Into the River

He sits on the ground at the top of the cliff above the whispering river waiting for the moon to show itself and the moment to arrive. When he sat here with her, the moon was full. Last night, two weeks since then, it was at a waning crescent and barely visible. He has told himself he will sit here every night of the moon cycle, of endless moon cycles, until he gets his wish.

He looks into the fire he lights every evening and sees her face. Wild hair framing bright eyes and a wide smile. Her lips move as if she’s talking and he can see that she’s trying to tell him something, but he can’t hear her voice. He strains mightily, listening for the high lilt of it, the song it always sang in his heart. Despite how hard he tries, he cannot hear the song any longer, and he withstands the torture of it only until the moon rises to where it rested that night above the two of them.

When that happens he stands, hopefully, thinking maybe, just maybe, this will be the night. He unfolds himself to his full height and walks to the edge of the cliff and listens to the river whisper below as he raises his eyes to the moon above him.

He says two words to the river, to the moon, to her.

“Forgive me.”

And he jumps.

***

He has jumped from this cliff hundreds of times, because that is what he does. He is a climber, a jumper, a dreamer. He lives his life flinging himself into the sky and soaring because something he cannot explain pulls him there, time and time again. She told him so many times, This is why I’m with you. Because you live in all of the possibilities. She lived with her feet firmly planted on the ground, because something about life that she could not explain to him terrified her. Her fears anchored her to the earth and she bore them in silence, never telling him anything about the why of it, only the how. She told him as much about how she felt as she could find words for, and he never pressed her for more. Deep down he hoped that maybe someday, somehow, he could help her escape from her demons.  

The cliff is fifty feet from the water below, and he has jumped it so many times that his body knows how to twist and bend and fly of its own accord, like the path of a blowing wind that only it knows. His body knows how to enter the water, how to rest at its lowest point of submergence, how to hold the air in his lungs and just be before rising once again to the surface. 

Perhaps all of this knowing is why, despite his attempts every night since their last night together, his body will not allow him to turn it off. Despite his earnest efforts when he enters the water to open his mouth and gulp enough water to fill his lungs to bursting, to sink his body to the river floor and anchor it there forever, he cannot.

This morning, like every morning after he has tried to drown himself, he awakens on the riverbank, whole. His eyes open to the sun shining above him, warm on his face. Air moves through his clear lungs as if they were never full.

And each morning he lies there on the pebbles of the river shore, life coursing through him, and he cries.

***

It takes him some time to gather himself and face the new day. He pulls himself onto all fours and crawls to the water, takes drinks of it by handfuls and splashes it on his face until he has enough strength to stand. It’s painstaking, since the sorrow has seeped down into his bones and made an old man of him. But he does it because he must climb back up the rock face to the cliff and do it all over again tonight.

He approaches it and breathes deeply, taking his first hand- and footholds, remembering that day, the first time she had made the climb alongside him. 

In the few months they had been together, she had only ever watched his jumps from the riverbank, sitting quietly on the pebble-strewn shore, smiling and clapping and ranking his jumps from one to ten. But on that day she’d said, “This time I’m going up with you.” There was a sense of urgency emanating from her that he had never seen in the way she moved and spoke. 

“I’m not kidding,” she said, “I have to.” 

He smiled his acknowledgement as he looked into her eyes. Where he normally saw the fire in them stoked by her intelligence and wit, that day there was this light that he couldn’t explain, like maybe some dawn was rising through the darkness inside her. The brightness of the sun was even sharper, and the cool of the breeze even crisper than he could remember it for an early summer day.

He remembers how it had made him giddy. How it had been a true effort for him to keep himself from running up the rock face with excitement, to climb patiently with her as she carefully felt for each handhold and foothold and stopped often to rest and breathe. 

He had joked with her the whole way up. 

“We’re gonna make a climber of you yet.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, bud.”

“I’m serious! Look at you! You could do this in your sleep.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Like you and I ever sleep when we’re together.”

They teased long after they had reached the top and settled down to sit and look out over the river. Her energy was captivating, and instead of him cliff jumping when they got there, he sat with her and they talked all through the afternoon until the sun started to set over the horizon.

She asked him dozens of questions about his jumps, about the wheres and the whens and about how it all began. He told her about having loved the water since his earliest memory of life. He told her how his mother used to call him her “little water prince” and weave stories for him at bedtime about the undersea kingdoms that he ruled, filled with water spirits and fairies and sea creatures who would whisper him asleep and into dreams. He told her about his first jump, from this very spot, when he had been just five years old.

He had wanted to talk about her, and he had tried, but she had deflected. Even in spite of this he remembered thinking, right before it happened, that in twenty-seven years he had never felt so happy.

***

This night is the same as last night, and the one before that, and the thirteen before that.

He sits and lights the fire again and listens to the river whisper. He sees her face in the firelight, watches her lips move in earnest, wishes he could hear her voice and what she is trying to tell him. He can only watch for so long because his chest feels as if it’s being cleaved open. So he looks up at the moon instead.

When it is in its correct place in the sky, he stands and walks to the edge of the cliff. His body feels so heavy, so anchored, as if his grief has become his gravity. 

It is amazing he can still jump at all.

Before he does, he begs her again, “Forgive me.” 

He hurls himself from the cliff’s edge and twists his body in ways he should not twist it in order to hit the water in the worst way possible. And again, he gulps river water enough to fill his lungs and more.

But still, he does not drown.

***

As he starts his climb back up the rock face the next morning, he realizes that he has broken his arm in the twisted way he hit the water. He has become weak from having eaten hardly anything for days, and climbing with one arm hugged tightly to his chest complicates things further. His breath is ragged and pain shoots through his arm in sharp jolts, so he contemplates whether he should just cut his wrists at the top of the cliff, and lie there until just before he bleeds to death, and then roll himself off of the edge for good. He is determined to die in the water to make amends to her, and this, he thinks, might be the only way to do it.

So this is what he plans as he settles onto the ground and waits for the night to come. 

When it does, he rummages through his pack that he has brought up from the riverbank. He takes out his camping knife that he has used every night to cut twigs for a new fire and sets it next to him on the ground, then lights the fire again and watches as her face forms clearly inside it. There are her lips moving again, in silence. It is a herculean effort for him to sit through this once more, to not hear the song of her voice, until the moon is at just the right spot in the sky.

He looks up for it but it’s almost a new moon, so he can see none of it. Instead, suddenly, a bright white star shoots across the night sky.

And then he is remembering every single moment of that night around the fire with her in vivid color, as if it is happening again right now.

He has just finished telling her about the meaning of the cliff to him, this place of his first jump. He looks at her and sees that she is gazing calmly into the fire, a peaceful smile on her lips, her face reflecting the flickering of the flames.

“I have to tell you something,” she says. But she has barely finished these words, and before she can tell him anything a bright white star shoots suddenly across the sky above them. It is an explosion of light trailing a wake of a million tiny stars behind it, a miracle that neither of them has ever seen, a thrill that moves him to impulse and away from her words.

“Quick!” he says. “Make a wish, before it’s gone!”

She watches the path of the star and laughs, then stands suddenly and throws up her arms to the sky.

“I wish I was a princess of the water and moon and stars!” 

He laughs as she begins to twirl in circles, then jumps to his feet and joins her. He twirls her once, twice, three times until she is fully out of breath and panting hard, and then pulls her tightly into his arms. 

“Let’s jump together,” he whispers, “and you can be.”

She doesn’t answer as her breathing settles, but her eyes never leave his face. 

He twirls them to the edge of the cliff and they only stand there long enough for him to hug her tightly once more and feel the pounding of her heart almost inside his own chest.

His adrenaline surges, and he lifts her up and jumps from the edge, propelling them into the cool night over the whispering river. As they begin to fall he no longer feels his adrenaline or the beating of her heart still pulled in closely to his. He only anticipates the exhilaration that will come in mere moments, of the two of them plunging into the black water and then swimming up to break through the surface, and then gulping in fresh night air under the moon and the disappearing tail sparks of that shooting star. He wishes with all his might that it helps free her from her demons.

Except that it is only he who breaks the surface.

She never does.

***

That is how he killed the girl who had wanted to live with her feet on the ground.

He brings himself back from the memory as the tail of this star is dissipating in the sky. He thinks that it’s a sign; that this second shooting star, this second miracle, means that this time the jump will work. That this time, the river will steal him with its current as it had done with her, will pull his body along for miles before it washes up on a bank far downriver like hers likely had by now. He feels energized, thrilled, as if it’s meant to be. He is fully alive at the certain prospect of his dying. So he stands and walks to the cliff’s edge, forgetting completely about the knife beside him.

He asks her one last time for her forgiveness.  

***

She sees the second shooting star, too, and knows that this is her last chance.

She makes her wish quickly, before it disappears, like he had instructed her to do that last night on the cliff.

He had been right, after all. She had made her wish out loud, just in time, and it had come true. It shouldn’t have surprised her, really. He had always known how to seize chances, to live life zestfully and in the moment. And in the end, that’s exactly what he had helped her do.

Which is what she had wanted more than anything from her life.

Her wish made, she floats on the cool breeze to the point where he has entered the water and descends through the surface in a whisper, as spirits do when they have left their bodies. Her movements are effortless and strong and she thrills in amazement that she can still perform them outside her humanity. That she can cup invisible hands under his motionless arms and kick nonexistent legs to propel them back to the surface. That she can swim to the shore holding his head above the water, then pull him onto the riverbank and turn him on his side so the water will drain from his lungs. That she can sit next to him on the pebbled shore through the night and watch him though she no longer has eyes.

***

He wakes again, destroyed, on the shore in the morning sun and feels a sob begin to twist his ribs inside his chest.

But then a cool hand rests upon it, and he turns his head to look beside him.

She lies there, smiling and whole and alive, her hand on his chest and her long wild hair splayed out wet on the pebbles between them. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore when he had twirled them to the edge of the cliff and jumped. It’s as if it all had never happened; that it had ended as he’d hoped.

“Hi,” she says.

He stutters, tries to speak, but she moves her hand from his chest and to his lips.

“I don’t have long, and I have to tell you something.”

She smiles that wide grin, and this time he holds his breath. He lets her say it.

“It was the end for me anyway. I had a bad heart.”

She moves her hand from his lips, then picks up his hand and places it on her own chest. It’s where her beating heart should be, but he feels nothing. The sob bursts from inside him and echoes, just once, off of the rocks and water. She wipes his cheek with her hand and looks into his eyes.

“I knew I would be gone that night,” she says. “But in my last heartbeat in the air with you, I was free. And I was as unafraid as I’ve ever been, all of my life.”

He rolls onto his side and cups her face in his hands. She kisses him.

“I’m sorry I never told you,” she says. “Forgive me.”

And he does.

END