Where the River Ends

Chapter One

May 30th

I climbed the final step into my studio, sniffed the dank fireplace and wondered how long it would take an errant flame to consume everything in here. Minutes I should think. Arms folded, I leaned against the wall and stared at all the eyes staring back at me. Abbie had tried so hard to make me believe. Even taken me halfway around the world. Introduced me to Rembrandt, poked me in the shoulder and said, “You can do that.” So, I had painted. Faces mostly. My mother had planted the seed that, years later, Abbie watered, nurtured and pruned. In truth, given a good flame and a tardy fire department, I stood to make more money on an insurance payout. Stacked around me in layered rows against the four walls lay more than three hundred dusty works— a decade’s worth—all oil on canvas. Faces captured in moments speaking emotions known by hearts but spoken by few mouths. At one time, it had come so easily. So fluidly. I remember moments when I couldn’t wait to get in here, when I couldn’t hold it back, when I would paint on four canvas’s at once. Those all-nighters when I discovered Vesuvius in me.

The last decade of my life was staring back at me. Once hung with promise in studios across Charleston, they had slowly, one at a time, returned. Self-proclaimed art critics pontificating in local papers complained that my work lacked originality, was absent of heart and my favorite, boring and devoid of artistic skill or understanding.

There’s a reason the critics are called ‘critics.’

On the easel before me, stretched a white canvas. Dusty, sun-faded and cracked. It was empty.

Like me.

I stepped through the window, along the side of the roof and climbed the iron stairs to the crow’s nest. I smelled the salt and looked out over the water. Somewhere a seagull squawked at me. The air was thick, dense and blanketed the city in quiet. The sky was clear but it smelled like rain. The moon hung high and full, casting shadows on the water that lapped the concrete bulkhead a hundred feet away. The lights of Fort Sumpter sat glistening in the distance to the southeast. Before me, the Ashley and Cooper rivers ran into one. Most Charlestonians will tell you it is there that the two form the Atlantic Ocean. Sullivan’s Island sat just north along with the beach where we used to swim. I closed my eyes and listened for the echo of our laughter.

That’d been a while.

“The Holy City,” with its competing steeples piercing the night sky, lay still behind me. Below me stretched my shadow. Cast upon the roof, it tugged at my pants leg, begging me backward and pulling me down. The ironwork that held me had been fashioned some fifty years ago by local legend, Philip Simmons. Now in his nineties, his work had become the Charleston rave and was very much in demand. The crow’s nest, having ridden out the storm, came with the house. In the thirteen years we’d lived here, this nine square feet of perch had become the midnight platform from which I viewed the world. My singular and solitary escape.

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I checked the faceplate and saw the Texas area code. “Hello?”

“Chris Michaels?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Anita Becker, assistant to Dr. Paul Virth.”

“Yes?” My breathing was short. So much hung on her next few words.

She paused. “We wanted to call and…” I knew it before she said it. “…say that the oversight committee has met and decided on the parameters of the study. At this time, we’re only accepting primary cases. Not secondary.” The wind shifted, and swiveled the squeaking vane. The rooster now pointed south. “Next year, if this study proceeds as we hope, we’re planning on adding a study on secondary...” she either faded off. Or, maybe I did. “We’re sending a letter recommending Abbie for a study with Doctors Plist and Mackles out of Sloan Kettering…”

“Thank you…very much.” I closed the phone.

The problem with a Hail Mary pass is that it hangs in the air so long, and most are dropped in the end zone. That’s why they invoke God.

Because it’s impossible to begin with.

Lungs half-full, I climbed down, and back through the window. The phone rang a second time but I let it ring. A minute passed and it rang again. I checked the faceplate. It read, “Dr. Ruddy.”

“Hey, Ruddy.”

“Chris.” His voice was quiet. Subdued. I could see him, leaning over his desk, head resting in his hands. His chair squeaked. “Your scan results are in. If you two could get around the speaker phone, thought maybe we’d talk through them.”

His tone of voice told me enough. “Ruddy, she’s sleeping. Finally. Did that most of yesterday. Maybe you could just give them to me.” He read between the lines.

“I’m with you.” A pause. “Umm…they’re uhh…” He choked. Ruddy had been our lead doctor since the beginning.

“Chris…I’m sorry.”

We listened to each other listening to each other. “How long?”

“A week. Maybe two. Longer if you can keep her horizontal… and still.”

I faked a laugh. “You know better than that.”

A deep breath. “Yep.”

I slid the phone back in my pocket and scratched my twoday stubble. My eyes stared out over the water, but my mind was a couple hundred miles away.

Empty-handed and lungs half-full, I climbed down and back through the window. Running my fingers along the trim tacked to the wall, I crept down another flight. The staircase was narrow, made of twelve-inch wide pine planks, which at nearly 200 years old, creaked loudly—tapping out a story of age and the drunken pirates who once stumbled down them.

The sound lifted her eyelids but I doubted she’d been asleep. Fighters don’t sleep between rounds. A cross-breeze slipped through the open windows and filtered across our room, raising goose bumps across her calves.

Footsteps sounded downstairs so I crossed the room, closed the bedroom door and returned. I sat next to her, slid the fleece blanket over her legs and sat back against the headboard. She whispered, “How long have I been asleep?”

I shrugged.

“Yesterday?”

“Almost.” While we could manage the pain with medication we couldn’t deter its debilitating effects. She would lie still, motionless for hours, fighting an inner battle in which I played helpless spectator. Then for reasons neither of us could explain, she’d experience moments—sometimes even days—of total, windswept lucidity, when the pain would relent and she was as normal as ever. Then with little warning, it would return and she’d begin her own private battle once again. It is there that you learn the difference between tired and fatigued. Sleep cures tired, but it has no effect on fatigued.