kept looking at the ground.
“Where were you going?” I asked.
“Up north,” she said.
“Canada?”
She looked up at me then, water beaded up and glistening on her eyelashes. She nodded. “Canada.”
“Do you know somebody up there?”
She looked toward the woods, chattering. “I got an aunt,” she said.
“Well, let’s get back to my house and you can give her a call. Let her know you’re okay,” I offered.
“It ain’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she don’t know I’m coming. My daddy…” Her voice trailed off.
“Can we call him ?”
“No!” she said loudly, shaking her head. And then she reached for my hand. “He sent me away. My mama’s dead. I ain’t got nobody.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to sort everything out in my mind.
“We need to go to the station, let them know you’re alive. Then they can get in touch with your aunt and we’ll get you on the next train. And if she can’t take you, we’ll go to the police. They’ll talk to your daddy. He’s your father. He has obligations.”
“No!” she cried again, squeezing my hand hard. “ Please . Maybe I can just stay a little while. I can’t go back there. I can’t.” Her eyes were wild and scared. One was the same color as river water, blue-gray and moving. The other was almost black. Determined. Like stone. “Let them think I drowned.”
“You can’t just pretend you’re dead.”
“Why not?” she asked, both of her eyes growing dark.
I flinched. “Two Rivers is a small town. People are going to wonder where you came from.”
“Maybe I’m your cousin,” she said, her eyes brightening. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Your cousin from Louisiana.”
I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t have any cousins from Louisiana.”
“From Alabama then. I don’t know. Mississippi,” she persisted, clearly irritated.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m not sure folks are going to buy the idea that you and I are family .”
The girl looked square at me, studying my face, as if contemplating the possibility herself.
“I’ve got a little girl,” I said. “I can’t just bring a stranger into my house.”
At the mention of Shelly, the girl reached out and grabbed my wrist, pressed my hand hard against her pregnant belly. When I pulled my hand back, she held onto my wrist, and she moved toward me. She was so close to my face I could smell the bubble gum smell of her breath. Her eyes were frantic, and she quickly pressed her lips against my forehead. It was such a tender gesture, it made me suck in my breath.
“I won’t be any trouble. I promise,” she said.
She looked at me again, and I willed myself to look into those disconcerting eyes. I concentrated on the blue one, the one the color of the river, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t say anything else; she simply took my hand and waited for me to take her home.
“You can stay for a little while, just until we get everything straightened out.” And then, because she looked as if she might cry, “I promise, everything will be okay.”
“Thank you,” the girl whispered, though it could have just been the wind rushing in my ears. She was riding on the back of my bicycle as I pedaled away from the accident at the river, through the woods, and back toward town. She held on to my waist tightly, her heartbeat hard and steady against my back. I was careful to avoid anything that might jar her or send us tumbling. We didn’t speak; the only sound was of bicycle tires crushing leaves. I worried about what would happen when I stopped pedaling, when the journey out of the woods inevitably ended, and so I concentrated on finding a clear and unobstructed path through the forest, taking great care to slow down when the terrain grew rough. Too quickly, the woods opened up to the high school parking lot.
I stopped. “If it’s okay with you, I should probably leave you here and have you meet me at the apartment,” I said. “Not the best idea for people to see us riding through town together.”
She climbed carefully down from the seat. She set the small suitcase she had with her onto the pavement, straightened her skirt, and touched her wet hair self-consciously. When she took off my shirt and handed it to me, I thought for a moment that she was going to let me go. I imagined pedaling away as fast as I could. I imagined forgetting all about her, about the wreck, about the river. But instead, I stayed on the bicycle, unsure of what to do next. I gripped the handlebars tightly, ready to go, but immobilized.
The lot was full of cars but empty of students and teachers. We were bound to be discovered by some kid ditching class or sneaking a smoke.
“This a high school?” she asked, looking at the low brick building in front of us. At the football field in the distance.
“Yeah,” I said. It was my high school, unchanged in all the years since I’d graduated. I knew every brick in this building’s walls. Every vine of ivy clinging to them. I knew the smell of the cafeteria vent on a cold autumn afternoon, the sound of the bell announcing the beginning of the day.
“No one will think nothin’ of it if they see me here then?” she asked.
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure what someone would make of this girl, this dark-skinned girl, dripping wet and pregnant in the high school parking lot. While it had its share of matriculated expectant mothers, Two Rivers High had seen all of two black students in the last two decades.
“Walk that way,” I said, motioning toward the road that would wind behind the school and ultimately down into the village where I lived. “I live on Depot Street. Upstairs, above Sunset Lanes Bowling Alley. Number two. I’ll be waiting. I’ll make you some soup or something. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
I stood up on the pedals and pushed off, looking over my shoulder at her briefly, and then rode away as fast as my tired legs would allow. I should have gone home. It wouldn’t take her long to walk from the high school into the village. I knew the apartment was in no condition for company, and that the folks at work were probably wondering where I’d gone. But my bike seemed to have a will of its own, carrying me away from the high school, down the winding road toward town, and then onto the little dead-end street I hadn’t visited in more than twelve years. As if Betsy would simply be waiting there, ready to help me figure out what to do next.
Betsy
T he neighborhood in Two Rivers where Betsy and I grew up was made up of row after row of crooked Victorians—crumbling monstrosities sinking in upon themselves. Each house on Charles Street had its own peculiar tendencies. The one next-door to ours had a widow’s walk whose railing had, unprovoked by either natural or unnatural disaster, collapsed into a pile of pick-up sticks on the lawn below one afternoon. The family who lived at the end of the street had the misfortune of owning a house that wouldn’t stay painted. No matter what pastel color they chose each summer, by the following spring it would have shrugged off the pink or yellow or lavender, the paint peeling and curling like old skin. My own family’s house was tilted at a noticeable angle; if you put a ball on the kitchen floor and let go, it would roll straight into the dining room (through the legs of the heavy wooden table), past my mother’s study, and finally into the living room where the pile of my father’s failed inventions inevitably stopped the ball’s trajectory. Most of the homeowners in our neighborhood had at some point given up, resigning themselves to sinking foundations and roofs. To the inevitable decay. There simply wasn’t