Carol's gone to the river to try to collect her senses. She's worried and depressed, even though she can't help but think she has little cause for her anxiety. What she can't do is talk herself out of it, however. When she sits there, overlooking the river, her own daughter's story rises, the real cause of her pain.
One silent hour later, she lied to him, told him she was going to Wal-Mart when she was going to River Hills, a park five miles west of town where the meandering Big Sioux River cut jagged sides from the yellow clay of a series of sharp bluffs. There were no police at the entrance--not that she expected them really, but the park wasn't more than a half hour away from the spot where they'd found the boy's truck. It was May, late May, and from the top of the bluffs, where she first stopped the car and stood outside for just a moment, the whited path of the river showed how high it had been carrying snow melt and heavy spring rains. All the way along, maples and cottonwoods had been brought low by the high water, dumped neatly as if kneeling for a drink.
From the very beginning, she and Lloyd had been together on this thing, worked together, ever since the day Burt had called to tell them Paige had walked away from her marriage, left her husband and precious little Hannah for another teacher in that school in Joliet. They'd never disagreed, not really. Not once. They'd sat together before the fireplace they'd just had built that fall--the idea was a sweet place to spend cold winter evenings, just the two of them. They'd talk and talk and talk about what could or couldn't be done; and not once in all those nights had they really disagreed. She knew very well that her daughter had no right, no horrific grievance against her husband. Burt had treated both of them well, their daughter and granddaughter. She and Lloyd had agreed that it was their own Paige who was at fault here, and they'd told Burt as much, time and time again when they'd call him or when they'd talk to his folks.
Maybe Lloyd had been more angry than she had been. It was Lloyd who had done most of the talking--and the yelling. It was Lloyd who'd laid down the law. It was Lloyd who'd cut Paige off--told her that the two of them had to play hard ball with the outright she'd done, that neither themselves or the Lord God Almighty would buy her excuse about never really loving Burt--and the baby, my goodness, she thought, the baby. From the very beginning three months ago--from Burt's first call--not once had she and Lloyd really disagreed about what their own baby had done.
She got back in the car and slowly followed the winding road down to the river bottom, where grass was just beginning to grow from the mat of gray mud that caked the banks after the spring floods. She pulled up to the bank of the river on freshly laid gravel, looked around to see if anyone else was there--the boy named Rory had tried to murder the girl, after all. "Plain old lovers triangle," Lloyd had said. And why was she calling him a boy? At 26, he was a man.
I don't want to find him, she told herself--that's not the point. I don't want to see a boy who tried to murder a girl. I just don't want Lloyd to be right. Lord, she said, don't let him be right.
She didn't really know the problem. For years she'd lived with his noisy eating--soup, for instance. It seemed that he had to make noise when he sipped. But lately it was so aggravating she couldn't take it. And why? Because of Paige? His laughing at a TV show could turn her inside out. Watching him correct his students' papers. Just knowing he was working at something in his office. Having to hear his strong bass voice in church made her almost nauseous--was it a virus she'd picked up from her daughter? They'd never disagreed about their daughter, not for a moment. They'd had a wonderful marriage--28 good years. But lately she took so little. Sometimes she just didn't see him suffer.
She left the car behind and followed the uneven path of freshly laid gravel as it skirted the banks of the river. Across the water, beaver dens gaped like black moons from the banks beneath four scraggly cottonwoods splayed in four different directions like pencils in a cup. Mid-stream, a sculpture of bleached limbs, one of the river's earlier victims, stood like a monument to the torrent of water that now seemed wide and slow and safe, nowhere near to dangerous.
What she wanted, of course, was for the boy to give himself up, not do himself in. But it was wrong of her to think that way about the whole story, because her motive had much more to do with her husband and his sense of what would happen than it did with the real life of a diabetic kid whose mother was horribly hurt. She wanted him alive only to spite her own husband.
What she hated was Lloyd's nonchalance--and maybe that wasn't the right word either. What she hated was the fact that this horror of Paige's flooded every last part of her, and had, for three months, swept everything alive and growing into its channel, everything at work and at home and at church--wherever. She couldn't sleep, and hearing his breathing relax into that heavy pattern she'd heard for years only aggravated her more. She had to force herself to eat. Twice in three months they'd made love, and both times she tried to fake her enjoyment.
Maybe she should simply go to Joliet herself, alone, she thought. Maybe if she would take Paige into her arms--maybe, maybe, maybe.
_______________________
Tomorrow: An unexpected guest interrupts Carol's anxiousness.
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