Suspicious River Read Online Free

came to ski down Soprano Hill—black pinpricks whipping through January blizzards. It wasn’t much of a hill, but it was the only one around for miles, and we were lucky to have a hill at all, there in the flat part of the state—the western ridge of the Michigan mitten. At night it was illuminated, and it lit up the whole town like a rest stop above us—especially when it was blown with artificial snow, which shot furious into its bare face like long feather boas in the cold zero of a spotlight on a stage.
    Finally, spring. The swans would come back, and they would build their nests outside the Swan Motel, drop their fist-sized eggs while the tourists stared, scratched their heads, used their hands like visors to look toward the sky, which would be blue in May and full of nothing. Soon enough their identical children would crack into the world, sticky wet and dirty white as dog-chewed tennis balls, and the tourists would creep closer through the damp grass on hands and knees to take blurred snapshots with expensive cameras of the new swans shaking off their eggs—broken and spermy with membrane, fresh birth mess.
    When you saw the weather map on the news at night, you probably didn’t think about us up there, living our lives on the pinkie of that fat Michigan hand—driving to work, boiling potatoes, digging graves. You were looking at your own edge of something and hearing
Eighty percent chance of rain, occasional sun, a storm system out of the West
, while the river just scrolled on, ink black, making a steady thrumming under us and, above us, a softer sound like lashing, slashing, clapping—or a child being lightly slapped, over and over, in a game.
    The tourists liked to have their pictures taken together under the sign that said WELCOME TO SUSPICIOUS RIVER . They laughed about the name of the town, though the name didn’t mean anything anymore to us, if it ever had—just assonance and syllables flagging up the vague image of a place we knew we lived.
     
    When I got to the Swan Motel, Millie was in her jean jacket, ready to go. She had a pink tissue pressed to her forehead. “Oh,” she said like a sound, not a word, “I’ve gotta get out of here.”
    “Go,” I said, friendly, “get out of here,” and I pushed my own jean jacket and my purse, a small red patent-leather oval like a stomach stuffed with Kleenex, under the counter. Both of them were damp.
    It had begun to rain while I was driving to work, and the moisture made the air in the office smell like tin, or sulfur, murky as a dirty locker room. Guests would come in asking where the indoor pool was. “At the Holiday Inn,” I’d want to say, but wouldn’t: There was no pool at all.
    But I could see why they asked—that odor, damp air, especially when it rained. The Swan Motel smelled of mold, chlorine, musk. The rooms were humid even in the driest, deadest dead of winter. I could smell the Swan Motel in my hair at night like formaldehyde, or copper, before I fell asleep.
    Millie stood with her back to the glass door, buttoning her jacket. Her hair was long and frizzy in the humidity and so black it washed her eyes away until they were only the faint blue of a white eggshell. She said, “So everything O.K. these days, Leila?”
    I shrugged, glanced at the clock. I could feel the wet rubber that lined the soles of my shoes seep dimly into my skin.
    Millie was younger than I was, but she was plain and wispy as fatigue itself—a scarf of air and smoke, frayed, a shred of a yellowed lace dress left for a long time on a wire hanger. The tips of her teeth were pointed, and Millie used them to dig at the skin around her fingernails, to scrape her bottom lip until it paled, cracked, bled pink onto the smaller, lower teeth.
    “Yeah, O.K., I guess,” I said.
    “Does Rick eat?”
    “You know.” I shrugged again. “Not much.”
    “God,” she said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him last week. He’s like—nothing—now.”
    I bit my own