the river

pia quintano

IT FELT LIKE THEY WERE MINING THE EAST RIVER, as if the heavy machines they were using to dredge it could easily unearth a car or the core of the planet. I could feel the FDR tremble under my feet but suspected that the heavy barges with their mysterious cargo would be undisturbed, as the men stretched apart the river’s seams.

I watched the dredging from the curved iron railing of John Findley Walk, by the weeping willow that bent to the river and gave shade. There was a twenty-foot drop to the water where they worked, the river heaving up its ghosts.

The evidence: a pair of slippers abandoned under a bench. They suspected that her abductor took her to the small park behind the walkway where, in the shadows of the trees and bushes, which in August were dense and prickly, he molested and killed her, then dropped her body into the water.

I had studied the shimmering lights that bounced along the river, wondering if they contained messages in some indecipherable tongue. I come here often to watch the tugboats, with names like Auricularis and North Star, pull the barges along, those vast, flat vessels that seem to take with them most of the mirrored surface of the water.

My stepfather Jerry and I live only two blocks away, so in a sense the river and the small park bordering it are my backyard. I come in the evenings to sketch. It is too dark to see the lines clearly; it is only later in my bedroom that I can read them as a kind of map of the evening’s events, as they impressed themselves on my rapidly moving hand.

I found out by accident that they were dredging the river. It was the night before when alone in my room, I examined my drawings on my drafting table and came across the strange pumping machines, which were spread over several sheets of paper. I recognized them as a new presence on the river, some kind of vessel with the arms of an octopus and as a result of my attention to them, I’d not drawn the buoys and tugboats and the various private and commercial crafts that usually floated by.

Although it was quite late, I returned to the park and saw police officers overseeing a transit ship that was docked parallel to the drive and which had divers and dinosaur-like drills operating over its side. I went up to an officer who was watching from the parapet above and asked what was going on.

“Dredging the river,” he said.

“For what?”

“The body of an eight-year-old girl who disappeared from East End two days ago.” He said it as if by rote, as if he had been asked the question so many times, he could just let his mouth do the work and leave his brain out of it.

“A little girl?”

He squinted at me without meeting my eyes, traveling above my forehead to my hair which, I had noticed that morning, formed a tangled halo around my head. I had ceased trying to tame my hair. I lost too much of it when I combed it.

“You don’t read the papers? She was seen with a man, sitting on this bench that night. They found her shoes later and no sign of either of them.”

“But that doesn’t mean that she’s dead. She might just have left her shoes.”

He looked at me like he had just discovered he was in the presence of an imbecile and turned back to the river.

“We’re going to find her body all right. Maybe not tonight and maybe not here. We might find it tomorrow washed up on Roosevelt Island, or in Greenpoint, at the bottom of the Gowanus canal. But we’re expecting to see something soon.”

I backed away and returned home to the pre-war apartment on East 88th street I share with my stepfather, Jerry. Perhaps it is unusual that at twenty-seven I continue to live with him, as I have done since I was thirteen when my mother died. But we do not make enough money to live apart. Jerry is an assistant manager in a two-star hotel in the west 50’s and I work part time as a clerk in a medical practice. The combined income from my small salary and Jerry’s is barely enough to pay for the little we have.

Of course, I am always thinking of leaving Jerry. Every so often I pick up the Village Voice and look through the apartment shares. I went to see one of them: a small bedroom in a boiler room apartment in the middle of a decayed strip of buildings on East Houston. The man who was renting it had covered the walls with chalk drawings of giant hands, reaching out into the room, like a Times Square army billboard. The rent was only $300 a month but the room was barely furnished, with only a dirty mattress on the floor and a lamp with a lopsided shade sitting beside it. In the dim light, I imagined the shadows of skittering roaches against the walls, intersected by the shadow of the painter as he passed in the hall. I couldn’t see myself there.

My memory of my mother is not very reliable. The framed photos Jerry has on our single bookshelf: a black-haired woman smiling into the camera with a pronounced overbite and a long-tanned neck are all I must draw on visually. The months I saw her sunken in bed, with needles taped to her veins and her cheeks puckered in undid what she had looked like before. Once she actually died, there issued over my brain a kind of dense cloud through which I could make out only the aspects of her that touched me at various times, a hand on my chin as she examined my face for rashes or untruths, the feel of her heavy chest as I lay my head against it before I was old enough to go to school, the sound of her dangling bracelet as it hit against the Vogues and Bazaars she read aloud instead of Dr. Suess. Articles on how to give your cheeks a high gloss and how to part your hair in a way that inspired confidence. Photographs were the only thing that regrouped her into anything whole.

I do not talk with Jerry about my mother. I know his impressions of her would not be helpful to me since she asserted a different gravitational pull on him.

<><><>

THE RIVER RECEIVED ITS BLOWS a second night in a row, men and machines shoving their way into it more aggressively than before, to purge its mysteries, and I found my sketchbook empty, so engrossed was I in the experience in the concrete. Still, like my notebook, they had caught nothing, the river had produced only decoys: a wooden mannequin that had been thrown over the side of a barge, the hull of a speedboat, a giant rubber Madonna that might have drifted away from a floating crèche. I began to follow the newspapers.

It was about this time that I remembered having seen Jerry in Central Park with a little girl the week before, on a Wednesday afternoon. I was sketching the model ships on the pond at 72nd Street, in preparation for the bigger vessels I would track later on the river. I gave up because it was so hot, I was leaving round impressions from my hands and wrists on the page and my pencil marks were getting a shiny, indelible quality. As I approached the bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland, I saw Jerry sitting next to a little girl on a bench, under the partial shade of a dogwood tree. They were licking melting ice cream cones. Afterwards, Jerry took out a handkerchief and dried her hands and replaced it in his pocket. They hadn’t seen me, so I turned away and went up the hill toward 76th street.

I don’t know why it took me so long to remember the vision. Perhaps I put it out of my mind because it made no sense. At 3pm, Jerry should have been at work.

On the third night of the dredging, I went home after work. I had left a copy of the front-page story about the quest for the missing child on the coffee table in front of the couch. When I came in, I hoped Jerry would be reading it, but instead I found that he had put his glass ashtray with his still-smoldering cigar butt on top of it, so that a small gray cloud rose over her photo. He was a bit hunched over, leaning his elbows against his knees. He had been a linebacker in college, which anyone could tell by the width of his chest even when he had his jacket on.

“Honey,” my stepfather called (I was already turning south), “don’t go off to the Park yet. Stay and watch this with me. It’s a special on Lindbergh.”

I stared at the TV a moment, at the tall, thin young man with the shy eyes.

“I don’t have any particular feelings toward aviators.”

“Remember we watched The Spirit of St. Louis with your moth-er?” Jerry was looking up at me, his black eyes moist and his brows knit together so that they formed a fleshy bulge above his nose.

“I don’t remember seeing it.”

“You were very excited about it. I made one of those hats for you with goggles. Look at the set—the same thing he has on. You liked it. I took this bathing cap, I think it was your mother’s, and I sewed a pair of sunglasses to it. You killed me in it!” He reached out and pulled a stray thread from my cotton sweater and let it fall to the floor between us.

“I don’t know where you’re getting this from. I never saw that movie and I never owned a pair of goggles.”

His face fell a little.

“You were just a little girl.”

“I was never a little girl when you and mom were together.” I softened my voice. “Don’t you remember? I was already ten when you got married.”

“You were small for your age.” He smiled, staring off into space. “Whose sunglasses did you use?”

He ignored the question or hadn’t heard it. Meanwhile, they were showing Lindbergh waving to thousands of people from the rudder of his plane. I noticed that I was sweating; there was a ribbon of water pasting the back of my silk dress to my shoulder blades. We have only a small air conditioner fitted into a narrow window that looks out on the building across the alley and it doesn’t have enough BTU’s to cool a closet.

“It’s a sauna in here.” I blamed Jerry for being so damned cheap. We’d bought the thing the October before at one of those fly-by-night trading posts on 86th street. The bigger one was only fifty dollars more, but I saw a look cross Jerry’s face and I figured he was counting out the Chef Boyardee’s that would equal if he sprang the extra cash.

Jerry poured some ginger ale in a tall colored glass which fizzed so violently, I was surprised his sleeve didn’t ignite. He offered me the glass but since he knew I hated ginger ale I pretended not to notice. He unwrapped a new cigar and as he had done since I was ten, handed me the paper ring. He waited for me to slip it on my finger, which was part of the ritual. Instead, I crumpled it, walked into my bedroom and dropped it into the wastebasket.

My room is full of shadows. Since there is no overhead light, I can only illuminate a small space at a time. I turned on my desk lamp and shook out the late edition from my knapsack. The story was still on page one. No bodies had turned up and they were now moving their search to the middle of the river, near Sutton Place. I wished that I’d had a clearer view when I’d seen Jerry in the Park. I could not make out the little girl’s features, only that she had curly hair. The girl in the newspaper photo had curly hair too, but you couldn’t judge the color of it. I tore off the front page of the article and returned to the living room.

“Did you hear about this little girl?” I asked Jerry who was still seated on the sofa, cigar in hand.

“Can you wait until the commercial, honey?”

“No.” I turned off the set and stood in front of him. “Read this. The little girl in that story lived around here. They think someone might have molested and murdered her.”

He glanced at the page I shoved in front of him, then handed it back. I studied his face, but it was so wide, it didn’t gather into an emotion I could read.

“Are you upsetting yourself again about something?”

“What?”

“Wasn’t it last month—that story on the coatimundi that escaped from the zoo? You thought Mrs. Yosi was hiding it in her apartment.”

“She had something in there.”

“A ferret!”

“You can’t tell the difference at a distance, not from a distance and her door was only open a crack. I saw something poking its nose through—something with whiskers larger than a rat. I never saw a coatimundi, how was I supposed to know?”

“We went to the zoo all the time when you were a kid.”

“Will you stop talking about that and look at this?”

“I saw it. They’ll probably find her.”

“Oh no, there’s literally no chance of that. She’s been missing three days.”

“I ran away when I was a little boy.”

“This isn’t running away! Don’t you get it? She was abducted. Probably for no good reason.”

“You don’t know that. You’re jumping to conclusions again—getting yourself all worked up.” I continued to stare at him, as if he were an egg I could crack with my gaze. He picked up the glass of ginger ale, flaring his pinkie as he did so, which had a small ring with a turquoise stone.

“Where did you go when you ran away Jerry?”

He put the glass down. “The train station. My parents found me sleeping on a bench. I didn’t have enough money to go anywhere.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel bad for the little girl?”

He touched my arm. “I feel bad that you are reading about things like this and getting all worried about it. Why don’t we talk about things that’ll make you happy?”

“What are you talking about?” I hated it when Jerry got on this train of thought. How he turned things to his advantage.

“Why don’t you sit with me, honey, and watch the program. Then I’ll heat you up something to eat. You look like you’re getting thin again.”

I wondered what Jerry with his watery eyes and his owl-like face might be capable of. I realized that in a certain sense I didn’t know him that well because we were protected by habits and patterns which had always kept us at a certain distance from each other. Maybe this is common with people who have lived together a very long time. We had the kind of routine that felt like brainwashing: He would set his alarm for seven. I would lie in bed and hear the slap of his leather slippers against the bare floor. First the sound of the toilet flushing, then the sound of the shower, then the faucet in the kitchen as he filled the coffee pot, then the sounds of him moving about in his room as he dressed, then the sound of his worn oxfords as he opened the front door and picked up the paper, then followed the narrow hallway back to the kitchen, where he had his coffee and a bowl of corn flakes. Twenty minutes later he was up again. Sometimes he stopped at the closed door of my room and tapped so lightly that there was no way I could have heard him if I weren’t already awake. Depending on my mood, I would pretend to be asleep, or I would get up, wrap myself in a heavy robe and head to the kitchen for whatever was left of the coffee and maybe a stale Danish in the Enterman’s box on the counter, which he always forgot to reclose. We rarely ate together unless it was in front of the TV set. The sounds Jerry made when he ate and drank put me off my food. Then he’d scold me for not finishing what was on my plate. There was rarely time for conversation and what there was of it almost always centered around the TV, it was both our subject and our chaperone.

I switched the set back on and retreated to my room. I had cheated myself of the river and felt a longing for it, especially in my hands, which were always steady when they drew its rippled current.

It was after my mother’s death that drawing became important to me. Usually, it is difficult to find the precise moment when one’s life took a certain turn, but I can trace it to the exact day, three weeks after her funeral, a Saturday morning. I had tiptoed out to the incinerator room during breakfast with my plate of scrambled eggs which Jerry had once again prepared with too much oil, and slid them down the chute. I saw a nearly blank sketchbook sitting on the floor. When I brought it back to my desk, I was enchanted by the texture of the pages and the feel of my pencil as it moved across them. I was used to the smooth loose-leaf tablets of my grammar school, containers barely adequate even for words. But this was different—there was a relationship here, an opposition, the pencil making a scratchy sound against the rough surface of the page. I let my pencil bring out the shapes that I spied in the blank sheets, the shapes which were already there but not quite visible.

I had begun with no real skill or awareness of how to draw. But I followed my hand. It saw things in the environment which my eyes and my mind had no recognition of, or rather, had failed to share with me. I did not think of myself as an artist, for my art was only a recording device: the way a woman looked with her straw hat laying in her lap while she sat on a park bench, the carriage horses in front of the Plaza Hotel with their green spittle and strange circus-like plumes.

The seriousness of my endeavors did not escape Jerry’s attention—which surprised me, since he had become remote and machine-like in the weeks following my mother’s death. I expected that he would not recover, that he would continue to shrink in on himself, closing all the windows in the apartment and creeping about as if he feared his aliveness took up too much space. However, he had noticed my drawing, standing at my elbow as I sat before the window in my room sketching the moon and the amber halos it made on the bricks of the opposite building. Maybe he thought I could imbue him with the same light, for he offered to sit for me.

It was spring, just two months after my mother’s passing. He sat at the kitchen table with his arms folded in front of him, the blinds drawn up and directly above, a bare 100-watt bulb that was screwed into the ceiling fixture, the best light in the apartment. He sat that way for an hour every evening for several weeks, his short-sleeved shirt open at the collar, small beads of sweat forming above his eyebrows and on his upper lip. He seemed to suffer from the effort involved in being still. Something in him always seemed to be moving, creating disturbances in the space between us. His eyes kept meeting mine while I worked and in his eyes was a complexity that made it impossible for me to convert him to an outline. I kept trying to avoid his gaze, but his eyes followed me everywhere, to his cheekbones, his heavy, whiskered chin, his throat.

I told him that I didn’t want him to pose anymore.

“Can I see it?” It was at the end of a session, he was sitting across from me, a pitcher of Minute Maid and two glasses between us. He reached for the pad.

“I’m sorry Jerry. I couldn’t do it.” I showed him the pages of erased lines and redrawn contours.

“Maybe if we tried a different position.”

I told him no, but that night I slipped into his bedroom and watched him as he slept. His face was mashed down into the pillow and his body made an oblique angle, his knees brought close to his chest, his left ankle, the one he had broken when he had taken me sledding the year before, turned in an inhuman curl. I memorized his shape and went back to my room and spent the night recomposing what I had seen. By morning I had a finished drawing.

I got into the habit of drawing Jerry at night. He was a sound sleeper, and it was possible for me to bring in my pad and draw by the vector of light created by a bright window across the courtyard. I made about a dozen sketches, and he never stirred. After a month, I had exhausted all of Jerry’s positions, it was getting warmer and he had taken to wrapping himself only in a thin sheet, his open pajama top exposing the softened muscles in his chest. I stopped drawing him.

<><><>

MY DRAWINGS HELPED ME TO NEGOTIATE THE WORLD: it was a great comfort to know that everything had a limit. With the aid of a HB pencil, an edge could be contracted or expanded or removed all together, or darkened into an airtight frame. When I turned fourteen and my body betrayed the conception I’d had of it as a child, I was able to apply this system to myself and ignoring the confusing mass of organs and emotions that lay within, I drew and redrew my own contours until I had an outline that satisfied me. I looked at those drawings as if they were my mirror and I didn’t let my mind stray from them when I thought about myself.

<><><>

I CLOSED THE DOOR OF MY ROOM and turned off the single light and lay down fully clothed. I tried to imagine the little girl, using the lines of peeling plaster on the ceiling to form her outlines, but nothing familiar came. I felt myself on the border of falling asleep, yet I was afraid to let go. My dreams were a place I feared visiting. Troubling things roamed there: half-formed images and voices that in the powerlessness of my sleep seemed coarse and threatening.

The TV had a tranquilizing rhythm in the background. I couldn’t escape the vision of Jerry’s large hands as they pulled the paper ring from his cigar and handed it to me. I could smell his tobacco and the spaghetti and tomato sauce he had re-heated from the evening before. He had become the gatekeeper in my dreams, the last image at its entrance, just as my mother was the figure that moved in front of me as I passed through the gates. I watch her from the back, her tailored suit, the leopard print scarf wrapped expertly around her neck, her dark, turned-under hair. There is no evidence of the tubes that come out of her body like tendrils and the blue lips which are as hard as stone.

Why does she fade so quickly from sight when things start to happen, when the dream overtakes me, and I am lost in its embrace? I lose my bearing, with no lines, and none of my own order to guide me, the city becoming a labyrinth of unknown streets and abrupt turns. I look at the sky and it is black with crows that come in great waves from a cave in the mountains. Suddenly, I am deep within the recesses of that cave; I can feel its cold walls. I am surrounded by merging channels which defy gravity and splash against my bed and in my mouth is the sour taste of the water.

I yanked myself awake and went to the window. Above the brownstones across the street, I could see the navy sky, a few thin clouds swimming past, extending silver fins in front of the moon.

Turning away, I felt suddenly that I was without lines, unbound by edges. This was a thought that terrified and thrilled me. I heard Jerry moving about in the living room. No longer on the rim of dreaming, I opened my door and stepped through the flickering beam of the TV into the small hallway between us. Jerry was pacing back and forth, crying into a huge, wrinkled handkerchief. When he saw me, he stopped and roughly wiped his eyes.

“You did it, didn’t you?” I said. “You did something to that little girl!”

He had unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt, revealing the St. Christopher medal he wore at his throat. His chest looked particularly wide. If he were to hold me, I would be crushed.

I stood in front of him, so he had to stop moving.

“I want to leave you, Jerry. I want to get the hell out of here and have my own life”. He’d stopped crying but was hiccuping like a child who was dried out of sobs. He put his hand out for me, but I didn’t take it.

Then the room shifted: a flock of black sparrows flew out of the couch, and I knew I was still dreaming. There was water seeping in from the outside, from giant waves that were hitting the windows with such force I expected them at any moment to explode. Jerry put his hand on my arm, and I realized that he had finally moved through the gate, that he was now with me in my dreams, taking up the same volumes of space he did when I was awake. Suddenly, we were on the rocks that the waves were crashing against, jutting out from the slope of the mountain, a bloated purse, an orange juice container and dozens of cigar butts swirling around our feet. The rain beat down from the darkened sky with such fury, I knew it was only a matter of time before we drowned. I held onto Jerry as if he were the trunk of a tree, pressing my face against his chest, which left painful welts on my skin. He squeezed me tightly. My mind broke apart into a dozen pieces that were released into the river and washed away. A branch was growing out of my forehead. I saw it all now: Jerry and I entwined on the river’s bed for all eternity, the earth and the people we had known, dissolving around us.

<><><>

WHEN I WOKE UP MY HEART WAS POUNDING so hard the bed was rattling under me. I was sitting straight up, my chest heaving up and down under my clothes. There was light in the room and the apartment was quiet. I looked at the clock: 9am. Jerry would already be at work. I got up and moved quickly into the kitchen, afraid that I would be caught in the snare of another dream. As usual, he had left his dishes in the sink, a bowl of shriveled corn flakes and the plate stained with tomato sauce from the night before. I couldn’t bear to touch them. My own appetite had deserted me.

Since I didn’t have to be at work until noon, I decided to go down to the river to see if there was any progress in the search for the little girl. I didn’t take my sketchbook with me. My hands were ringing, as if they had been touched by a tuning fork.

The police and their boats were gone without a trace. The water had a strange glow on its surface—it did nothing to dispel the atmosphere of the dream which clung to me like an unwanted soul.

I spent the afternoon at the office updating codes on patient files, bent over the metal counter for so long I got a cramp in my neck. The people I worked with didn’t talk to me as usual, but I caught them sending curious glances my way. Maybe it wasn’t a day I was supposed to be there—I often lost track of those things, but they paid me anyway.

When the evening finally came, I left the office and went for a long walk down East End Avenue. I sat down on the stoop of a brownstone on 84th street, a much nicer one than Jerry’s and mine, and looked at the sky. The Big Dipper and hundreds of other stars in configurations I didn’t recognize were clearly visible. It was an unusual sight for the city. I thought of the North Star tugging the constellations across the galaxy, but the vision seemed shallow. The sky, not even divided by a layering of clouds, had no depth. Still, I decided I would spend the evening there.

My mind started traveling through space, reforming an old constellation I hadn’t thought about in years: the three of us, my mother, Jerry and me. He is breathing on her neck, balancing his hand on the small of her back and my mother is combing her hair, dropping long black hairs on us. I can’t see her face but it’s prettier than mine, and she smells better too, of vanilla and chamomile. She is several inches taller, like a great white pine and I wonder how I will ever reach her, or how my clumsy fingers will hold such elegant, skinny rings. But there is a voice that locates me, I move under it for shelter. She isn’t talking to me, her laughter is directed at Jerry and he answers back, his eyes watering. I can sense the thrill in his heavy body, and the way it is shaped to hers, leaning into her space and diminishing the little piece of her shadow I have thought of as my own.

We are going out to dinner together. Hands reach down to tighten the bow in the back of my hair. I walk behind them like a dog without a leash, obediently heeling, rushing inside when they open the doors in case they forget and shut them on me. I can’t remember how my mother looks across the table. She is suffused with an aura, which is lilac, whatever the actual hue of the room we are in. I can’t remember if I ever was able to see past the veil of her personality or if this blindness is a consequence of her death, some kind of comforting haze my mind has wrapped around her memory. Even if the photographs hadn’t existed, I would have known that she was beautiful—knew it by the troubling ripple it made in my mind when I saw a pretty woman in the street with pumps and lipstick and little flowered pins threading through her hair, her beauty left behind like an unshakable scent.

<><><>

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when I decided it was time to move off the stoop. I got up and headed over to the river.

There were no people around and the surface of the water was uninterrupted by the plowing of the transit ships. I stood for a long time at the railing and then proceeded to walk north, where the walkway eventually narrowed to a tarred road and finally ended by an abandoned shed, out from which projected a rotting wharf. Where I stood, the drop to the river was only five feet. Below the crumbling rail was a stone ledge and in front of that, rocks covered in blackened seaweed and moss, which met the shallow river with its half-submerged stones and rotting garbage, so close that I could breathe it. The water that coursed over the rocks was brown, edged with white foam.

Without giving it any conscious thought, I twisted my body through a large gap in the rusted railing and jumped down to the stone shelf and stepped carefully onto the rocks. Just then, from east of me, I saw the approach of the North Star as it pulled its nameless freight and for a minute I lost my bearings, the empty sky had turned into the sea, and I was part of a constellation that was stretching out across the universe. I thought of how I might draw this vision, but the lines didn’t come to me and anyway, I couldn’t think of a surface large enough to contain it. The river was lapping at the tips of my sneakers. The top layer of water, di-luted by the current, had become transparent. I knelt on the rock, feeling its grainy surface against my knees and looked cautiously under the water.

About three feet ahead of me was a dark mass. At first, it looked like the trunk of a tree, its four limbs and sodden leaves entangled by some kind of black netting. But leaning closer, I saw that it was a body. Perhaps it had been trapped by the splintered poles of the wharf, and the waves created by the passing barge had freed it. I looked about for a stick and found instead a stiff piece of rope with a knotted end. It was caught in the hollow between two rocks and when I pulled it loose, it cut my palm.

I thought of the loyalty I’d had to the river and the feel of it in my hands, which now bled from the rope. I felt the usual loneliness, unsure of who I was in relation to the people who were no longer with me. I wondered if there was some kind of life I was supposed to have that got spooned up on another shore like a gasping fish. Across the water there were sirens in Queens, and I could see the single lighthouse on the jetty, its rotating beam reaching out from Roosevelt Island, but no one could see me. I pitched the rope out as far as it could extend so that it touched the body. It took several throws before it caught under the chin, and I was able to pull it toward me.

There were weeds wrapped in its inky hair and the face was covered in slime, but even so, as soon as it came closer to the rocks, I could see that it wasn’t a child at all. I kneeled back down and, stretching forward as far as I dared, pulled it toward me by the hair and discovered it was a doll. At least three feet in length and missing an eye but with all the limbs intact, its torn gingham dress clinging to it like a swaddling cloth. I picked it up—it was as heavy as an anchor—and rested it on a bed of seaweed on the rocks behind me. It smelled of sea and sewage, the malignancy of the river bottom. I was repelled by having touched it and tried to make my senses retreat from my nerve-endings so I wouldn’t be aware of the ugly paste on my hands. I stepped off the rock and into the shallow water. Pointy objects scraped against my shins and my shoes were deeply sunk in mud. Using the rope as a stiff, half-formed lasso, I cast it out over and over again to see what it might hook, until my hands were bleeding, and my legs numb from the cold water. Yet, still I cast it out and each time it came back empty. I lost track of my thoughts; I might have been standing inside a dream. The river refused to give up its secrets.

When dawn came, the dirty surface of the water became opaque, and I could no longer see beneath it. The sky, now a pale blue, still contained the white shadow of a moon, and the darkness in which I was submerged no longer felt like my element.

I got out of the water and, leaving the doll on the rocks, stepped back on the stone shelf, heaved myself up through the parted railing and onto the walkway. I wasn’t sure where to go. I felt the sewage from the night on my body and I couldn’t bear to inhabit it. The light in the park had a strange, pre-snow feeling, as if at any moment, electrical sparks might come shimmering out of the sky. I felt for the first time a little alive to the morning, like there might be something in it for me.

My legs and shoes were pasted with the river’s dark muck and amber tuffs of seaweed wriggled in my shoelaces. I started running, through the deserted park and the empty streets, not slowing down until I had reached my building. I had not planned to go home but knew I had to get the river off me. I ran up the three flights of stairs, not stopping for breath so there were flecks before my eyes and a painful stitch on my side. Once inside the dark apartment, I went straight to my bedroom and turned on a light. Opened out on the bedspread was the late edition of the newspaper:

MISSING CHILD FOUND IN CALIFORNIA, KIDNAPPED BY EX-HUSBAND.

I couldn’t penetrate the blurry text below it. I went into the bathroom and took a shower, trying to wash the river from me, yet an odor like a decaying animal clung to me. Wrapped in a robe, I stood before my bed, it was so flat and clean it seemed wrong to disturb it.

Then a light tap on the door, which I’d left partly open.

He was standing as if he had been hatched from the darkness of the hall, his hair half standing up and sheet burns creasing his left cheek.

“I thought I heard the water going. I just wanted to make sure you were alright. I’m not spying but it’s after five in the morning.” He looked over at my pile of wet, soiled clothes on the bathroom floor. I knew he wanted to ask where I’d been but was fighting himself.

“Thank you for the newspaper.”

The space between us felt like a blank sheet. I wanted to trace what lay under the surface: Jerry and me forming a partial triangle in the shadows of my room.

He went to my bed and picked up the newspaper.

“There—what did I tell you? It doesn’t all end bad.”

I felt so tired that my hands were shaking. I tucked them into “I saw you last week Jerry, in Central Park with a little girl.”

“Last week? I wasn’t in the Park.”

“Yes, in the afternoon.” He was looking at me directly. I tried to decipher the mood in his eyes, but they were blank.

“I haven’t been to Central Park for a long time.” He came over to me and touched my hair. “Don’t go to bed with it wet like that. You’ll get a cold.”

“Jerry, I don’t believe you. You must have been there.”

“I wasn’t.”

I looked at him, trying to form something new around him, a new idea as to who he was. Then I thought about the river, how little I had really understood until I was inside it.

I shivered at the thought.

I could feel the warmth of his hand brushing my neck. I had two impulses: to walk away and, equally strong, to stay where I was.

“Jerry, you could try to help me. Maybe if I could remember things better, I’d have a chance.”

“I used to take you to the Park, on Saturdays, when your mother was at Saks. We’d pick up frozen custards at the boathouse and sometimes we’d go to Alice in Wonderland. When you finished your ice cream, you’d climb up and lay down in Alice’s lap. Gave me half a heart attack. I was afraid you’d slide off. You did slide off once. Bumped your head, but not bad. I guess you don’t remember.”

“No.”

He looked genuinely disappointed.

“I thought I saw you there.”

“I wouldn’t go back, too many memories. That happens when you get old like me—you stay away from the things that make you feel sad. The world gets smaller and smaller. You’re too young to know all that.”

“Then I guess you don’t think about my mother that much.”

I don’t know why I said it. I thought I saw anger flash in Jer-ry’s eyes. He flushed and it was perhaps by contrast that I noticed how gray his hair and eyebrows had become. He stood close to me, composed not only of planes and angles but of some kind of strange melancholy emanating from deep inside. He leaned down and kissed my cheek and I felt the sting of his whiskers against my face.

“Jerry, did I become who you thought I was going to be? I guess I’m not anything like her.”

“The way I remember your mother is like a dream from long ago. She’s very vague, her image is constantly shifting. But you have always been the same.”

I felt some fleeting happiness as if someone had placed a warm hand on my shoulder. The years we had lived at opposite poles seemed to dissolve between us. A strange word formed on my lips which I had never said in his presence, but he didn’t give me the chance. He backed out of the room and closed the door.

When I lay down, I wondered if I had really seen Jerry in the park at all. I had forgotten what the years have taught me, that my eyes give me images my mind cannot trust. Only my hands tell the truth, and they had not recorded the vision. I began to breathe again, to take air into the cavity, which was as deep as my soul.

I closed my eyes and almost immediately fell asleep. Jerry was with me, holding my hand the way he did when I was a little girl and we walked through the gate together and into my dream. We were outside, in a vast open space, before us the clouds raced across the horizon and the river expanded in front of us as far as the eye could see. Black ships like dark stars neatly parted its surface, and released into the night the ghosts of those who would never come between us.

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