Rapid Falls(63)

“Dad?”

“Hello, Cara.”

“I’m . . . driving there. To Rapid Falls.”

“Oh.”

His silence makes me want to hang up, turn around, undo things, but I can’t. I have to come back.

“Is that okay?”

“Anna will be here.”

“I know.”

He hesitates again, but I pretend not to notice.

“I’ll see you in two hours.”

His sigh fills the line, as if something heavy has crushed his chest. “Okay.”

I buy a coffee. The smell makes me nauseated, but I need to find a way to clear my mind. My lips feel chapped; I imagine Brian’s mouth on mine. Remorse fills my body with a low-lying dread. As I get closer to Rapid Falls, I keep imagining steering my car over the sheer cliffs, jerking suddenly to the right and hurtling myself into oblivion. Being alone feels dangerous, but the thought of being with other people feels worse. I wonder what Rick is telling Maggie right now. It’s Thursday. I should be leaving for work, kissing her three times on the lips and winking as I whirl out the door. I have never been missing in the morning before.

I press the gas, and the BMW hums back onto the highway. A few trees have begun to change. It is colder here than in the city; fall comes earlier. I catch a glimpse of a deer in the forest, and it makes me think of Maggie mewing on the phone yesterday afternoon. I shake my head. Don’t be stupid. Baby deer don’t make sounds. Their silence protects them.

I blink hard, trying to follow the jumbled thought. Anna and I found a baby deer once. No, it was just me. My mother asked me to grab a handful of tomatoes for our salad when I noticed the quivering caramel-colored fur. It was lying under our lilac bush in the back of the garden. I was so young that at first I was scared, thinking it might hurt me. Then I figured out what it was. Bambi. It was folded in on itself, trembling, small and low in the undergrowth of the bush. I reached out to touch its heaving sides and was surprised by the coarseness of its fur. I wanted to tell Anna, so I turned to run the twenty steps back to the house.

When I got there, my mom and Anna were crying. Anna was in her arms, and my dad was yelling. Anna always cried—she was only four—so I wasn’t scared about that. But my mom’s face was all red, and her lip was bleeding as she yelled. I closed the distance between us, trying to make sense of what was going on. Tears were running down my dad’s face and that made my stomach flip. He never cried. He reached out to me and I ran, calling at my mother’s back as she opened the car door. She turned and looked at me. Anna was wailing, ripping at her shirt, and my mom’s eyes were pleading. Then they hardened, and she turned on her heel as if she had made a decision about me. Everything felt wrong. I screamed as I realized what was happening. I ran toward the car, but it was too late. My mother drove away.

I turned to my dad, but he was gone. I raced back through the garden and fell onto the small deer. My sobs were so loud that I made it shake with fear as I ran my hands through its brown fur. I thought it was the lilacs and the crying that was making my throat burn. I was only five. I didn’t know what the beginning of strep throat felt like. I didn’t know that the infection would move from my throat to the rest of the body. Neither did my father, who ignored me for days while the red rash bloomed across my chest. It was Mrs. Turner who noticed when she came to check on us. She told me to keep a wet towel pressed against my eyes while we drove to the hospital. She told me it was to cool my fever, but now I realize she didn’t want me to see the welts that had spread across my face and body. I thought my mom would meet us at the doctor, but she never came.

My light blouse feels wet with sweat when I pass the sign marking the outskirts of Rapid Falls. I can’t go into my dad’s house yet. I need more time. It all started here. With Anna. I take the route to the diving rocks. The road is rougher than I remember, as if no one uses it anymore. My legs are stiff when I get out of the car and start to walk down the narrow path. I have to turn around when I start to stumble in my heels; I will never make it down the steep slope. I can hear the river in my ears as I walk back. I remember when it used to lull me to sleep. Now it just seems like a dull roar.

I get back into the car and head toward the center of town. There is a new traffic light at the intersection where Anna stalled my dad’s old Cadillac when she first learned to drive. It’s red when I pull up despite the fact that there is no other traffic. A new grocery store has been built on the highway by the Rapid Falls Inn, leaving Mr. Johnson’s store, where Jesse once worked, abandoned and derelict. A new playground stands empty and forlorn. Rapid Falls seems sadder than I remember it. But it feels like there’s an anger here too, simmering below the surface, as if the town resents its own failings. I can see it in the peeling paint of the church where they held Jesse’s funeral and in the overgrown, weedy lawns in the park. I can feel it as I drive over the river, which looks black and furious.

I pass the turnoff to my dad’s place and keep going up the dusty roads that I’ve visited more times than I can count. I’m driving to the Field. The back end of my car scrapes the rocks that erupt out of the overgrown road. Branches rake my windows, like fingernails scratching down an arm, pleading for mercy. I park at the top of the hill and look at the Field for the first time ever in broad daylight. It would be a lovely meadow if it wasn’t so fouled by the things that happen here. Plastic six-pack rings and crushed cans mar the grass every few feet. Brown broken glass glints ominously in the places where footsteps have crushed any chance of something growing. I look at the woods. Jesse seemed so happy that night. I wonder if I ever made him feel like that. I wonder what he had been planning to do with the ring. As I step toward the green trees, rage fills me. I realize that I have never stopped feeling it. For years I had it under control. Now, as Anna threatens to ruin my perfect life, it is rising again.