Dark Water - Laura McNeal [60]
“No,” I said to Mary Beth. “He didn’t.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks, anyway,” and, taking the sandwich that she didn’t want, she walked away from me, and as I’d feared she would, she dropped it in the trash.
Thirty-eight
I told my mother I had more shifts at Subway than I really did so I could be at the river when I wasn’t at work, waiting for Amiel to draw letters on the trembling skin of my palm. More often, though, he wrote what he had to say on the dirt or answered me, if the weather wasn’t too hot and dry, in his raspy voice.
I would ask a question: “So where were you born?”
It took a while to spell out San Ygnacio, Guanajuato.
Another time, I asked about his father.
Estados Unidos, he wrote.
“But where? Here?”
The answer was too long to write, so he whispered, “My father sent my mother money until I had four years, but then he stopped.”
“Why?”
Amiel shrugged.
“What happened to your mother?”
With the stick he drew what looked like a small hill, and then he drew a cross on top of it.
The day I finally spotted the green string hammock wadded up in the willows and brought it to him, he untangled it and strung it from one tree to another and then, with an elegant bow that reminded me of his juggling performance, he offered it to me. I laid myself in the hammock and asked, “How did you learn English, anyway?”
He shrugged. “A guy. Un maestro.”
I waited for him to add more, but he didn’t. He pushed gently on the hammock, and I swayed under the restless trees.
“Did he teach you juggling and stuff, too?”
He nodded.
“Did you see me that day I took a nap in this?” I asked.
He didn’t have to speak to answer that. He nodded slowly, and the hammock went on swinging under his gentle touch.
“What about the accident? The steering wheel?”
He looked away from me and kept his fingers knotted in the hammock string, allowing them to go back and forth, to slow me down, to stop the movement entirely. This time, he took my hand as I longed for him to do, and he used his finger to make the number 2. “Long,” he whispered, and my ride in the swing was over.
Thirty-nine
We hadn’t kissed except for the one time with the loquats. But on August 21, three days before the return to school, clouds rippled overhead like dirty fleece, turning the river into a room lit evenly from within.
I had the whole day off, so I had ridden into the canyon early, passing one woman on horseback and another with an off-leash Labrador. I hated the off-leash dogs. They found their way to Amiel’s house fairly often and carried ramen bags away in their mouths.
I knew that what we were going to do that day was catch cangrejos. It turns out that cangrejos del mar are crabs, but cangrejos del río are crayfish, and that was the kind Amiel meant when he said they were his favorite food. Amiel allowed me to bring things now and then to contribute to our picnics at the river—a nice frying pan, a batch of brownies, matches—but this time he’d asked me to bring liver as bait for the cangrejos. Lamb liver. I handed it over, and he opened the grocery store package with his knife.
A crayfish trap, or at least a crayfish trap made by Amiel, looks like a collapsible wire basket. The lamb’s liver goes in the bottom, and the long chain that comes up from the center is tied to an old plastic milk jug. Amiel had three of these traps, and once he’d baited them all and attached the floats, he led me to a place along his side of the river where little holes in the sand meant crayfish. Amiel dropped the baskets carefully in the water and led me further up the bank to sit. I had secretly brought something besides lamb’s liver to share: the French mime movie that I’d watched back in May and tried to show him before he tapped my laptop shut.
“Come on,” I said. “Do we have to watch the traps the whole time?”
He shook his head, but he seemed to think watching them would be ideal.
“Come on,” I repeated. I made him follow me into his house—not the roofless old cottage where we cooked, but the grotto. I knew we