John Hart - Down River

“I didn’t know that Adam was here,” she said.

“Can it wait?” my father asked.

“Mom wants you,” she said.

My father blew out a breath of obvious frustration. “Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.”

He looked at me. “Don’t go away,” he said.

After he left, Miriam lingered in the doorway. She’d come to the trial, sat quietly on the front row every day, but I’d seen her only once afterward, the briefest goodbye as I’d thrown what I could into the trunk of my car. I recalled her last words. Where will you go? she’d asked. And I’d said the only thing I could. I honestly don’t know.

“Hello, Miriam.”

She raised a hand. “I’m not sure what to say to you.”

“Don’t say anything, then.”

She showed me the top of her head. “It’s been hard,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“Is it?”

Something unknowable moved through her. She’d been unable to look at me during the trial, and had fled the courtroom when the prosecutor mounted the enlarged autopsy photos on an easel for the jury to see. The wound was vividly displayed, the shots taken under bright lights with a high-resolution camera. Three feet tall, the first photo showed hair spiked with blood and dirt, shards of bone and brain matter gone to wax. He’d positioned it for the jury to see, but Miriam sat in the front row, just a few feet away. She’d covered her mouth and run down the center aisle. I always imagined her in the grass beyond the sidewalk, heaving out her insides. It’s where I’d wanted to be. Even my father had been forced to look away. For her, though, it must have been unbearable. They’d known each other for years.

“It’s okay,” I repeated.

She nodded, but looked like she might cry. “How long are you here for?”

“I don’t know.”

She slipped further into her loose clothing and leaned against the door frame. She still had not met my eyes. “This is weird,” she said.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

She was already shaking her head. “It just is.”

“Miriam-”

“I gotta go.” And then she was gone, her footsteps a whisper on the bare wood floors of the long hallway. In the silence I heard voices from above, an argument, and my stepmother’s escalating voice. When my father returned I saw that his face had hardened. “What did Janice want?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

“She wanted to know if you’d be joining us for dinner tonight.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

He looked up. “You heard?”

“She wants me out of the house.”

“This has been difficult for your stepmother.”

I fought to remain civil. “I would not want to inconvenience her.”

“This is bullshit,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He turned for the back of his study and the door leading outside. His hand settled on one of the rifles propped in the corner and the morning sun flooded the room as the door opened under his hand. I followed him out. His truck was parked twenty feet away. He put the rifle on the gun rack. “For those damn dogs,” he said. “Get in.”

The truck was old, and smelled of dust and straw. He drove slowly, and pointed the truck upriver. We crossed through cornfields and soy, a new planting of loblolly pines, and into the forest proper before he spoke again. “Did you get a chance to speak to Miriam?”

“She didn’t really want to talk.”

My father waved a hand, and I saw a quick twist of displeasure on his face. “She’s twitchy.”

“It was more than that,” I said, and could feel his eyes on me as I stared straight ahead. He turned my way, and when he spoke, it was of the dead boy.

“He was her friend, Adam.”

I lost my temper. I couldn’t help it. “You don’t think I know that! You don’t think I remember that!”

“It’ll work out,” he said weakly.

“What about you?” I asked. “A pat on the back doesn’t make it all right.”

He opened his mouth again and then shut it. The truck crested a hill with a view of the house. He pulled to a stop and switched off the ignition. It was quiet.

“I did what I felt I had to do, son. No one could move forward with you still in the house. Janice was distraught. Jamie and Miriam were affected. I was, too. There were just too many questions.”

“I can’t give you answers I don’t have. Somebody killed him. I told you that it wasn’t me. That should have been enough.”

“It wasn’t. Your acquittal didn’t erase what Janice saw.”

I turned in my seat and studied the man. “Are we going to start this again?”

“No, son. We’re not.” I looked at the floor, at the straw and the mud and the tattered, dead leaves. “I miss your mother,” he finally said.

“Me, too.”

We sat through a long silence as the sun streamed in. “I understand, you know.”

“What?”

He paused. “How much you lost when she died.”

“Don’t,” I said.

More wordless time, most of it thick with memories of her and of how good we three had been.

“There must have been some part of you that thought I was capable of murder,” I said.

He scrubbed both hands over his face, ground at his eyes with the callused palms. There was dirt under his fingernails, and truth all over him when he spoke. “You were never the same after she died. Before that, you were such a sweet boy. God, you were perfect, a pure joy. After she died, though, you changed, grew dark and distrusting. Resentful. Distant. I thought you’d come out of it with time. But you started fighting in school. Arguing with teachers. You were angry all the time. It was like a goddamn cancer. Like it just ate all that sweetness away.”

He palmed his face again; hard skin rasped over the creases. “I thought you’d work it out. I guess there was always the chance you’d pop. I just didn’t think it would happen like that. You’d put a car into a tree, get seriously hurt in a fight maybe. When that boy was killed, it never occurred to me that you might be responsible. But Janice swore that she saw you.” He sighed. “I thought that maybe you’d finally come undone.”

“Because of my mother?” I asked, and he did not see the ice in me. He nodded, and something violent thumped in my chest. I’d been falsely accused, tried for murder, and driven out. He was blaming this on my mother’s death. “If I was so messed up, why didn’t you get me some help?”

“You mean like a shrink?”

“Yeah. Anything.”

“All a man needs are his feet on the ground. We thought we could get you there. Dolf and me.”

“And that’s worked out for you, has it?”

“Don’t you judge me, boy.”

“Like it worked for Mom?”

His jaw muscles bulged before he spoke. “Now you need to shut your damn mouth. You’re talking about something way over your head.”

“Fuck this,” I said, and opened the door to the truck. I walked down the road and heard his door slam behind me.

“Don’t walk away from me,” he said.

I felt his hand on my shoulder, and without conscious thought I turned and punched him in the face. He went down in the dirt, and I stood over him. I saw a flash of color, my mother’s last second on this earth, and spoke the thought that had tormented me for the past few years.

“It was supposed to be you,” I said.

Blood spread from his nose, down the right side of his mouth. He looked small in the dirt, and I saw the day she did it: the way the gun leapt out of her lifeless hand, how the coffee scalded my fingers when I dropped the cup. But there had been an instant, a flash on her face as the door swung wide. Surprise, I thought. Regret. I used to think it was imagination on my part.

But not now.