I realized then that River wasn’t the wanderer I had always thought him to be. It wasn’t the case that he always had to be on the go, trying something new, wearing out places within months and moving on. That wasn’t it. It was that he had not had a real home—not since Julian died. He hadn’t had a place where it was worth staying put, a place that was worth setting up properly and calling his own.
But now he did. And I understood that he wasn’t going anywhere.
◈ ◈ ◈
Cambria moved to San Francisco. She had completed her cosmetology training and lined up a job at a spa in the Bay Area, mostly to do bridal and event makeup, she had informed me. She had explained that there would be more work for her in the city, and that getting to live closer to Jamie was only secondary.
She had always acted so nonchalantly on the topic of Jamie—her stubbornness preventing her from admitting that I, her boring, older sister, had been the one to find her a guy she was crazy about. She even went as far as to claim that her primary reason for dating him was that he would, one day, make phenomenal money as an ER doctor.
I was sad when the day came and she moved miles and miles away from me. But more than that, I was happy for her, much the way I had felt when Chloe and Ariel moved across the country to Connecticut. I still kept in touch with Chloe; we had resorted to emailing each other a few times a month, and she always attached pictures of Ariel for me, so I could see exactly just how tall and beautiful she was getting.
River and I remained in Deerfield, in our farmhouse that was gradually coming back to life, thanks to River’s efforts. We had no plans of leaving anytime soon.
At first, the place had just been a house. Walls, wood, windows, wiring. But over time it became more. Its first transformation came when I heard River refer to it not as the house but as home. My body tingled when he said it. It had happened during our first month there, while we were going on a walk down our road. The sun was setting. He’d woven his fingers in between mine and said, “Let’s go home.”
The next transformation of our home came unexpectedly for me. I had always thought that home was the ultimate goal of a house—what more could it become?
It became a part of me. A part of us. In some sense, the house was us.
I could feel it. One day that March, I painted our spare bedroom a pale yellow. The next day I felt different. Better, although I couldn’t identify in what way exactly.
I cleaned the front room another day. I spent hours wiping away cobwebs, organizing our books, and beautifying the room with what resources I had at my disposal. I felt these effects, too. A room in my own body felt cleaner and more beautiful.
I told River about it, and he believed me. The next morning, we went into our bedroom and worked inside of it until the sun went down. We cleaned and sorted; we shed what we didn’t need. While I was dusting behind our dresser, I found a chip in the wall’s white paint. Underneath was a soft green color, like a leaf that had been bleached by the sun. We ran to the store and came back home with a bucket of paint that matched it. We covered the wall—just that one—in the leaf-green hue.
When we were finished, we stretched out on the bed and took in what we had accomplished. Lying there, I felt a kind of contentment creep over me and saturate my body more fully than I had ever experienced. I looked over at River, who held his gaze on our new, green wall.
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
“Perfect.”
We slept in our contentment that night, gratefully giving it the reins to help us drift away into the darkness.
◈ ◈ ◈
Darkness.
There are different kinds of it.
There is the transient kind that takes over the world at night, sucking the color from all objects, causing the mind to question the body’s surroundings—but the mind knows with certainty that its lightless dominion will fade by morning.
There is the kind of darkness that often occurs in synchronization with nightfall—the kind that possesses your consciousness when you fall asleep, blurring the passage of time, preventing you from knowing what events might be taking place around you as you lay in dormancy. But still, sleep is only temporary, and vital. It is even pleasant, oftentimes, like that night River and I drifted off together in our newly rejuvenated bedroom.
In my short stories, I had written about other sorts of darkness, as well. One of these stories was even published—my third story to make its way into a literary magazine—a tale of an elderly woman with a tragic background she had finally learned to overcome. But that kind of darkness only lived in her past, and more than that, it only lived in my fiction, my made-up world where things couldn’t get out and touch me or so much as look at me with their tortured eyes.
Then, I learned, there is yet another kind of darkness.
We had just celebrated our second year of marriage. Still in the farmhouse. Milo fully grown and just as likely as ever to snooze in my lap while I typed up stories. Cambria and Jamie were engaged in San Francisco. Zach and Riley had a newborn, Lyla Beatrice, at their home in Seattle. River was still working as a rafting guide for another month or so until the season died out; I was still at the bookstore for another few weeks until my winter leave.
It started with the flu. A coworker at Wild Waters had been sick, and a week later, River’s body ached, he had a fever, and he stayed home from work, sleeping in bed. What I should say is, we figured it had been the flu.
Another week went by, and River told me he was still cold. He shivered when changing his clothes; he dressed in sweaters and jeans even though it was still relatively warm out in September. He started waking up with night sweats—his body caked in perspiration, his clothes soaked, but he told me he was still cold, that he couldn’t get warm.
He told me his body still ached—his ankles hurt when he walked, his knees stung when trying to pull on his pants in the morning, his wrists burned when he tried helping me chop up food in the kitchen.
He told me he was still tired. He stopped rafting a few weeks early. He struggled to climb the steps to get up to our bedroom at night. He started napping two hours a day.
I had implored him several times to let me make a doctor appointment, but he told me he would be fine. He told me that he was still recovering from the flu, that it had been a bad one, that as a kid it had sometimes taken him a few weeks to make a full recovery.
Finally, one night, he gave in. I threw all the extra blankets we had on top of him as he trembled in bed from the chills, and he told me he would make an appointment in the morning.
When morning came, I woke up to blood. A soft pool of it on his pillow, the color of dried cranberries, still wet. My hands frantically shook him awake, my voice saying, “River, blood.” When he opened his eyes and lifted his head, I could see the same crimson stain below his nose, on his lips. A nosebleed, but one I had never seen the likes of before. I jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom, and returned with a dampened washcloth. I wiped away the blood and kissed his lips, and he kissed mine, but we were afraid.
Doctor appointments—plural. Not just one, like I had been pushing River to make. Two, three, four, then several, then several more. And tests. Tests with words like aspiration and biopsy and puncture, bone marrow and blood and spinal. Imaging tests and more doctors and cautiously-toned words, words that were really bullets but that were pretended to be mere possibilities, little specks floating around in the air that might just blow away into nothing.