The River at Night(36)

Rory lay in speckled sunlight, his moss-green eyes open, mouth slightly parted, so that he seemed about to speak. I stared at him until it felt wrong doing so, and still I looked; we all did. His Michelangelo’s David build, his handsome face; a beautiful boy who would always be twenty, who would never be this beautiful again. He looked even younger dead, his skin moist and dewy, his well-defined muscles seeming somehow tensed and about to move.

I thought of Marcus. I couldn’t help it. The only other dead person I had ever seen. A month after we signed him into the group home, he’d broken into the meds—there was only a shitty lock a child could break—and swallowed everything he could find. He thought they were candy. At least that was my hope; it’s still what I tell myself when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. Clearly Richard and I were in decay, but Marcus was the one I thought I would never have to live without.

The dread before they pulled back the sheet was like nothing I had ever felt, but when they did, when I forced myself to look, it was just his face, my dear sweet brother lying there, thirty-three years old and gone forever. He looked asleep, as if he were dreaming. And I thought, Now I’ll never know for sure. I knew him better than anyone else; still he was locked inside, still there were unseen dimensions, unopened rooms, chapters of him in languages I couldn’t decipher. No one had a clue what was inside his head. No one understood, when he was young, that it paid to look a little deeper into people like him. On most days he was like a seven-year-old boy in a grown man’s body; on others he signed complex sentences to me. He’d invent his own signs for things, cracking ridiculous jokes that would make us both double over in laughter. The next day it was as if he’d traveled to the other side of the world in his mind. He’d look at me with blank eyes when I signed him his silly made-up signs, and I couldn’t reach him at all.

A crashing sound in the woods behind us. We turned, trembling. Sandra, bedraggled, her face bloody and scratched, stumbled toward our strangely intimate circle.

“Thank God!” she cried, hysteria in her voice. “I couldn’t find you! I didn’t know where you were. . . .” Dazed, she turned in a half circle, staring up into the menacing green, the cruel blue sky. “I washed downriver, I don’t even know how far. . . . I couldn’t get out! But then I did and I called for you, didn’t you hear me?”

Rachel and I moved toward her to comfort her, but her eyes fell on Rory and she covered her mouth, gasped, and fell a few steps toward him. I tried to put my arms around her, but she wasn’t having it. She pushed us both away.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s gone,” Rachel said softly.

Sandra ran over to the body and fell to her knees. “Are you sure? Have you done everything—”

Pia nodded through her tears. She placed a badly shaking hand on Rory’s belly, then pulled it away.

“He was gone back in the river, I’m pretty sure,” Rachel said. She walked over to him. Kneeling, she reached down with trembling fingers—purplish with cold—and closed his eyes, one at a time. “Good-bye, Rory,” I thought I heard her say before she got to her feet.

I took a look at all of us. We were a pretty sad-looking crew. As if she were trying to fit under a desk, Pia knelt doubled over on the ground, legs folded under her, forehead pressed to the earth, fingers laced behind the back of her neck. She’d stopped crying, but her back would spasm now and then. Sandra stood looking haggard, wet, and small. Two long, bloody cuts swept diagonally across her cheek as if something clawed had attacked her. Under her helmet and mop of wet hair, Rachel’s glasses—still strapped to her head by the elastic strap—zigzagged crazily from eyebrow to lip. One lens was completely missing. I’m sure I looked just as hellish.

“Is everyone okay?” My voice sounded strange to me, as if it came from some doppelg?nger speaking in a dark room. Sandra and Rachel nodded. They held out and examined their intact limbs, marveling at them as if they’d never seen them before. Pia remained folded over in her small-as-possible position.

Rachel took off her glasses, wiped the remaining lens with her shirt, turned, and started walking toward the river. “I’ll be right back.”

Pia looked up. “Where are you going?”

Rachel spun around. “We have to go get the raft while it’s still light.”

“We can’t just leave him here!”

A fat black fly landed on Rory’s nose, ambled down to his cheek.

“You can stay with him if you want. We’ll find the raft and come back.”

Pia dropped her head again, crying silently.

My legs felt thick and leaden as I followed Sandra and Rachel to the bank, where the river had begun to darken. A velvety evening feel had crept into it. We stood and watched it move; in my mind’s eye I saw Rory, crucified by the log and hurtling forward into his tomb of water and wood and stone, but now the log was just another piece of flotsam, jammed up and lying with its brothers, to be beaten and worn down to nothingness by the infinite water.

Sandra scrambled onto a ledge that jutted out over the river like the beseeching hand of God. She pointed toward the clot of fallen trees and stone a few hundred yards downriver on the opposite bank, where the raft had been stranded less than an hour ago. “It was right there.” Her voice trailed off into the hush of moving water.