it’s a swollen orange sunset by the time lucy wades into the river.
rumor has emptied the banks. no one around to see as she damps her skirts, pauses. as, very carefully, she contorts herself to undo all thirty pearl buttons. she floats naked beside her dress. the water rushes over flesh and fabric alike, dispassionate in its cleansing.
if anna is her second friend in sweetwater, the river is her first.
five years ago she first crossed into town. carts banged into her, a crowd spun her round. she was lost. the sky no help—look up as she’d learned to do in the hills, and buildings crowded her view. clouds didn’t circle. she was the center of nothing and the land didn’t speak. she was no one.
she found her way to a restaurant kitchen. a relief in what she knew: greasy dishes, low ceiling, ache in her bent neck. three other girls stood at the sink. one pale, two dark. lucy murmured: an orphan. left. don’t know. no one.the pale girl lost interest. the dark girls were persistent, whispering together till they approached lucy in the alley.
“who are you?” the taller asked.
“an orphan.”
“no,” said the shorter, stepping closer. lucy looked them full in the face: indian, most like. there were a number of indians, people of all stripes, in sweetwater’s streets. “who are your people?” the short girl pressed a hand to her chest, spoke the name of her tribe.
another long-ago name, spoken to her in a loft, whirled across lucy’s memory, broke apart like dust. this is the right word.gone. taste of her own dry tongue. if she’d had a people, she could no longer name them. the taller indian girl put her hand on her chest, too, and lucy realized that the two must be sisters.
the girls kept looking at lucy, kept asking, kept inviting her to share their strange, wrapped lunches. kept pestering till one day lucy turned and said something about skin. about water. about filth.
the indian girls never spoke to her again. lick of shame, consuming, then an emptiness that she learned to see as lightness. deliberately this time, she let the name of the girls’ people drop between the gaps in her memory, gone where her own name had gone. at least they left her alone.
she wasn’t completely alone, not yet. noon and night she returned to the river with kitchen scraps that sam wrinkled a nose at. sam offered those two silver dollars, lucy pretending deafness till the offering stopped. other talk stopped too. sam grew more picky, more fidgety, more absent. gone for hours, sam acquired food some other way.
finally came the trade fair the mountain man had spoken of. cowboys and trappers and cattlemen, games and shows, blew through sweetwater like weather. when the fair lifted away, sam was gone too—and nellie.
for a week more, lucy waited alone with the river. so clear up top. so much rubble at its bottom. at last she threw her belongings—threadbare, dented, tattered and mean, sun-stained and stinking of the long road from the western territory—into the water. she moved with just the dress on her back into a boardinghouse.
her first year, she scanned sweetwater’s crowds. thousands of faces, more types than she’d seen before. none familiar.
her second year she quit seeking disappointment, hurried head-down through the streets. sometimes voices called. never those she knew. men, mostly, and mostly at night.
her third year she said orphan, left, no oneso often the words made a lacquer over the truth. a blank story to suit this town where she learned what civilization properly meant: no danger, no adventure, no uncertainty in a place so bled of wildness that a false tiger could be an event.
three years of suds, wrinkled hands, cobbles, neat corners, green leaves then brown leaves then no leaves then green again, sharp-creased dresses, coins slid over the grocer’s counter, white curtains, starched sheets, salt, sweet water, heavy air, streetlamps, cricked neck, dish suds turned to laundry suds, a new job at the hotel with higher pay, the indian girls left behind in the kitchen where lucy heard they were indentured to work eight years more to pay a debt, salt, sweet water, aching hands, air so hard to breathe, glint of fork and knife at a table set for one, and no touch on her own skin but for the touch of river water.
and then at the start of the fourth year, lucy met anna by the river.
“what are you doing with that?” a voice asked that day from behind. a hand shot over lucy’s shoulder, pointing at the stick in lucy’s hand. a strange girl stepped forward on the riverbank. she held a dowsing rod just like lucy’s.
“i’m anna,” she said. her voice broke the solitude.
up till then lucy had come to the river alone. on days off she swam, or scrubbed her skin, or searched the water for glimpses of her own face: slash of cheek, wing of hair, an eye’s narrow line. she picked up objects—long gray rocks, pebbles black as bullets, a branch forked into a y like a dowsing rod—and held them to her ear as if they might speak to her as no one did.
and then, anna.
i hear it’ll rain tomorrow.
i like your hair.
i like your freckles.
will you teach me to swim like that?
how old are you?
sixteen.
me too.
lucy came to suspect that her new friend, too, had something to hide. they never spoke of the past. anna had interest only in the future. a train she wanted to ride, a dress she wanted made, a fruit she wanted to eat come autumn. life as a bloom of possibilities, just waiting for to ripen.
one sunday the bank was white with frost and anna carried three of the autumn apples she’d talked about for weeks—so red that lucy’s eyes smarted. anna spun her dowsing rod in rare silence, then said, “my father was a prospector.”
lucy’s mouth was full of juice. sweetness loosed her tongue. “mine too.”
to her surprise anna didn’t let the words lie between them as usual. “i knew it,” she said, gripping lucy’s hands. lucy tried to slide back. tried to divine what the girl knew, and how. the gun, the bank, the jackal-men? “i knew you were the same as me. papa said not to tell people, he said i’m too na?ve, he doesn’t like when i come here without my hired man—but i knew i could trust you. the moment i saw you, i knew. we’re going to be the very best of friends.”
—
anna is a prospector’s daughter, but there the likeness ends. because when anna’s father took gold from these hills, he kept it. he has deeds to prove his claim, and men who work under him. he hoarded mines, hotels, stores, trains, a house in sweetwater far from the hills he’d emptied of riches, a daughter.
fool’s goldis a thing lucy learns of in sweetwater. a cheap stone, it deceives the untrained eye. fool’s goldhas become a saying about that which imitates truth. prospector’s daughter anna may be, but she looked at lucy and was deceived.
lucy amended her lie. an orphan. don’t know. no one. but i suspect my father was a prospector.anna forgave. anna forgives easy, laughs easy, cries so easy that lucy, who does none of this easy, who has packed so tight the grave of her girlhood that little feeling trembles through, marvels. and still anna insists, we’re just the same, deep down.
in anna’s house there are twenty-one rooms and fifteen horses, two kitchens and three fountains. velvet and damask, silver and marble. and in the largest room, its vaulted ceiling so high that the blue tiles mimic sky, is a deed in a frame. the frame is solid gold. the deed is mere paper. dusty edges, one corner torn. anna’s father’s signature a snake across the bottom. this is his most precious thing, this that gives him claim to his first prospecting siteare you hurting?anna asked the first time she brought lucy to see the deedyour face—it looks—likely anna had little practice with the word despair. anyhow anna fussed over lucy, fed her sweets, led her across the marble floors and pressed onto lucy silver boxes of salt, velvet dresses. anna saying all the while, the same.those words echo through the mansion where emptiness lurks despite the maids and grooms and gardeners—anna’s mother dead, her father always traveling—and lucy thought she heard what sounded behind them.
it is as if anna waved a wand over her friend—only the wand was a dowsing rod, and the rod held by anna’s father, and the magic only gold. transformation into the same girl
it worked, for a while. they even tricked the half-blind gardener. same dress, same curls. lucy repeated anna’s words, repeated her carefree laugh. anna filled lucy’s vision so that, passing a mirror, lucy was startled at the face within—not green-eyed, not round. a strange, grave face with crooked nose and guarded eyes.
the gardener said, yes, little madam. he cut the flowers that lucy asked for.
the spell broke at midnight, two months back, when lucy stayed longer than ever in anna’s room. they lit a candle, sneaked cold biscuits though the cook could’ve whipped up a feast. a vase of cut roses heady. pressed close on anna’s bed, the rest of the enormous house darkened, insignificant. anna turned in midgiggle. her face close and flushed. she asked if lucy would like to live in one of the twenty-one rooms. said, you’re like a sister to me.
for the first time since returning to an empty riverbank, lucy imagined waking to the certainty of another. that animal smell of a second body. truth welled up in her, muddy. she was ready to speak.
and then the gas lamps flared on. a man stood in the doorway, asking, “who are you?”
anna’s father had returned from his business trip. lucy brushed crumbs from her dress, dipped her head to hide her exposed nose.
anna was born in this soft green place, but her father was of the hills. he knew true gold and wasn’t deceived. as anna hugged him, he asked where lucy came from. said he’d heard of people like her from his colleagues. he listened to the lies—orphan—don’t know—no one—and then he asked anna for a private word. lucy gathered her things and left. no one called her back.
—
since then, anna’s quit talking of their shared future. the train they’d ride to its last stop in the east, the picnics they’d eat in her father’s orchards, the rivers they’d swim, the dresses they’d buy with her father’s money. no mention of lucy living in one of the twenty-one rooms.
after that night beaus were sent to the mansion. anna mocked them, complained of them, compared them to animals and furniture. but she picked a man with his own family mansion, his own wealth in gold.
now anna speaks of a house with charles, a garden with charles, travel with charles. of course lucy is invited along. anna so pleased by her best friend and her fiancé arrayed around her that she doesn’t see how charles’s fingers loiter at lucy’s waist, how charles calls lucy our very close friend, how charles sends gifts to the hotel where lucy launders clothes and shows up at lucy’s window stinking of a saloon.
lucy accepts invitations to dinner and sits at the table set for three. she praises the delicacies. the flowers. the kindness. never mentioning charles’s whispering, when anna leaves the room, that they should take a walk alone. the place beside anna—once wide enough to accommodate a sister—has narrowed.
and so lucy soaks in the river, alone as she was before. her skin puckers into damp ridges. still she floats. imagining a future in which she is as wrinkled on land as she is in water, and still sitting, smiling beside her friend. what other future can there be? she’s become what she said: orphan. no one. no fortune, no land, no horse, no family, no past, no home, no future.
