Run River Read Free Page A

Channing on the stretch of sand where Knight and Julie gave beach parties. (He had heard the shower when he went into the house to get the gun. Standing in their bedroom after he had taken the gun from the drawer, he had watched the steam through the open bathroom door, had listened to her humming a song to which she could never remember the words, we will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses.) Well, she had heard the shot and come to him: she had called Everett .
    Still holding the gun, he got to his feet. Lily stood in the clearing by the dock, looking first at him and then at Channing’s body where it lay sprawled over a rotting log. In that moment before either of them spoke, it occurred to Everett that Lily was not as pretty as she had once been. No one had ever called her beautiful, but there had been about her a compelling fragility, the illusion not only of her bones but of her eyes. It was not that her eyes were any memorable color (hazel, her driver’s license must say), any extraordinary shape. It was simply that they seemed larger than anything else about her, making her very presence, like that of someone on a hunger strike, a kind of emotional claim. It exhausted him to look at her now: her eyes were too large.
    “I guess he came here to meet you,” Everett said, swiping at a mosquito with his free hand. He did not look at Channing’s body.
    She did not speak.
    Unable to think, Everett wished that they could go back to the house and to bed; he wanted to make her a drink, bourbon with crushed ice the way she liked it, sit with her in the dark calm beneath the mosquito netting.
    “There was no need,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “No need.”
    She began crying then. Everett stood watching until her sobs took on the helpless, automatic quality which meant that she was losing control, crossing an invisible border into some unmapped private terror. Sudden or expected death, the sight of a stranger planting daffodil bulbs, or the recollection of some commonplace, forgotten afternoon (say when they had taken the children to look at the seahorses in Golden Gate Park and the seahorses had been gone) could tap Lily’s reserve of hysteria. (“That’s how people should live,” she had said about the planter of daffodils; he had suggested that she set out some daffodils around the house.) He wondered without interest if Channing had ever seen Lily cry. He supposed he had. He supposed every son of a bitch on the river had.
    He laid the gun on the dock and walked over to her. Her sweater had fallen from her shoulders, and he stooped to pick it up from the dirt. It was a pink cashmere sweater that belonged to Julie; one of the name tapes Lily had bought when they sent her down to school at Dominican was sewn in the neck. Julia Knight McClellan . Julie was as pretty now as Lily had once been. Although her fine, almost white blond hair had always reminded Everett of his sisters (“She may look like Sarah but she looks nothing like the way Martha looked,” Lily had said this summer, nearly screaming. “I don’t know how you can even say that”), Julie looked, on the whole, more and more like Lily: she moved the way Lily moved, had even the shy, hesitant smile which by now was only a mannerism for Lily. (Only about an hour ago, at the Templetons’ party, had he not looked across the room to see Julie brush a strand of hair from her face with Lily’s own rapid, tentative gesture? Lily , he had thought, his face suddenly cold with relief and shame, in that instant between seeing the gesture and realizing that it was not Lily at all, but Julie. Until that moment when he thought he knew he had refused to ask himself where Lily was. Only then did he realize that he had not moved from the room in half an hour, had stayed there deliberately so that he might believe Lily to be on the terrace, or downstairs in the room with the piano. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses .