Page 73 of A Summer to Save Us

T wo months have passed since that day in Yosemite, but it feels like a lifetime. I’m back home in Cottage Grove. I can hardly believe it myself.

If I fall asleep at all, I end up waking around four in the morning and wandering through the house, driven by a restlessness that makes my heart tighten.

Tonight, after several laps through the living room, hallway, and stairwell, I’m sitting on the kitchen table again and staring out through the tilted window.

But all I see is my reflection. My hair is light brown again.

Arizona dyed it for me; unfortunately, there’s a green tinge in the daylight, but I didn’t want to be blonde anymore.

June was blonde with blonde curls. Zozoo wrote to me and attached a picture that he found in River’s things.

In the photo, she’s even wearing a batwing blouse.

The picture confused me. I had always imagined June to be elfin and ethereally beautiful.

Like a goddess. Simply because River loved her so much.

But the June in the photo looks like a normal girl—except for the scar that runs from her temple to her chin.

This scar gives her face something bizarre.

And that’s what River always loved. Beauty in the ordinary.

My eyes moisten. I can’t think of River without crying. I can’t even walk past the coat rack without crying because I smell the leather of James’ jacket.

Sometimes, when bad things happen, the events become blurred so that they seem dreamlike afterward, and fragments repeatedly flare up.

This is because the human brain is overwhelmed when processing them, and they’re not able to be stored properly.

At least, that’s how James explained it to me.

Our thalamus filters all sensory impressions, then feelings and events are linked in the amygdala.

The geographic and temporal assignment takes place in the hippocampus, and the whole thing goes into the long-term memory of the cerebral cortex as a fixed memory.

However, when bad events occur, the assignment of the incidents in regard to reality in the hippocampus is disrupted.

Ultimately, real memories are missing, or there are gaps in memory.

These incomplete, unsaved memories drift around in the brain like emotional soap bubbles.

But as soon as something reminds you of the situation from back then, they burst and scream loudly: Here I am!

Maybe that’s why I sometimes still experience the events of that day as if they’re happening now.

Maybe that’s why the smell of James’ black leather jacket is often enough to take me back to Yosemite National Park.

Maybe that’s why I sometimes burst into tears for seemingly no reason when I look up at the sky for a long time—that infinite blue that seems as deep as River’s eyes, as deep and wide as a free fall.

I keep asking myself if River suspected that I had betrayed him.

Today, I know how sensitive people with bipolar disorder can be, especially when they’re manic—that they have inner antennas and can pick up vibrations that others miss.

Maybe that’s why he always said or did the right thing at the right time.

I don’t know. I’ll never know if he was actually bipolar because that diagnosis can only be made after a few years based on the course of the illness, regardless of what Clark Davenport thinks he knows about it.

Maybe River was merely a lost soul with a heart of gold.

But whatever he suffered from, I firmly believe that neglect during his childhood and emotional deprivation were partly to blame.

I believe they were the reason he wanted to be loved by the world so badly and that no love in the world would ever have been enough to fill that void.

Not even mine.

Not even mine .

I swallow. Even today, I can smell the scent of the waterfalls and the pines, and even today, I can taste his gentle kiss on my lips—that sweet, bitter hint of farewell that eluded me in those seconds.

Words, feelings, and images move through my thoughts, unsorted and out of order. His rough voice drifts to me as if from far away.

“Hey, Tucks, wait a minute.”

I blink, staring out into the night.

“Tucks. Close your eyes, okay.”

I do it, just as I had back then. Our little fingers intertwined. The last touch. His whispered words in my ear: “Promise me something?” The blind panic in my mind when I realized what he was planning. The terror in my throat.

He said something about not coming after him and that there was nothing in the world you could have done to stop it .

He’s walking backward—or maybe he’s running again.

I remember the salt on my face, tears that just keep running and running.

The scratchy pine branches as I chase after him across the rocky ground.

The stumbling, the getting up again. The thought that there aren’t enough guardrails here.

He’s shouting for me to stop already, damn it , and he’s so fast. He’s too fast for me, as always. I can’t catch him.

I remember the helicopters and search parties when it was over.

We were going to be River and Tucks forever .

A cold wind blows across my cheeks through the tilted window. It’s already freezing outside.

“I love you,” I whisper, even though he can’t hear me. My pale reflection looks back at me from the window.

I wipe away my tears in silence.

“Kansas?”

Frightened, I look around and see Dad standing in the kitchen doorway. He’s wearing his dark blue pajamas, which he wore the night he mistook me for Mom. Deep bags hang under his eyes like crumpled, wet tea bags. “It’s freezing cold. You opened the window again.”

He cautiously comes around the kitchen table and closes it, leaning over the table and brushing my arm. He smells of his bitter aftershave, of man and Dad.

“You did this when Mom left, remember?”

Surprised, I look at him. “I thought you hadn’t noticed.”

He laughs briefly and looks like Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises . As if the responsibility of the whole world was on his shoulders. “I tucked you in. Night after night, I closed the window and opened it again at six in the morning so you wouldn’t notice that I had been there.”

I slide off the kitchen table in my white nightgown. “Why? Why wouldn’t I notice?” Confused, I shake my head and wipe the rest of the tears away.

“You were angry with me. You thought it was my fault.” He’s silent. “You never said it, but I saw it in your eyes.”

“Dad, I thought you were mad at me. I thought you thought Mom had left because I was such a difficult child. You told Aunt Jessie on the phone that if I hadn’t been so painfully shy, Mom would still be here...”

“Oh, Kansas.” Now he looks like he wants to give me a hug.

“You weren’t really difficult. You were shy, yes, and I didn’t know how to deal with you sometimes.

” He shoves his hands into the pockets of his pajama bottoms. “Your Mom met William Sparks in your therapist’s waiting room.

He was there with his niece, helping his sister since she was unavailable. He was visiting from the West Coast.”

“Mom wha...” My jaw drops. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

He brushes his sleep-ruffled curls off his forehead. “I didn’t want you to blame yourself. I had no way of knowing that you were listening in on the phone. You’re not supposed to eavesdrop, are you?”

I smile guiltily as he winks at me. Yes, I can smile again, but it still hurts. It feels a bit like I’m wearing a hard plaster mask that my muscles have to fight.

“I liked the blonde hair,” Dad admits now, shifting from one foot to the other. “It looked less like her.”

“You still miss her.” Once again, I think of River, and my throat becomes tight and hot, as if I’d swallowed a freshly roasted chestnut. “Dad, she left us and never contacted us. You shouldn’t miss someone like that. She let us all down.” River, on the other hand...

“I know. But sometimes the mind and heart disagree.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “A hot chocolate with extra cream?” he asks, opening the kitchen cupboard.

I am miserable and terribly lonely. I hardly eat anything, but I don’t want to curb his renewed caring because it’s the only way he can show me what I mean to him. “Sure,” I say and nod eagerly, even though everything inside me is raw and hollow.

Dad puts the kettle on.

I turn to the kitchen, window and for an instant, I believe I see River standing behind the pane in the cold night, resting his forehead against the glass and winking at me, but that’s impossible.

Tears well in my eyes again.

The day before yesterday, Arizona and I watched all the recordings of Demons ’N Saints’ live concerts.

I wanted to see River in action, not just in one of the photos on my phone that I know almost by heart.

I took most of them when I knew he was Chester’s brother.

Every now and then, I took a photo of the two of us.

River, however, has nothing in common with Asher Blackwell in any of the photos.

Asher Blackwell is a stranger to me. Even his voice didn’t sound like River's during the live concerts, as I had hoped.

Only now and then, during a fleeting gesture as he ran his hand through his hair or in a smile, did I recognize River behind all that makeup.

And those moments—those flashes of love in my heart—were a thousand times worse than the moments when he was a stranger to me.

Their current album is now all over the charts.

All the songs they should have played at the concerts. An entire nation is mourning.

Dad pours the hot water into the two mugs with heart-shaped handles that James gave Arizona and me for our twelfth birthday. He meticulously stirs the chocolate powder and then puts a huge dollop of whipped cream on top.

“Drink,” he says and presses a mug into my hand. He avoids my gaze—I don’t think he can watch me cry without it physically hurting him. “It’s good after such a cold night,” he adds. “I don’t understand what the point is, but you do.”

“To sleep down here?” I ask. I sniff the steaming drink, but my stomach turns.

Food and I still don’t really get along.

When I eat, it’s only because I know I need strength.

I glance out the window into the darkness again.

River isn’t out there—I know that—but I can’t stop waiting for him. It is completely crazy.

The first snowflakes drift by—thick flakes like cotton balls or glittering white stars. Snow-star-flurries. Nightlight-flakes. Sky-tear-crystals.

My heart clenches. “I think if I sit here long enough, maybe he’ll come back,” I reply quietly, a deep wave of sadness sweeping over me. “Then I’ll be the first to see him...”

Dad looks concerned. “Oh, Kans...”

“Did you know that River slept on June’s grave for a year?”

“No.” My dad relaxes his shoulders by rolling them around. “Why did he do that?”

“He couldn’t let go of her. He said it was his fault that she killed herself.”

“No one is solely to blame for something like that. I hope you know that.”

Yes, I understand it now. River’s words helped me. There was nothing in the world that you could have done to stop it . He didn’t want me to hold on to him, so now I have to let him go—a little bit more every day.

Dad looks at me, and something strange happens to his eyes. They glitter with moisture in the dim kitchen light. “It must have been so bad for you. Kansas, we still haven’t talked about what happened that day when...”

“I talked to Arizona; it’s okay,” I reply evasively.

River did all that for me. He gave me my sister back.

And James. Last weekend, we rode our old bikes out to the oil refinery and marveled at the green glow of the steel towers and pipelines until dawn.

We even climbed and balanced on the adjacent unused site.

It was almost like it used to be. If only there wasn’t always that wrenching pain in my chest and I didn’t have to think about River every time.

About his crooked smile and his smoky voice, about the tender hey and his irresistible baby .

Sometimes, I imagine he’s with me, wrapping his arms around me and whispering a hundred beautiful words in my ear.

Then I smell his breath—that mixture of caramel-sweet Jack Daniel’s and a freshness that tastes like freedom.

During those moments, when I miss him so much, I feel like I die a bit.

I long for the feeling of the slackline under my bare feet and the wind on my face.

I want to run lines with him between the firs again, escape through blue-green rivers, and discover the feeling of love.

I want to put myself in danger and feel safe again, just to experience the intensity of life.

I want to make love to him, to feel him as deeply as I did back in Las Vegas.

Damn it, I just want him back.

The paradox is that he never really existed.

I loved someone who didn’t exist. It’s as if I had fallen in love with a phantom or a character from a fairy tale.

River McFarley was merely a projection of River’s own desires—how he wanted to be.

The eternal savior, always in a good mood.

Daring and bold. He wanted to pay off Tanner Davenport’s debt, but in his dark hours, Tanner was always with him.

Tears are streaming down my cheeks again and dripping into the cream on my cocoa. “I miss him, Dad,” I choke out as I set the cup down because the cocoa is spilling over. “I miss him so much that everything hurts. Sometimes, I feel like I can hardly breathe because I miss him so much...”

Dad puts down his cup and approaches the kitchen table. And after so many years, he takes me in his arms tightly and presses me to his chest. I suddenly feel small again, like the child I once was—back when I needed his comfort, and he couldn’t be there for me.

“I know how bad missing him and longing for him can be, sweetheart,” he says quietly, without letting go. He holds me as tightly as he can, and that’s another thing River did for me.

I cry in my dad’s arms, feeling how much all of this connects us.

The missing. The longing. The love.

It’s truly bizarre.

River would have liked it.