At first Geiger wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Perhaps it was the hallucination of a blood-starved mind, or maybe he was now fully in the grip of the dream’s embrace.
Two hands rose from the river like pale aquatic creatures and grabbed the rowboat’s gunwale. A head broke the water’s surface; Geiger saw the mad eyes of a savior, the open mouth of a child seeking its own kind, a body pushed by fear and exhilaration beyond its limits-and then Lily tried to lever herself up out of the river.
With her added weight, the boat abruptly listed forty degrees, causing Hall to rear backward and send the vessel into a full capsize. He, Ezra, and Lily all disappeared beneath the upturned boat without a sound.
Geiger knew he would finish the dream now, awake and in the world. There would be no coming apart.
He heard a voice behind him, a hoarse and desperate shout:
“Geiger!”
But he knew the call came from outside the dream, so he dove off the dock’s edge, slamming down on the water, and began swimming for the boat. The coolness of the river was both a stimulant and an anesthetic, pricking the mind and numbing the flesh.
As he neared the boat, he dove under. Geiger swam forward through the blackness, and then desperate hands found him, clawing, grabbing. They pulled him into the thrashing madness.
Harry staggered down the dock. The river churned with unseen violence around the rowboat. Flailing, anonymous limbs broke the surface, then disappeared beneath it, as if the river had staked a claim to them. Then the commotion ceased.
The last pyrotechnics painted the sky with a majestic facsimile of the American flag. As the lights gradually dispersed and winked out, the flag dissolved, leaving only a few stars shining modestly in the blackness. The distant cheers faded to silence.
Harry watched the boat drift down the river, looking for any sign of life around it, desperately fighting against the pull of grief. Then he saw a figure surge up from beneath the river.
The swimmer started for shore, obviously exhausted. One arm slapped the water; the other dragged something behind. Harry raced off the dock and ran a few steps along the riverbank. Looking out across the black water, he still couldn’t tell who it was. When he reached a spot opposite the swimmer, he jumped down to the stones and mud. The skinny figure crawled the last few yards and collapsed on the shore, coughing, heaving. The gym bag lay beside him.
Harry knelt beside Ezra and gently put a hand on his back. Ignoring the shouts and the skittering flashlight beams coming from behind him, he slowly rolled the boy over.
Ezra looked up at him and hacked up some of the river.
“Easy,” Harry said. “Easy.”
He saw the question in Ezra’s eyes before it was asked.
“Geiger?” said the boy.
Harry shook his head, and Ezra began to cry, a silent, abyssal outpouring.
They sat on the top front step of Corley’s house-Ezra, wrapped in a blanket, and Harry, his chest bandaged from shoulder to waist, with his arm around the boy. They shared the same flat stare of fresh grief.
The lights of two police cars and an ambulance drew shimmering patterns of color on the yard. Earlier, sitting in the living room, a first round of questions had been asked of each of them, eliciting answers intended to confound instead of clarify. Theirs was a mystifying tale of a home invasion by two strangers who had attacked them for inexplicable reasons, resulting in one dead body and three people missing in the river. In all the drama and confusion, the gym bag had been tossed onto the kitchen counter, unexplored. At a break in the questioning, Harry had excused himself and paid a visit to the bathroom, where he had emptied the bag of its contents and hidden the discs in the toilet’s tank.
Now, as they sat on the step, Ezra finally turned to Harry and told him about what had happened in the river’s black turmoil. The boy had been no match for the strength of other hands pulling at him and grasping for control. Then someone had pried him free from the tangle of bodies, shoved the gym bag into his midsection, and pushed him up toward air and life. But the cost of his survival felt unbearable.
“I’m so sorry,” Ezra said, shaking his head.
Harry turned to him. “For what?”
“This is all because of me.”
Harry pulled him closer. “No, it’s not, Ezra. It’s just…” He was desperate for more words, for something wiser or more soothing to say to the boy, but nothing came.
A car drove out of the woods, and a policeman jogged forward and stood in front of it, his arms up. The car stopped, and a tall, lanky woman got out. The cop approached her, a ten-second conversation took place, and then she shoved him out of the way and marched forward.
“Ezra?”
The boy looked up, startled by the sound of a familiar voice. Harry, smiling, gave Ezra’s shoulder a squeeze.
The woman caught sight of her son and started to run.
22
Business was bad. A dog days heat wave had driven people from the street, and it didn’t help that the city had started hauling away the wreckage of Geiger’s house. A storm fence with a gate had been put up in front of the lot, and the demolition crew had cordoned off a strip of the sidewalk.
Mr. Memz took a half-smoked cigarette from his pack, flicked his Zippo, and lit up. When the skinny guy with the cane stopped at his table, it took Mr. Memz a second or two to place him. But then the scene came back to him, and he remembered the name, too.
“Harry, right? Yeah, Geiger’s Harry. The cane threw me off for a sec.”
Smiling faintly, Harry raised the dark cherry cane and showed Mr. Memz its carved handle.
“Distinguished, huh?”
“Wish I could use one. It’s a nice look.” Mr. Memz glanced up at Harry hopefully. “Hey, Harry, you got a smoke?”
“Nope, sorry.”
“Damn. Hardly anybody smokes anymore.”
Harry scanned the street, his new habit. “So how’s business?”
“Shit, man- what business?”
A loud crunch made them both turn. A tractor had just dropped a load of debris from the ruined house into a dump truck.
Turning back, the two men looked at each other.
“He’s gone, man,” Harry said.
“‘Gone’ as in gone away?”
“No-drowned. Upstate, five weeks ago.”
Mr. Memz’s lips twisted into a dark grimace, and he shook his head. “Was it that July Fourth thing I heard about, the one on the river?”
“Yeah.”
For a moment Mr. Memz sat utterly still, but then he growled and slammed a fist onto the table. His books jumped.
Harry sighed. “I just wanted you to know.”
Mr. Memz said nothing. The growl had become a hollow mutter.
Harry tapped his cane on the sidewalk. “I gotta go now, okay? I gotta be somewhere.”
“Okay.” Mr. Memz nodded, his eyes blank. “See ya ’round.”
“Probably not, actually.”
