Slow River

“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner. Do you know what I’m entrusting to you? I think she did. “My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been…” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my… Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so…” the monster “my…” the monster “so Oster couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand…” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even… He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”

What did Stella say? he had asked.

No one tells me anything, I replied.

But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.

Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old…”

“Yes.”

“But you think Greta was abused, too.”

“Yes.”

“Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time… Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”

“I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”

“Katerine was there when you woke up?”

“Yes.” I was puzzled.

“Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”

“Yes…” I said slowly.

“Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”

Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What I have done to her?

“It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.

Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.

Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.

“But she’s my mother,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly to my knees, before I could get air into my lungs.

My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost.

I started pulling on my coat. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Are you all right.”

“I don’t know. But I need to think.”

The air above the wharf was heavy with damp, the scent of timbers softened and swollen with rain and river water. I slipped down the right alleyway, found the panel set in the pavement, and levered it open. I laid my fingers lightly on the switches, then Hipped them. The lights went out.

There was no moon and the stars hid behind soft black clouds; nothing to reflect from the water. Just me. I sat down on the wharf, careless of the cold. I could feel the river rather than see it: distended by the rains of the last two days to a thick, dark tongue feeling its way blindly to the sea. Somewhere downriver a barge bumped hollowly against its moorings. Water lapped softly at the timbers.

An old river made old sounds. The water at Ratnapida had never sounded or smelled like this. There, it fountained in the sunshine, tinkled on stone, plopped when a fish surfaced for a fly. Even the rain sparkled—fast showers, followed by rainbows and glistening grass. Young water, and lighthearted. Maybe that was why Stella had chosen the fountain as her backdrop…

It all seemed so different now: Stella desperate and pleading, begging for Oster to notice, to do something. Giving him, and me, clues that we couldn’t see.