The River (9 page)

11

Tomás and I got back from our bank-combing at twilight, what should have been the beginning of the dinner rush, but no one was rushing. As we stood on the sun porch shaking ourselves off, I took in the changes. Mom had set up warmers of food along the café windows. Odd. Mom didn’t believe in buffet-style meals. She said they were salmonella in the making, a sign of a lazy chef serving egg substitutes and near-bacon on Sunday mornings.

And then, next to the sun porch door, was a stockpile of things—chanterelle mushrooms in paper Safeway Foods bags; jars of blackberry preserves and spiced peaches, pickles with a label that said “Aunt Irma’s Private Select” on them. And it wasn’t just food in the stockpile. There were hand-knit caps, mohair blankets, ancient videos of Babar and Dora the Explorer—all collected in a giant wicker basket, beneath a sign-up sheet that said “Armstrong Babysitting Rotation” at the top.

The list was completely filled with names.

“What’s this?” I asked Tomás, tapping the paper, which was only beginning to curl upward, like a scroll.

He shrugged and stomped the river water from his boots. “Just what it looks like,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic and didn’t get to ask him before he tromped off into the kitchen.

I studied the list again, then peered through the sun porch window. The whole first floor was completely full. I don’t know what Mom had in the warmers but people were eating it—some of them off paper plates balanced in their laps while they sat on sofas. Mom didn’t believe in paper plates, either. Kum Ba Yah guy was still there, but he had progressed to “The Long and Winding Road.” No one was singing along, but no one was gossiping, either. The mood—at least what I could see from the sun porch—was somber but respectful.

“It was smart, really, bringing everything here.” Dad was leaning against the doorjamb, two fingers loosely gripping the neck of a Pyramid Hefeweizen. “They all said the same thing. They wanted to bring tuna casseroles to the Armstrongs but thought your mom would be a better person to coordinate help.”

Looking at those people through the window made me feel the way I had shoveling that bunny carcass while everyone was warm and inside: I was circling something, looking for a way in. So I rallied the best way I knew how.

“I’m ready to work,” I said.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said. “Gretchen and Tomás and Gloria Inez can cover, if you need some time to yourself.”

I tried smiling at him. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather keep moving.”

Dad smiled back at me, and it seemed the smile even reached his eyes, as though to say he knew exactly what I was talking about. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a green plastic pill bottle. When he shook it, the contents rattled. “Before I forget, have you been in my medicine cabinet?”

“No.” I stayed away from Dad’s pharmaceuticals, convinced they were the only things keeping him from mildewing and curling up on himself. I had Advils for the days I worked out too hard. That was as serious as I wanted to get.

“ ’Cause I thought I had twenty of these but now there are only fifteen.”

“Fifteen of what?”

“Lorazepam,” he said, twisted the cap off, shook out two, and handed them to me. Since my hands were still wet they left little chalky circles in my palm.

“I’m not sure I want these,” I said. The way he hoarded them made me deeply suspicious.

“Nothing to be afraid of, Ronnie,” Dad said. “I take them sometimes to help me sleep. If I’ve had a really rough day. You know. Like you have.”

I doubted he’d ever had a day like mine in his life, but maybe he had. Maybe that was his problem. Maybe at his old job, he had them five times a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

“Take them one at a time. They’re addictive. And any analyst will tell you that what you’re feeling now—eventually you have to let yourself feel it. That’s when your mother’s talents come in handy. Pain is a lot easier to take with a meal.”

Like asprin, I thought, looking at the teeny pills in my hand.

Dad smiled sadly at me and walked away, skulking back down to the Astro Lounge. I assumed that was full of informal mourners, too.

Even though he told me I didn’t have to pitch in, I spent the evening circulating among customers, helped bus paper plates, all the while listening to snippets of conversation. People were sharing memories of Karen, as if sharing was a way to hang on to her. They all smiled warmly at me and some even gave my hand a squeeze, but no one questioned me—not even to ask how I was doing. It was as though they’d all resolved to let me be. And I felt a kinship for all the generous souls in that room, with their woven memories and crocheted hats and their soft but firm grasps.

“I had her in Sunday school, you know,” I heard one blue-haired woman say to another. “She couldn’t have been more than five. She asked me if elk could get into heaven. I tried to tell her that they didn’t have souls but that didn’t seem to help. Poor thing. She must’ve seen one strapped to the hood of someone’s pickup.”

The other blue hair clucked sympathetically. “That’s a toughie, all right.” They themselves seemed perfectly at home with the soul/no soul delineation. I envied them their sureness. Me? I didn’t know what I believed. If elk didn’t have souls, what about well-loved household pets? Dogs who wore bandannas and caught Frisbees; cats who purred and kneaded your lap when you watched
Gilligan’s Island
reruns; and maybe even goldfish who swam up to you and smiled when you walked toward them with fish flakes. Didn’t they deserve souls if we loved them enough?

I ghosted around until the end of my shift, my gestures practiced and fluid. I didn’t work so much as drift along, contemplating the big questions. I didn’t make any progress. At the end of the evening I’d circled around the afterlife more than the buffet. Finally, around 11:00, after the joint had emptied out, I went upstairs and collapsed on my bed. Gretchen had neatly tucked the hide-a-bed back underneath so there was no evidence she’d been here at all. She was a really good bunkmate.

I remembered Dad’s pills and pulled them from my apron. They were so teeny. Could something so small really pack a big wallop?

I put them on my nightstand. Maybe as a last resort, I thought. Besides: Dad had said that eventually I’d have to feel the pain. Why not now? No sense putting it off. Maybe I didn’t need them to get to sleep. Maybe all I needed was a soundtrack.

I know it’s weird, but nothing relaxes me so much as a band with really loud, really driving guitars, like the Clash or the Ramones. Or sometimes, if I’m feeling really low and deep, like I was tonight, I would reach even further back into the history of pop and go for the Who. Not just any Who. It had to be
Quadrophenia
, one of Pete Townshend’s concept albums, like his rock opera
Tommy
. I didn’t know what “concept” meant, other than the whole thing was supposed to stand as a whole instead of separate tracks plunked together. There were common melodies running throughout—some of them so subtle they sounded like echoes. Like: “Is it me, for a moment?”
Moment moment moment
… There’s a movie
Quadrophenia
, too. It’s about this kid who does too many drugs and feels like there’s a separate him for every occasion. Major identity crisis but since he’s English, he may feel divided but looks super spiffy with his rain parka, tooling around on his Vespa. At the end of the movie he stands on the seat of his scooter, kicks it into gear, and drives it off a cliff. You see it crash onto the rocks of a shoreline a hundred feet below, but you don’t see his body falling with it. And that’s the end of the movie. As the credits roll, you’re left to wonder: did he really do it? Or did he chicken out at the last moment and decide to live?

That last part was certainly morbid. But suddenly nothing else would do. I had to listen to
Quadrophenia
. I couldn’t go to sleep without it. Luckily, I had the whole thing in my iTunes.

I pulled open the drawer to my nightstand to fish out my iPod, but it wasn’t there. I foraged for it under bookmarks, a diary I never wrote in anymore, and several highlighters which, before they’d dried up, were pink and yellow. No luck. Then I thought: maybe I left it in my backpack. It wasn’t there either. Nor was it in my desk or on my bookshelf or hidden beneath the pillows on the window seat. It wasn’t in the bathroom. (I didn’t think it would be, but I was so desperate I checked anyway.) Finally I decided that there was nothing I could do. I’d look in the kitchen tomorrow, and then my school locker on Monday.
Quadrophenia
would have to wait.

I put on my jammies and crawled under the five layers of quilts. I thought about reading for a while, but then took another look at the two tiny pills on the nightstand and thought, do I dare?

There were more ways to be brave than crossing a swift current. So I scooped one of the pills up in my hand, stood on my Vespa, and jumped off a cliff.