Down River Part 5

"h.e.l.l, I'd f.u.c.k her." He winked at me, not seeing how close he was to a beating. I told myself that he meant nothing by it. He was just being a smart-a.s.s. He'd forgotten how much I loved Grace. How protective of her I'd always been.

He wasn't trying to start something.

"Good to see you, Jamie." I dropped a hand on the hard lump of his shoulder. "I've missed you."

He folded his ma.s.sive frame into the pickup truck. "Tomorrow night," he said, and jolted off toward the fields. From the porch I saw his arm appear as he draped it through the window. Then he tossed a wave, and I knew that he was watching me in the rearview mirror. I stepped onto the lawn and watched until he was gone. Then I turned down the hill.

Grace and I had been close. Maybe it was that day on the riverbank, when I'd held her, wailing, as my father hammered Dolf into the dirt for letting her wander off. Or the long walk back to the house, as my words finally calmed her. Maybe it was the smile she'd given me, or the desperate grip around my neck when I'd tried to put her down. Whatever the case, we'd bonded; and I'd watched with pride as she took the farm by storm. It was as if that plunge in the river had marked her, for she was fearless. She could swim the river by age five, ride bareback by seven. At ten, she could handle my father's horse, a big, nasty brute that scared everyone but the old man. I taught her how to shoot and how to fish. She'd ride the tractor with me, beg to drive one of the farm trucks, then squeal with laughter when I let her. She was wild by nature, and often returned from school with blood on her cheek and tales of some boy who'd made her angry.

In many ways, I'd missed her the most.

I followed the narrow trail to the river and heard the music long before I got there. She was listening to Elvis Costello.

The dock was thirty feet long, a finger bone stroking the river in the middle of its slow bend to the south. She was at the end of it, a lean brown figure in the smallest white bikini I'd ever seen. She sat on the side of the dock, holding, with her foot, the edge of a dark blue canoe and speaking to the woman who sat in it. I stopped under a tree, hesitant about intruding.

The woman had white hair, a heart-shaped face, and lean arms. She looked very tan in a shirt the color of daffodils. I watched as she patted Grace's hand and said something I could not hear. Then she gave a small wave and Grace pushed with her foot, skimming the canoe out into the river. The woman dipped a paddle and held the bow upstream. She said last words to the younger woman, then looked up and saw me. She stopped paddling and the current bore her down. She stared hard, then nodded once, and it was like I'd seen a ghost.

She drove the canoe upstream, and Grace lay down on the hard, white wood. The moment held such brightness, and I watched the woman until the curve in the river stole her away. Then I walked onto the dock, my feet loud on the wood. She did not move when she spoke.

"Go away, Jamie. I will not swim with you. I will not date you. I will not sleep with you under any circ.u.mstances. If you want to stare at me, go back to your telescope on the third floor."

"It's not Jamie," I said.

She rolled onto her side, slid tinted gla.s.ses down her nose, and showed me her eyes. They were blue and sharp.

"h.e.l.lo, Grace."

She declined to smile, and lifted the gla.s.ses to hide her eyes. She rolled onto her stomach, reached for the radio, and turned it down. Her chin settled on the back of her folded hands, and she looked out over the water.

"Am I supposed to jump up and throw my arms around you?" she asked.

"No one else has."

"I won't feel sorry for you."

"You never answered my letters."

"To h.e.l.l with your letters, Adam. You were all I had and you left. That's where the story ends."

"I'm sorry, Grace. If it means anything, leaving you alone broke my heart."

"Go away, Adam."

"I'm here now."

Her voice spiked. "Who else cared about me? Not your stepmother. Not Miriam and not Jamie. Not until I had t.i.ts. Just a couple of busy old men that knew nothing about raising young girls. The whole world was messed up after you left, and you left me alone to deal with it. All of it. A world of s.h.i.t. Keep your letters."

Her words were killing me. "I was tried for murder. My own father kicked me out. I couldn't stay here."

"Whatever."

"Grace-"

"Put some lotion on my back, Adam."

"I don't-"

"Just do it."

I knelt on the wood beside her. The lotion was hot out of the bottle, cooked in the sun and smelling of bananas. Grace was beneath me, a stretch of hard, brown body that I could not relate to. I hesitated, and she reached behind herself and untied the top of her bikini. The straps fell away and for an instant, before she lay back down, one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung in my vision. Then she was flat on the wood, and I knelt unmoving, completely undone. It was her manner, the sudden woman of her, and the certain knowledge that the Grace I'd known was lost forever.

"Don't take all day," she said.

I put the lotion on her back but did a bad job of it. I couldn't look at the soft curves of her, the long legs slightly parted. So I looked over the river as well, and if we saw the same thing we could not have known. There were no words for that moment.

I'd barely finished when she said, "I'm going for a swim." She retied her top and stood, the smooth plane of her stomach inches from my face. "Don't go away," she said, then turned and split the water in one fluid motion. I stood and watched the sun flash off of her arms as she stroked hard against the current. She went out fifty feet, then turned, and swam back. She cut through the river like she belonged in it, and I thought of the day she'd first went in, how the water had opened up and taken her down.

The river ran off of her as she climbed up the ladder. The weight of water pulled her hair back, and for a moment I saw something fierce in her naked features. But then the gla.s.ses went back on, and I stood mutely as she lay back down and let the sun begin to bake her dry.

"Should I even ask how long you plan to stay?" she said.

I sat next to her. "As long as it takes. A couple of days."

"Do you have any plans?"

"One or two things," I said. "Seeing friends. Seeing family."

She laughed an unforgiving laugh. "Don't count on a whole lot of this. I have a life, you know. Things I won't drop just because you decide to show up unannounced." Then, without skipping a beat, she asked me, "Do you smoke?" She reached into the pile of clothes next to her-cutoffs, red T-shirt, flip-flops-and came out with a small plastic bag. She pulled out a joint and a lighter.

"Not since college," I said.

She lit the joint, sucked in a lungful. "Well, I smoke," she said tightly. She extended the joint toward me, but I shook my head. She took another drag, and the smoke moved out over the water.

"Do you have a wife?" she asked.

"No."

"A girlfriend?"

"No."

"What about Robin Alexander?"

"Not for a long time."

She took one more drag, stubbed the joint out, and dropped the charred end back into the plastic bag. Her words were soft around the edges.

"I've got boyfriends," she said.

"That's good."

"Lots of boyfriends. I date one and then I date another." I didn't know what to say. She sat up, facing me. "Don't you care?" she asked.

"Of course I care, but it's none of my business."

Then she was on her feet.

"It is your business," she said. "If not yours, then whose?" She stepped closer, stopped an inch away. Powerful emotions emanated from her, but they were complex. I didn't know what to say, so I said the only thing that I could.

"I'm sorry, Grace."

Then she was against me, still wet from the river. Her arms circled my neck. She clutched me with sudden intensity. Her hands found my face, squeezed it, and then her lips pushed against mine. She kissed me, and she meant it. And when her mouth settled against my ear, she squeezed me even tighter, so that I could not have stepped away without forcing her. Her words were barely there, and still they crushed me.

"I hate you, Adam. I hate you like I could kill you."

Then she turned and ran, down the riverbank, through the trees, her white suit flashing like the tail of a startled deer.

CHAPTER 4.

Some time later, I closed the door of my car as if I could shut off the world. It was hot inside, and blood pounded where the st.i.tches held my skin together. For five years I'd lived in a vacuum, trying to forget the life I'd lost, but even in the world's greatest city the brightest days had run shallow.

But not here.

I started the car.

Everything here was so G.o.dd.a.m.ned real.

Back at Robin's, I cut the tape from my ribs and stood under pounding water for as long as I could. I found the Percocet and took two, thought about it, and then swallowed another. Then, with all of the lights off, I climbed into bed.

When I woke it was dark outside, but a light shone from the hallway. The drugs still had a grip on me, and deep as I'd been, the dream still found me: a dark curve of red spatter, and an old brush too big for small hands.

Robin stood next to the bed, dark against the light. She was very still. I couldn't see her face. "This doesn't mean anything," she told me.

"What doesn't?"

She unb.u.t.toned her shirt, then slipped it off. She wore nothing else. Light spilled through the gaps between her fingers, the s.p.a.ce between her legs. She was a silhouette, a paper doll. I thought of the years we'd shared, of how close we'd come to forever. I wished that I could see her face.

When I lifted the blanket, she slipped in, on her side, and put a leg over me. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Don't talk."

She kissed the side of my neck, rose to kiss my face, and then covered my mouth. She tasted as I remembered, felt the same: hard and hot and eager. She rolled on top of me, and I winced as her weight came onto my ribs. "Sorry," she whispered, and shifted all of her weight onto my hips. A shudder moved through her. She rose above me and I saw the side of her face in the hall's light, the dark pit of one eye and the dark hair that gleamed where the light touched it. She took my hands and placed them on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"This doesn't mean anything," she repeated; but she was lying, and we both knew it. The communion was immediate and total.

Like stepping off a cliff.

Like falling.

When next I woke, she was getting dressed.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey yourself."

"Want to talk?" I asked.

She whipped on her shirt, started on the b.u.t.tons. She could not bring herself to look at me. "Not about this."

"Why not?"

"I needed to figure something out."

"Do you mean us?"

She shook her head. "I can't talk to you like this."

"Like what?"

"Naked, tangled in my sheets. Put on some pants, come into the living room."

I pulled on pants and a T-shirt, found her sitting in a leather club chair with her legs drawn up beneath her. "What time is it?" I asked.

"Late," she said.

A single lamp burned, leaving most of the room in shadow. Her face was pale and uncertain, eyes filled up with hard gray shadow. Her fingers twisted together. I looked around the room as silence stretched between us. "So, how've you been?" I finally asked.

Robin came to her feet. "I can't do this. I can't make small talk like we saw each other last week. It's been five years, Adam. You didn't call or write. I didn't know if you were alive, dead, married, still single. Nothing." She ran her fingers through her hair. "And even with all of that, I still haven't moved on. Yet here I am sleeping with you, and you want to know why? Because I know that you're going to leave; and I had to find out if it was still there between us. Because if it was gone, then I'd be okay. Only if it was gone."

She stopped talking, turned her face away, and I understood. She'd let her guard down and now she hurt. I stood up. I wanted to stop what was coming, but she spoke over me.

"Don't say anything, Adam. And don't ask me if it's gone, because I'm about to tell you." She turned to face me, and lied for the second time. "It's gone."

"Robin..."

She shoved her feet into untied running shoes, picked up her keys. "I'm going for a walk. Get your stuff together. When I get back we'll see about finding you a hotel room."

She slammed the door behind her, and I sat down, awed again by the force of the pa.s.sions that had grown in the wake of my flight northward.

When she returned, twenty minutes later, I had showered and shaved; everything I owned was either on my back or in the car. I met her in the foyer, by the door. Her face was flushed. "I found a room at the Holiday Inn," I told her. "I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye."

She closed the door and leaned against it. "Hang on a second," she said. "I owe you an apology." A pause. "Look, Adam. I'm a cop, and that's all about keeping control. You understand? It's about logic, and I've trained myself that way since you left. It's all I had left." She blew out a hard breath. "What I said back there, that was five years' worth of control slipping away in under a minute. You didn't deserve it. You don't deserve to be tossed out in the middle of the night either. Tomorrow's soon enough."