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    Little Lost River: A Novel
    Little Lost River: A Novel
    Little Lost River: A Novel
    Ebook364 pages6 hours

    Little Lost River: A Novel

    By Pamela Johnston

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    About this ebook

    Set in Boise, Idaho in the early 1980s, Little Lost River is the story of two young women who come together in the wake of tragedy. Cindy Morgan is still reeling from the loss of her mother when an accident leaves her boyfriend missing and presumed drowned. When Frances Rogers happens upon the accident site, she stays with Cindy until help arrives. In the aftermath of that night’s events, as Cindy faces her future with a determination often misunderstood as indifference, Frances becomes her source of both support and compassion. Cindy and Frances are determined to find their own lives unencumbered by conventional expectations, but their path to adulthood is neither easy nor clear, and the future that each girl finds is not what she expected or planned. One generation follows another, and in the end, the girls learn that life moves on its own path, that “transformation is what takes you forward. It’s the only constant thing.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Nevada Press
    Release dateMar 28, 2008
    ISBN9780874177459
    Little Lost River: A Novel

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      Little Lost River - Pamela Johnston

      (ebook)

      [PART ONE]

      The Crazy Girl

      [CINDY]

      THE DAY AFTER my mom put the gun in her mouth, I went back to school. My dad stayed home and watched TV. If I’d stayed with him it would have meant four hours of game shows and a lunch of chicken pot pie or tomato soup, then an old movie or reruns of Bewitched! and I Dream of Jeannie until the five o’clock news. Even algebra sounded better than listening to him try to work out the puzzles on Concentration. But he’d decided to take a few days off, to recuperate from the day before, and I couldn’t blame him. It really hadn’t been one of our better days.

      For a long time we’d had no in-between with my mother: On her better days she got out of bed sometime before noon, got dressed, lit a cigarette. Sometimes she even made coffee. Then she sat on the back steps and stared at the trees that ran thick and dark around the edge of our yard. She got up when she heard the mailman come by at noon, made a sandwich, got more coffee. Then she went outside again.

      It was easy to tell how long she’d been sitting there by looking at the mound of bent and broken cigarettes in her ashtray. Strange but true, the one thing sure to set her off was cigarette butts anywhere but in an ashtray—on her bad days, she could spend a whole afternoon picking the little foam filters out of the peony beds, where they washed in from the street every time it rained. No one thought twice about throwing cigarette butts out their car windows in that part of Boise, which was nearly the country anyway, except that the roads were still paved for another mile past our house. I’d come home from school, walk up the street after getting off the bus, and there she’d be—hunched over between the peony bushes, strands of her hair caught on the sticky blooms, the pockets of her robe soaked through with dirty water bleeding from the filters. I’d try to talk her into going back inside the house, but that conversation always ended with her crying.

      She tried so hard to keep them up, but nobody cared, she said. It broke her heart. It was too much.

      We lived at the end of the school bus route, almost outside the city limits. We didn’t have anything like a neighborhood—the closest house was half a mile away. My dad had moved us out to the edge of town years earlier because it was easier to keep an eye on my mom when that was all we had to think about, when we didn’t have to waste our energy making excuses for things that couldn’t be explained in a way normal people would understand. So he just gave up. And I couldn’t blame him for that, either. I’d given up on trying to make my mom seem normal, even to myself, a long time before all this happened.

      Though we had our moments.

      That October, for example. I came through the front door one day after school and left my muddy shoes sitting on the rubber mat. It had rained the night before, and the flower beds were still a mess—always a good sign. For nearly two weeks I’d been doing this, coming home to find everything just as I’d left it. I walked into the kitchen and found myself something to eat. Then I stood behind the back screen door, not opening it, not wanting to scare her. I said hello, but quietly, so she could pretend not to hear me if she wanted to. Her ashtray was full, almost but not quite overflowing onto the step.

      You’re home already? she asked.

      It’s four o’clock.

      I didn’t realize it was so late. She turned around and smiled at me over her shoulder, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand. It was a bright fall day one week before Halloween, and her brown hair looked almost red in that light. Could you do me a favor and make dinner tonight? I just don’t feel like cooking.

      Sure, I said. No problem.

      She said this like I’d really be filling in for her, but the truth was she hadn’t tried to cook anything in over a year. That last time, she’d set the hem of her blouse on fire when she leaned across a burner. None of us—not even my mom herself, I think—were convinced that this had been an accident.

      SO I DID THE COOKING, and the laundry. My dad went to work every day and took care of the car. Together, we cleaned up the yard on Saturdays, the house on Sundays. Between the two of us, things got done. But nothing ever got finished.

      That fall it stayed warm longer than usual—the leaves turned, but they stayed on the trees. Then a storm blew through on Halloween night, and the next day our yard looked like someone had thrown down a huge patchwork quilt. I couldn’t even see the grass underneath.

      My mom got up that morning, took one look at the yard, and went right back to bed. I knew how she felt: there was more work to do outside that window than one person could hold in her head. I ate some toast, read the funnies, went to the shed for a rake. My dad was outside already, trying to shove wet leaves off the front walk with a push broom.

      Everything’s soaking wet, he said. We can’t use the lawnmower. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

      I held up the rake. I’ll get started.

      You’re not going to make any headway with just that. It’ll take all day.

      I shrugged, because what else did I have planned? I was sixteen, but I didn’t have a driver’s license yet—I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t see the point. My friends had cars, but they’d finally just stopped asking if I wanted to go anywhere, because I always said no. I’d stopped trying to explain why I couldn’t ever do anything, why I had to be home right after school and all the time on weekends.

      So I got busy with the rake. It felt good to start a job I knew I could actually finish, given enough time and the right tools.

      My dad came out and bagged the leaves once I’d raked them into piles, and we carried the bags to the curb where the garbage men would pick them up on Monday. We worked all morning, and by noon we’d cleared one narrow strip down the middle of the yard.

      It’s okay, my dad said, when I just sat down in a pile of wet leaves. It’s a lot of work for just two people.

      The old rain soaked through the seat of my jeans, but I didn’t even care. I let the rake fall to the grass in front of me. There’s still so much, I said.

      I know. He sat down beside me and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. You do what you can, that’s all. No one can ask for more than that.

      Which was true. In fact, my mom didn’t ask for a thing. But that was the problem—you could never know what it was she needed, and I was tired of trying to guess.

      You’re doing fine, he said, and handed me a cigarette of my own. I wondered when he’d noticed the packs disappearing from his cartons, but I didn’t ask. I just took the cigarette, and he lit it, and we sat there and smoked like any two people taking a break together. It was obvious, even to him, that there was no point in trying to treat me like a kid.

      I heard the screen door slam shut behind us. My dad turned his head, fast, like what he’d heard was a gunshot. I turned toward the house, and there was my mother standing calmly on the front porch in her pink robe. She wasn’t smoking—she wasn’t even looking around the yard to see what we’d accomplished so far. She just stood there for a moment, looking at us like she sometimes did—like someone had hit her personal pause button and left her no choice but to watch the rest of us go on without her.

      Come on outside, Alice, my dad said. It’s warming up a little. It’s nice out here.

      My mom stood there for a moment longer, then turned around and went back inside. My dad turned to face the yard again, stubbed out his cigarette against the bottom of his wet shoe. He put an arm around me, squeezed my shoulder lightly, then stood up. We’ll get this done, he said. We’re a good team. And there’s no hurry, right?

      I nodded, and then I got up too. I couldn’t tell him that was what scared me more than anything else—the thought of my whole life eaten up by days like these, blank as the boxes on a calendar, only waiting for an X to show their passing and make them count for something.

      IN NOVEMBER, my mom had a run of good days longer than either my dad or I could remember: every single day for three straight weeks she was out of bed by the time I left to catch the bus. One morning she even made me breakfast—she put a box of cereal and a clean bowl and spoon beside a jug of milk on the table. That morning I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor for a long time, paralyzed by the sight of that box of Captain Crunch, convinced that someone had been in our house during the night and left it sitting out. Then my mom stuck her head around the corner.

      Hurry up and eat, she said. You’re going to miss your bus.

      I told myself to wait until I left the house to start crying, but by then I didn’t feel like it anymore. For that one moment, I was just like any other girl on her way to school. I decided to be that girl while I could, because I knew it wouldn’t last.

      But we let ourselves hope anyway, just because it had been so long since we’d had anything to hope for. Dozens of doctors and all kinds of pills, and nothing ever worked for long. We couldn’t be with her all the time, and we didn’t have the money to hire someone who could—not that this would make any difference, the doctors said. She had to want to save herself. We didn’t even talk about putting her in the hospital anymore, because she always came home eventually. And it was harder to think about how almost normal your life had been while she was gone than to just forget it could ever be that way.

      So now we hoped things were changing on their own. We hoped she’d figured out how to pull herself together, because nothing that was supposed to help her do that had worked for long. For almost a month we tried to make ourselves believe my mom was turning things around. We knew there were two possibilities, two completely different reasons for her sudden change of mood, but it was almost Thanksgiving, and we were looking for something, anything, to be thankful for.

      SHE WOKE ME UP that morning by brushing the hair off my face. Cindy, she said. Wake up, honey. Time for school.

      I was there all at once, the way you wake up in the middle of a dream that’s just too strange to stick with anymore. She’d been waking me for school for almost a month by then, but that morning she was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a crisp white blouse that still smelled like a hot iron. Her hair looked clean, and she’d pulled it back with a dark green scarf. Her ponytail slid forward over one shoulder when she leaned across my bed. It touched the top of a cornucopia pin on her collar. No robe, no cigarette. Her breath smelled like mint.

      Get dressed and I’ll make you some breakfast, she said.

      I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. It was one of those moments you’d rather watch than actually be a part of, because you’re just not sure what’s going on or even what you’re supposed to do.

      Are you awake? she asked me.

      I nodded then, and I sat up to prove the point to both of us.

      It was all too normal to be scary. Still, I was more afraid in that moment than I was ten minutes later. I tried to talk my hands out of shaking—this was the morning I’d been hoping for most of my life, I told myself. I should enjoy it. But as normal as it might have seemed to anybody else, this wasn’t the way my mom worked. I knew that, the same way I knew which one of the two explanations for her sudden change of mood made more sense. What I didn’t know was how to stop what was about to happen, or if I was even supposed to try.

      I started getting dressed, and that’s when I noticed the empty hanger in my closet—the blouse my mom was wearing actually belonged to me. It surprised me that we wore the same size. She always seemed shrunken up from weeks of not eating, the skin on her hands and face sagging over the empty spaces below it, making her look closer to something like sixty instead of forty. I picked out a sweater to wear with my jeans, a cardigan, and it took me longer than normal to dress. The buttons gave my fingers trouble.

      Then I walked down the dark hall and into the kitchen. My mom wasn’t there, but she’d set the table for breakfast with a plate and silverware and a glass of orange juice already poured. The electric skillet was plugged in and sitting on the counter. I lifted the lid and looked at the mound of scrambled eggs she’d pushed into one corner, flecked with pepper, fingers of link sausage lined up beside it—more food than I’d ever be able to eat by myself. Toast popped up on the other side of the kitchen sink, and I jumped at the sound of the spring releasing.

      And then I heard the gun. And because I’d already been surprised too many times that morning, I didn’t move at all.

      You’d expect a thing that drives through muscle and bone to make more noise. What I heard was something that could have been a cork popping out of a bottle. But the sound had come from down the hall, back toward my bedroom. I took a few steps toward the kitchen doorway, until I could see a sliver of yellow light cutting into the edge of the hall carpet from under the bathroom door. Then I took a few more steps, and I stood in front of that door for a moment before I could do anything else.

      I tried the knob. Locked. Years later, I would remember this and thank her for that final act of kindness.

      Mom, I said. Are you okay?

      She didn’t answer, of course. I walked through the rest of the house, turning lights on in every room, and then I opened the back door. It was early, still dark. The windows gave me enough light to find a rock in the flower bed, and I backed up a few steps before I lobbed it through the frosted glass. A basket of dried yellow flowers hung calm and dusty beside the mirror, right where it always had been. Below it, a splattering of something dark had streaked down the wall.

      I went back to the kitchen after that and made phone calls: first for an ambulance, then for my dad.

      What happened? he asked. In the background, the letter-sorting machines were chugging along as always.

      She shot herself, I think.

      What do you mean, you think?

      She’s in the bathroom and the door’s locked. But I think I heard a gunshot. He didn’t say anything else. You need to come home, I said.

      I know that. He paused. Okay. Sit tight. I’m on my way.

      I sat down at the table after I’d hung up the phone. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate what she’d made me for breakfast. I didn’t know if she’d meant it all for me, or if she’d been thinking of my dad coming home; I only knew I wasn’t letting any of this go to waste.

      So when the police arrived, I was still chewing on the last bite of sausage. I answered the door and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin before I told them where they’d find her.

      THE NEXT DAY, when I went back to school, people knew everything. Boise was still a small town then, and kids whose fathers were policemen and doctors always had the latest news. Since we’d moved to the edge of town, though, where she couldn’t bother anyone, my mom had fallen off their radar. People had almost forgotten about her, until now.

      Now, they knew about the window. They knew about the sausage and the eggs. They even knew about the napkin.

      I heard she broke the window with a rock just so she could look at her mother laying there on the bathroom floor, someone said in the locker room, after gym. God, I’d puke if I saw something like that.

      Her voice was coming from the row of lockers behind mine. Over the noise of slamming doors and chatter, I wouldn’t have heard a thing that girl was saying if I hadn’t been listening for the way people would tell this part of my story.

      She even made herself breakfast afterward, someone else said. Sausage and scrambled eggs. And when the ambulance guys came, she was just sitting there eating it, like nothing had happened.

      "I wouldn’t be able to eat for a year if I saw that, the first girl said. Seriously. I would puke."

      I finished getting dressed and walked down the hall to the door. I leaned against the wall, arms folded across my biology book and folder, waiting for the final bell. A pair of girls walked past me. One of them looked back over her shoulder and smiled what could have been sympathy, if I’d been another sort of person, then tipped her head and whispered something to the girl beside her.

      I didn’t need to hear what she was saying.

      That girl is crazy.

      And after that, I was.

      The Lost Children

      [FRANCES]

      I DON’T KNOW how many children my mother wanted or tried to have. I do know that I was her only successful attempt at motherhood for a very long time, and that success is a relative term when it’s applied to children.

      There are people who will tell you that being the only child in a house full of adults is a lonely business, and at times I suppose it was. But what child doesn’t find herself longing for the kind of company adults seem to share so easily? The obvious conversations that come with the shared routines of your daily lives, the clear sense of how things should be—none of that belongs to children. I had less interest in my sister, once she was born, than I’d had in any one of the women in our neighborhood.

      My mother spent her free moments at our kitchen table, talking with our neighbor, Mrs. Hadley, and drinking iced tea in the summer and coffee through the long winter afternoons. She was the one with a child at home, so Mrs. Hadley always came to our house; her children, Donny and Jane, were in high school and often praised (in our neighborhood, at least) for their good manners and grades. I was six. I’d just started first grade, but I often came home after half a day with the unverifiable symptoms of what could have been a real illness: nausea, headache, sudden lethargy. I’d thrown up at school more than once, which had made me famous in my own right among the children in my class, and made my teacher more than willing to respond with a nurse’s pass when I said I didn’t feel good. My mother told the attendance secretary that I was under a doctor’s care, which seemed to satisfy everyone at school.

      But not Mrs. Hadley.

      Frances is a sensitive child, my mother said, when Mrs. Hadley wanted to know why I was always home so much earlier than anyone else on our block. My mother made it sound as if that were something of which she was very proud.

      But how’s she ever going to get along, Helen? Mrs. Hadley wanted to know.

      Frances is very smart, my mother said. She does her work at home, and the teacher says she’s doing just fine.

      Smart is all good and well, but you know that’s not the only thing school is for. You can’t just let her come home whenever she feels like it—she’s going to have to toughen up sooner or later. She has to learn to get along on her own.

      My mother shrugged and stirred her coffee. The truth was, she didn’t like being away from me either. That only left her alone in the clean little house where we read stories together in the rocking chair, baked bread for dinner or cookies for my father to eat when he came home from work. And whenever I was gone, the other children—the ones she’d lost—came back to her. Their absence filled the space beside her in the overstuffed chair, sat on a high kitchen stool and watched her roll out cookie dough.

      For a long time I thought that losing a child meant simply looking until you found her again, like losing anything else. Some of my classmates had stories of getting lost at the grocery store, finding a kindly cashier to call their mothers to retrieve them. But all the women in our neighborhood, it seemed to me, were said to have lost a child at some point, and clearly none of those children were being returned. Mrs. Merrigan, across the street, had lost a stillborn baby before we’d moved into the neighborhood. (Which explains, said Mrs. Hadley, "why the poor thing cries at the drop of a hat.") Mrs. Shelton was supposed to have twins, but lost one of them before it was born. Mrs. Hunnicutt lost her daughter Charity, who had a brain tumor no one even knew about until it killed her. She was outside jumping rope with two other girls, and when she fell down and didn’t get up the girls ran to tell her mother. But Charity never did get up; she stayed in a coma for a few weeks, and then Mrs. Hadley broke the news that the Hunnicutts had lost their only daughter.

      I thought about Charity most often, afraid the same thing could happen to me: that someday I could simply fall down and die, without even making the mistake of stepping in front of a car or climbing too high on the jungle gym at school, things I’d already been warned against. It seemed unfair that the rules I observed so assiduously weren’t enough to protect me. But if that were to happen, I thought, if I were to be lost, I wanted to know what to expect.

      Where do the children go when you lose them? I asked my mother. She was putting me to bed. My father had come in to say good night already, so all that was left was to be kissed on the forehead before she turned out the light.

      Where do what children go? she asked.

      The ones that get lost.

      My mother was confused for a moment. She sat down on the side of the bed, trying hard not to answer the wrong question. She was surprised, I think, that I knew about this part of her life; it wasn’t something she had talked to me about, of course, and since her first miscarriage I had not been promised a new little brother or sister—an act of superstition disguised as kindness in her mind. All the others, however many there had been, were made known to me through my father’s suggestion that I be extra nice to my mother, who was feeling a little sad.

      Are you talking about a lost baby? Like the one I told you I lost, a long time ago?

      All the children, I said. Like Charity.

      Oh. My mother smiled her relief, then reached out to brush a piece of hair from my eyes. Well, they go to heaven, Franny. To be with God.

      We went to church on a regular basis—I was a standout in my Sunday school class, capable of memorizing, if not exactly understanding, the most ornately worded Bible verses—but for some reason, I hadn’t envisioned those missing children enjoying the perfection of the afterlife. Lost was different than dead, I had thought.

      So God just takes them?

      My mother’s eyebrows disappeared under her long, dark bangs. She was young herself, and the fact that her response might not answer my question really hadn’t occurred to her. It was the only answer she’d needed, up to that point.

      I don’t really know if God takes them, or if they go to Him on their own. But I do know that all little children go to heaven, no matter how big or how little they are. Even the ones that haven’t been born yet.

      How do you know?

      She was still for a long moment, looking at her hands as they pulled the sheet closer to my chin. When she looked at me again, she wasn’t smiling anymore.

      Because that’s what the Bible says, Franny. She stood up then, turned off my lamp, and closed the door behind her.

      It seemed to me, even then, that faith was an awfully slight comfort in the face of everything that could go wrong: babies could disappear before they’d even been alive outside of you. And even afterward, when you could hold them in your own two arms, God could snatch away the thing that made them be alive, whatever that was. They could just disappear.

      A YEAR LATER, my mother got pregnant again, and I started to stay in school all day. The few times I had come home early, she’d made me stay in bed while she and Mrs. Hadley talked. If you’re well enough to play, you’re well enough to be in school, she said, and Mrs. Hadley nodded, stirring her coffee.

      No one told me anything about the baby until it was obvious what would happen, and when I asked her my mother said only that I would have a little brother or sister sometime in May. After so much weeping over babies who hadn’t arrived, it seemed almost anticlimactic to discover that a child was actually going to make an appearance, and apparently without incident. But neither of my parents really trusted that the doctor knew what he was saying, that the baby and my mother were fine this time.

      I came home every day to find my mother on the couch, her feet propped on a pillow. She’d be listening to the radio or reading a magazine, but as soon as I came in the door she’d roll to her side, sit up, and ask about my day at school. We’d have a snack together in the kitchen. It was the same routine we’d always followed on the days when I stayed in school, and it felt almost as if nothing had begun to change between us.

      And then my sister was born, as promised, in May and in perfect health. Robin came home from the hospital wrapped in a pink and blue striped blanket, and she spent her first few days being passed from one pair of adult arms to another. All the neighbors came to visit and brought food with them, so my mother didn’t have to cook. Mrs. Hadley made potato salad with pickles and mustard, which was different from the kind my mother made. Mrs. Merrigan brought a banana cream pie—and because no one told me to stop, I ate half of it at one sitting.

      Anyone who eats half a pie deserves to be sick, my father said, when he found me in the bathroom later, curled around a stomachache. But my mother came in and sat down on the edge of the bathtub, patted my back until I felt better.

      You’re still my baby, too, Franny. She held a pink washcloth under the cold water, wiped my face, and smiled at me. I have two beautiful baby girls now. That’s something we should all be happy about.

      I nodded, even though I was crying. I’m sure I was worried my mother would love me less, dividing her heart between the two of us. But more than this, I was afraid that if I were to get lost, my mother wouldn’t come looking for me right away. It might be awhile before she even had time to notice I was gone.

      I SAW ROBIN BRIEFLY when my mother first brought her home from the hospital; after that, I saw little more than the hand she sometimes managed to free from the blankets my mother wrapped around her like bandages. I wasn’t allowed to go into her bedroom when she was asleep, and she was always sleeping, it seemed, or waking up just when it was time for me to go to bed. But my mother let me hold her once that I can remember.

      Her hand was larger than a doll’s, and that surprised me; I had always assumed my babies were as close to the real thing as someone could get without using actual skin and bones. Now I saw that they were nothing like this child. They were lighter, for one thing, almost weightless really.

      Robin felt heavy when my mother put her in my arms. Sit there and hold her carefully, but don’t try to walk around. You’ll drop her on her head, my mother told

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