Two Rivers Page 7

  After Lucy, I figured it was likely I’d have to finish raising Shelly by myself. Lucy was right. Betsy’s shadow loomed large. And as far as finding a new mom for Shelly, it wasn’t like she didn’t have women in her life. Hanna was like a mother to her. And now that we were on our own, we had Mrs. Marigold and the bowling league ladies.

  At the bowling alley, Shelly played “Ladies Night” on the jukebox until a couple of guys groaned audibly, and I stopped giving her quarters. Marguerite was quite good. She said she and her girlfriends liked to bowl too. We bowled until Shelly slumped over in a booth, exhausted, and Marguerite said her feet hurt.

  When we turned in the rental shoes, Kip Kilroy, the counter manager, said, “Hey, Harper, I saw you on the news. Man, what a disaster.”

  I was worried he would ask about Marguerite, but he only said, “Those size sixes work out for you okay, miss?”

  She winked and said, “A five and a half woulda been better, but I still rolled a two-twenty.”

  Back upstairs in the apartment, I offered Marguerite my room for the night, put some clean sheets on the bed. I told her I’d sleep on the couch, though I doubted sleep would likely come tonight either.

  “Tomorrow we need to get in touch with your family,” I said as I handed her a clean towel and washcloth. She didn’t say anything, but she accepted the towels.

  “Thanks again,” she said. “This is really nice of y’all.”

  In the morning I would call over to the train station, talk to the weekend crew, have them check their roster for a girl named Marguerite, for her mother. But for tonight, I let her rest. The kitchen still smelled like jambalaya, and when I opened the window it seemed the heat had finally broken. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, the air smelled like rain.

  The Road Less Traveled

  W hen Betsy said she was running away, I knew I had no choice but to go with her. She needed me. Besides which, I would have followed Betsy Parker anywhere.

  On the last day of eighth grade, as Miss Bean said her tearful farewells to us, Betsy leaned over across the aisle that separated us and whispered, “Today.” I ignored her, staring straight ahead as Miss Bean wiped at her nose with a tissue she plucked from a box on her desk. Truth be told, I was moved by Miss Bean’s heartfelt speech. I even felt a small lump swell in my throat as she spoke. She was the youngest teacher that Two Rivers Graded School had ever had—fresh out of college and still in love with the idea of teaching. Miss Bean, unlike our other teachers, believed in us; she believed that we would not only go on to graduate from Two Rivers High, but that we might even eventually find a way to change the world in some significant way. And perhaps it was Miss Bean’s enthusiasm, her thrilling naiveté that got into my gut that early June afternoon as flies slapped sluggishly at the windowpanes in our basement classroom. It was Miss Bean, wearing a soft pink sweater and a matching scarf knotted at her throat, and her promises that the road less traveled would, indeed, make all the difference that made me consent to Betsy’s wildest scheme yet.

  Betsy and I had had endless conversations about leaving Two Rivers. I participated in these discussions mainly because I loved Betsy Parker. It had everything to do with the way she smelled like lilacs, even in the winter, and nothing to do with actually wanting to leave our hometown. I loved Two Rivers. The way I figured it, I was probably about the only person who wasn’t trying to get away. But I cherished this nothing place. I treasured it: the way the woods smelled after rain, the thunderous sound of the train, that still place where the two rivers meet. Betsy’s machinations to flee contradicted every instinct I had. But Betsy Parker, like the giant maples that grew inexplicably in a perfect circle around the town’s library, had also grown out of Two Rivers. And I loved her more than water, so I listened as she devised her plan. And agreed when she asked me to go. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. But now, Miss Bean was hugging me so hard I could feel the gentle cage of her ribs pressing into my cheeks, her breasts pressing into my cheeks, and Betsy Parker was giving me the signal that the time had come. Suddenly, I was thirteen years old, a graded school graduate, and the whole wide world lay before me like some sort of open road. That’s the way I saw it; I pictured the dirt road that led from the river eastward, the one that would wind and twist and branch onto other dirt roads, leading, finally, to Maine, where Betsy had deigned we might finally settle.

  Most other girls at thirteen might have pointed their starry eyes westward, fueled by too many winter nights spent curled up under covers reading about all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier adventures. Not Betsy though. Betsy Parker was an adventurer of the truest sort. She knew her limitations, could differentiate between fantasy and potentiality. When she set out to do something, she did it. This was what made me both adore Betsy and fear her. She never made idle threats, and she never made idle plans.

  Betsy chose Maine as a destination because of a photo of her mother that she had found in a box in her basement. In the picture, Mrs. Parker was perched on top of a large rock, the wind blowing her hair across her face, the ocean crashing against the shore below. It was taken on the coast of Maine, back when Mrs. Parker was an aspiring model, long before she married Mr. Parker. Betsy told me that one time her mother grabbed her arm tightly and said, “I died the day I met your father. You are looking at a corpse.” She said her mother’s fingernails left four bloody half moons in the soft skin of her upper arm; she even showed me the four faint scars, which I wanted, but didn’t dare, to touch. It was hard for me to imagine Mrs. Parker with her oven mitts and patent leather pumps saying this about Mr. Parker or to imagine her hurting Betsy. But it wasn’t hard for me to envision Mrs. Parker sitting on a rock with waves crashing below her, a photographer clicking away. Betsy wouldn’t let me see this picture, but I imagined her looking like Annette Funicello, wearing nothing but a smile. I think Betsy envisioned herself perched above a rocky beach. When she fantasized about running away it wasn’t about riding in a horse-drawn wagon but about walking barefoot in the sand, ankles numb in the cold Atlantic. “Besides which,” she offered when I gave her my typically dubious smile, “you can fish. That’s how we’ll make our money.”

  As we left school that afternoon, Betsy didn’t give in to my usual diversions. No stop for Red Hots at the drugstore, where Brooder and Ray would be parked at the counter, digging around in their pockets for loose change. No detours to the cemetery, where I liked to see how many angels I could hit with my slingshot. She was all business, pulling me by the hand until we were in her backyard. She left me standing by the oak tree and went into her father’s shed, where he kept his tools and lawn mower and the stash of dirty magazines, and came out with a small shovel. I followed her to the far corner of her yard, where she looked up at the sky, crossed herself as if she were in church, and then started to dig.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer me. And after she had dug about a foot down into the earth, she silently dropped the shovel and knelt down next to the hole she had made. She continued to dig with her hands, her expression serious, intent. When she pulled out the soggy cardboard box, I thought it might be some sort of hidden treasure. There was a part of me, even then, that resided in the stories my mother read to me at night. Treasure Island . The Swiss Family Robinson . “What is it?” I asked.

  When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet. She blinked hard and lifted the lid of the box. “When I was six,” she said, quiet, like a question, “a bird smashed into our front window. A robin. My mom had just washed the windows, and
the stupid bird must not have been able to tell there was glass there. I was playing jacks on the front porch, and I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It sounded like a gun or something. And then the bird was just lying there in the rosebush. There wasn’t any blood or anything, but its neck was all twisted. Its wing was crushed. Mom came running out of the house to see what happened, and when I showed her the bird, she covered my eyes with her hands. They smelled like ammonia. I remember they smelled so clean it could make you sick. She made me go inside, told me to go to my room and not come out until she said. After a long time, she finally came and got me. She told me that the bird was really hurt, but that she fixed its wing. She said that it flew away.” Betsy’s hands were trembling, the box was trembling in her hands. “So I forgot about the bird. And then a few days later I was out here and I saw this pile of dirt. I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to dig it up. And I found this.” She motioned to the box, to the bones inside the box. “Course it wasn’t just bones then. It still had its feathers and everything. Its wing was still broken. Its neck was still broken.”

  I knelt down next to Betsy and looked into the box. Inside were yellowed bones, impossibly small and collapsed. The miniature skull with its empty eye sockets was looking up at me.

  “She probably just didn’t want you to feel bad,” I said.

  “Well I did ,” Betsy said, and she seemed almost angry.

  “Are you going to bury it again?” I asked. There was something disconcerting about the skeleton. About Betsy right then.

  She nodded and lowered the box back into the ground. “Dumb bird. Flying around, just being a bird, and then bam , it’s over.” She looked at me and frowned. “Nobody bothered to tell him about the glass. You’d have told me, right? If I were that bird? And you were my bird friend?”

  I nodded. I would have.

  She’d packed for both of us—everything we needed except for my clothes. She’d been stealing food from the pantry for nearly two months. She’d also been pilfering from the pickle jar where Mr. Parker threw his spare change. She had almost forty dollars, which she’d had Nancy Butler’s older sister, who worked at the Two Rivers Savings and Loan, turn into bills so as not to raise any eyebrows. She had toiletries she’d shoplifted from the drugstore and even a pair of men’s hiking boots she’d found at the Goodwill, which she offered to me like a gift. “We’ve got many miles ahead of us,” she said. “I don’t need you going home when your sole blows out.” The way she said it made me think of my soul exploding. My mother did not believe in God, but I had my suspicions.

  “Where will we sleep?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a tent,” she said. “I was a Brownie, before I got kicked out, you know.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions.

  I dawdled. I stood in my bedroom, looking for a way out. It was futile. I didn’t even have a proper closet in which I could hide. My closet was full of more of my father’s inventions; no one had dared open that door in years. Downstairs my mother was playing the piano, angry music. Last day of school music. She had a summer of daily piano lessons ahead of her. Never mind a thirteen-year-old boy puttering around the house. My father was at work. By the time he got home, I would be gone. It made me sad. Though Betsy had forbidden me to do so, I got out a piece of paper from my school notebook and scribbled down a quick note: “I’m okay. Don’t worry. I’ll call when I get a chance. Your loving son, Harper Montgomery.” I wasn’t sure why I bothered to sign my last name except that it made the whole thing seem somehow more official. I muttered “Good-bye” to my mother, kissed the top of her head, and she nodded her farewell as she continued to abuse the piano keys.

  I met Betsy at the drugstore, as planned, for a final soda pop. I ordered a Vanilla Coke, and she got her usual Orange Crush. Luckily, Brooder and Ray weren’t there or else I might have chickened out. We sat at the counter, both of us making those drinks last as long as they possibly could, until finally Betsy said, “Let’s go.”

  By the time the sun was starting to set, I had lost my bearings. Betsy insisted that we travel through the woods until we were out of Two Rivers, lest anyone driving by might wonder what we were up to. She had calculated even the most minute details of our escape. She carried elaborate maps, which she had traced from her father’s road atlas. A compass. A pocketful of stones to make a trail, even, I figured. But after the sound of the river faded into the sound of wind in the trees, I couldn’t tell which way we were headed anymore and I was starting to wonder when one of us would finally say, “Uncle.”

  As the sun burned red and orange through the thick foliage all around us, Betsy stopped. “Let’s camp here for the night.” As she pitched the tent and unrolled the sleeping bags, I waited for her to stop what she was doing, to turn to me, punch me in the shoulder and say something like, “All right, let’s head back.” But she didn’t. “Why don’t you go find some wood for a fire?” she asked.

  I agreed and set out in the waning light to look for kindling and firewood. Though I didn’t have a watch on, I figured it to be about eight o’clock. If I were at home, my father would be climbing the stairs from his basement laboratory, stretching and calling out to my mother, “Helen, come watch Wyatt Earp with me.” She would mutter something from the other room, and my father would fix himself a peanut butter sandwich as he waited for her. When she emerged from her study, bleary-eyed and yawning, he would motion for her to join him in the living room. They would settle onto the couch then, and my mother would lay her head in my father’s lap so that he could stroke her hair. I would sit Indian-style on the floor in front of them, in front of the TV close enough to reach over and change the channel during the commercials. If someone were to ask me what the word family meant then, this is the image that would have come to mind. We did not eat together, but we did meet religiously for prime-time television. For this, I would abandon games of kick-the-can and hide-n-seek as soon as the streetlights hummed. Now, in the woods, I thought of my father walking up the basement steps, my mother devouring one more paragraph. I wondered at what moment they would realize that I was gone.

  I bent over, selecting twigs and fallen branches haphazardly, without any real expertise. I hadn’t joined the Boy Scouts because my mother considered them an organization of Christian zealots. She did think their survival tips were important however, considering the amount of time I spent outside. She found a used copy of the Cub Scout Leader Book as well as the Wilderness Survival Guide at a library sale, and taught me how to make a tourniquet, how to identify edible mushrooms, and how to track a badger. None of this seemed pertinent right now.

  I brought the pile of sticks to Betsy, eager for her approval.

  “Over there,” she said, motioning to a circle of rocks she had created not far from the opening of the tent.

  I dropped the branches on the ground and sat down next to them. I thought of my mother, unwinding her hair from the two frayed braids she wore pinned to the top of her head.

  Betsy made a pyramid of twigs, crumpled a piece of newspaper, which materialized from the pack she’d been carrying on her back. She lit a match just as the last embers of sunlight burned beyond the forest, and started the fire. We ate creamed corn and hot dogs, charred from the open flame. I sat next to Betsy, eating quietly, and knew that my parents had probably realized by now that I was missing. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen my mother look afraid.

  We talked about school, about the new Everly Brothers album, about Jack Kerouac and whether or not anyone would ever travel to outer space. We even talked about what we would mi
ss. “Double Delights,” Betsy said. (You could only get them from the ice-cream truck that drove through our neighborhood at dusk on summer evenings.)

  “Chicken croquettes.” I nodded. My father made them, with thick creamy gravy.

  “Smoking candy cigarettes on the train tracks.”

  “Sugar on snow,” I said. (Sugar on snow is hot maple syrup on clean white snow. It makes a sort of sticky candy. You eat it followed by a dill pickle and then a plain doughnut. It’s one of the best things about spring in Vermont.)

  “They’ve got that in Maine.”

  “Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten for a minute about Maine.

  “Spying on Mr. Lowe,” she said. She smiled a little wistfully. “My tree.”

  The fire was burning low. I followed Betsy into the tent and accepted when she offered me half of her unzipped sleeping bag. We lay on our backs staring up at the roof of the tent, the edges of our bodies just touching: the sides of our hands, our hips, our ankles. The sleeping bag was heavy and warm. My skin, where it touched hers, felt electric.

  “I’ll miss my dad, “she said softly.

  “Um-hm,” I said, nodding in the darkness. I wanted to squeeze her hand, let her know that I was having second thoughts too, but I worried it would break the spell.

  We lay there for a long time, and I waited for her to sit up, laugh, say, “It’s too cold. Let’s go home.” But it only got darker and quieter, and soon the cadence of her breathing changed. She was asleep. And I knew that we weren’t going home. We were running away. For real. I must have laid there for hours, listening to her breathe, trying to discern any restlessness, any fear. But remarkably, Betsy kept sleeping.

  Soon I was cold, freezing cold, and I imagined Betsy (had she been awake) would have been cold too. My mother had also taught me the dangers of hypothermia, and so, in all my imagined chivalry, I crawled out of the tent into the almost absolute darkness and added another log to the fire. It took a while for it to catch, and I nearly hollered with joy when it finally did. I was thinking mostly about warmth, and maybe just a little about my mother’s instructions on how to make a signal with smoke.