Dark Water - Laura McNeal [39]
Now what? I wondered. Call out to him?
There’s something about trespassing that makes you feel larger than everything else, and clumsier. I pushed Amiel’s bicycle to the lattice of gray branches and considered just leaning it there for him to find, but I couldn’t leave his only expensive possession in plain sight.
“Amiel?” I half whispered. “I’ve brought your bike.”
I touched the wall with my fingers and listened to my loud heartbeat. He didn’t answer, and I stood very still. I stared at the branches under my fingertips, where tiny white cobwebs pillowed all the crevices and an orange speckled orb weaver ascended a line he’d just made.
“Amiel?” I called softly, and then I made myself look around the corner.
He sat with his knees up on the blankets that formed his bed. The fatness of the white bandages on his hand glowed in the shadowy room, but I couldn’t see if his eyes were open or closed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was worried. I know I said I wouldn’t bother you.”
At that he turned his head, but he didn’t answer.
I stepped forward and opened my backpack. I set the water, the tube of antibiotics, and the roll of bandages on the ground. “I brought your bike back. That way my uncle didn’t have to know. Where you live, I mean.”
All that was left to show him was the Luden’s cough drops. My mouth was so dry that I unwrapped one and popped it in. I held one out to him and he took it, but you can’t unwrap a cough drop with one hand. I sat down and took it back, and after I had untwisted the wrapper, I gave it to him.
“Do you want me to go?” I asked.
He didn’t shake his head, and he didn’t nod. He put the cough drop in his mouth.
I waited, and as I waited, I kept my eyes averted, as if I would only be invading his privacy if I looked at his things. I studied the trees and wondered if the bird that was singing was a finch or a phoebe, the dark sugar dissolving on my tongue. Finally, I felt so awful about the silence that I looked him full in the face and saw that he’d closed his eyes. That seemed peculiar. He was resting the bandaged hand on his knees, which were pulled up, and it seemed like a position you might sit in if you felt sick or hopeless. “Does it hurt?” I asked.
He shook his head, but he didn’t open his eyes.
Maybe it was because I was sitting there in his camp, instead of seeing him at my uncle’s ranch, that I realized, for the first time, the loneliness of his life. To me, the river was a romantic place where you could live like Thoreau or Laura Ingalls Wilder. But when I tried to imagine going off on my own to a foreign country and making a house out of scraps and looking for work and eating ramen noodles for every meal, the canyon seemed dirty and hard and cold. I reached out my hand to touch one of his fingers, but I was just grazing the skin when he opened his eyes and pulled it back.
He studied me with his face tensed. “Imposible,” he said, a more beautiful word in Spanish but just as final.
“Right,” I said. “You don’t feel that way about me.”
He closed his eyes again, then opened them. “Go away,” he said pleadingly. “Por favor.”
“Okay,” I said.
I stood up and blundered out into the sunlight, which reminded me of the problem his bike presented. I pointed to the bicycle, and he nodded. Holding his cut hand unnaturally still and stiff, he wheeled the bicycle to a place in the willows where it could hardly be seen. Then he turned to me, and I stood awkwardly for a few seconds, waiting to feel less horrible. He just stared at me with his solemn, narrow, beautiful face all sunken with pain and something else.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I held out my left hand as if to shake his left hand, and at first he didn’t move. Then he took my hand and held it as if we were going to shake like normal strangers, moving our arms up and down politely, but instead we were still. We stood like that, hand in hand, and it reminded me of what happens when you join circuits