Slow River

“We?”

She just looked at me, indecipherable.

I felt strange. “I need another drink.”

We were quiet while the drinks arrived.

“When did it happen, the kidnap?”

“September. Three years ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said we.

“September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three-”

But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.

Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.

“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spa

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.

Katerine had watched the whole scene so calmly. Too calmly, I saw now: What mother should be able to watch her daughter like that, half naked, drunk, obviously in some pain? Why hadn’t I thought about that before? Because that’s just how Katerine was: closed up like a lacquered fan.

But not always, Something, some feeling I had never seen, never even caught a glimpse of, had prompted her to steal into her children’s room at night—Greta, Stella, me—and… and… I felt again the heat of the monster’s breath on the back of my neck and the fear, the creeping flesh feeling that something was terribly awry in my seven-year-old world.

How many times had Stella had to lie quietly through that? A mother was a foundation, a cornerstone, a touchstone, not a monster. Not the reason to kill oneself.

All the time my mother had been doing that to my sister I had wanted her to love me, had ached for her approval, had wanted her to believe I was like her.

I had to lean forward with my weight on my palms, I was so dizzy. Did the fact that I knew, now, what she had done make her a different person? Was I a bad person because I still wanted to be like her? And I still did. On some level I always would. It was what I had grown up with, that image of the calm, competent woman.

I didn’t want to think about it. I stared down at my hands, at the drying cobbles, the miniature riverbeds that formed between them. Here and there were discarded remnants of the tourist trade: beverage cans, a torn disk wrapper. It would all be cleaned up by midmorning.

Katerine had always liked things clean and orderly. Efficient. That monster, Tok had called her. That monster can’t be allowed to get away with it.

Tok and Oster talking to the camera. Tok looking—not beaten, I realized, but exhausted. What had they done to her? Where was she? Why hadn’t they said something, anything on the net?

My mother. I imagined her carefully: tidy hair, concise conversation, economical gestures. She had never gestured much, come to think of it. And her hair was always cut the same way, though she did occasionally tint it varying shades of blond, as a concession to fashion. Her eyes… I had never known the color of her eyes. Did she hide them in a subconscious attempt to hide her soul?