THE CROSSING Episode 2
“Does it hurt much to die?” I tell her, “Yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.” —Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
Read About The Story Origin And Episode 1 Here.
10 Years Later
That Evening
Lisa had heard footsteps squish through the sodden leaves behind her and knew it was Lucas by the sound of how he moved and his breathing pattern once he got close enough. Her husband had mocked her: “You’re like a yard cat; you see and hear every damn thing. It gets you wound too tight.” He had been right, but that hadn’t made wrong her being that way. Lucas had paused noiselessly—something he seemed to do naturally—to watch her, so she spoke first.
“You can see the sunset under it.” She had risen and turned to him. The simple white dress he had given her to wear, its silk sheen, caught the dying sunlight, tinting it a reddish shade. It had appeared on the cot that afternoon while she showered and fit her perfectly. “Thanks for the dress.”
He nodded, seemed almost hesitant to move closer to her, then came up beside her and looked upriver at the bridge only a couple hundred yards away. “That point of land,” he raised his left hand, index finger extended, and swept it right-to-left, “the Yakama—natives of this area long before white settlers—called it The Crossing.”
She remembered going over the bridge with her husband. Sitting in his car, seeing the bridge bend into the fog was like moving from one world to another. But it hadn’t been. Things were the same; despite another new job… another new place, he had not changed. She realized Lucas was still talking, “I’m sorry… what?”
“It’s talked about in the legend of the Tah-tah kle'-ah.” He repeated it and paused, waiting.
She obliged his need and asked, “What’s that mean?”
“It’s the Yakama word for ‘Owl-Woman Monster,’ a ravenous being who hunts at night.” At her blank look, he had shrugged. “I read a lot. Local history mostly.”
She had turned from him to look out over the water. “I followed the only path down here. Is this where you found me?”
“Yeah. After storms, I come see what’s washed up. Sometimes I wonder at what people throw into this river. If it’s useful or I can fix it, I keep it.”
Which am I, she had wondered, the salvaged or the can’t-be-fixed? Twilight had settled, turning the far side of the river darker. She looked around at the steep banks behind her that climbed higher to an earthen shelf that ran for a mile, dotted with a handful of cabins overlooking the water.
Lucas had walked to the edge and nudged a piece of driftwood half in, half out of the water, with his boot. “You were clinging to this.”
She had stared down at it and then up at the bridge. The lights of the cars crossing it drew her attention. They shimmered through pooling tears. Their beams had reminded her of the last drive with her husband, moving to this area. Far and few between, the highway lights had done more to emphasize the long periods of darkness than offer any help to see anything. The road ahead unknown; the roadside and the road behind quickly receded. Occasionally, the headlights from an oncoming car would highlight her husband from the shoulders up. The firm jawline on a face marred by weak eyes that always refused to meet her judging gaze. She had inherited that look from her mother; it was one reason he had beaten her so.
“Lisa.”
She had felt Lucas’s stare and regretted his letting her have that silence, that flash of recall. “Yes,” she had turned to him, the paleness of his face over dark clothing a smudge of lightness in the gloaming.
“I’ve made dinner, let’s go eat.”
“Sure,” she had smiled at him. “Then I think I’ll go back to bed. I’m still tired.” But sleep meant bad dreams, though they also came on when she was awake. Filling the blank nooks and crannies of moments with vivid, moving images, narrated; a litany of bad shit. Or there were nightmares of things that never happened but might. She never knew which would come, but maybe it didn’t really matter. No… she decided, the real memories are worse.
* * *
Back Then…
That day I came home from school and saw from the bus two police cars and an ambulance moving down Ivy, the street I lived on, to turn on 4th Street. A third cop car was at the alley behind our house and the row of shops and the hardware store, I’d been in with my stepdad a few times. I got out at my stop and went into the house to ask mama if she knew what had happened.
But mama didn’t answer when I called out to her. A policeman stopped me before I could go upstairs. “Your mother’s not here, honey,” he told me. Then I knew who was in the ambulance I’d seen. Then a woman cop took me outside, where another woman stood like she was there for me.
I never saw mama again, so when they buried her, I tried to remember how pretty she was. Had been. But I couldn’t. And that hurt even worse.
‘They’ never found who killed my mother. ‘They’ said someone broke in the back door and stole what little jewelry mama had. She must have fought, ‘they’ said. But I know my mama didn’t fight back. Not that I’d ever seen.
People we—I—barely knew, the head-nod-and-wave neighbors, for a few days, when they saw me… would tell me how sorry they were and ask if they could do anything. Maybe some meant it. One man had brought me a dog he’d been trying to find a home for and thought he’d be good for me to have. My stepdad let me keep him; I don’t know why. Maybe to pretend he was a ‘caring father’ to the neighbor. I loved Buddy, and he was maybe the only thing that loved me other than mama. One night, my stepdad had been drinking since he got home from work. He stumbled over Buddy and kicked him hard. Buddy growled, and my stepdad backed away, taking his bottle upstairs. Buddy came with me to my room, but he was gone when I woke up…
* * *
Continued in Episode 3