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 thatthere 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 metostop 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 inThe 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.”
