All Rivers Flow to the Sea Read online

  I open the manual at random.

  If you want to make a left turn from a one-way road onto a two-way road, you must approach the turn in the left lane or from the left side of a single lane. As you cross the intersection, enter the two-way road to the right of its center line, but as close as possible to the center line. Be alert for traffic, especially motorcycles, approaching from the road to the left. Oncoming motorcycles are difficult to see, and it is difficult to judge their speed and distance away.

  “Read aloud,” William T. says. “Maybe I’ll learn something.”

  “‘Single broken line,’” I read. “‘You may pass other vehicles or change lanes if you can do so safely and not interfere with traffic.’”

  “Well, hell, who doesn’t know that one?”

  “‘If two drivers enter an intersection from opposite directions at the same time, one going straight, the other turning left, which must yield the right of way?’”

  “Jesus. Ask me something I don’t know.”

  “‘What’s the hand signal for right turn?’”

  William T. frowns. He raises his left hand straight up in the air and studies it, then drops it by his side, then holds it straight out.

  “Goddamn. I think you’ve got me, Younger.”

  “Didn’t take much. Quarter, please.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  I wave the manual at him. “Study up on the rules of the road. You might learn something.”

  William T. laughs. “You’re a tough customer, Younger.”

  “‘Solid line with broken line,’” I read. “‘If you’re on the side with the solid line, you may not pass other vehicles or cross the line except to make a left turn into a driveway. If you’re on the side with the broken line, you may pass if it is safe to do so and your driving will not interfere with traffic.’”

  “Duh,” William T. says.

  “‘Single solid line,’” I read. “‘You may pass other vehicles or change lanes, but you should do so only if obstructions in the road make it necessary or traffic conditions require it. With regard to a left turn from a one-way road onto another one-way road, prepare to turn by getting into the left lane, or the left side of a single lane, as close as possible to the left curb or edge of the road. If the road you enter has two lanes, you must turn into its left lane.’”

  “Jesus, there’s a lot of rules in that thing,” William T. says.

  “You should know. You must have studied it when you were getting your license.”

  “If I did, I have no memory of it.”

  I look at Ivy, sister with hands folded in front of her heart as if she is keeping them warm, as if she is praying, as if she is pleading, as if she is holding her own self together. Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks that night, and we were coming around a curve.

  “I don’t want to drive,” I say.

  “To live in this world you must drive,” William T. says.

  “I’ll live in another world, then.”

  I shut the driver’s manual and pick up my Pompeii book again.

  “Imagine it,” I pretend-read. “All those ordinary people, living their ordinary lives. Maybe the baby had just gone to sleep in his basket of rushes in the corner.”

  “Basket of rushes?” William T. says. “I thought that was Moses.”

  “The baby is asleep in his basket of rushes,” I pretend-read. “And his mother stands at the clay oven baking the bread for lunch, and his father is at the marketplace selling flagons of homemade wine.”

  “How is it possible that Moses was a Pompeian and all this time I never knew?” William T. says.

  The door handle turns, and we both look up, ready to greet Angel. But it’s not Angel. It’s Tom Miller and Joe Miller. Joe looks like an animal who has never been indoors before. “It’s a crime, to keep a Miller confined,” William T. said once.

  Joe Miller stands there with his Gray’s Automotive cap in his hands. There he stands, Tom behind him. It is the end of May, and Ivy has been on the ventilator for over two months. I watch Joe behold her, my sister Ivy with the tube in her throat and the tube in her arm and the tubes you can’t see, underneath the sheet. Joe Miller turns and turns and turns his cap.

  “Ivy?”

  That’s Joe, his voice. Low. Quiet. Saying her name. Can she hear him? Is she there? Joe watches Ivy, and I watch Joe, and Tom watches Joe, and Ivy with her closed eyes watches nothing.

  “Ivy?”

  Joe puts his cap on the table. He kneels by Ivy’s bed.

  “Ivy.”

  He says her name, and again he says her name.

  “Ivy.”

  He reaches his hands to Ivy’s, to Ivy’s hands that lie cradled one inside the other. He folds his fingers around hers.

  “Ivy,” Joe whispers.

  Then his eyes close. He brings my sister’s folded hands to his cheek and rubs his cheek along the bundle of hands, four hands, that are his hands encircling my sister’s hands. He rubs his face against my sister’s hands, and he whispers her name, and I close my eyes and listen to him: “Ivy, Ivy, Ivy.”

  Ivy, when your head hit the steering wheel, did you know that I was next to you? I saw your face just before the light blue truck finished its slide — its slide that looked so gentle — and met our car. You looked blank.

  Joe Miller turns away from the bed and walks to the door. Tom starts up from the floor where he sits, but Joe flicks his hand and Tom sinks back down.

  “She would have hated this,” Joe says to me. “She would’ve fucking hated this.”

  He pushes at the door and it stays motionless. He jerks at the handle and it swings in at him. He shoves out the door. He’s gone. Tom turns to me and William T., shrugs: I’m sorry. Then he, too, is gone, gone after his cousin, gone to take him home.

  The still water of Hinckley Reservoir covers what used to be: an entire town, the structure and framework of a thousand people’s lives.

  Does water have a memory? Does water remember where it came from, what it used to be? Does a drop of rain that falls in the middle of the opening bud remember that it used to be a frozen crystal under someone’s gliding skate?

  “I can’t lose my girl,” my mother said to the doctors. She stood in the hall of the hospital, surrounded by them — the nurses, the doctors, the white coats and the blue scrubs, and the light flashing off eyeglasses and pens. Hands held at their sides, hands clutching papers or instruments, hands jammed in pockets.

  My mother put her hands over her ears.

  “I can’t lose my girl.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I can’t lose my girl. Can’t lose my girl. Can’t lose my girl.”

  Words rose around my mother, whose eyes were closed and whose hands were over her ears. What were the words? I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter.

  Let her go is what they were saying.

  They didn’t use those words. They never would. They take a vow called the Hippocratic oath. It must go against everything in their training, to think of letting someone just . . . die. Just stop.

  Stop breathing. Stop beating. Stop being.

  Let her go.

  I can’t lose my daughter.

  Let her go.

  I can’t lose my daughter.

  I stood against the wall down the hall and watched. It went on for some time. The circle of men and women stood around my mother. The gentle wash of their voices continued. My mother was the lone center, her eyes closed and her hands over her ears, her face squinched shut, turning and turning and turning in a circle.

  Ivy, are you somewhere else now? Does your spirit hover over that patch of road?

  My sister and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks that night. A boy who had just gotten his license came slipping and sliding down the mountains not knowing that he should be going slower, that it was a long curve, that it was icy here and there, and his light blue pickup truck didn’t stop when he put on his brakes, and it slid into our c
ar that Ivy was driving.

  It happened so gently. I was with Ivy, sitting beside her. And I was looking through the windshield, at the diamond-light sky, and I saw the truck coming and I knew that it wouldn’t be able to stop. It was going to happen. The truck would slide, and it would be soundless, and it would turn sideways toward us, and then it would turn again so that its front would be pointed directly at the car. It’s happening again —

  On the way home from Ivy’s room, William T. stops at the Utica A&P. He wants to buy his girlfriend, Crystal, some green olives stuffed with garlic, which Crystal likes and which they don’t sell at Jewell’s Grocery. William T. loves to make Crystal happy.

  “Garlic-stuffed olives for Crystal!” he says through the window to me. He holds up his right hand and blinks his fingers three times. “Fifteen minutes. Sit tight, Younger. Fifteen minutes.”

  In the truck I sit, waiting for him. An old lady comes out of the A&P carrying a brown paper bag of groceries. She’s an old lady, old old. Her days of walking well, of not thinking about walking, are long behind her. Now her every step is fraught. Her every step is something she thinks about, even now, in May, when winter is a memory.

  Is that a puddle?

  Is that a curb?

  Mustn’t fall. Mustn’t fall. Mustn’t fall.

  Are those the thoughts of the old lady? Is that her mantra? I look at her and imagine that she’s only trying to get back across the street into the Olbiston apartment building. Maybe she has a cat, a cat lying in a blue velvet chair, waiting for the old lady who has to think about Every, Single, Step.

  But she doesn’t fall. She makes her way slowly and steadily across the street. I cheer her on from my seat in William T.’s truck.

  Then the bag splits. The old lady’s cans and boxes roll around on the sidewalk, off the curb, into a puddle.

  I shove open William T.’s truck door and run. Quick, Rose, pick up all the groceries and set them beside the old lady. She stands there trembling.

  “Wait! I’ll be right back!”

  I hold my hand up. “Two minutes! Wait!”

  Then I run into the A&P and grab a couple of plastic bags from the cashier and run back out. She’s still standing there. Trembling. I crouch at her feet. She’s wearing stockings. Old ladies always wear stockings. She’s wearing old lady black rubber boots with fur at the top even though it’s May, and gloves, and a hat, and an old lady black coat because old ladies are always cold.

  I put all the groceries — the cans and boxes and bottles, the lamb chop and the two long carrots and the one onion and the head of lettuce — into the plastic bag. Then I put that bag inside the other bag.

  “There you go.”

  “Thank you.”

  She doesn’t look at me. She’s too far gone into what just happened.

  “Can I help you across the street?”

  “Thank you.”

  But she can barely move. Her mouth is trembling. Her eyes are moving around, casting about on the sidewalk.

  “Let me help you.”

  But I can’t. That’s the worst thing. I can’t really help the old lady. I can run around and pick up all her groceries and put them in a plastic bag and take her arm and guide her across the street and raise my fist at a car that’s going too fast and splashes us both with dirty brown water. I can walk her slowly, slowly, slowly, up the ramp into the brick building. I can hold the door for her, breathe in the stuffy indoor old-apartment-cooking-food-knocking-radiator smell of the building. But I can’t help her the way I want to help her. I can’t bring her back her legs. I can’t bring her back her youth. I can’t bring her back to a time in her life when someone stood beside her laughing and holding her hand.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “Anytime!” I say in a cheerleader voice. “No problem!”

  William T. waits in the truck, watching me cross the street from the old lady’s apartment building.

  “What was that about?” he says.

  I shake my head. Inside me I’m all exclamation marks, small streaks of lightning stabbing.

  “She all right?” William T. says, looking across the street to where the old lady disappeared into the building.

  I shake my head.

  “Are you all right?”

  I shake my head.

  William T. puts the truck in gear and pulls out of the A&P parking lot. He points us north, to where the foothills are rising up, and eases into traffic.

  “Home?” he asks after a while. After about fifteen minutes. Another fifteen minutes, and we will be at my driveway.

  I shake my head.

  “You want to go to skip stones at the Sterns Gorge, then?” he says. “We could have a contest, like we used to way back when.”

  “No!”

  I can feel him looking at me. Stop looking at me, William T.

  “That was a pretty big no,” he says after a while. “Any particular reason for that?”

  “No!”

  “Younger.”

  “No! No! No!”

  Exclamation points, jabbing and stabbing inside me. I sit in the truck and rock. Rock. Rock. Try to rock the water inside me, loosen it from its still lakes and overflowing oceans. There is not enough room in my body to contain all the water overflowing its banks. Will there ever be?

  Hello June.

  Goodbye March, when it happened, and goodbye April, when Ivy slept, and goodbye May, when Ivy slept, and hello June, and Ivy sleeps on.

  “‘Be prepared and look ahead,’” I read from the manual. “‘You should sit comfortably, but upright, and keep both hands on the steering wheel. Slumping in the driver’s seat or steering with one hand makes it harder to control your vehicle, and your “relaxed” position can lead to a dangerously relaxed attitude toward driving.’”

  Could you stop reading that damn thing? Ivy doesn’t say.

  “‘Anticipate mistakes by other drivers and think about what you will do if a mistake does happen. For example, do not always assume that a driver approaching a STOP or YIELD sign on a side road is actually going to stop or yield. It is better to assume the other driver may not stop. Be ready to react.’”

  Give it a rest, Rose! Ivy doesn’t say.

  “To live in this world, Ivy,” I pretend-read from the book, “you must know how to drive.”

  This world of roads and highways and cars and trucks and stop signs and blinking red lights and yellow lights that mean caution and green lights that mean go and engines that can throw a rod and tires that can go flat and brakes that can fail and air bags that may not inflate and gas stations, the endless ugliness of gas stations with their hoses and their pumps and their stink of gasoline.

  To live in this world, you didn’t always have to know how to drive. Once upon a time, people rode horseback. Once upon a time, the inhabitants of this world walked on foot, carrying their belongings in packs. Once upon a time the inhabitants of Pompeii ran, carrying their children in their arms.

  I close the manual. Let Ivy sleep. Sleep, sister, sleep.

  “You ever have a dream where you’re falling, Younger?” William T. says from the blue chair. “One of those falling dreams? Jesus Christ, I hate those falling dreams.”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “What brought on that comment?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  I turn around in my green chair and look at him, bent over the little table, pencil clutched in his big hand, underlining sentences in his bird book. I open the driver’s manual again.

  “‘Sometimes it’s better not to make eye contact with another driver, especially where conflict can occur,’” I read to William T. “‘The other driver may interpret eye contact as a “challenge.”’”

  “That’s true,” William T. says. “God knows I’ve run into enough of that up on Route 12.”

  “‘If confronted by an aggressive driver, stay calm and relaxed. Make every attempt to get out of the way safely. Do not escalate the situation.’”

  “Never es
calate,” William T. says. “And never de-escalate, as in a falling dream. Excellent advice.”

  “‘Put your pride in the back seat. Do not challenge an aggressive driver by speeding up or attempting to hold your position in your travel lane.’”

  “Especially if he’s a Statie,” William T. says. “Those troopers take their travel lane position very seriously.”

  “‘No matter how carefully you drive, there is always a chance that you will be involved in a traffic crash. You cannot predict when it may happen.’”

  William T. is silent. He bends over his bird book.

  “William T.,” I say, “when your son died, what did you do?”

  His pencil hovers a fraction of an inch over the page. Searching, searching. For what? He doesn’t look up.

  “I wanted to die too,” he says.

  His pencil keeps hovering. Then I watch it underline a sentence swiftly and surely. Then another one. Another one. The pencil is a speed skater, practicing for the Olympics.

  “But I kept on living,” William T. says. “It’s a weird thing, Younger, how sometimes we think we can’t, but we do. We just keep on living.”

  Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks that night. Ivy’s foot pumped the brake when the light blue truck began to slide toward us. She knew what to do and she did it. She pumped lightly and quickly, her foot in its black winter boot moving like a piston on the brake. The boy in the light blue truck was wearing brown work boots. He was from Remsen. It was only his third time alone in the truck. That’s what his mother told me.

  “Had I known what would happen,” she said, “I never would have let him go.”

  DUH, I thought. It’s weird how sometimes part of your mind can be separate from the rest of you, and think things like DUH.

  “Younger?”