Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(38)

“I’m not—”

He held up one finger to silence me. “No. Come or mope. Those are your choices.”

I got up and grabbed the fishing rod. The line hissed as I reeled it in and then recast it.

“We are friends,” Greer said from behind me. “Right, Card?”

I watched as the floater bobbed on the water. Greer turned away and headed back to camp. I dropped the fishing rod. Soon the ripples faded and the reservoir spread out in front of me, as flat and bright as a razor.





15


THAT AFTERNOON, I did what I should have done the minute Greer and the others showed up on Lucy’s Promise. I packed my things and moved as far away as possible.

I found a spot on the opposite side of the reservoir. It was in the deep forest, far from any trail, a tangle of brush and vines and deadfall. It took me a full day to hack a path through it and then another to carve out a spot big enough for my tent. It was worth the effort. The woods around me were so thick that I couldn’t hear a sound except for my own breathing and the occasional rustle of a bird’s wings up in the branches. Even at noon on a cloudless day, it might as well have been dusk.

I spent my days fishing and foraging for mushrooms, crabapples, and blackberries. I even started gathering firewood in preparation for my first winter alone on the mountain. It was tough with just my knife, but there were enough dead trees and branches around that I got a decent pile going. The best part was that, for the first time in almost a year, I didn’t have to wear my mask or my gloves. The air tasted like earth and wood instead of hot plastic. It was so strange to touch things without gloves that I compulsively ran my fingers over tree bark and flower petals and my own skin, just for the thrill of it.

Time had a strange way of expanding and contracting. A morning would seem to last a year, and then all of a sudden it would be past midnight. Sometimes I pretended I was living millions of years in the future and was the only human left alive. I imagined walking a thousand miles in any direction—up into Canada or down into Virginia and the Carolinas—and seeing nothing but empty houses and crumbling highways. It was strange how comforting the idea was.

In the beginning I thought about Hannah and Greer and the kids all the time, but as the days went by, they emptied out of my mind one by one. Pretty soon I figured there’d be nothing left in my head but find food, find water, build a fire. I couldn’t wait for that moment to come, but it didn’t turn out that way. Once they were gone, someone else appeared and took their place. Dad.

It wasn’t even like I was thinking about him at first. Not exactly. It was more like he was this presence that hovered around me all the time. There, but not there. I’d walk into a stand of trees, certain that I was going to find him on the other side, waiting for me. Or I’d think I’d heard his voice, but it would turn out to be a flock of birds or a tumble of dead branches blown by the wind. During the few hours a night I managed to sleep, he moved in and out of my dreams.

It didn’t stay that way, though. Soon it was as if there was this filmstrip of memories unspooling in my head all the time. Dad taking us to the sideshow at Coney Island or to those art movies at the Angelika. Dad leading us on a forced march to the Strand bookstore, where he’d press his favorites into our hands: Harry Potter. The Dark Is Rising. The Left Hand of Darkness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Every day there were more images, and they came faster and faster until I felt as if I were on a treadmill that I couldn’t keep up with and couldn’t get off of either.

The only time I could escape it was when I was running, so each night after sundown I’d leave my tent and sprint the mountain trails. The batteries in my flashlight had died—I lost count of how many times I fell in the dark. How many skinned knees and bruised elbows. It didn’t matter. If I stumbled, I got up and pushed harder, ran faster. I’d run until the sun came up and then I’d pass out. Sometimes I’d get a few hours of sleep before Dad was there again, just outside my tent, calling me for breakfast or to get ready for school.

One night I finished my run at the reservoir and collapsed on the shore, my legs sore and my lungs feeling like they had sprouted thorns. When I caught my breath, I sat up and looked out at the water. It was a patch of blackness, just a little darker than the woods around it. There was a rhythmic splash as little waves fell against the beach and retreated. Owls hooted and frogs croaked. For a second the world was caught in this easy balance. I breathed in and out, calm, centered, but then there was a flash in my head and the reservoir on Lucy’s Promise became the reservoir in Central Park. It was a bright summer day, and we were on our way to see the polar bears at the zoo. Dad had me on his shoulders and you were walking by his side. It was all so clear. I could hear Dad’s voice. I could smell his aftershave.

I stripped off my clothes and dove in. I was still aching from my run, but I leaned into the pain instead of ignoring it, digging my arms through the water. As I swam, it hit me how all of my memories of Dad were from when we lived in Brooklyn, as if the minute we moved to Black River, he began to fade. Instead of doing his work in a corner of the living room—blasting his music while we played video games on the couch—he was in his office, usually with the door shut. Six hours of work a day became eight, then ten, then twelve. Weekends evaporated. Then it was missed dinners, missed performances, missed track meets. We told ourselves it was nothing. A temporary thing. He’d just won the Hugo, and everybody was saying the Eisner was right around the corner. People were talking movies. TV shows. Even Mom laughed that night when you said we weren’t living with Derrick Cassidy anymore, we were living with Derrick Cassidy, Award-Winning Creator of Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings.