Page 19 of The River Is Waiting

I start the car. The mirrors are still positioned for Emily, so as I pull out into traffic, I get a blast from someone’s horn. Look again to make sure it’s clear, then hit the gas and drive off in the opposite direction from home. IfI don’t turn around, I might miss the meeting at the funeral home. It isn’t right; I’m his father. But Emily will probably prefer to go with her mother. I’m not sure I could handle it anyway: bringing them his clothes, choosing a casket, deciding about calling hours, a service, cremation or burial.

I drive south without any destination in mind.…

Maisie will be up by now, missing her brother. She’ll be confused, in need of reassurance, and where am I? Her daddy is missing, too—driving away from her because I’m a coward. They’ll probably be better off without me. Maybe I should put the pedal to the metal and aim for some tree. But I’m too weak to do that, too.

I’m eight or nine miles past Three Rivers when the traffic begins to slow down near the exit for the Wequonnoc Moon Casino. Spur of the moment, I put on my blinker and follow the line of cars to the entrance, then to the massive parking lot. I have no idea why I’m doing this.

But the answer comes to me once I’m inside and have joined the stream of morning gamblers. As I walk past the craps tables, the clamoring slot machine halls and off-track betting parlors, I’m not the father who backed over his kid; I’m just some anonymous guy hoping, like everyone else, to score with Lady Luck. The problem is: even if nobody else knows who I am,Iknow. That calls for a drink. I go into one of the bars and sit down at a table for two. The cocktail waitress who comes toward me is wearing a fringed buckskin top and matching short shorts. “What can I get you?” she asks. I order a Jack and Coke.

Waiting for my drink, I look around. Two old duffers at the end of the bar are talking Red Sox—their hopes that Rajai Davis’s base-stealing will do for Boston what he did for Cleveland last year. A trio of older ladies are sharing laughs and cocktails at a table halfway across the floor from me. Two of them are silver-haired, the third is wearing one of those cancer-victim headscarves. A couple closer to my age sits on the other side of the bar. They’re drinking Bloody Marys and his hands are all over her. Honeymooners, I figure, or cheating on their spouses. Everyone in here is clueless. What does baseball matter? Or fucking someone else’s wife? Dothose other two women think their friend is the only one whose days are numbered? Why should we all still be alive when my little boy is dead?

I look up at the four soundless TVs above the bar, each tuned to something different: Fox News, CNN, a rerun of a Sox game on NESN, and one of the local stations—the morning news. I watch the anchor’s lips move. Read the crawl at the bottom of the screen: “Tragedy in Three Rivers.” The picture changes to a reporter holding a microphone—the one who arrived as I was leaving for the hospital in the back of that cruiser yesterday. She’s standing across the road from our house. Over her shoulder, I see my SUV, a perimeter of yellow crime tape, a huddle of neighbors.

“Run a tab, sir?” the waitress asks. She’s already placed my drink on the table. Looking at it, not at her, I say, “Sure. Why not?” Taking a sip, I glance back at the TV screen. There’s Emily’s Facebook profile picture of the four of us. When the camera zooms in on me, I’m confronted with the smiling face of the son of a bitch who killed his son. I look away, gulp down my drink, slap a twenty on the table, and get the fuck out of there. Out in the parking lot, I break into a run.

Back in Emily’s car, I check my phone. She’s texted:You still at the lawyer’s? Sorry I shut you out last nite. Couldn’t deal. Funeral home appt is @ 1:00. Plz be back in time. I can’t do this by myself.

I shake my head no. Pull out of the lot and turn right, heading farther south. It’s like that thing they say before the plane takes off? Put on your own mask before you help anyone else. She’ll have to call her mother, have Betsy take her to the funeral parlor. Ignoring the highway entrance toward New London, I take the back road that runs parallel with the Wequonnoc river. I think again about what that lawyer—mylawyer—implied: if I lie about why I went back in the house, those test results might get tossed. Can I out-and-out lie like that? Why the hell not? Everyone lies to cover their asses. The cops who claimed self-defense when they shot that black guy in the back. The politicians: “We have credible intelligence that Saddam has stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.” “I did not have sex with thatwoman, Miss Lewinsky.” Trump lies every time he opens his mouth and we all just shake our heads and let him get away with it.

But can I pull it off? Lie to Detective Sparks or some prosecutor, some judge? Maybe. Since my drinking has ticked up, I’ve become a pretty good sneak. Hiding my bottles until recycling day, lying about how I’m still looking for work. Keeping my Ativan prescription at the back of my nightstand drawer so she won’t question why my supply is nearly gone. Even throwing that rum bottle into the woods on my way to Dixon’s office. Disposing of the proof that I had a few yesterday morning so that Emily won’t assume I was impaired when I started the car. I mean yeah, Ihavebeen overdoing the booze and the benzos a little, and sure, I need to cut back. But I was in control when I put the car in reverse. It happened because the McNallys distracted me. How could I live with myself otherwise?

It’s after ten now. The river is playing peekaboo, sparkling in the sun one minute, hiding behind thickets of trees and brambles the next. I roll down the window so I can hear it move. I let that sound steer me to the river’s edge. Why have I come here? What am I looking for?

CHAPTER NINE

At the river’s edge I watch and listen to the moving water for a while. Am I absolutely sure I wasn’t under the influence when it happened? Would it dishonor Niko if I lied to Sparks? I close my eyes and take myself back to that afternoon when I got my first glimpse of him, on a screen in Dr. Delgado’s office. We knew by then that we were having twins, each of them in their own amniotic sac. During a previous visit, I’d asked the doctor if he thought they had any awareness of each other. He turned the question over to Emily. “What do you think, Mama? You’re the expert on these two.” She smiled at me and said she was sure they did.

As we watched the blurry ultrasound movie, I was moved by the miracle of a rapidly beating heart. “Is that the boy or the girl in front?” I asked Delgado’s nurse. “The boy,” she said, pointing at something. “There’s his little penis.”

The night Emily’s water broke, I drove her to the hospital. Held her hand as they wheeled her to the delivery room, then suited up in the paper gown they handed me. Stretched the gloves over my hands. She worked so hard, so bravely, all night long to push our two children into the world. She’d read all the baby books and was determined that both would have vaginal births. She didn’t want to take an anesthetic because she wanted to be alert and ready to see them and hold them as soon as they appeared.

At last, in the first light of morning, I saw between Emily’s legs the crowning of a small head with its dark matted hair. The firstborn twin: whowould it be? “Breathe, Emily. Now push. Deep breath. Smaller push.” Out came more of the head, then the neck, the top of a shoulder. It amazed me that some version of what I was witnessing was how everyone, past and present, entered the world. It was profound.

“One last push now, Emily!” and the rest of our daughter slid out in a whoosh of blood and fluid. Her body was bluish and I was afraid something was wrong. Then she squawked and, as her lungs took in air, she turned pink, her head first, then little by little the rest of her, down to her toes. The baby nurse—her name was Maureen—placed her on Emily’s chest and, turning to me, asked whether Maisie was a keeper. “Hell, yes,” I told her, laughing as my tears fell. Emily was laughing and crying, too.

I open my eyes now and start hiking along the riverbank, following the direction of the rushing water.…

As Maisie was carried to the other side of the room to be cleaned up and bundled in a warm blanket, Dr. Delgado turned his attention to delivering Niko. But there was a problem: he’d shifted and was positioned now to come out bottom first, knees bent. Emily’s exhaustion was a concern at this point, plus there was the complication of what would be a breech delivery unless he could be turned. Doctor Delgado made two unsuccessful attempts to shift him when Maureen said the heartbeat was weakening and dropping quickly. Dr. Delgado decided an emergency C-section was necessary; Emily sobbed and protested but I managed to talk down her opposition. It all happened so fast! Emily was rushed to an operating room and I followed. Another nurse put up a screen to block my view when I saw the doctor grab a scalpel. As his hand disappeared behind the screen, I got weak-kneed. “You all right, Dad?” the nurse asked. I nodded, embarrassed to have any attention on me. Seconds later, Niko was wailing away, pink and perfect. My son! I had a son!…

The riverbank turns sandy for a while, then gives way to a stretch that bulges with wild vegetation: arborvitae, hemlock, skunk cabbage, forsythia. Somewhere nearby a woodpecker is tap-tapping away, hunting for insects, eggs, and larvae.They also peck to declare their territory or drum for a mate,I hear my father say—a remnant of some long-ago walk in the woods when I was seven or eight. Those nature walks were one of the few aspects of my dad’s parenting that I’d been looking forward to replicating with my daughter and son once they were old enough.

A day or so after we brought the babies home from the hospital, Niko gave us another scare, and as first-time parents, Emily and I were worst-case-scenario worriers. Maisie took to breastfeeding right away, but Niko was cranky and jittery and didn’t seem to get the hang of sucking. His skin and the whites of his eyes were turning yellowish and we grew scared. We drove to Dr. Delgado’s office without an appointment. The nurse practitioner said words like “bilirubin” and “jaundice,” and the next thing we knew, Niko was demoted back to the hospital for treatment under a phototherapy lamp. His yellowish cast faded away soon after and, home again, he suddenly mastered his mother’s nipple and established himself as the chowhound twin. He began to thrive.

Emily and I were fascinated with every stage of the kids’ development during that first year. Their growing awareness of each other. Their smiles in recognition of our faces, our voices. Their ability to turn over and then creep. The days when Maisie, and then her brother, let go of the furniture and took their first wobbly steps before falling into my open arms. In all these achievements, Maisie led and Niko followed. But there was one exception. Niko was the twinkly-eyed scamp who taught his more serious sister the pleasure of laughter. Maisie thought he was hilarious and we did, too. I took a cell phone video of him swaying and dancing to some song on the radio, another of him deliberately teasing us. The twins were exhausting but fascinating, too; each day brought new discoveries, new mastery of skills, as they learned how to negotiate their world. One night, I heard Emily call me from the twins’ room. “I want you to see something,” she said. She was standing at the crib. “Look at them, Corby.” They were sleeping side by side, sucking each other’s thumb. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer. “We made these two,” she said.…

Now I wipe my eyes on my shirtsleeve. Tell myself to turn around anddrive back home. Instead, I keep walking. Is what I did going to destroy our marriage? Mom said I need to figure out how to forgive myself if I’m going to move forward. But what if I can’t? What if Emily decides she wants to move forward without me? I pick up a flat stone at my feet and pitch it into the water. Watch it jump along the surface once, twice, three times before it sinks. Skipping stones was one of the boyhood skills my father taught me, a pleasure Niko will never know—one of the thousands of things I’ve deprived him of. I see him lying in the driveway, breathing bravely, just minutes away from dying in the back of that ambulance. How can I not blame myself? How can I have failed my son far more disastrously than my father failed me?

I’ve been hiking for about a mile when I come upon a boulder lodged in the middle of the river, the water churning and rushing around it. A large, long-beaked, spindly-legged bird—an egret?—stands atop the rock, still as a statue as it watches the water. I stop. Stare at it as I speak to my dead son.

“Hey, little man, can you hear me? Where did you go?” I drop to my knees at the water’s edge and begin to cry. “You had so much of your life left to live, Niko, so much waiting for you. How can I still be in the world when you’re not? I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but if I could know that… somehow…”

I plunge my hands into the cold water and claw the bottom. Scoop up handfuls of gravel and fling them at my face. Make a fist and punch myself in the chest. Do it again, harder. The hurt of it feels right.

“Niko, what’s going to happen if I tell the truth? Will your mother leave me? Will I go to prison?” I deliver another punch, harder still. “But how can I live inside my skin if I keep lying about why you died? If I devalue your life like that?” I slam my knuckles against my forehead once, twice, three times. “I don’t want to lie anymore, Niko, but I’m scared of losing them both. What should I do?”

I don’t realize I’m shouting the last, pleading with my dead son, until I see that bird on the rock turn its head and look across the rushing waterat me. Then with slow, deep wingbeats, it takes flight, its neck tucked into its body, its legs trailing behind it. It’s not an egret. It’s a majestic great blue heron. I watch it soar, flying farther and farther away from me until all I can see are the indifferent clouds and the hard blue sky.

I hike back to where I parked Emily’s car. Get in, grab my phone, and text her:Coming home now. Should be back in time.

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