The Truth About Keeping Secrets(37)

We turned on to River Styx Road.

River Styx. I’d driven down this road hundreds of times. We’d driven down this road hundreds of times. Dad and me.

And I knew, based on that, that River Styx Road was a dead end.

‘Is … this where Heath lives?’ I asked.

June didn’t answer.

We seemed to float down the road until we followed a left turning marked with a sign that read RIVER STYX, down a steep slope then into the empty parking lot.

I was back.

June parked the car, the sudden stop jolting both of us backwards. I felt her eyes on me while I sat there, doing nothing. It seemed like I was doing a lot of that these days.

I was back, and nothing was the same.

‘I’m sorry,’ June finally said. ‘This was a stupid idea. I should have asked you first. I’m sorry. You hate it. I just thought, maybe if you came here again, if you saw it, then we could – I don’t know. I don’t actually know what I was thinking. This was stupid. I’m so, so sorry. Let’s just go to Heath’s.’

‘No,’ I said too quickly, like every time she threatened to leave and I said no, no, no. Maybe it had been stupid of her. I hadn’t decided yet. But I didn’t care. ‘I want to see it. Let’s go.’

‘Are you sure? I’m so sorry, I –’

‘Yeah. Uh, yeah. Come on. It’s OK.’ I was taken aback by the sheer force of her apology; I turned to examine her. ‘Are you OK?’

I swore I saw her blink back tears. ‘Yeah.’

Car doors slammed.

I eyed up the entrance, two flimsy-looking fence gates, and worried. That I’d see his ghost. That maybe we’d crossed planes and were glaring down the entrance to the actual river to hell instead of an admittedly unimpressive excuse for a river with a melodramatic name.

‘We don’t have to, like, stay for long,’ June said. ‘It’s chilly, anyways. And the sun’s gonna set.’

‘Yeah, no, we probably shouldn’t stay after dark. There’s this, uh, path that goes in a circle. Over the river. It would only take a half-hour or so. I don’t know. Maybe more with the snow, but we don’t have to do the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, OK. Let’s do that.’

She was doing it again. Injecting herself into places that weren’t hers. She stood in the spots where Dad stood, slipped herself into his silhouettes and made them dance again. The faded wooden map. The unassuming path. This was mine and his. And now June was here. And I guess I wasn’t upset about it, somehow. Maybe because the path was almost unrecognizable in the snow, without the trill of evening cicadas or the sizzle of July sun.

We walked slowly, me in the lead, keeping guard, almost, as if something was going to leap out, as if this was actually a dream and the world was green, not white, and Dad was just a few steps ahead. You fell asleep, I imagined him saying. It was all a bad dream.

We quickly realized that walking along a snow-covered trail without boots would prove difficult; the cold leaked through my shoes and numbed my feet. ‘Sorry,’ June said. ‘I guess I didn’t really consider the, like, logistics of it.’

I didn’t mind. I sort of liked the feeling. ‘You don’t have to keep saying sorry.’

June looked at me, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t even realized. Softened. ‘I apologize,’ she joked.

The Styx was a river in its own right, but only really a tributary that flowed into the larger Ohio River to the east. At its thinnest, it was hardly a creek here; at its widest, it was maybe ten long paces across, and deep. I guess it was named because the area was a bit depressing; a lot of the land on either side of the river was swamp. Mud. Quicksand.

We crept along the trail, which was hardly defined, the snow blurring the landscape into one uninterrupted sheet of white. Thick-trunked sycamores loomed over us, their placement messy; the trail had been carved to weave through the grove, so as not to disturb it. This was their home.

I had trouble reconciling my surroundings with the knowledge that this was my River Styx. Ours. It still was, just in different clothes. I wondered whether I was touching spots on the ground where Dad’s footsteps had been, or if the trees remembered us, had heard our conversations, and maybe if you’d cut them down all the ghosts of what we were could fly out, out, out. Not that I loved the thought of Dad being trapped somewhere but I guessed there were worse places than in the trees.

He sort of was. There was a divergence in the path; the left, I remembered, twisted towards the swamp, and the right went towards the river. But an aspen sat directly at the fork where the two trails converged. I knew this one. I cleared the snow round its roots, the cold pinching the skin between my fingers; he was there.

Aspens were easy to carve. The bark was soft and malleable, just the sort that an eight-year-old might be able to slice away at with a particularly sharp branch.

I had seen people whittling their initials into trees on TV, apparently. At the time, I hadn’t realized the gesture was pretty much exclusively romantic. I’d inscribed ‘S+D’ into the tree – Sydney and Dad – sloppily enough that they barely registered as letters and almost looked like natural grooves in the bark; you had to know where to look to even see them at all.

Is this all there is?

I traced the letters with the tips of my fingers, aware that June was behind me, but not really registering that she was watching. ‘Oh, Sydney,’ she said, understanding.