to Betsy. Her name found its way to my throat but not through my lips. I squinted against the sun and quickly realized that this was not a ghost, not Betsy , but a real girl. A girl with skin the color of blackberries, holding a suitcase, her hair dripping river water onto my legs.
“What’s your name?” she asked, her accent jarring me, clearly placing her far away from home.
“Harper,” I answered, standing up awkwardly, as if I were only going to shake her hand.
“Harper,” she said. And then she pressed her tiny hand against her swollen stomach, a gesture I could never forget. “Please,” she said. “You gotta help me, sir. My mama’s dead. I got nowhere to go.”
What happened after this (the moments that followed, the months that followed) I can only explain as the acts of a man so full of sorrow he’d do just about anything to get free of it. Here I was at the river again, with only a moment to decide. Forgiveness. For twelve years, I’d only wanted to say I was sorry, but before this there was no one left alive to offer my apologies to.
“Please,” she said again.
And this time, I didn’t turn away.
Two Rivers
T here aren’t really two rivers in Two Rivers, Vermont. There’s the Connecticut, of course (single-minded with its rushing blue-gray water), but the other river is really just a wide and quiet creek. Where they intersect, now that’s the real thing. Because the place where the creek meets the Connecticut, where the two strangely different moving bodies of water join, is the stillest place I’ve ever seen. And in that stillness, it almost seems possible that the creek could keep on going, minding its own business, that it might emerge on the other side and keep on traveling away from town. But nature doesn’t work that way, doesn’t allow for this kind of deviation. What must (and does) happen is that the small creek gets caught up in the big river’s arms, convinced or coerced to join it on its more important journey.
The girl was shivering, her arms wrapped around her waist, her hands clutching her sides. Her teeth were chattering. They were small teeth in a tidy row, like a child’s.
I peeled off my flannel shirt, which was the driest thing I had on me, and offered it to her. She accepted the shirt, awkwardly pulling it on. The sleeves hung over her hands; she almost disappeared inside it when she sat down.
“What’s your name?” I asked softly. She was like a wounded animal, knees curled to her chest and trembling.
“Marguerite,” she said, shaking her head.
“Your mother’s dead?” I asked.
The girl looked down at her hands and nodded.
“Was she on the train?”
She kept looking at the ground.
“Where were you going?” I asked.
“Up north,” she said.
“Canada?”
She looked up at me then, water beaded up and glistening on her eyelashes. She nodded. “Canada.”
“Do you know somebody up there?”
She looked toward the woods, chattering. “I got an aunt,” she said.
“Well, let’s get back to my house and you can give her a call. Let her know you’re okay,” I offered.
“It ain’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she don’t know I’m coming. My daddy…” Her voice trailed off.
“Can we call him ?”
“No!” she said loudly, shaking her head. And then she reached for my hand. “He sent me away. My mama’s dead. I ain’t got nobody.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to sort everything out in my mind.
“We need to go to the station, let them know you’re alive. Then they can get in touch with your aunt and we’ll get you on the next train. And if she can’t take you, we’ll go to the police. They’ll talk to your daddy. He’s your father. He has obligations.”
“No!” she cried again, squeezing my hand hard. “ Please . Maybe I can just stay a little while. I can’t go back there. I can’t.” Her eyes were wild and scared. One was the same color as river water, blue-gray and moving. The other was almost black. Determined. Like stone. “Let them think I drowned.”
“You can’t just pretend you’re dead.”
“Why not?” she asked, both of her eyes growing dark.
I flinched. “Two Rivers is a small town. People are going to wonder where you came from.”
“Maybe I’m your cousin,” she said, her eyes brightening. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Your cousin from Louisiana.”
I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t have any cousins from Louisiana.”
“From Alabama then. I don’t know. Mississippi,” she persisted, clearly irritated.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m not sure folks are going to buy the idea that you and I are family .”
The girl looked square at me, studying my face, as if contemplating the possibility herself.
“I’ve got a little girl,” I said. “I can’t just bring a stranger into my house.”
At the mention of Shelly, the girl reached out and grabbed my wrist, pressed my hand hard against her pregnant belly. When I pulled my hand back, she held onto my wrist, and she moved toward me. She was so close to my face I could smell the bubble gum smell of her breath. Her eyes were frantic, and she quickly pressed her lips against my forehead. It was such a tender gesture, it made me suck in my breath.
“I won’t be any trouble. I promise,” she said.
She looked at me again, and I willed myself to look into those disconcerting eyes. I concentrated on the blue one, the one the color of the river, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t say anything else; she simply took my hand and waited for me to take her home.
“You can stay for a little while, just until we get everything straightened out.” And then, because she looked as if she might cry, “I promise, everything will be okay.”
“Thank you,” the girl whispered, though it could have just been the wind rushing in my ears. She was riding on the back of my bicycle as I pedaled away from the accident at the river, through the woods, and back toward town. She held on to my waist tightly, her heartbeat hard and steady against my back. I was careful to avoid anything that might jar her or send us tumbling. We didn’t speak; the only sound was of bicycle tires crushing leaves. I worried about what would happen when I stopped pedaling, when the journey out of the woods inevitably ended, and so I concentrated on finding a clear and unobstructed path through the forest, taking great
