Greenwood, who helped me get all the important details right. To the folks at Newbreak Coffee Co. in Ocean Beach, CA, for the good bagels, endless cups of coffee and ocean view. To my students and colleagues at The George Washington University and at The Writer’s Center, who teach me something new about writing every day. For the readers of my Mermama blog, who continue to cheer me up and cheer me on. To my extraordinary agent, Henry Dunow, for holding my hand through every step of the revision process, and for believing in this story despite everything. And to Peter Senftleben, who made this all, finally, happen. Lastly, to Patrick for his enormous patience and gigantic heart, and to Kicky and Esmée, whom I love…to the bottom of the ocean and back to the top.
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
—T ONI M ORRISON
P ROLOGUE
1968: Fall
B lackberries. The man’s skin reminds him of late summer blackberries. The color of not-quite midnight. The color of bruise. This is what Harper thinks as he looks at the man they have taken to the river, the one who is half-drowned now, pleading for his life: the miracle that human skin can have the same blue-black stillness as ripe fruit, as evening, as sorrow itself.
Of course he also thinks about what you might see (if you were here at the confluence of rivers). Three white boys. One black man, begging to be saved. The harvest moon casting an orange haze over everything: just a sepia picture on a lynching postcard like the ones his mother had shown him once. He’d had to look away then, both because the hanged man had no eyes, and because it was the only time he’d seen his mother cry. And he knows that if she were still alive she’d be weeping now too, but not only because of the black man about to die.
It was anger that brought him here. After he understood that Betsy was dead (not wounded, not hurt, but gone), everything else—the grief, the sadness, the horror—became distilled, watery sap boiled down into thick syrup. All that was left then was anger, in its purest form. It was rage that brought him here. But somehow, now, in the cool forest at the place where the two rivers meet, as the man looks straight into Harper’s eyes and pleads, the anger is gone. Swallowed up by the night, by old sadness and new regret.
“Please,” the man says, and Harper thinks only of blackberries.
He will see this color when he closes his eyes tonight and every night afterward and wonder what, if anything, it has to do with the most despicable thing he’s ever done.
1980: Wreckage
P eople say we are defined by the choices that we make; some of them are easy, small, while others are more difficult. These are the decisions that keep us up at night, forcing us to weigh the pros and cons, to examine what is right and what is wrong. They require us to examine the options, scrutinize the possibilities and potential outcomes. But what about the split-second decision? What about the one made without the luxury of contemplation, the one made from the gut rather than the brain? Does this speak more loudly to who we really are? The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good. But what about the man who feels nothing? What about the man who stands at the edge of the well and does nothing? Who is he? Once, a long time ago, I made a split-second decision that has made me question who I am, what I am capable of, every day since. And this instant, this horrible moment, has haunted every other moment of my life. I don’t think I am a bad man, but sometimes I just don’t know.
What I do know is that, twelve years later, all I wanted was forgiveness. I just needed to make things right, to somehow make amends. Over the years, the sorrow of that night had settled into my bones. Deep inside my joints. In my shoulders. In my hands. I needed absolution. I needed a second chance. I imagined the guilt dissolving like salt in hot water. I imagined it lifting off me, taking flight like a strange and terrible bird. But what I didn’t imagine was that my one chance at forgiveness would find its way to me in a train wreck and a pregnant girl with mismatched eyes. But opportunities are often disguised. I know that now.
The night before the wreck, I didn’t sleep. After Shelly went to bed, I stayed up, making cupcakes for her to bring to school the next day for her birthday: sad chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting. My efforts at holidays always seemed to fall short of what Shelly really wanted, though she would certainly never say so (store bought Halloween costumes instead of homemade, homemade valentines instead of the glossy ones sold at the Rexall, and so many bad cupcakes). Hanna would have made a cake from scratch, inscribed Shelly’s name in sweet calligraphy on top. Shelly’s great-aunt had taken care of the first eleven birthdays; when my efforts invariably failed, she always quietly stepped in and saved me from whatever disaster I’d made. But now, I was on my own, frosting cupcakes whose middles were as soft as pudding, chocolate crumbs mixing with the pink frosting like gravel. In the morning Shelly would be twelve. Twelve years. And I still felt as incompetent as the day I brought her home from the hospital.
Our new apartment was above the bowling alley. We’d lived there since we left Paul and Hanna’s house at the beginning of the summer. This too was a temporary situation; I had to keep telling myself that. I wouldn’t let the years slip by here, not in a dingy apartment above a bowling alley. I wanted so much more for Shelly.
Moving in with Betsy’s aunt and uncle was a decision I had made twelve years ago out of grief and desperation. Alone, with a brand new baby to take care of, I needed someone to keep me from shattering into a thousand pieces. None of us had planned on this lasting forever. But Shelly was happy there, and the years had just sort of passed by. It wasn’t until she finished up the sixth grade earlier that summer that I knew it was time to move on. She was too old to be sharing a room with her daddy, and I couldn’t help but feel like we’d overstayed our welcome. Our room was drafty and smelled like other people’s things. In all the years we’d slept there, Paul and Hanna never managed to move out the broken bureau or the old clothes hanging in the closets, and I never felt right asking them. Of course they offered to let Shelly stay, wanted Shelly to stay, but the thought of giving her up too was more than I could bear.
When I found the apartment downtown, I raided my savings account and paid six months’ rent in one fell swoop. This was mostly for Hanna. She doubted me, I knew this, and I wanted to prove that I was capable. That we would be fine on our own. And though she adored both Paul and Hanna, Shelly didn’t seem to mind leaving much. She took only the clothes that would fit into a small suitcase. She even left some of her belongings behind: a pair of ratty old slippers, a magnifying glass she used to spy on things she found in the river, a piggy bank filled with coins. I guess a child who loses her mother the moment she’s born learns not to grow too attached to things.
Besides, the new place had two bedrooms: one of them just for her. The first night there, Shelly stood on the mattress I’d put on the floor in her bedroom with her arms stretched out and spun around until she got too dizzy to stand. “I love it, love it, love it!” she said. And I felt for the first time in a long time that I’d done something right. She fell asleep before I even had a chance to put sheets on the mattress. Below us, the rolling balls and the crashing pins were an odd lullaby.
Tonight, I knew that between the heat of Indian summer and the sounds of the bowling alley below, sleep would once again pass me by. And so I resigned myself to wakefulness, figured I’d spend the night as I spent most every night lately: sitting on the roof looking at the cool shimmering green of the public pool across the street, closed for the summer now, while Shelly slept in the other room.
I poked my head in to check on her. A few weeks earlier, when summer came back, I’d put our only fan in her room. It whirred in the window, making the curtains billow out like ghosts. She was flat on her back and fast asleep, wearing one of my old Middlebury T-shirts and the gum wrapper necklace she never took off.
I quietly closed her door and went down the hall to the window, which led to my rooftop refuge. Even at almost midnight, the tar paper still held some of the sun’s warmth, and the