Burning the Edges: What The River Took

The balcony of the DeSoto Hotel hung above the treetops like a green copper coin dropped into a well of moonlight. Below, the fountain in Johnson Square whispered to itself. Above, Spanish moss trailed from the live oaks and the Savannah night pressed warm and wet against Seraphina Drake's bare arms, against the open pages of the manuscript she held, against the sweat that gathered at the small of her back despite the hour. She sat cross-legged in a wrought-iron chair that had no business being comfortable and somehow was, sneakers tucked beneath her, a stack of bound galleys balanced on her knee.

Matthias Calder paced the length of the balcony with a long-legged, restless gait, his own manuscript clutched against his chest like a wounded bird. He was nineteen. He looked fifteen. He had not yet learned to hide the bruise-colored hollows beneath his eyes.

"You're going to wear a groove in the stone," Seraphina said, without looking up. Her voice came out quick and warm, the way she spoke when she was trying not to frighten a stray cat. "And your author's going to feel it in her bones. Page four, the one where the river takes the boy. You rewrote it."

"It's not the river that takes him." He stopped. His accent roughened the edges of the words, soft Scottish consonants that wanted to retreat. "He chooses. He chooses to go. That's the whole point. I had to get the verbs right or it meant something else."

"It meant something else before." She tapped the margin where she'd penciled a question. "Before, it meant the river was hungry. Now it means the boy is hungry. That's a different book."

He came and sat on the railing across from her, one ankle hooked around the balustrade, his manuscript open in his lap. The pages fluttered in the breeze coming up from the square. Jasmine, wet stone, the faintly sulfurous breath of the fountain. Somewhere a streetcar dinged at a ghost stop two blocks over, though no streetcar had run this line in forty years.

"Say it again," he said.

"Page four. Out loud. I want to hear how it sounds when you're not thinking about whether I'm going to reject it."

"I know you're not going to reject it." His jaw tightened. "You brought me up here. You brought the coffee."

"I brought the terrible coffee from the hospitality suite that tastes like it was brewed in 1987. That's not a promise, that's a punishment."

He almost smiled. Then he bent over the page and began to read.

His voice changed when he read. The rough, defensive edges softened into something more careful, almost tender, and his accent thickened on certain words, water becoming watter , thought becoming thocht , as though the boy in the story was speaking through him. The fountain murmured beneath the words. A mosquito orbited the lantern above their heads with the patience of a small, determined monk.

Seraphina listened with her pencil suspended. The galley in her lap was the one she'd brought, an early pass of a debut novel by a writer in Houston who had buried her dog in the acknowledgments, and she was supposed to be flagging typos for the production team. Instead she watched his hands on the manuscript, the way his thumb kept drifting to the corner of the page as though reassuring himself the paper was still there. She'd been a junior editor for nine months. She'd been in three editorial meetings, two pitch lunches, and one catastrophic lunch where a senior editor had asked her to take notes and she'd accidentally written a poem in the margin. She did not yet know how to say no to a manuscript that needed her.

"Stop," she said, when he reached the second paragraph. "The comma after watter . Take it out."

"It's a breath."

"A breath the reader doesn't need. You're trusting them to pause on their own. Trust them, Matthias."

He looked up. The lantern light caught the gold in his irises, made them look almost amber. "You say trust them like it's nothing."

"It is nothing. It's the whole job." She grinned. "We get paid the medium amount of money to believe in strangers."

He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh and bent back to the page. The reading resumed. The fountain kept its own counsel. A magnolia petal drifted down from somewhere above and landed on her galley, pale against the cream paper, and she left it there because she superstitiously did not touch anything that came from above while editing.

An hour passed. Maybe two.

The hospitality coffee went cold in its paper cup. Somewhere below, a jazz trio packed up their instruments and the sidewalk went quiet. The square filled up with the sound of crickets and the distant complaint of a cat who had lost something it was not going to name. Matthias kept reading. His throat went dry and he did not stop for water, because stopping was a kind of permission he did not want to give himself. Seraphina kept her pencil moving in the margin, small loops and arrows, a question mark once, twice, then a star where the prose opened like a window.

"You have stars in your margins," he said, when he reached the end of a chapter.

"That's where the book surprises me."

"It surprises you a lot."

"It's a good book."

He looked down at the page, and something in his shoulders loosened, as though a stitch had been pulled. She knew that look. She'd seen it in her aunt Imogen's shop when a customer first understood the book they were holding. The look of being met.

"Keep going," she said. "Chapter five."

He turned the page. The lantern above them flickered once, twice, then steadied. The jasmine thickened. The cat below the square gave up its complaint and began a different one, softer, almost conversational, as though it had found what it was looking for and was now negotiating terms.

Seraphina pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them, the galley balanced against her shins. The magnolia petal stayed where it had fallen. The fountain murmured. Somewhere, very far off, a church bell tolled the quarter hour and she counted under her breath, one, two, three, four, and the night went on.

At two-fourteen, by the small clock on the wrought-iron table neither of them had noticed before, Matthias stopped mid-sentence and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye.

"That's the third time you've rubbed your eye in twenty minutes," Seraphina said.

"My eyes do that."

"Your eyes do that because you're exhausted."

"My eyes do that because there's pollen in this city. Savannah is a pollen factory." He dropped his hand. "I'm fine."

"You sound like my aunt Imogen. She says I'm fine when she's standing in a room that's on fire."

Something crossed his face, quick and unguarded, gone before she could read it. He looked down at the page.

"Your aunt," he said. "The bookshop."

"The bookshop."

"She's the one who taught you to edit."

"She taught me to read out loud. Editing I figured out by terror and coffee." She tilted her head. "How did you know that?"

"You wrote it in your query letter. I learned to read at the counter of a bookshop in Charleston run by my aunt, who insisted every book be read aloud at least once. That was in the second paragraph."

"You memorized my query letter?"

"I memorize everything people write to me when I'm trying to decide whether to trust them." He said it without embarrassment, the way a child says a thing that should be embarrassing and isn't because it is simply true. "The third paragraph had a typo. Acquiesce instead of acquiesce . You spelled it with two c's."

"Everyone makes typos."

"You don't. I've read your blog. You don't make typos." He looked up. The lantern had begun to gutter, the flame leaning sideways in its glass. "You made one in the query letter because you wanted me to know you were human."

Seraphina opened her mouth. Closed it. The magnolia petal quivered on the page in a breath of wind that came from nowhere.

"That's a dangerous thing to say to a junior editor at two in the morning," she said, finally.

"It's not two in the morning. It's past two."

"That's worse."

He turned the page. She let him. The fountain went on with its murmuring. A mockingbird in the oak above them offered a handful of borrowed phrases, a cardinal's whistle, a wood thrush's fluted note, then its own wild nonsense. Seraphina listened with her pencil still and her eyes half-closed, and somewhere between the mockingbird's third phrase and the fourth, she realized that the manuscript in her lap had gone cold where her hands had warmed it, that her feet were numb, that the city below the balcony had emptied of everything except cats and streetlights and the slow creak of a sign for a closed tavern turning in the breeze.

Matthias read on. His voice had dropped into the lower register he used for the boy in the story, the one who walked into the river and kept walking, and the rough Scottish consonants had softened into something almost American, almost childlike, as though the boy had come forward through him and taken over the throat. Seraphina marked a star in the margin without looking down.

The clock on the wrought-iron table said three.

She did not say stop. He did not say stop. The lantern guttered once more and went out, and they sat in the dark with the manuscript open between them and the jasmine heavy on the air and the mockingbird still practicing its stolen songs in the oak above, and the river in the story kept rising.

The manuscript page she turned to next was not the boy in the river. It was younger, and it was hers, and it smelled faintly of cold rain and old paper and the particular mildew that lived in the back room of a certain bookshop on Halsted Street in the summer of 1994.

Seraphina was eleven the first time she noticed him. He was twelve, which mattered enormously, and he was standing in the narrow aisle between the poetry section and the locked cabinet where Aunt Imogen kept the books she said were too lovely for careless hands. He had a book open in his lap and he was crying, quietly, with his shoulders hunched and his chin tucked down so that anyone glancing in would have thought he was simply reading.

Seraphina, who had been crouched behind the rolling ladder eavesdropping on Aunt Imogen and a man in a gray suit who kept saying the words option and rights and regrettable, saw him first. She watched for three full minutes before she did anything. Then she climbed down and walked over and sat on the floor beside him and said nothing, because she had been raised by a woman who believed that presence was a form of speech.

He did not look up. His thumb traced the same line over and over. The book, she saw when she tilted her head, was a battered paperback of The Wild Places. Robert Macfarlane. She recognized the cover because Aunt Imogen had a first edition behind the counter and treated it like a sleeping infant.

After a while he said, without lifting his head, "My da died in March."

Seraphina considered this. She had lost a hamster and a grandmother and, once, a sandal in Lake Michigan, and none of these seemed to be the same thing, but she also knew what it was like to feel that the shape of the world had been altered without warning. "I'm sorry," she said, which felt thin, so she added, "Do you want to read mine? It's about a boy who walks into a river."

"He dies?"

"Probably."

He looked at her then. His eyes were the kind of green that looked almost gray in bad light and almost blue in good light, and they were swollen from crying, and there was a scab on his chin where he had clearly fallen off something recently. "All right," he said.

She handed him the manuscript. He read the first page. He turned to her with a face that had forgotten, for the moment, to be sad. "This is you," he said. "You wrote this."

"I'm working on it," Seraphina said, which was not quite true. She had written the first line three years earlier and the second line seven minutes earlier and the rest was mostly in her head. "I'm eleven. I have time."

He looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone who had just discovered a country on a map he thought he already knew. Then he wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, "I'm Matthias. I came from Scotland. My name sounds like the man who burned the women but I'm not him."

"I know," Seraphina said, though she didn't. "I'm Seraphina. My aunt owns this shop. I live here in the summers."

"The summers?"

She nodded. "The rest of the year I'm in Cincinnati with my mother who doesn't read." She considered. "She reads, but not the right things."

He almost smiled. It was the smallest possible smile, a crack in a wall, but Seraphina saw it and felt the particular thrill of having caused it.

That was the beginning. Not the rainstorm. The rainstorm came later, in August, the same summer, on a Tuesday that smelled of ozone and hot asphalt and the particular metallic threat of a Chicago thunderstorm about to break.

She had been sent by Aunt Imogen to the post office on Broadway with a satchel full of manuscripts that needed mailing to agents in New York. The bag was too heavy for her. The sky was too low. The first drops hit her like cold coins as she came out of the post office, and by the time she reached the corner of Halsted and Aldine she was soaked through, her shoes squelching, the satchel clutched to her chest to save the manuscripts, which mattered more than she did.

Matthias came out of nowhere. He had an umbrella that was too small and a coat that was too big and he was on the wrong side of the street, and he crossed at a run, splashing through a puddle that drenched his jeans to the knee, and he did not ask permission. He simply took the satchel from her arms, slung it over his shoulder, and put the coat around her shoulders without a word. It smelled like his house, which she had never been inside but could now imagine: wool, woodsmoke, something like damp wool and tea.

"You'll catch your death," he said, and his voice had the rough music she was learning was particular to him, the consonants soft, the vowels round, the whole thing wrapped in a kind of stubborn gentleness.

"I'm already wet," she pointed out.

"You're wetter than you have to be." He held the umbrella over her, which meant he was not under it himself, and the rain hit his red hair and ran down his face in thin streams and he did not seem to mind. "Where are you going?"

"Back to the shop."

"I'm going that way."

They walked together. The coat came down to her knees. The sleeves had to be rolled twice. She could feel the warmth of him still in the lining, as though he had just taken it off, as though he had worn it specifically so that she could wear it next.

That was the rainstorm. That was the coat. That was the moment, though neither of them knew it then, when the shape of the world shifted.

The dinner came in October, after Seraphina had gone home to Cincinnati and come back for a weekend in the fall, and after Matthias had begun appearing at the bookshop with a regularity that Aunt Imogen noted without comment and Seraphina pretended not to notice. It was Halloween. Aunt Imogen had gone to a reading at the Newberry and left them with money for food and the warning that if they made a mess of the kitchen she would know, and would know specifically how.

They ordered in. Thai. Pad thai for her, green curry for him, spring rolls to share, and a bottle of something sparkling and nonalcoholic that Aunt Imogen kept for guests who were technically too young for the real thing.

"Say a title," Matthias said. "Any title. But you have to mean it."

"Mean it how?"

"Like it's a sentence. Like you're saying something to me and the title is the only way you can say it."

Seraphina thought. The spring roll was hot between her fingers. The curry smelled of lemongrass and heat. "The Secret Garden," she said, and watched his face.

He nodded slowly, his eyes on hers. "Yes," he said. "Exactly."

"Your turn."

"A Wrinkle in Time."

She considered. "That's the one about not giving up," she said. "Even when the people you love don't recognize you."

"Yes."

"And about the tesseract. The folding."

"Also the folding."

She took a bite of pad thai. The peanut sauce was sweet and sharp and a little burnt at the edges, the way she liked it. "Tuck Everlasting," she said.

He was quiet for a long moment. The rain had started again outside, soft against the windows of the shop's small back kitchen. "You're asking," he said finally, "if I would live forever with you if I could."

"Or if you would choose the river."

"I would choose the river."

"Every time?"

"Every time. If you were there."

She did not say anything for a moment. She felt the warmth of the curry and the cool of the rain and the particular electricity of being understood without having to explain herself. "A Little Princess," she said.

"Because you're pretending not to be rich when you are."

"Because I'm pretending not to be lonely when I am."

He reached across the table. He did not take her hand. He simply rested his knuckles against her wrist, very lightly, as though he were touching something that might fly away. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," he said, and his voice was rough, and she understood that he was not talking about the book at all.

She did not answer. She turned her wrist so that her palm was up, so that his hand fell into it, so that they sat there with their fingers loosely tangled over cooling curry while the rain wrote on the windows and the clock in the shop said ten and then eleven and then the particular hour when the city went quiet and even the sirens gave up.

The third night came in the winter, when Seraphina was back in Cincinnati and Matthias was in Edinburgh for a funeral, and they spoke on the telephone for four hours because the rates were cheaper after eleven and neither of them had money. The bookshop was closed. Aunt Imogen was in the back room going through the post. Seraphina was wrapped in a blanket on the daybed, and Matthias was at a pay phone in a hallway that smelled of carpet cleaner and cabbage, and they were talking about the future, which was a thing they had begun to do with increasing specificity.

"What do you want to be?" he asked.

"A writer," she said. "A real one. With books on shelves."

"And if they try to make you into something you're not?"

She thought about her aunt, who had fought with publishers and agents and the entire machinery of the trade and come out the other side with her standards intact and her hair grayer and her heart no smaller. "I won't let them," Seraphina said. "I promise."

"Promise what?"

"Promise that I won't let the industry make me cruel. That I won't trade what I actually think for what sells. That I won't pretend the boy in the river is a metaphor for anything except himself."

A long pause. The line hummed. She could hear, faintly, a television somewhere in his building, and the muffled sound of someone else's argument, and the rain, which was of course raining, because Edinburgh.

"I promise too," Matthias said. "On the telephone. In the hallway. On my brother's life."

"Don't swear on him."

"On my own life then. On the river. On the book I'm going to give you when I have the money."

"What book?"

"I don't know yet. But I'll know it when I see it. And I'll give it to you, and you'll know it's a title, and you'll know what it means."

She pressed the phone hard against her ear. The blanket smelled of cedar and dust and the lavender sachets Aunt Imogen tucked into everything. "Matthias," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm going to marry you one day."

He laughed. It was the first time she had made him laugh, really laugh, the sound startled out of him like a bird from a hedge. "All right," he said. "Yes. Do that."

The line hummed. The rain fell on two cities at once. Somewhere in the back room of a bookshop on Halsted Street, Aunt Imogen Drake paused over a letter and listened to her niece laugh into the telephone and did not smile, because smiling, she felt, would have been an intrusion, and yet she felt it anyway, the particular bittersweet lift of watching someone you love step willingly into a story that will cost them everything they have.

The manuscript page in Seraphina's lap, present tense, three in the morning on a balcony in a city that did not belong to either of them, turned itself at the touch of a breeze that had come up from the river. The next page was blank. The next page after that was not.

The lantern, which had been dark for an hour, chose that moment to remember it had fuel, and the small flame climbed back up the wick and steadied, and the manuscript lay open to a page headed, in Matthias's careful hand, with a single word: After.

The page said After.

Seraphina read.

The handwriting was Matthias's, careful as ever, but the loops of the letters had tightened, as though his hand had been colder than the room warranted, or as though his chest had been, which was more likely. He had always written the way he spoke when he was trying not to be overheard. The letters crowded close. They leaned on each other for warmth.

After I left your apartment that morning I walked the long way home. I went past the river. I stood on the bridge you and I used to lean over and I thought about the summer of the fire and how you had held my hand in the ambulance and how I had not deserved it then and did not deserve it now and how some men do not deserve anything but go on being given things anyway, until the giving stops, until the woman who has been giving finally runs out of the particular currency required, and then the men stand on bridges and marvel at the emptiness that has, all along, been their own.

I did not tell you about London because I could not find a version of the sentence that did not begin with an apology, and I have never been good at apologies, you know this, you have always known this, you once told me I apologized the way other men took off their hats, mechanically, without thinking, as though the gesture were the substance.

The job is a good job. A better job than I deserve, given how little I have done to deserve anything. Three years. Possibly five. They want me to start on the first of September. I will not start on the first of September. I will start on the first of October because I need a month to tell you, and a month to be told no by you, and a month to learn how to be the man who is told no by you.

I have packed nothing. I have bought nothing. I have not even booked the flight. I am writing this letter at three in the morning in the kitchen of our apartment, which is, I should have said, your apartment, because I have never paid a fair share of the rent, have I, I have always been the man who arrives and the woman who provides, and I have told myself this is love, and you have told yourself this is love, and we have both known it was something else.

Seraphina set the page down. Her hand was shaking. She picked up the mug Theo Ashby had left on the railing, the dregs of a tea he had brewed at midnight when he noticed her light still on and had not commented, only set the cup beside her elbow and gone back inside. The mug was cold. The tea had gone the particular gray of forgotten drinks. She drank it anyway, because her mouth was dry and because she did not know what else to do with her hands.

Theo. He had arrived from Edinburgh eight months ago, in the autumn of the year she had not yet finished grieving. He had answered an advertisement she had not placed. He had moved into the back room of the shop, the room with the crooked window, and had fixed the crooked window within a week and had said nothing about it, only closed the shutters with the particular quiet of a man who knew he was being allowed to stay. He was a poet. He taught at the university two days a week. He made very good toast. He had not, in all the months of his tenancy, asked her a single question about Matthias, which she had understood, in time, to be a kind of asking.

She turned the page. Matthias's handwriting continued.

You are moving. I know you are moving. Priya told me, and I am sorry I did not hear it from you, and I am sorrier still that I am using Priya as a way of not hearing it from you, because Priya is kind and Priya will be careful with the shape of the news, and I am not kind, and I would have dropped the shape on the floor like a dropped dish and we would both be standing among the pieces.

It is the morning of the move. I am writing this at seven. You will be awake. You will be making coffee. You will be wondering if you have packed the kettle, and you will have packed the kettle, because you always pack the kettle, because the kettle is, in your particular mythology of yourself, the talisman of the settled woman, the small iron proof that a home can be made anywhere.

I am going to call you. I am going to tell you about London. I am going to say the words in the order I have practiced them in the mirror, which is the only place I have ever practiced anything, the mirror, the small square of glass in the bathroom that fogs when I shower and clears when I am finished and that has, over the years, become the only honest witness of the man I am trying to be.

I am going to say: I have taken a job. I am going to say: In London. I am going to say: I start in October. I am going to say: I should have told you sooner. I am going to say: I am sorry. I am going to say: I love you. I am going to say all of these things and none of them will be the true thing, and the true thing is this:

I am a coward.

I have always been a coward. I have been a coward since the summer of the fire, since the day I could not get to my brother, since the day you held my hand in the ambulance and I let you hold it because I wanted to be held, and because I did not know how to ask to be held, and because it was easier, then, to let you hold me than to learn how to hold myself. I have been living on the proceeds of that holding ever since. I have been spending the capital of your patience. I have drawn it down to almost nothing. I will draw it down to nothing on this phone call, and then I will hang up, and then I will go to London, and then I will be the man on the bridge again, the man who marvels.

Seraphina put the manuscript down. The lantern flickered. The river moved below the balcony, black and patient, carrying whatever it carried toward whatever it carried things toward, the way rivers do, indifferent to the particular griefs of the people who stand on their banks.

The phone in the kitchen rang.

She did not move for a long moment. Theo, in the back room, must have heard it. He did not come out. Priya, in her apartment across the city, must have been asleep. Jasper, who had offered to come help with the move and whom she had, in a small unkindness she would regret for years, declined, must have been asleep. The phone rang again. The sound was the color of brass. The sound was the color of an apology made by a man who did not know how to apologize.

She went inside.

The kitchen smelled of yesterday's bread and of the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, the boxes she had labeled in her own hand, the boxes she had packed with the kettle and the good plates and the photograph of Aunt Imogen and the small carved bird Matthias had given her on her twentieth birthday, the bird she was not sure she would unpack, the bird she was not sure she would not.

She picked up the phone.

"Hello."

"Seraphina." His voice was the voice of the bridge. His voice was the voice of the man marveling. "I have taken a job."

"I know," she said. She had not known. She knew.

"How do you know?"

"Priya."

A pause. The pause of a man recalculating the cost of a transaction he has already made. "I should have told you."

"Yes."

"In person."

"Yes."

"I couldn't. I tried. I sat at the kitchen table three times and wrote the sentence down and couldn't make the sentence work. I am not good at sentences."

"I know," she said. "I have always known."

"Are you angry?"

"I don't know yet," she said, and it was true. She had not yet arrived at anger. She was somewhere before anger, in the country that came before anger, the country of the woman who has been given the news and is holding it the way one holds a dish one suspects is going to be dropped. "Where is the job, Matthias."

"London."

"London," she repeated. The word tasted of brass and rain.

"Three years. Possibly five. They want me to start in October. I should have told you. I am telling you now. I love you. I am sorry."

She pressed her forehead against the cool plaster of the kitchen wall. The boxes looked at her. The kettle, packed in its newspaper shroud, looked at her. The photograph of Aunt Imogen, propped on the counter for the move, looked at her with the particular steady gaze of a woman who had once been the girl on the riverbank, who had once chosen a man, who had once lost him to a river that was not literal, and who had lived, after, in the country that comes after.

"Matthias," she said.

"Yes."

"I am standing in a kitchen full of boxes. I am moving into a new apartment today. Theo is in the back room. He has offered to carry the heavy things. He has very good arms. He will not ask me a single question about you, and that will be, in its way, the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years."

A long breath on the other end of the line.

"Seraphina," he said. "Please."

"No," she said. "I am not going to please. I am going to hang up. I am going to let Theo carry the boxes. I am going to drink the bad tea he left on the railing. I am going to unpack the kettle. I am going to unpack the photograph of Aunt Imogen. I am going to leave the bird in its box. I am going to live in the apartment after, and the apartment after is going to be, I think, the apartment I should have been living in for some time."

"Don't," he said.

"I am not doing this to hurt you."

"Don't."

"I am doing this because I am tired. I am tired the way the river is tired, Matthias. The river does not choose to be tired. The river arrives at tired."

The line hummed. The boxes waited. In the back room, the small sound of Theo shifting in his sleep, or not in his sleep, the small sound of a man listening through a wall because he could not help it, because some kindnesses cannot help themselves.

"I am sorry," Matthias said again.

"I know," she said. "I have always known. Goodbye, Matthias."

She hung up. The phone was warm in her hand. She set it on the counter, very gently, the way one sets down a dish one has decided not to drop.

The lantern on the balcony, outside, guttered once and went out, and the river moved on, and the morning came up over the city, and the boxes waited to be carried, and Theo, in the back room, did not come out, did not ask, only rose, and put the kettle on, and waited for her to be ready to be helped.