And only now, as he stares at them, do I notice the fine white lines on his arms. They travel up from his wrists and disappear under his shirt.
I feel like I’m under anesthesia while awake. They’re cuts, clearly. Why didn’t I notice them before? Was I too busy letting him save me? How could I be so blind to him and his problems?
“You see, Tucks, your silence? Now it’s a whisper,” he says softly, stroking my cheek with his knuckles. Reflexively, I hold his hand and press it to my face, but actually, this gesture is merely pushing back my unnoticed tears.
“I didn’t want to kill myself, not back then.” His fingers are cool, and my cheek is hot. I want so badly to give him what he needs. I know what it feels like to be abandoned by someone, to be alone with no way out. As if in a daze, I let go of his hand and trace the scars with two fingers up to the sleeve of his shirt, where they disappear.
“That’s not all of them,” he says, answering the question only my fingers asked.
I let go of him for a moment because I want to write something.How did you do it? With what?
Is that why he asked me for a blade in front of the toilet?
River turns one corner of his mouth up in a mocking smile. “With a sinfully expensive amphora vase that I had hurled against the wall. Damn sharp shards. Belonged to my mother. Estimated to be worth six thousand dollars—pretty expensive fun.”
How can he joke about that? He hurt himself. Intentionally. I mean, I also inflicted wounds on my hand, but it was never out of choice; it was simply a stress reaction. God, how can you voluntarily hurt yourself like that?
“The pain helped, as did the alcohol. Whenever the chaos or emptiness inside me became too great, it kept me in the here and now. It took away the madness, my mind’s restlessness, just as it filled the emptiness.”
It brought you down, I mouth, and River closes his eyes for a second because he understands that I understand.
“My parents put me in St. Benedict after that. It’s a boarding school for troubled young people... My mother almost freaked out when she found me covered in blood. I even smiled at her.Of course, she thought I was trying to provoke her, but I thought it was so crazy... she finally had a real reaction. I was fourteen at the time.”
How bad it must have been for him to grow up in such a sterile home. I mean, okay, Mom left and Dad and I never had established a base, but I still had Arizona and James. At least until a year ago. And Dad probably never would have sent me away, either.
Maybe your parents wanted to protect you from yourself.
“Above all, they wanted to protect their good name. They’d always locked me away before when they had parties. Apparently, I had a ‘migraine that was difficult to control.’ When I went to boarding school, they told their friends that I was going to a gifted school in Europe. In Switzerland, I think.” River snorts. For the first time, I understand where the anger in him comes from and what the rebelliousness in him means. He is a lost boy.
You said you haven’t seen your parents in years. What happened?
“A lot of things.” He smiles, but his eyes reflect something darker and heavier than anything else before. “A lot of beautiful things, and then a lot of terrible things.... the butterfly effect.”
The butterfly effect—a butterfly flaps its wings and triggers a tsunami on the other side of the world.
“I won everything and lost it again in the blink of an eye.” He stares off into the distance again, and when he looks at me, a black crane is sitting in his hand. He holds it out to me. “I met a girl.”
From one second to the next, I feel ice-cold.Still alive for you.
June. I point toward his shoulder.
“Clever girl.” He nods. “I met her at St. Benedict. She was everything, Tucks. She was my answer to life.”
And you are mine, I think. If there was one question I asked about life at Old Sheriff, it was what it had to offer me other than the everyday pain.
What happened to June and you?I ask, even though I’m afraid of the answer. Because one thing is clear: whatever happened, he loved June more than anything in the world. Maybe loved her too much; I can’t really be jealous if it affects him like that.
River looks intently at the origami bird in his hand. “She left me. I can’t talk about it without wanting to jump. Do you understand?”
Yes and no. How could I, if he hasn’t told me anything?
He tugs on the paper wing. “Short story for what came next: I was kicked out of boarding school and lived on the streets. When I was seventeen and a half, I went to New Orleans and met Zozoo, Sam, and Jasper. We made music. No, we numbed ourselves with music, playing our hearts out at night until dawn. That was my answer to everything that happened.”
I turn my book upside down and write on the last page:Because I can’t sleep, I make music at night.
River reads the sentence aloud and raises his eyebrows.
“Nobody knows Rumi these days, Tucks. And yet his poems are the most beautiful form of art.” He laughs quietly. “I wrote this saying on the wall of my wing as a farewell to my parents. Extra big. An actual provocation... the color was blood red and extremely waterproof.”