Dead River - By Cyn Balog Page 0,5

Nia Levesque waded into the Delaware River one fair summer’s night shortly after my seventh birthday. I know little else because how much a person’s mother hated life is not something people like to discuss with a seven-year-old. I remember things, though, like that her skin was always damp and clammy and that her hair always looked like it needed a comb run through it. Despite those things, she was my sun. When she was gone, it was like my whole universe went out of orbit, because I’d been so used to following three steps behind her.

I’ve heard that after a suicide, the people left behind always look back and see signs in the victim, signs of pain or trauma they somehow ignored. I know I was only seven, but with my mom, there were no indications. Nothing. She was never distant; she smiled and hugged and kissed me all the time. When I look back at my mom, I can’t help but think there was so much about her I didn’t know, so much she must have kept hidden from me.

I know that I have forgotten things: the slope of her nose, the color of her skin, the exact blue shade of her eyes, the little mannerisms she had. Pictures don’t convey a whole person, and I only have one of those. It wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but I didn’t know that my father and I would never return home. I would have taken my whole photo book, which had countless beautiful pictures of my mother, but he chose one picture, from my sixth birthday. In it, she’s not even smiling. She’s leaning over me as I blow out the candles on my birthday cake and she looks worried, probably that a lock of my hair might get caught in the flame. I don’t know what her smile looks like anymore. Every memory I have is just a poor reproduction, merely a shade of her. I worry that as days go by I will forget more and more, and the only thing left will be this overwhelming feeling of abandonment. That and the worried, uneasy woman she was in that picture.

When we lived in New Jersey, we had a house right on the river. I had the best room, all pink, and the sunrise would bounce off the waves and create magical iridescent ripples on my walls. My father put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, but when the moon shone, it would splash the brightest white ripples right onto them. More often than not, I felt like I was sleeping underwater rather than under a night sky.

Strange things happened around the time of her death. I can’t really explain it. I would lie in my bed, listening to the rush of the river against the rocks, and in time it would sound like voices. Whispering to me. Then the visions came. They didn’t start off frightening. I’d lie in the dark with my eyes open, watching them parade through my room, oblivious to me, a series of who-knows-what—ideas or dreams or ghosts, playing on a movie reel. Redheaded boys in overalls, fishing. Girls in old-fashioned swim trunks, holding their noses as they plunged into the blackness. Men in waders, sleeves rolled up. Sometimes I’d have conversations with them, play games with them, but usually I’d just watch them quietly, all night long, wishing I could be part of their carefree, happy lives.

Until the images … changed.

I fight back the picture of the girl in the pink party dress and tight, stringy braids. I didn’t know her name, didn’t know anything about her except that her expression was hopeless and sad, she was covered in dirt, one of her knee-high socks was pooled around her ankle, and her knees were bloody. I think she wanted to tell me something, but whenever she opened her mouth to speak to me, mud poured from it. Mud trickled from her nose, covering the lower part of her face like a beard. Her cheeks were muddy and lined with tears.

I stopped sleeping. My dad was stressed out enough teaching history to inner-city kids in Paterson, in a district two hours from our house, so he didn’t need me screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, like I so often did. He thought I missed my mom. And yeah, I did, but there was more. And I was afraid to tell him. Turned out I was as good at keeping