Timothy Johnston - The Current

There’s been an accident, said Leslie, and the store rolled and Rachel pitched backwards, sickly, into a scene on the highway, Danny’s truck upside down on the shoulder, wheels to the sky…

No, no, Leslie said quickly. Not that, not one of yours. It’s Holly Burke, she said. Gordon Burke’s girl. They found her this morning in the river.

She went under . She went under and she swam those cold yellow waters for days and days, tumbling in the river’s underworld, its constant current, constant deep pull, the lights of the car spinning through the yellow water and lighting up the hair of the other girls who were down there with her, so many girls, or maybe just one girl passing again and again through the lights, the way this girl’s hair moved in the lit-up currents like the hair of a mermaid, like seagrass, the way the light caught the whites of her eyes, and her teeth when she smiled. How smooth her face when she reached out and brushed the girl’s cheek with the back of her hand, how soft her lips when she kissed them, how warm and thrilling the breath this girl blew into her own empty lungs…

And when she surfaced at last and drew her first breath in the new world, the new life, she was not cold, and she was not wet, and she was not in the river at all, and a man was sitting next to her, and after a few spinning, blurry moments she saw that it was a man who looked like her father, only older, thinner-faced, his hair gone white and wispy on his head, but those same blue eyes that she’d looked into all her former life .

Holding her hand, this man, and she lay in a bed in a room she didn’t know and there was a window and it was early morning, or late in the day, and something hard and annoying was up inside her nose but she could not lift her right arm and there was pain all up and down her body as if she’d been pounded on by fists as she slept.

That you, Sheriff? she thought—only she must have said it aloud, because he smiled and gripped her hand more tightly and said, “It’s me, Deputy. I’m right here, sweetheart.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re in Rochester. The hospital in Rochester. You’re OK. You’re going to be just fine.”

She ran her tongue over her lips and swallowed thickly. “Thirsty,” she said.

With his free hand he brought the plastic cup and the straw to her lips and she drank. She drank and drank. All that time in the river, drowning, and now all she wanted was water—there would never be enough of it for her thirst! She emptied the cup and kept sucking noisily at the air of the cup.

“Easy, easy,” he said. “I’ll get you more in a second. I’m gonna go get the doctor now so he can look at you.”

“Don’t go. Please.” Gripping his hand, or trying to. She was so weak.

He smiled. How thin his face was! She felt the tears on her cheeks and watched as he wiped them with his thumb, his good big old thumb.

“I drowned, Sheriff.”

“No, you didn’t, sweetheart. You’re right here with me. You’re just fine. The doctor—”

She squeezed at his hand. “I did, though. We both did. Caroline and me, both together. But it was all right, because we were together. And also—”

He waited. “Also what, sweetheart?”

She rolled her head and looked up at the ceiling, and the tears ran from the corners of her eyes. She shook her head.

She turned back to him, to his eyes. Nothing but love and worry in those eyes.

“Did they find her?” she said.

“You rest, sweetheart.”

“Daddy.”

He swept the hair from her forehead.

“I saw her go under, Daddy. I saw her go. The current got her and carried her off under the ice.”

“OK, but not now. You just—”

“Did they find her? Did they find Caroline? That’s all I’m asking.”

He nodded. “Yes, sweetheart. They found her at the dam. At the power plant in Riverside. The water never freezes there. That’s where she was.”

Audrey watched his face, his eyes. “How far?”

“How far what?”

“How far from where we went in.”

He frowned. He shook his head.

“Daddy.”

“Two miles. Maybe three.”

All that way in the dark, under the ice. Beautiful, strong Caroline.

She turned and looked at the ceiling again. Her body was so sore. She could not lift her free hand, her right arm. As if it were frozen to the ice. The bed. She felt profoundly and forever drugged. Her eyes would not stay open— But stay awake , she told herself. He is sick and he needs you with him. How much time? How much did you waste by sleeping? Stay awake!

“You used to take me fishing there, Sheriff. Remember?”

“That was another dam,” he said. Then he said, “Of course I do. In the summertime.”

“The trout like it behind the dam.” Her heavy lids lowered. Her hand relaxed in his.

“Hush now, Deputy,” he said from far away… don’t spook the fish .

“The water’s so cool and deep there, behind the dam. We’d… we’d stand on the bank and cast and… the bait just… down to them in the current.”

HE WAS AWAKE and out of bed while the house, and the woods all around the house, were still in darkness, with only a lesser shade of darkness in the east-facing windows, and that shade a good ways farther along than he cared to see in his windows before he was shaved and dressed and downstairs for coffee, but he’d slept poorly, passing in and out of a nagging dream in which he walked and walked, like the last man, over a burned land, and when at last he got up from his bed and walked to the bathroom his legs were all rubber and ache, and there was a thickness in his head and a drainage at the back of his throat that he kept swallowing like a sour rope, and by the time his coffee was brewing he knew he’d taken sick, as his mother used to say, and only then did he remember his trip to the hospital the night before: Tom Sutter coming out to meet him, standing outside in the cold so Sutter could have himself another cancer stick, then the long drive home with no heat in the van and his entire body shivering, until at last he was under his covers and shivering there too until he slept and then shivering in his strange dream of walking. He’d gone out into the world and taken sick and brought it home.

In the kitchen he washed down a handful of aspirin with orange juice, then fried up two eggs, and carried eggs and coffee to the living room. He hauled his chair closer to the fire and took up the old blanket from the sofa and shawled it about his shoulders. His face was hot to the touch, and yet he was so cold—the mug trembling when he lifted it.

He cocked his ear to a noise above him. What day was this? School day? He thought to look at the paper but he would have to go out to the porch to get it. And he did not remember hearing it hit the porchboards, so was it Sunday? That would explain why that girl was still in bed. How late did she come home? Or did you fall asleep again waiting for her? A great clomping, thudding, music-playing, phone-yammering creature except when she chose not to be—quiet as a ghost in slippers then, able to pass soundlessly through doors, to float by you and up the creaky stairs without a creak and into the bathroom to brush the beer and smoke from her mouth, into her PJs and into her bed, late as hell again but safe, thank God, not out with some drunk boy driving, not in some accident but home, safe…

Until one morning it’s a sheriff’s deputy who brings her home, drunk, high, something. Her license long gone. Her face puffy, her eyes red, wobbling in her shoes. You should just let her go to bed but you can’t. You can’t. It’s all out of control. A goddam sheriff’s deputy!