!” She laughed a little. “I have already said too much. I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re fine.” Denver felt uncomfortable and at a loss for words.

“I’m not even going anywhere in particular on this bus. I just want to get back in touch with old days, before we had money for cars. I’m trying to get back the person I was before he ever entered my life. And you know what? I think I see her, that Madeline. I’m getting closer to her more and more every day. Some light is starting to shine through.”

Denver continued her own masquerade because she did not have the heart to betray Madeline in the way that she was already feeling so deeply betrayed. Madeline was vulnerable and only just beginning to heal. They both were. The guilt sat in Denver’s chest like a knotted snake. But Madeline reminded her of something that day. She reminded her of the importance of authenticity. Whoever Denver chose to be in the future and wherever she chose to go, she wanted authenticity to be in her life. If people didn’t like her for who she was, then she would have no business paying any attention to them. They would have to deal with their insecurities and judgments one day on their own time. She couldn’t imagine life being meaningful without being true to herself and truthful to others, but the only approval she needed was her own.

Chapter 15

Sanctuary

By the time Madeline finished her story, she was tired and somehow managed to fall asleep on the bus with a sweatshirt as a pillow propped up against the seat. It’s a good thing Madeline didn’t ask Denver to share information about her fictitious job because she wasn’t feeling particularly inventive anymore. She could always have just claimed that she couldn’t tell any stories due to the confidentiality agreement, but they both fell asleep and Denver was off the hook. The bus stopped in a small town just over the North Carolina border where Madeline needed to transfer to a different bus. Groggily, she lifted her bag and smiled at Denver. “Thanks for listening,” Madeline said.

“Good luck to you,” Denver replied.

Although stranger things have happened, the possibility of Denver running into Madeline again was very slim. Her story left Denver wondering. She said that the situation with her ex-husband was very hazy, but although she may not have known it, Madeline had a clarity that was striking even though she was teetering on the edge. She must have had a sense of what needed to be done and the bus ticket was the knot on the end of the rope that she held on to, that kept her from slipping away. In one of her books about the sea, Denver read about red tides that occur when there’s an overly high concentration of a certain type of algae. The massive bed of algae produces a toxin that paralyzes fish so they cannot breathe. It’s the lack of oxygen that asphyxiates the sea creatures and leaves them draped all along the sun bleached shore-line like a scarlet robe, or like a bloody beach. The color of war, the color of deep rose, the color of love. Maybe in her marriage, Madeline just needed more room to breathe.

Sometimes Denver’s mind was a box of loaded clouds, soaking with thoughts and questions she couldn’t answer. Whenever she had a philosophical thought, she often wrote it down on a piece of scratch paper thinking that maybe she could read it again someday and remember what event provoked it. At the next bus stop, she wrote on the back of a restaurant receipt:
Some days, the mind is a windowless box. Some days it is full of open passageways, breezy and free, letting in a flare of light until another time, when the windows disappear.

By the time the bus arrived in Wilmington, it was overdue. Denver was finished. She said she would ride until she didn’t want to ride anymore and the time had come. She rode the local transit authority to the waterfront and found a small wood-framed eatery sitting almost directly on the dock by the water. The blue sky reflecting off the water made it dazzle and dance in the sun as the white boats rippled its surface and the seagulls spun heavy webs in the moist air. It had taken a long time for the bus to get to Wilmington so what felt like lunch was really early dinner, crab cakes and lobster salad. She was in heaven.

She could have sat there forever gazing out onto the water and watching it change moment by moment with the shifting wind and scattering tourists, but instead, she hailed a cab and asked the driver to drive north up the coast and take her to the most remote beach that he knew existed.

“You don’t care where?” he asked.

“I don’t care where it is or how long it takes to get there, as long as it is reasonably unpopulated.”

“Okay,” he said assuredly, as if he knew exactly where to go.

They whirled along the coastal road with its trees and bushes the likes of which she had never seen before, and the shore line houses sat by the dunes like square bird’s nests all looking outward and waiting. The road they were on got thinner and the houses became fewer and the tall grasses became more plentiful and the sand became deeper along the side of the road. Between the taxi car and the ocean, she saw a long fenced-in area filled with birds of all kinds that kicked around in the sand and poked their beaks into its cool depths. The car pulled slightly off to the right and cab driver said, “Here you go miss.” She paid the man, grabbed everything she had in the world, shut the cab door, and watched the taxi drive away.

She walked toward the beach through a very narrow path in the sand that cut through a long row of dunes and tall grass. Once her eyes crossed the rumpled edge of dune, the wide shimmering expanse of tumbling, crashing sea was there in front of her. Could anything be so vast, she wondered. She made herself comfortable on the beach like it was her own private sanctuary. She leaned up against her duffel bag and took off her shoes. The sun had dipped below the dunes behind her and the horizon was a dreamy light blue haze with the water the same color only with a silvery glint.

Born of wind and water far out in the Atlantic, the waves came spilling onto the beach one after the other, slowing down in a rush of confusion as the momentum to blow forward and crash was counteracted by the pull to leave again and regroup. These waves had a story to tell of their own. They were not young waves boiling their white caps over in eager anticipation to lunge, but the kind of waves that are long and rolling, building up their event in a large, swelling mass and then crashing in a sudden tumultuous roar. These waves had been places. They had traveled far. They came from a place where palm fronds are swiftly blown and when the wind hits your face, it stings.

Out in the open sea, there were boats passing one another in what seemed like a perishable highway, one that could simply swallow up their tiny sails in a blink and she’d know nothing other than the direction they were traveling. From the beaches’ perspective, the boats know one another, pass by and say hello, perhaps share wine and stories about perils on the sea, but they are as distant as so many of us are, sharing land with so many others who remain nameless.

The tide was high and the seagulls scrambled away from its push. When the beach became dark, she still didn’t want to leave. Instead of watching the boats pass one another, she watched their lights blink in from the horizon and then out again. Once it was dark, she saw that there was a lighthouse up the beach some distance. Its revolving round light broke through the darkness and signaled the boats to come home. On second glance, in the direction of the lighthouse, a figure of a young woman in a long, blowing dress stood by the water line waving a lantern out to sea. She walked back and forth allowing her dress to soak around her ankles and fill with salt. An uneasy feeling passed through Denver at the thought of what this woman might be looking for and why she waved an old lantern to the wide, dark sea.

She walked toward the woman slowly and listened for a call to the waves. She didn’t know exactly when she stopped walking toward her or when the recognition entered her consciousness that the woman’s lantern was not lit. All that illuminated her was her dress. It was bright like the foaming waves, but not white. Denver had no understanding at that moment of what she saw, a woman holding a dark lantern up to an even darker sea. She felt a nervous flutter tumble like marbles rolling from a leather bag, moving through the depths of her stomach, and then she chose to turn away.

She walked to the other side of high dune jutting out onto the beach, knelt down, and hid there until the half moon was high over the ocean. Unlike the visions she saw in the cabin in the woods at Desert Ring Island, she heard no sound this time. She was too far away and the sound of waves caressing one another kept her from hearing even her own movement or sigh. She didn’t know if the woman was from the past or a vision of the future, other than the fact that the lantern she carried did not look modern but antique and worn.

There is a whole world out there that we can’t see, she thought to herself, a world of energy and light and picture and sometimes even sound made by beings that exist in another realm, beings that sometimes try to communicate and sometimes want you to see them. But think of what they know, what they might be trying to tell us. Maybe this material world is only a small fraction of a larger reality, but we have closed our minds off to other possibilities. We have anchored ourselves to a physical place that is only part of the story because we are afraid. Aunt Rosemary was maybe the one person who did understand. She once told Denver that she wasn’t afraid to die.

After a while, Denver crept around the side of the dune and looked down the beach in the direction where the woman was walking. She was gone. Denver went to the spot on the beach where she had been standing, but there were no footprints or remnants in the sandy stretch by the retreating current. Denver returned to the place where she had piled her belongings on the sand and took out a jacket and a towel. She told herself that she needed to go soon. She needed to find a place to sleep for the night. She didn’t want to leave just yet so she put on the jacket and gently laid the towel down in the bumpy sand and laid her head back on her bag again to sit and watch. The peacefulness was intoxicating and the temperature coming in from the surf was cool and comfortable.

There on the beach, she could see the stars sharp and plentiful. There were lights behind her, but they didn’t stop the starlight from piercing through the night sky. She gazed upward and listened to the sounds and felt the breeze dance like soft socks over her face. She never wanted to leave. As she melted into the sand, she felt as if much of her stress lifted from her body, extracted by the salt air, and pulled up into the wind where it was blown out to sea. A few tears rolled back from her eyes and floated down into her hair.

There was only one other time in her life when she had seen so many stars. It was in Pennsylvania on the border to New York, at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. She was with Helena on a road trip to visit a family member of hers when they pulled over to the side of the road to see if Helena’s front left tire was going flat. They were on top of a mountain in a clearing where the road was narrow and framed by wide fields filled with singing crickets and tree frogs on branches far in the distance. Out of habit, Helena turned off the car. Denver reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight to check the tire. The tire was fine, only a little low.

When Denver turned the flashlight off after checking the tire, the night was dark, very, very dark. The moon was a pencil thin sliver far to the east horizon only barely sticking its nose up above a tree line. There were no houses, no farms, no street lights, no cars coming in either direction. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face or the car or Helena. All they had to go on was sound and touch and smell to determine what was around them.

“Helena, where are you?” Denver said softly.

“I’m right here,” Helena whispered.

Instinctively or perhaps in awe or fear of the darkness, they both stood dead still on the side of the road near the car. Denver reached out her hand to feel for the warm car hood for some stability or security, but every sound she made seemed out of place as if she was disturbing some profound sacred stillness. Several minutes passed while they stood in silence waiting for their eyes to adjust, but it never happened. Their human eyes were not created for that kind of darkness, but they realized that other eyes were. It was the darkest, most silent place she had ever been and the air smelled like lilacs, although it was too late in the summer for lilacs. When there was a sudden sound of weeds rustling near the road a few feet ahead, they hurriedly felt their way to the car doors, jumped in, and locked the doors with a half-scream and half-laugh.

Denver was not sure what Helena was thinking about during those minutes when they stood still and silent in the blackness of a Catskill mountain, but she was looking up at the stars transfixed by the sheer number and brightness of them. It was not the first time they star gazed together. Sometimes they stretched out on their backs on a hillside and stared up at the stars while talking and laughing about things that didn’t matter. If it is true that stars give off light long after they are dead, then the sky is deceiving in how alive it looks, like the young woman waving her lantern out to sea, still giving off her own light, long after she walked into the gray sea looking for her husband whose ship never came back to port. That is what happened to her in Denver’s imagination. That is what the woman’s silhouette told her. People tell stories without ever saying a word.

Denver wanted to stay there in the darkness on the beach until she no longer thought about coal. On the bus ride to North Carolina, she tried to forget about the color of coal. She thought the coast would be the perfect place with its washed out, natural hues. Her mind started to swirl thinking of Adena and Josh and his antics by the river, and Helena ramming her husband’s truck into a tree, and her parents, what they said the last time she saw them, her father and his books, the smell of her mother’s cooking, her father’s pipe, those cigarette butts by the coal pit, flower pedals in a pool of rain, Josh under a tree on Desert Ring Island, tears mixed with sweat, river water, leaves, pine needles, his hair so soft in her hands, his eyes smoky with sleeplessness, the carbon monoxide monitors keeping people awake, sleeping with windows open in January, wanting to run, wanting to stay, wanting to love, what you need to hate to divide yourself from history, to work for a living, to be grateful to be here anyway. And the wild geese that flew over the Susquehanna always returning in spring, no matter what.