Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [55]
“Abigail Coleman, I’m not marrying the idea of you. Or even the memory of you. I’m marrying you. So don’t worry about what you might become. I’ll love her, too. Even more. I’ll take the bad because that means I will have lived to know the good.”
She pressed her face to my chest, the sobs bubbling up quietly. When they grew too strong to hold back, she threw her arms around my neck, let out a cry that sounded like it started near her belly button and then pressed her tearstained and snotty face to mine. “Yes.”
18
JUNE 3
On the afternoon of the third day, we passed under the bridge at Highway 121. That meant we’d come twenty-three miles. Six more to Stokes Bridge—the quarterway mark.
This far up, the river isn’t used recreationally—as it is south of Trader’s Ferry. That meant the river would offer us cover up here, but further north, then east, it would open up and we’d start bumping into joyriders on Jet Skis, Bubbas in johnboats fishing the banks and federal wildlife officers patrolling in their twenty-two-foot Pathfinders mounted with FM radios, satellite phones and two-hundred-horse Yamaha four-stroke engines. Once spotted, you might duck and dodge your way around the engine, but not the radio.
The river narrowed again, the sandy bottom poking up through the water, making the river only a foot deep. A long expansive beach opened on our left. The sticky afternoon sun pressed down on my shoulders, making me sleepy, so I slid the canoe quietly beneath a tree, careful not to wake Abbie. Above us, on the Florida side, an enormous house was under construction. Its owners must have known what they were doing, because they’d bought the highest bluff on the river. The sheer topography of it placed them above any flood—except maybe Noah’s. Beyond us, the river turned hard right. I closed my eyes and saw every square inch of the riverbank. Within eyesight hung the stub of a rope swing where I learned to do a back flip. The rope was frayed, green and swayed slowly.
Below it sat the remnant of a bench.
I beached the canoe and shook Abbie. She raised an eyelid. “We there yet?”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’re here.”
She stood, weak-kneed and wobbly. “Good, ’cause I was thinking we had like another hundred miles to go or something.”
Concrete steps led from the riverbank, up the bluff and into the backyard of what looked like a ten-thousand-square-foot house. The high-pitched roofline came down over an expansive concrete back porch that would hold fifty rocking chairs and provide a spectacular vista of the river snaking below.
I carried Abbie up the steps and through the knee-high grass of the backyard. The house had been studded, the roof had been shingled and dried in and the brick had been laid but there were no windows, no Sheetrock and no interior finish work. It looked like they had just started working on the inside and only a few windows had been set in the front of the house. A Port-O-Let sat near the back porch, so I helped Abbie onto the seat and let her lean against me while her body emptied itself of more poison.
The doors were locked but I crawled through a window and brought her in. The vaulted ceilings in the den were nearly twenty feet high and a fireplace large enough to lay in grew out of the far wall. Cold ashes piled in the bottom. I checked the flume, which was open, rummaged through the lumber scrap pile and built a small fire. Abbie lay on the ground and turned toward it. I found some drop cloths in the laundry room along with a working sink. I brought Abbie a cup of water, then searched the remainder of the house. The second floor was no less small and when it came to views on the river, this might be about as good as it gets. The house was pretty clean, meaning there wasn’t much to be had. Back in the laundry room I discovered a Mr. Coffee and a half-full can of Maxwell House. I plugged the coffeemaker into an orange extension cord that ran in from the garage and the red light flashed on. While the Mr. Coffee sputtered, I pulled one of the aluminum foil–sided insulation boards out of the garage