Suspicious River Read Free Page B

boat. The sail, a sharp knife of light then a bright blur receding.
    When they are farther into the water, a fading image, overexposed in so much wild white clear as gin, she reaches behind her and unsnaps the back of her bikini top. It slips off fast—a quick yank of sexual gravity like a scream.
    She holds the bikini top in the empty hand and waves it toward the shore back and forth in arcs above her head, as if in surrender.
    Then the scene scintillates, glints, and a piece of bent metal on the boat blazes; I have to squint. I can’t be much older than four or five. Her breasts are even brighter than the rest of her body and more pale than the glare all around her, but I can’t stare into it any longer: a shock of skin like white milk spilled all over a wax-white tray.
    They are shrinking, crumbling into the sheen, while their sail beats the air like a single, thrilled wing—a huge white bird with those two human captives smiling in its beak. And my uncle, whose looks, I know already, though I’m only a child myself, are handsome, more handsome than my father’s, shrugs toward my father, who clears his throat apologetically behind me.
    There’s a foamy rolling of water between my uncle, the woman with her bare breasts under a beating wing now, and the place where my father and I stand with our eyes nearly closed to see it better. She turns her back to us, and what we can see of it is a blank slate, as they say. She is moving naked over water and moving away.
    She’s my mother, and then she dies.
     
    “Rick,” I said one of those first afternoons in October when I’d been doing what I was doing for more than a month, “I may be a little late tonight. I told Mrs. Briggs I’d do some accounting, and maybe I won’t have time until after Samantha comes in.”
    I looked steadily into Rick’s dark eyes to see what he might suspect, but in them I just saw myself, twice, miniaturized, wearing a jean jacket, clutching my red purse against my ribs. My image in each of those eyes was smaller than a half-moon rising in a fingernail, but exact.
    “Well, O.K.,” Rick said—only a dip of disappointment in it before he turned back to the game show he’d been watching.
    A board of light bulbs zapped. Sirens. A woman shrieked, put her face in her hands, cried and cried and screamed as if she were being stabbed, over and over, with a dull knife. She was overwrought, overweight, and wearing a halter-top. Her arms looked moist, doughy, in the TV fuzz. Some of her skin rippled when she sobbed, but some stretched taut as too-tight bandages. She’d won a compact car, and the body of it was revealed to her slowly between two maroon curtains parting around the car like lips—something sporty, red, and sexy waiting for her in a wide, warm mouth. She gasped. The host of the show stood stiff beside her in his heavy dark suit. You could not see his arms or even his neck, but his face was open and round as a stopped clock. He put his hand on the woman’s bare back and rubbed it up and down, numbly—smiling into the distance, which was us.
    Rick looked back up at me. “Bye,” he said.
    Even under his T-shirt I could see the wide V of bone on his chest like a seagull’s spread wings, thinned and rigid, caught between the rotors of his shoulders.
    “Bye.” I said it brightly, but my back was to him when I said it.
     
    It was a short drive to the Swan Motel from our apartment because it was a small town. Still, a lot of people passed through the town every year, tossing candy bar wrappers out car windows. In the summer, they swept by on their way to the lake, staying a night or two on the river, which was also eternally sweeping toward the lake. In the fall, they came to see the leaves go bloody or gold before they fell, or to see the swans flock and rise up above us in October like a flying church choir in white robes, leaving, while the Michigan winter shuffled itself together on the horizon, ready to blow.
    Then, the tourists