to the river by diana s. adams book preview

8/17/2019 To the River by Diana S. Adams Book Preview

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TO THE R IVER

BY DIANA S. ADAMS

B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ]Buffalo, New York


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To The River by Diana S. AdamsCopyright © 2016Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced withoutthe publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations inreviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, eventsand incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination orused in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, livingor dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

Cover Art by Diana Adams

First EditionISBN: 978-1-60964-213-6Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937805

BlazeVOX [books]131 Euclid AveKenmore, NY 14217

[email protected]

publisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [books]

blazevox.org

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9

He kneels by the brown-green river, tempted to

take a sip, but he knows it could make him sick if he

drinks from it. The river runs down from the

mountains through two towns before reaching this

spot in the ravine. He dips in a finger; the current is

full of strength and loaded with spring debris. He can

see his own warped reflection. The North

Saskatchewan River could easily own him right now;

it is reeling back at him and the paper birch along the

bank—they could go down too. The branches hang

low to flick their black onto the water’s surface.

As he looks past the line of trees he sees a woman

running with a German shepherd. She’s fast,

sprinting on the pathway, and her face is rigid with

exertion. The dog, soft-eyed, watches him as though

sensing him out. A few yards away the gish-gish

sounds of her running shoes stop on the pathway;

she’s not going this close to the water. She is cautious

but athletic-bound and must walk past him to


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continue on with her run. The dog pulls on the leash,

trying to come closer to him, but she yanks the dog

back, scolding it into submission. He’s seen her

before, broad-faced, healthy, hair tied back in a thick

ponytail like a schoolgirl. He recognizes that she’s a

certain type of woman, the type to always do the right

thing. He moves his weight onto his thighs and

relaxes his body. Now that he is being watched, it is

easy to shift into his ordinary self, the more casual

John Donner he has learned to become to keep

people at ease. Hello, you have reached John Donner.

His name on the old office recording flowed nicely

with vowel sounds strung together. He made his

voice a little higher in tone too, aiming to please.

Clients. Back then he was taking people’s money and

basically gambling it away. The market was a

playground, cash flowing around the world,

overnight, when he got up, before he went to bed.

The river is only a background now, rolling away

from him. He gives the woman a small smile of

greeting and holds out his hand to the dog. Hey, big

fella. The dog wants to come to him; he can see it in

its beige-black eyes. He knows dogs deep inside, their

pack needs, wolf thoughts.


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11

The woman nods with her eyes averted and then

her right foot slips, or at least that’s what he thinks.

There is a blank space of time and then before he

knows it he is holding on to her forearm, her red

running jacket twisting in his hand. But she is looking

at him in astonishment and there is raw fear in her

eyes. That’s when he has his first shock of doubt:

Why isn’t she grateful? Her mouth opens and before

the word ‘Help’ can begin to come out of it, he’s got

his other hand over her mouth. He won’t be able to

clear this from his head for months. At work, at

home, every time he steps through his front door. Her

dark blond hair falling out of the ponytail. His hand

going over her mouth, her lips underneath his palm.

She tries to bite his hand. He pushes his palm down

on the lips harder, feeling her teeth underneath the

gums. He can’t seem to breathe properly and he

doesn’t know if she is pushing or pulling. The river is

churning dangerously only one foot away. For a long

moment they are locked in this awkward hold. Now

he is afraid she will push him over the bank into the

water. His confusion and fear is so great he’s tempted

to take her to the ground. It’s like he has somehow

stepped into a movie. Surely this very scene has

played out before; he remembers it detail by detail.


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12

He keeps going over the facts in his mind, about

her foot and whether it slipped. She is wearing blue

and red running shoes that had little mud on them

until now. If she didn’t slip, then he is in deep

trouble. A few seconds ago he was so mesmerized by

the river that he now wonders if he didn’t create the

very event he was afraid of. There it was; that’s what

really worried him. He was capable of screwing up

again. Self-sabotage was the word Dr. Enzer had used.

How many traps can he make for himself? Messing

up other people and himself at the same time? So far

in the past two years he had kept it all together, and

he just wanted to get through this next phase without

trouble. But here was trouble in a gigantic way,

lurching up at him like a big black bus that he might

not be able to avoid.

He remembers Dr. Enzer saying that he must

release himself from an event at the first recognition,

he must engage in dialectical behavior therapy. But her

foot did slip, he tells himself, this is not that. Now he

is sure of it. The image of the shoe is burned in his

brain. This is not one of those events, he tells himself

again, and he tries to calm himself with deep breaths

through his nose.


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13

The shepherd is whimpering, turning around

and around in circles. Somehow even the dog is

aware that he is not accosting her. He tilts his head to

the animal as if to say, There, there is my proof.

He knows he has to let her go but worries that she

might put them both in the water. He needs to

somehow make things right. It is like pushing a huge

rock up a steep hill. He needs to change the situation

now. There must be an explanation; it can’t go down

this way so suddenly. He removes his hand from her

mouth. They move quickly away from danger.

Her panicked breathing is studded with

coughing, and now they stand apart on solid ground

far from the edge of the river. There is a small

amount of blood on her lips. He knows he has to steer

this now. He’s done it before and did it well in front

of a judge and the attacking lawyers. A jolt of hope

runs through him. He can do this, yes, yes, he can.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he hears himself saying calmly, in

his best voice, the one everyone wants to hear. ‘I

thought you were falling…’

A heavyset man is approaching them, his fat legs

running comically light on the path. And now the

dog is barking, followed by low growls at the other

man. John’s hands are up in the air. ‘Everything is


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fine,’ he says. The man is appraising him, putting

himself between the woman and then advancing

stealthily toward him. His hair is shaved short around

his round face and there is sweat on his smooth

forehead. Then, without much movement, he grabs

both of John’s arms and wrenches them up behind

John’s back.

‘Beth, what’s going on here? Is he causing any

trouble?’

She and John study each other, her flat green-

brown eyes darting to the river and back. She shakes

her head. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she says. John

is starting to get queasy and might easily be sick if not

for his ability to somehow get a hold of a problematic

situation, as he has done so many times before, an

expert at changing a difficult encounter from

confrontation to affirmation.

‘I tripped and he, yes, he did keep me from

falling. But it was a bit too much to cover my mouth.

It hurt.’

‘I thought you were going to panic, that’s why I

did it. We both could have ended up in the river.’

His arms are set free; he shakes them to get rid of

the deep ache in his shoulder joints. Then he takes

out his wallet and finds his driver’s license. He’s not


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sure why—it’s the last thing he would normally want

to do—but there is something official about it. He

shows them the photo, the amiable smile and clean-

shaven jawline of health and success.

‘Look, I thought you were going to fall and tried

to pull you back. I’m sorry if I startled you, but the

river is very dangerous at this time of year.’

For a long moment she and the heavyset man

both stand there, examining him. His dark-blue golf

jacket, the khaki pants, reasonably pressed. The man

takes John’s license and flattens his lips. The high

sides of the ravine surrounded them, with only the

narrow pathway between them and the river. The

slopes are thick with shrubbery and rock, brown with

flecks of green just starting to emerge in the

undergrowth. In the winter John had seen a pack of

coyotes coming down the banks, healthy beige-furred

beasts that had no intention of wavering their course

even though he was directly in their path. He yelled

and hollered, and the coyotes finally retreated,

traversing the sloping banks before coming down

onto the pathway some distance ahead of him.

‘John, is it?’ The man is looking back down at his

license. ‘I’m Len, Len Crawford. You reside on 14477


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16

Ravine Drive? So happens you two are only a few

doors away from each other.’

John nods, relieved that Len is now

conversational. ‘Are you with the police?’

‘I retired from the force a few years ago, but I still

have a knack for detailing a scene. Yeah, you seem

okay. Sorry if I got confused there for a second, you

were just trying to help. I’m sorry for wrenching your

arms.’

The woman’s eyes are shifting erratically, as if

she’s going over the events, looking for the answer as

to why there is something missing. The dog is sniffing

the ground, still moving around in circles, and then it

flops down to rest. She squats to pat it and then grabs

the fur around its neck, her eyes moving again from

him back to the river behind them.

John says, ‘Can I do anything for you? This is all

bit confusing—I was sitting here by the river

worrying about the possibility of someone falling in,

and then there you were.’

She’s pulling herself together and nodding.

Everything he’s saying hits the right mark. He feels

more relief wash over him. She is adjusting her jacket

and scraping mud off the bottom of her shoes on a

rock, shaking her head at the other man. There is a


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17

slight smile of embarrassment on her face. The pupils

of her eyes are huge. He knows how she works,

always putting things together in her thoughts and

fitting them into the perfect holes and squares.

‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Len says to her, holding

her by the elbow. The dog is leading her, anxious to

be walking again.

‘If I were you, I would try not to stand so close to

the bank next time,’ Len says to him with firm

politeness.

She looks back only once as they walk away. He’s

alone again, and the rushing sound of the river is

getting on his nerves.

From the pathway that goes up the hills of the

ravine he can see his house, a small stone-faced

bungalow constructed in the late 1960s in a Frank

Lloyd Wright style, built to last in a classic yet

modern line. Pride swells thick in him. He walks

faster, his boots taking up mud and grass in the

treads. Although he has lived here two years now, he

still finds it hard to believe the house is his, his alone.

Claire is nowhere near this house, except perhaps in

the car parked in the dirty-floored garage. The car

she insisted they buy, dark red and curved like an

animal. She would never own a house like this and


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probably had never even been in one, mortar

crumbling around the edges of the stone, the swirled

half-circles of rusting white wrought iron on the front

railing, the impossible wallpaper inside of snakes and

ferns. Her need for beauty would be repelled by the

beige shag carpet and the green fabric lamps that

haven’t moved in more than thirty years. And the

river too; it would be too much for her. It was not a

scenic lake or a swelling ocean; she had no use for

bodies of water that she couldn’t swim in. So, the

river became his own, a place he could go to get

outside of the ovens of the Bonnet Bakery after

working since the early hours of the morning, to get

outside of his own head and get outside of hers, her

thoughts still running through him daily like a drip.

The wooden steps out of the MacKinnon Ravine

are steep. He runs up them, the mud caked on his

boots slowing him down. His heart thuds so rapidly it

almost hurts. When he first thought about what it

might be like in Edmonton, he imagined it would be

dry and flat. Instead, he was confronted with a lush

river valley, dense and jungle-like, with some of the

tallest trees he’d ever seen. Towering spruce and pine

line the ravine, digging their roots into the rich

Alberta earth in search of a sip of the water table that


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19

rises up the steep banks of the North Saskatchewan

River. Oil Country, hockey, oil money.

‘Hey, Donner.’

Hanging over the wooden railing at the top, a

man waves his large, fleshy hand. George, a retired

anesthesiologist, is his neighbor six doors down. As

he tells anybody who will listen, since his wife died

five years ago he’d packed on the weight and was

eating through grief. He still found it necessary to

give out medical advice, particularly during flu

season.

‘What’s up, George? I usually don’t see you till

much later.’

‘Damn knee. Got me up early, probably when

you were only halfway through work.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Big game tonight. The Kings. Want to grab a bite

at the bar and watch?’

Before he can answer, George has a low croak of

a cough. The sound shocks him and just for a second

John can see into his mouth. Luminous and red, the

thick pads of his cheeks are cartoonishly round. John

looks away to the houses behind them so he doesn’t

have to see George spit into the dirt.


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‘Just a lingering bronchial difficulty.’ He reaches

into his coat, and John wonders how many years he

has had this black coat, as it barely stretches over his

large stomach and looks like it cuts into his waist.

Instead of tissue, George pulls out an egg salad

sandwich, undoing the tight cafeteria wrapping with

efficient fingers.

‘Protein, something you bakers don’t get enough

of,’ George says.

‘Oh, come on, I eat more than bread. I’m just

damn good at making it.’ And then, not wanting to

offend George, he adds, ‘I’ll take a pass on tonight. I

don’t work tomorrow and I have some things to catch

up on.’

‘Next time then, plenty of games coming up.’

Back at his house John faces the bare spaces of

early evening. He sits in the armchair covered in soft-

yellow synthetic fabric; it is thick with foam slabs

about to pop out of the armrests. There’s a light on

the fireplace that he forgot to turn off last night; it is

directed at a piece of polished yet cracking driftwood.

It has been two years, but he still hasn’t bothered to

redecorate. He likes the retro feel of the space.

There’s a museum quality to the furniture and odd

knick-knacks that he finds appealing.


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It would be easy to sleep in the yellow chair in

front of the television, but he has learned that when

he comes home from a shift he has to get into bed or

he will never catch up on rest, and that would lead to

other days without proper sleep and then, worse, to a

kind of mental distraction that makes everything feel

wrong.

John is not a psychologist but has gleaned a few

things from Dr. Enzer over the years. There is some

comfort in this, self-knowledge, a sign that he has

better insight into things and is no longer the fuck-up

he was before. He wonders if the woman named Beth

is going to be afraid to go down to the ravine alone

again. The shepherd should be enough by way of

protection, yet obviously it can’t be completely relied

on to ward off perpetrators. There was something

stubborn in her thick lips, something about the way

she controlled herself even in the face of being

utterly scared that he had to admire. He sensed she

was wealthy, not only because of the large diamond

ring on her finger but the air of polite aloofness with

just the edge of a scold at the back of her glance.

When she realized he was not her attacker, it all

vanished; the scold, the indifference all moved to a

shared common ground.


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He pictures her going home and crying a little as

she told her husband about what had happened.

That she might have fallen into the river if it hadn’t

been for a man who was carelessly perched at the

edge of the riverbank. What man? the husband

would ask. It turns out he’s in our neighborhood, she

would say. At first I thought there was something not

quite right about him. John imagines the husband

giving her a brief hug and telling her that she

shouldn’t be going down in the ravine alone. His

protective tones would do nothing for her as she

clearly makes up her own agenda and that’s exactly

what the husband likes about her. They would each

return to the topic over the course of the evening,

unless there were children around, at which point

she and her husband would wait until they were

alone again so they could discuss it deeper and not

alarm them.

Again John has the odd sensation of both

watching and being in a movie, a scene in which a

curtain blows out from an open window and every

shot includes a subtle threat, all leading up to some

greater act of horror. He assumes he is just tired but

also worries whether he is getting a bit overwhelmed.

He reminds himself that there is no reason to


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experience dread again like this; confusion maybe,

but not the anticipation of an event that was

obviously not part of reality.

‘It doesn’t seem right to me, a healthy young

man living alone without comfort,’ George had said a

few days ago. It sounded old-fashioned at the time, as

though this were the 1960s and wives were popping

pot roasts into the oven while husbands snoozed into

their papers in armchairs with footrests. There was

some truth to it, now that he thinks of it: maybe too

much solitude isn’t good for him. He should get out

and play a game of squash after work, that’s it.

Something other than going home to this empty

house full of books and figurines. This is the first time

in his adult life he has been totally alone, and he’s not

sure he likes it.

Then he remembers his driver’s license. Shit. The

man named Len still has it. And Len is short for

what? He bangs his fist on the chair. John recalls

Len’s last name. He’ll look up “L Crawford” in the

morning and try to get his license back. Still, the idea

of someone else holding on to a major piece of

identification bothers him. God, how he hates this

kind of thing. He was hoping for a little anonymity at

this point. Something he has been afraid of, if not


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obsessive about—identity theft, shredding his mail,

anything with an address or phone number on it. It

had already been a demanding day and now he has

to worry about this too.

He walks to the main floor guest room and

stretches out on the bed. The previous owner had

painted the room lavender. Although it would have

never been his color choice, he finds it oddly

comforting. Even though there are three bedrooms

upstairs, including a large master bedroom, he has

claimed this one as his own. He still has to use the

bathroom upstairs though. He filled the closet of the

guest room with his few possessions and stacked up

books on the floor. He used to be surrounded by

books on finance and now he has every book on

baking he can get his hands on. The Cordon Bleu

textbook was as good as a degree in culinary arts.

John chose this room because it is easier to live

on one floor, and also because of the strong dusty

smell in the master bedroom—a kind of borderless

orchard of must. The smell of old people and, even

worse, the smell of the sick or the nearly dead.

John is learning about the former owner of the

house, sometimes more than he wants to know. He

found out that she died by falling between the tub


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and the pea-green sink in the upstairs bathroom. He

can’t help but think about Dot Burrows whenever he

shaves at the cracked sink or takes a shower.

Sometimes in the kitchen he can half imagine her

standing there, assembling a roast chicken and

potatoes, tipping back a small sip of sherry from the

rose-etched glasses that sit at the back of the cracked

white cupboards. George told him that Dot had tried

to take her own life a year before she died from her

fall, and that he’d been the one to help resuscitate

her. After swallowing a bottle of lorazepam, Dot had

lay down on the kitchen floor and then experienced a

drastic change of heart. She called George with

whatever lucidity she could muster. He got the

ambulance there quickly and helped insert a gastric

lavage into her stomach.

The guest-room bed is small and narrow, but it is

better than contemplating a dead woman. There

were too many traces of her in the upstairs rooms,

and he hasn’t the energy to clean out the shelves full

of perfume bottles, the wig on the stand that creeps

him out, or the books on gardening that are older

than even she was at the end.

It is still too light in the room to sleep, even

though he has pulled the heavy off-white drapes


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together. The outside light comes through a small

gap between the left and right drape and lands right

on his pillow. He gets up and yanks the drapes closer

together to create a little dark in the early evening.

Most days he is physically tired from the labor of

hoisting so many flour sacks at the bakery. Even with

the help of industrial mixers, it is still a hard lifting

job. His mother would have fought the mixers or,

even better, left and set up a small shop of her own to

sell pain au levain. Pain au levain is a demanding

dough, concocted from water, flour, and the wild

yeast that exists in the air. A Frankenstein bread, or

so he thought at twelve years old, because it was his

job to build the bread out of starters, feeding them

every three days a mix of potato water and the tough

unbleached flour that came from France. And then

there was the endless kneading, dozens of balls of

dough transformed to perfect domed loaves that

made it into hotels and restaurants. Some were also

sold to private customers from the main floor of their

house.

Before his mother got sick, she had kept the final

details of making bread to herself, only allowing him

to experiment with the starters and dough, never

allowing him to finish the final loaves. He learned to


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running water sounds of the house. The bungalow is

full of exchanges, gusts, and broadcasts from being

built too quickly in a cold climate and the business of

being there too long, old and stone-faced.

As he is about to enter the pre-dream state of a

good rest, the doorbell rings. Long, sonorous Big Ben

notes. He decides not to answer it. After three more

extended Big Bens, he gets up and hastily puts on his

pants, hoping it might be Len Crawford with his

driver’s license. He hurries to the peephole not to see

Len but the woman from the ravine. He unlocks the

door and before he can say anything she quickly says,

‘I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s Elizabeth

Lawrence—I’m not sure you caught my name in all

that kerfuffle.’

She’s holding out a loaf to him, banana bread.

He can smell the over-ripe bananas through the tight

plastic wrap layered with condensation. Not wanting

to take his hands off the door, he doesn’t take the

bread, but she insists, shoving the loaf at him as she

steps inside despite the fact the door is open only a

few inches. He feels caught off-guard, and in his

current mood he’s not sure he can pull out the social

niceties required.


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‘Thought I’d say thank you. I felt bad the way Len

did that to you. And you might have just saved my

life.’ She doesn’t hesitate to scope out the house.

‘I wondered who bought this place,’ she says and

pauses, ‘but I have never once seen you around.’ Her

look parses past him, x-ing back on the driftwood on

the fireplace, looking into the living room and up the

celery-green-carpeted stairway, wonderstruck. His

lack of response is now a form of rudeness. She takes

one step back, a little out the door, then comes back

in. Her face softening, she has clean-lined brows and

a smile on her plump mouth.

‘But it’s exactly the same!’

‘Sorry?’ he asks, completely bewildered.

‘I used to play in this house with Veronica

Burrows. We went to school together.’

He knows he should participate in a simple chat,

an exchange of what is required, and perhaps even

invite her in for a tour of the main floor. It would be

easy to dish out a few compliments on the banana

bread or ask her questions about who with and what

years she had played in the house. Talk about her

husband who works too much, or her children who

might be teenagers causing her some stress. He could

hit on her in some small way—flirt chat came easy to


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him, practically required when it came to the world

of finance. And she is attractive enough to expect that

kind of talk: a small smile, her scrubbed-fresh smell,

pushing off the compliments, controlling the flow. At

minimum he could offer her coffee to thank her for

her peace offering, so that this woman who has

obviously taken the pains to bake an extra loaf of

past-due banana bread after being scared out of her

wits will go away pleased, and when other neighbors

bring him up, or ask about the new occupant in the

old Burrows house, she might say something simple,

half-nice.

‘I’d have you come in, but I’m not quite feeling

well. I must be coming down with something,” he

offers, pulling the line from the primetime soap

opera he’s been watching lately to try to fall asleep at

8 p.m. so he can be up in the early hours of morning

to get to the bakery. His insomniac boats of eyes

straining at the bedroom television, eventually

waking himself up with a snore. The cedar-red-

haired woman on the soap opera, her plush-lipped

response to a caller. A man named Jake, with slant

eyes and dark whips of hair, who later turns out to be

a stalker at the door.

to the river by diana s. adams book preview

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