Long Bright River(115)

I put a hand, finally, on my sister’s shoulder.

Violently, Kacey windmills her arm.

I bend down, get to eye level with her. Pedestrians move around us.

—What’s going on? I say. Kacey?

She lifts her head up, at last, and looks at me. Looks me right in the eye. Says, Get the fuck away from me.

I stand again. What the hell, Kacey, I say. What did I do?

Kacey stands up, too, chest out, belly out. I brace myself.

—You knew, Kacey says. You might not have known about Lafferty, but you knew this shit happened. You must have. You’d been told before.

I bristle.

—I didn’t, I say. Nobody ever told me.

Kacey laughs loudly, once.

—I told you, says Kacey. Me. Your own sister. I told you that Simon Cleare took advantage of me when I couldn’t say no. You didn’t believe me. You said I was lying.

—That’s different, I say. I was wrong about that. But it’s different.

Kacey smiles, sadly.

—What’s Simon? she says. What is he? Is Simon a cop?

I close my eyes. Breathe in.

—Because I thought he was, says Kacey.

Kacey looks at me for a long time, searching my face.

Then she looks past me, toward the corner, toward Alonzo’s store. She’s frozen. I turn, finally, to see what she sees, but no one is there. And I know, without asking, that Kacey is picturing Paula Mulroney standing there, one leg propped up against the wall, cocky, smiling, her usual stance.

—They were my friends, says Kacey, quietly now. All of them. Even the ones I didn’t know.

—I’m sorry, I say at last.

She doesn’t reply.

—Kacey, I’m sorry, I say again.

But the El train is going by now, and I don’t know if my sister can hear me.





LIST





Sean Geoghehan; Kimberly Gummer; Kimberly Brewer, Kimberly Brewer’s mother and uncle; Britt-Anne Conover; Jeremy Haskill; two of the younger DiPaolantonio boys; Chuck Bierce; Maureen Howard; Kaylee Zanella; Chris Carter and John Marks (one day apart, victims of the same bad batch, someone said); Carlo, whose last name I can never remember; Taylor Bowes’s boyfriend, and then Taylor Bowes a year later; Pete Stockton; the granddaughter of our former neighbors; Hayley Driscoll; Shayna Pietrewski; Pat Bowman; Sean Bowman; Shawn Williams; Juan Moya; Toni Chapman; Dooney Jacobs and his mother; Melissa Gill; Meghan Morrow; Meghan Hanover; Meghan Chisholm; Meghan Greene; Hank Chambliss; Tim and Paul Flores; Robby Symons; Ricky Todd; Brian Aldrich; Mike Ashman; Cheryl Sokol; Sandra Broach; Lisa Morales; Mary Lynch; Mary Bridges and her niece, who was her age, and her friend; Mikey Hughes’s father and uncle; two great-uncles we rarely see. Our cousin Tracy. Our cousin Shannon. Our mother. Our mother. Our mother. All of them children, all of them gone. People with promise, people dependent and depended upon, people loving and beloved, one after another, in a line, in a river, no fount and no outlet, a long bright river of departed souls.





NOW





Some days, I spend hours on my laptop, visiting online memorials for those who’ve died. They’re all still there: Facebook pages, funeral home websites, blogs. The deceased are digital ghosts, the last posts they ever made buried beneath a tidal wave of grief, of commands to Rest In Peace, of in-fighting between friends and enemies who claim that half the people on the page are fake, whatever that means. Their girlfriends still posting happy birthday baby two years after they’re gone, as if the Internet were a crystal ball, a Ouija board, a portal to the afterlife. In a way, I suppose, it is.

It’s become a habit of mine to look at these pages, and at the pages of the friends and family members of the deceased, first thing in the morning. How is the mother holding up, I wonder. And I check. How is the best friend? The boyfriend? (Usually, it is the boyfriends who move on first: down come the profile pictures of the happy couple, posing in a mirror; up goes a picture he has taken of himself; next will come the new woman in his life.) Sometimes, friends are bitter. u promised kyle. i swear if one more person dies. why kyle. rip. People in the throes of addiction are hardest on others like them. THA WHOLE NTHEAST IS FULLA FUKN JUNKIES, one of them rants, and I know I’ve pulled him in before for dealing. In his pictures he’s glazed and dreamy.



* * *



—

When I think about Kacey, when I wonder whether she will find the strength and luck and perseverance to get and stay clean, it is these souls I think of first. How few ever seem to make it out. I think of the Piper, the whole town of Hamelin, shocked in his wake, abandoned and condemned.

But then I look at Kacey—who comes to visit most Sundays now, who at this moment is sitting on my couch, who on this day has 189 days clean—and think, maybe she’ll be one of the few. The veteran of some war, wounded but alive. Maybe Kacey will outlive us all, will live to be a hundred and five. Maybe Kacey will be all right.



* * *



—

Letting hope back in feels right and wrong all at once. Like letting Thomas sleep in my bed when he really should sleep in his.

Like letting him meet the woman who brought him into the world.

Like breaking an oath of loyalty when you know a secret needs telling.





I turned in my uniform. Thomas was happy to see it go. The day I did, I worked up some courage and called Truman Dawes, holding my breath until he answered.