The River at Night(5)

Thursday


   June 21





3


I am usually the lightest of sleepers, but the night before we left for the river I sank so far down a black well of dreams that I had to claw my way to the surface to wake up. I dozed through the polite chirp of my alarm and would have gone on except for a windstorm that blew in just before dawn. Dry, cool gusts howled through my open window, shuddering the panes. I slept caged in a dream of violence with no narrative, like a scrap of old film with only a few frames still visible. On a clothesline, a torn linen dress twisted in the wind. A haggard face of a woman turned away again and again, always in shadow, an endless loop. I never got to see her eyes. I jerked awake in a sheen of sweat to the frantic clanging of a wind chime over my kitchen window, a set of bells inside an oblong pine box my mother had given me that only ferocious storms brought to life. It was as if she were trying to tell me something.

Through all this, my cat, Ziggy, snored on, all eighteen pounds of him slung across my feet like a sack of warm sand. As I slid out from under him, he gave me this look, a mix of How dare you and What the hell are you doing, it’s just past five and we usually sleep till at least six thirty. When I reached down to scratch his head, he gave my hand an uncharacteristic swat of his hefty paw, claws in evidence. I snapped my hand back and sat up, regarded him. Saw the lion in him clearly.

I spoke softly to him, cooed my eternal adoration; watched the lion fade and my kitty return. He thumped to the rug and swaggered toward the bathroom, resigned now to the early hour, then leapt to the counter for his morning brushing. Feeling the same tug of routine, I followed him there, but with a silvery jolt of joy down my spine, I let it go.

? ? ?

I buzzed in my friends. First came Pia’s laugh, big and hearty, followed by several sets of clomping footsteps up my uneven, narrow back stairs; more laughing, then a clattering sound as if something ceramic had broken. A heavy sound, full of wood. I remembered the dead ficus I’d stashed there and forgotten to take out to the garbage, and ran to open the door.

All six feet of Pia burst through the doorway and rushed to hug me with abandon—nothing ladylike—she even lifted me a little off my feet and held me there for a second, knocking the wind out of me. She smelled like Dunkin’ Donuts and lavender shampoo. In jeans, a flannel shirt, and sneakers—despite her height and ropy length—she managed to look feminine and even a touch gamine. Behind her, Rachel, a blur of kinky-curly black hair and glasses and red fleece, flew up the stairs and threw her arms around the two of us. Sandra, carrying the remains of the potted plant, set the wedges of shattered clay on the kitchen counter and smiled when she saw us with our arms wrapped around each other. She joined the hug party, and we all stood screaming and laughing with a kind of joy that is simply not a daily event.

“I broke your pot!” Pia said, still jumping up and down.

“Fuck the pot!” I said, jumping with her.

Soon we loosened our clinch but stayed in a tight circle as we held hands. “It’s been so long!” Rachel said.

“Forever!” Sandra said, breathless. “Wow, look at us. We’re all so beautiful!”

“What’s our secret?” Rachel said. “We get younger every year.”

“Chardonnay,” Pia said as she let go of my hand and Rachel’s. “And adventure!” Face flushed, she reached back to free her auburn hair from a tangled ponytail. It tumbled down, still damp, to her shoulders. With no pretense at a style, she swooped it back, knotting it into the rubber band. As the rest of us poured ourselves coffee and chose our favorites from a box of Italian pastries I’d picked up in the North End the night before, Pia rummaged in her day pack, extracting a dog-eared map of Maine, which she flattened with her palms on my kitchen table. I loved how it looked: a tangled burst of roads, rivers, lakes, and towns and no onus on me to pretty it up or make sense of it.

I placed our coffee cups on the map’s four tattered corners. Every part of it wanted to scroll up—keep the secret of where we were going—but under Pia’s hands the mountains rose up, the streams flowed and became real. Lush forests rang with life, and blue rivers snaked north to Canada. I squinted at the map, blurring everything so I could picture the curvature of earth, water, and sky, conjure the creatures that crawled, swam, and flew there.

“So listen up,” Pia said, quieting our chatter. “Today we drive to base camp, which is in this tiny town called Dickey, here. About nine, maybe nine and a half hours.” Pia’s long finger skimmed across two feet of map, stopping at a small black dot where all the red and the green lines—roads—ended, as if by agreement. Just a blip on the map surrounded by swaths of forest and wriggling blue lines. I felt some of my old terror, but—with my friends around me—drawn to these mad green places and rushing waters, I thought, This is my world too; don’t I deserve the chance to see it?

“Excuse me while we join the twenty-first century here.” Rachel flipped open her iPad and tapped at her screen. “Find out a little more about where the hell we’re going . . .” Funky horn-rimmed glasses exaggerated her already large blue eyes, while the chronic worry lines between her brows deepened. She found Dickey and pulled out the detail with her thumb and forefinger. It looked like an intersection, not much more.

Rachel frowned as she scrolled up and down. An emergency--room nurse for over a decade, she possessed both an affection for detail and a mounting exhaustion with surprises. So really, who could blame her for preferring her rare time off to be trauma-free? There wasn’t much, life-and-death-wise, she hadn’t seen. I almost couldn’t bear to listen to some of her stories about horrific wounds or accidents, or the things people did to themselves—or each other—that landed them in emergency rooms. But her sharing of these episodes was the preamble to most of our visits. Listening seemed the least I could do.