The River Widow(2)

He was behind her now, pulling up her head by her dripping ropes of sodden hair. Visions inside her eyelids, small streaks and spots of light, shooting stars or fireflies, strange sparks and flames. He jerked her head—hard—and then a shot of pain, a hot, throbbing stab over her left eye, where he must have landed the blow. H er heart thumping high in her throat, her breaths ragged, bile rising in her mouth.

He dropped her back into the mud, and then came brutal kicks to her side, each blow delivering its own excruciating pain to her ribs. S he lifted her head, and there, within her grasp, the pile of tools he’d gathered. She lunged. A heavy iron shovel in her hands, she scrambled to her feet and then struck out with all her might.

When Les staggered back, swayed, and then fell face-first into the muck, it took a moment to register. She had hit him. She had landed a good blow. She’d never fought back before; he’d probably kill her now.

Run. She should run. But where? She wouldn’t dare take his truck.

Lester wasn’t moving. Heaving and swiping at the wet hair plastered on her face, pressing rain out of her eyes, she slumped down on the ground and nudged him. He still didn’t move. She rolled him over.

Crouched beside his body in the mud, she must have blacked out for a moment. And then, as the rain pelted the earth like falling bullets, she came to. Though still swimming upward back into the moment, not believing where she was or what had happened, struggling to make herself see straight, she did, however, know this: his temple was not shaped the way it had been shaped before, and Lester was not breathing.

Dear God, what have I done?

She had endured his tirades and temper, his foul mouth and coarse hands, his slaps and fists and shoves for three years, and now something had cracked open inside her on this storm-soaked, wild night. Now she had murdered her husband, and either she would go to jail or his family would kill her.

Later she would have no notion of how long she sat there, her body filling with stunned, conflicting emotions: she had loved Les, she had hated Les. She had killed him, she was free of him. Better, perhaps, that she had died. And yet an inborn instinct to survive still burned.

Get rid of the body.

She lifted him from behind, under his shoulders, and, hunkering low to the ground, dragged his body toward the swollen river into utter blackness, feeling her way with her feet, backing downhill until she heard the raging and foaming snake of a river already over its banks and bleeding onto the land.

She was already composing a story. She could say Les went too close to the river or some such, and then he was just . . . gone. The truth would never do. It wouldn’t matter that he’d hit her so many times she’d lost count, that she had to cover her bruised body with long sleeves even in the summer, that she wore makeup from Kresge’s Five and Ten Cent Store to mask discolorations on her face. It wouldn’t matter that she was pretty certain he was widely known as a bad man, that his family were equally well known as menacing people. She had killed Les, and someone would make sure she paid.

And yet there was hope. Hope was something she always kept close, held in her hands, and spread over her body like a balm. It had saved her from despair. And now the flood, this gift, would provide her with a story.

R iver roaring in her ears now, trees snapping, the smell of soil and death rising from the muddy water surging forward with surf like the ocean. Her next step was into shin-high freezing water pushing her and trying to suck her down. She dropped Lester and trudged to his feet and began to push. He didn’t budge. The water was swirling around him, but it wasn’t deep enough to take him away. She slogged back to his head and pulled him up again by the shoulders, stepped back a few more feet into thigh-high rushing water, almost lost her balance, checked herself, dropped Lester again, and then sloshed her way back to his feet, knelt down, and shoved.

Another blow, and her first thought was that Les had arisen from the dead and was well enough to strike her again, but instead it was shockingly cold water, the river raging like a beast of purest evil, taking her away from her sin and into the very bowels of the place the killer in her deserved to go, into a frigid and water-ravaged version of hell.





Chapter Two

Bitterest cold and blackness and no air and the powerful force of a river turned furious. Unable to gain purchase on the slippery ground below her, not knowing which way to go, she clawed at the water and kicked and flailed, and it made no difference. The river had her in its almighty grip, as if God had ventured down with the rain to make certain she would never gain redemption. Her head above the surface for a moment, she screamed, but only a wave replied, filling her mouth with putrid water, the current pulling her in deeper.

The river would not let her go. She would drown.

There hadn’t been much for her in the world anyway, and she’d felt only snatches of happiness since being left at Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowery, in New York City, when she was but thirteen years old. Her sweet, loving parents had perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919, and her only living relative, an aunt, couldn’t take her in and had instead taken her to the church. Then there was a year of learning from Father Sparrow, and it had been magical, a book always in her hands.

Happiness disappeared after his death. Not even during a brief period of adoption by a barren couple was it better; that family lasted only until what they felt was a miracle happened—the woman was finally pregnant—and they didn’t want another mouth to feed. After that, Adah lived among thousands of other young people who worked and prowled and slept in street corners, eking out meager existences often within sight of New York’s famous Broadway. They roamed Manhattan’s Lower East Side and earned a few coins working as newsboys, trinket peddlers, flower sellers, and shoeshine boys, among assorted other pitiable occupations that Father Sparrow had once said didn’t require any learning or expansion of bright, young, and impressionable minds.