All Rivers Flow to the Sea Read online

  I close my eyes. I push the stick around a little bit, up and down, back and forth. I listen to the long brushing leaves of green, cornstalk leaves, arching down upon the hood of the little red truck as we stutter along.

  “Go ahead and test it out on the corn itself,” Tom says. “Drive down a row.”

  I open my eyes. The rays of the setting sun filter through the corn, stretching ahead of us. We’re at the end of the field, the woods behind us and the green waving stalks in front. The sun has sunk below the level of the highest leaves, and the air is bathed in soft pink and orange and blue, the colors of an ending day.

  “Give it a try, Rose. Take a walk on the wild side.”

  Tom smiles at me. It’s William T.’s corn. He grows it for the hell of it, he says, the sheer hell of it, because he likes the look of the tall waves of green. I know that he grows it for more than that, though. He feeds it to his flock, his flock of lame birds, the chickens and the geese and the ducks that he keeps in his broken-down barn.

  “It’s just cow corn. Mow it down. Why are you restraining yourself?”

  The just-cow-corn stretches itself in front of me, rippling in the breeze that sometimes springs up just before sunset, when the world quiets itself for the passing of the light. It’s just cow corn, but it’s William T.’s cow corn.

  “Go on,” Tom says.

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  He looks at me. I look at him, too, but only for a second. When William T.’s son was still alive he — William T.’s son — would sometimes drive past our house in his truck, and he would stick his hand out the window if we were on the lawn, and he would wave and call to us. Sometimes he would be singing. William T.’s son loved to sing, and he would wave and keep right on singing, not say hi, just sing, and his truck would go around the bend and then the song would be gone.

  “No?” Tom says.

  A seed is dropped on the fertile earth, and the sun shines on it and the rain rains down, and days pass and nights, too, and a stalk of corn grows and grows and grows into the world, giving to and receiving from the earth oxygen and carbon dioxide in equal measure.

  “No,” I say again, and Tom understands something, because he tells me just to drive to the end of the field, then, and I do. And when we get to the end of the field, Tom tells me to nose the little red truck over the hump of the road, and I do.

  “Look both ways,” he says, and I do. “Anything coming?”

  Nothing coming. Tom tells me to drive the little red truck straight across the road, straight into the driveway, and flush with the porch, and I do. He tells me to push down on the clutch as I push down on the brake, and then to shift into first gear, and I do.

  The engine ticks. The truck is motionless, solid and firm on the surface of the earth. But while we sit in the truck, parked on the packed earth driveway, tectonic plates are shifting beneath us. They are moving now, underneath the red Datsun, where Tom and I sit. Tom reaches across the stick shift and turns the ignition off, plucks out the key, and tosses it from hand to hand.

  “Why did you do that with Jimmy Wilson?” Tom says.

  Silence.

  “Didn’t you know he was nuts about you?”

  Silence.

  “He’s been nuts about you his whole life.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t hurt someone who cares about you like that,” Tom says. “You’re not the only person in the world who’s ever been hurt. Don’t be cruel.”

  Cruel? The gorge comes over me again, rock below me, rock around me, and Jimmy Wilson with that look in his eyes. Tom inserts the key in the ignition again.

  “Switch places with me,” he says. “We’re going up to Star Hill.”

  My mother gazes at us through the kitchen screen door. What is she thinking? What are her thoughts? Night after night she sits, her fingers moving. Come with me, Mom. One paper crane. They don’t know everything. Two paper cranes. Come with me. Three paper cranes. Don’t hate me.

  “Okay, Rose,” Tom says halfway up William T.’s hill. “Talk to me.”

  He looks over at me.

  “You’re supposed to keep your eyes on the road,” I say. “Didn’t you study that in your driver’s manual? Didn’t your grandfather teach you that when he took you out on the road for the first time?”

  He will not be distracted.

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s not Jimmy,” I say. “It’s me.”

  “Tell that to Jimmy.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “Try me. Maybe I get more than you think.”

  How to explain? What to explain? That I am still water that doesn’t want to be still, that I want to be moving water, that the still water that is me wants out, wants to flow, wants to flow away, wants to change and pass through, be done?

  Tom sits next to me, his hands and feet moving in harmony with the pedals and the wheel and the stick of his truck. Tom Miller of the stone in the village green, the gazebo, the drives in the darkness to lean against his father’s name. Tom Miller of the haymow, and the rope swing, and the window in the barn that is less window and more door to the ether. Walk straight through it into sky. Sometimes at night now, I stand in the opening of that window-that-is-not-window and imagine falling.

  What can I tell Tom? That I’m numb and I want to feel? That I thought Jimmy and the others would take the hurt from my heart and put it elsewhere, but I was wrong? It just stayed right there in my heart. All Millers go through crazy, William T. says. But I am Rose Latham, and I am going through crazy, and I can’t find my way out of crazy.

  “Out,” I say. “I want out.”

  Ivy is joined to me through blood and bone and something else, something I can only sense. Her trappedness is my trappedness, and I am an animal caught in a trap who looks down and would chew her own leg off if she could, but I can’t.

  “I can’t,” I say. I shake my head. Nothing more to say.

  We sit in Tom’s truck on top of Star Hill. Star Hill is where the ghosts came out, where our friends come after parties and dances to park and wait for the ghosts and drink and make out. This is where Ivy and Joe used to come. I would lie awake until she came slipping back into the house, slipping up the stairs, slipping into the room, slipping out of her clothes, slipping between the sheets. I would lie awake until I heard her breathing slip into the slow soft breathing of a person who knew how to sleep. A person who knew how to be awake, and how to be asleep.

  Hello, young doctor walking away down the hall. Helloooo, can you hear me? Do you ever think about my sister? Do you ever think about my mother, whirling in the hallway, her hands against her ears, her head shaking back and forth and back and forth? Can you still hear her voice?

  “I cannot lose my daughter.”

  Do you ever think about what you said to her?

  “Too late,” you said. “Too late.”

  “Didn’t you know Jimmy was nuts about you?” Tom says.

  “I’m not nuts about Jimmy, though.”

  “I know you’re not. That’s what I’m talking about. Don’t sleep with him if you don’t care about him.”

  Sleep? I didn’t sleep with Jimmy Wilson. We lay down together on the rocks at the gorge, rock beneath me, rock all around me, hard and unmoving. Far below us, tectonic plates grinding away.

  “Don’t break his heart on purpose.”

  “Don’t break his heart?”

  “Yeah. Don’t.”

  “Whose heart is fucking breaking here?” I say.

  His hand is loose on the stick shift, fingers relaxed.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me.”

  Suddenly I hate him, hate Tom Miller, Tom Miller with his T-shirt fraying at the neck seam, his brown boots, his jeans with the hole in the knee. I hate Tom Miller, Tom Miller who drives at night to the stone in the village green, Tom Miller who regards me with his hazel eyes.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  Still he gazes at me. Doesn’t blink. My finger
comes up and points at my own heart, my own pumping blindly away inside my chest.

  “So you know what it feels like, then,” he says. “Don’t go breaking someone else’s in the hope that you’ll feel better. Because you won’t.”

  His hand plays on the stick shift.

  “But they all talk about her. They talk about her. They say she’s a vegetable. As if she’s not even there.”

  All around us evening is falling on the Sterns Valley. The view from Star Hill is the most beautiful view for miles and miles, and I can’t see it. All I see is a girl in a hospital bed.

  “Jimmy Wilson has nothing to do with what happened to Ivy,” Tom says. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”

  “Why don’t you shut up about Jimmy Wilson?”

  “Why don’t you be angry if you’re angry? Don’t take it out on him.”

  “It’s not just him,” I say.

  He looks at me. Those eyes.

  “Warren,” I say. “Todd.”

  Something flickers in his eyes. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “I’ll hurt myself if I want,” I say, and even to my own ears I sound like a child.

  “You’re angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m sick of you, though. I can tell you that.”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Who would I be angry at?”

  “You tell me.”

  The sun is gone now. The Sterns Valley shimmers below us, bathed in the soft blues and grays and greens of a summer dusk. Ivy would have loved this.

  “My mother.”

  “Why?”

  “She hasn’t once been to visit Ivy. She doesn’t know what it’s like. She makes William T. and me do it all. She sits there making those fucking cranes, and she doesn’t even look at me. ‘You never know,’ she says. ‘Miracles happen.’ Miracles don’t happen.”

  The lights in the Buchholzes’ barn down below us in Sterns Corners glows brighter as dusk grows darker. William T. once told me that the Buchholzes dance naked in their barn at night.

  “Maybe she needs to believe that miracles can happen,” Tom says. “Maybe she’s not like you — maybe she can’t let Ivy go.”

  Let Ivy go?

  Am I letting Ivy go?

  “Hey,” Tom says. “Hey.”

  But I can’t stop crying. Water clogs my eyes and nose and throat, water flows out of me. Am I letting my sister go? Who am I, if not Ivy’s sister? Who will I be, without her beside me?

  Tears leak out of me everywhere, and there’s nothing to blow my nose on but my sleeve, and then my sleeve is wet and filthy. Tom takes off his flannel shirt and drapes it over me. Don’t hurt someone who cares about you. Don’t be cruel.

  “My heart is breaking,” I tell him, and it’s the truth. Your heart literally hurts when it’s breaking. You can feel it, every beat another ache, and nothing you can do will stop it, either from beating or breaking.

  “Why don’t you drive us down today, Younger?” William T. says. “Now that you’re getting the hang of it.”

  “What? Drive your truck?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “William T., the gas gauge doesn’t even work. What if we run out of gas on Route 12?”

  “If we run out of gas on Route 12, then we’ll pull over. We’ll drift over. In a gasless situation, drift is a better word.”

  “And you know all about gasless situations.”

  “Indeed I do,” William T. agrees.

  “Maybe we should ask my mother to come with us.”

  William T. is silent.

  “You know, to break up the monotony of her life a little? Suggest to her that — surprise, surprise — the normal thing for a mother to do if her daughter’s lying in a hospital bed is to go visit her.”

  Will the day come when my mother puts down her squares of paper, brushes aside her hundreds of origami cranes, and walks into Ivy’s room? William T. pokes the butter knife into the place where, in a normal world, his key would go — he had to drill out his ignition a few weeks ago — and the engine starts up obediently.

  “What kind of mother never once visits her daughter in the hospital?”

  “The kind of mother who’s doing what she can do.”

  “And what is that, exactly? A thousand paper cranes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Why are you so angry, Younger?”

  “Jesus,” I say. “First Tom and now you. I’m angry at her.”

  “Who?”

  “Her! My mother!”

  “Are you sure it isn’t Ivy?”

  “No!”

  But I’m crying again. Again I’m crying. William T. pulls the truck over to the side of Glass Factory Road, about half a mile before the entrance to Route 12.

  “Come here,” he says, and he hauls me over the hump in the front seat until I’m sitting on his lap, a seventeen-year-old baby. He reaches over me and pounds on the broken glove compartment until it opens. A mound of fast-food napkins tumbles out. He wipes at my cheeks and eyes and rests his chin on top of my head as if I’m his baby daughter.

  “How can you say I’m angry at Ivy?” I say.

  “I didn’t say you were. I only asked.”

  “But how can you even think that? It wasn’t Ivy’s fault.”

  “I know.”

  “My stupid mother should see her! Be with her! Visit her, her own daughter for God’s sake!”

  “Your mother’s not normal.”

  I look at him. That is not something I ever expected to hear. He looks back at me steadily. Holds my gaze.

  “You know it, Younger, and I know it. But she does the best she can.”

  I try to say, Well, her best is not good enough, but the words won’t come out. Something in the world changed when William T. said what he said. Your mother’s not normal. Something clicked into place. William T. is right, and his eyes are sad and tired.

  “William T., were you mad at your son when he died?”

  He doesn’t flinch. “I was mad at the world,” he says. “The entire world had let me down. Including him.”

  Together we sit in his truck, pulled over to the side of Glass Factory Road. Once in a while a car drones by. A bee flies in the open window, swoops around for a few seconds, hovers in the air before us, flies on out again.

  “We all walk around with a stone in our shoe, Younger,” William T. says. “You. Me. Crystal. Your mother. The whole entire world.”

  “Ivy left me,” I say. “She left me behind.”

  “She did,” William T. says. “She wouldn’t have chosen to, but she did.”

  After a while I crawl back over the hump to the passenger side of the cab, and William T. sticks the butter knife back into the ignition. Onward.

  Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks, and the light blue truck came sliding and sliding. Can Ivy see her life at all anymore, somewhere way down deep inside her brain, her brain that’s a line on a machine now? Can she remember that night in the haymow? All those nights in the haymow, all those nights when we were little, and then not so little, and we were growing up, and we were teenagers, and Joey turned into Joe and Rosie turned into Rose and Tommy turned into Tom, and Ivy stayed Ivy. Ivy began as Ivy and remains as Ivy.

  Joe Miller turned to her that night and said, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid, Ivy?”

  And she jumped. A swoosh above our heads — we were all sitting on hay bales in the darkness — and she was up and away.

  Through the paneless window she swung, and she disappeared, and there was no sound. She was gone. And we were up and running, out of the barn, down around the hill: “Ivy? Ivy! Ivy!” There she was, there on the rocks where she had fallen, the long flat rocks that surrounded the springhouse where the cool water comes bubbling out of the ground. The rocks that broke her arm and her ankle. We ran, and wove our arms together, and picked her up and carried her to the house, and into the car we went, and down to Utica, the hosp
ital, the fluorescence, the white casts for the rest of the summer.

  “Screw it,” Ivy said. “It was worth it.”

  Joe didn’t say he was sorry, sorry he goaded her, sorry he dared her. And she didn’t ask him to.

  My sister’s heart is working, pumping and pumping and pumping. When that truck came sliding into us, were her hands on the steering wheel trying to steer away from the truck, steer anywhere, over a guardrail into a tree, anywhere to get away from the truck that wouldn’t stop coming? Were her hands on the windshield, trying to push the truck away from her?

  I don’t know. My own eyes were closed.

  The only thing I know for sure was that in the end, her arm came out and smashed against my chest. Like mothers do with their babies. My sister was trying to keep me safe.

  “Did you?” she said to me in the lucid interval, that brief span of time before the hemorrhage spread too far and shut her down. “Did you?”

  Did I what, Ivy? Sister, tell me.

  I’m in the green chair with my Pompeii book. William T. is behind me, reading about the bird of the day, which is the hermit thrush, the only brown thrush likely in cold weather. When the hermit thrush is alarmed, it flicks its wings and raises and lowers its tail. Its call note? A nasal vreeeee.

  “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.”

  “Jesus,” William T. says. “We’re back to Moses again?”

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

  Angel peeks in and sees that all is well — Rose in the green chair with the book, William T. in the blue chair with his hermit thrush — and waves from the door as she lets it close again.

  “And then, perhaps, there came the sound,” I pretend-read. “There might well have been a sound. Would it have been the sound of ash filling the air? Did it make a sound like the beating of wings?”

  The sounds I most love: hail, rattling on the deck or pounding the hood of the truck; snow, the softness of it when I wake up on a winter night and feel the world around me muffled; rain, in spring or summer when it drums on the roof and lulls me into sleep; crickets chirping or bullfrogs down at the pond, croaking their way through a soft summer night.