Before I left Baltimore for a week, I went to the Inner Harbor and sat on the edge of the water with my legs dangling over the side of the sidewalk. I watched flocks of white birds disperse over the water and a pair of ducks that swam underneath my feet. The male must have thought my cigarette was a piece of bread.
Within five minutes of being home, I sanded and spray painted my bike bronze to get rid of the purple flames, and I rode to my sister's middle school to see her basketball game. My car wasn't in the driveway. It was dusk, the sun was blinding, and I was still wearing heels and a dress.
The school was deserted, so I called my mother. She told me they were at a different school in Readington, and I should head home. I said I'd stash the bike and wait for her. I was exhausted, too winded to even have a cigarette on the bench and wait for rescue. The bike was striking against the still-dead trees and soccer fields, so I couldn't leave it. I put it in doorways, next to electricity generators, and in a ditch by a tiny stream, but it wasn't worth it. I pedaled through townhouse developments and past the algae-coated pond in Sun Ridge until I saw my mother driving towards me just as it was turning dark, yelling out the window to pull over. We stuffed the bike in the trunk, and it was hanging halfway outside the window. She scolded me for painting it and my sister laughed.
The next day I bought brown lace-up boots, put on black knee-high socks over my tights and left the house on my bike. I went to the small part of the Neshanic River. The rivers I went to were muddy and violent with rainfall, and the Neshanic was flooding the riverbank. I sat on a slab of concrete that reached out halfway into the water and watched cars passing by on the bridge. The world was gray, the grass still yellow and the trees bare, but I noticed neon colored fishing bobbins caught in a tree branch above me.
It was my sister's 10th birthday, so I asked the baker at the grocery store to write "Haps Birth Meg & Is" on a tiny cake, because it was our neighbor's birthday too. Stacey, as I remember her name from working in the bakery a few times, wrote "Happy Birth 1st Meg", and when I asked her to fix it the name became "Megis". My family was pretty upset with me.
I went back to the Neshanic the following day, but I biked along a road I had never taken before but was always curious about. I found a gated off bridge and the widest part of the river that leaned away from the road and disappeared into the forest. The trees along the road were covered in No Trespassing signs, so I could only sit on the outskirts of the property on a broken stone wall. I saw two ducks swimming nearby that reminded me very much of the pair I had seen in the Harbor before I left, and I thought it could be a good omen, like they followed me to New Jersey to make sure I was alright.
I listened to a man cutting wood with an electric saw in the blue house behind me, and I watched golf carts move around the course that was beyond the river. I was annoyed at the empty wine and vodka bottles strewn around beside the river, the flowerpot stuck in the dirt to my left, the man who yelled "hole in one" on his beautiful golf course, and the trespassing signs plastered in my face. I had only gone there to sit by the water.
I climbed onto a field on the way home, probably owned by the same family the road was named after, the people who owned that stretch of river and golf course. I found a half-decomposed deer carcass with its legs sprawled around the skull and the jawbone near ready to take, but with nothing to bring any of it home in, I left. Further along the road I found long, brown and black bird feathers that I stuck into the front of my bike.
Virginia told me where to find another deer skeleton. I was surprised she said that, because it seemed to me that my sister never took much of an interest in anything. My mother drove us around roads I never knew existed along my sister's bus route, but we couldn't find it.
I took Isabelle and Virginia back the next day. She told me that it was somewhere between Peaceful Haven, a creepy house she didn't know the purpose of, and the guardrail at the bottom of a dirt road. I spotted it when she was already standing above it. I took the unhinged jaw and wrapped it in wax paper, and we took turns carrying it on the walk back to the car.
I hadn't been to Minebrook Park since the summer, so it was nice to walk the trails there and see the river again. I went with Kyle one afternoon and it was especially muddy. He said I hadn't changed at all and always walked three strides ahead of me. I found a broken jawbone embedded in one of the paths, so I dug it out and carried the pile of bones in my hands, like they were fragile and not in pieces yet. I picked up two red berries but returned them; I think it was something about the red's intensity against the dry brown colors of the park that wouldn't let me keep the color. Kyle showed me the benches his name was carved into, and I added mine to one. We stood on rocks in the river, and the air was so warm, especially for March, that I wanted to walk in the water. On the ride home we stopped by the first skeleton I had found in the field and wrapped the jawbone in the wax paper that was still left in the backseat.
I’d give one jaw to Hunter and keep the other for myself once I was in Baltimore again.
Peacock’s is a small deli at the end of Manners road, which is a few miles away from mine. I set out to bike there as the sun was hovering above the trees, and I knew I wouldn’t make it back before nightfall. I pedaled past the yellow house on the corner of the intersection, the place I always thought I would go if I ran away, the home for the elderly. Two old men hobbled outside the back door to have a cigarette by the plastic furniture set on a small square of pavement, raised on a tiny hill above street level. A woman was sitting on the stoop of the next door over, saw me and smiled. I think it was the feathers sticking out of my bike like a headdress. I didn’t make it to the deli, but stopped halfway at a wide river that ran underneath a metal bridge. The fields that surrounded me reached so far that even the mansions looked tiny where the grass stopped in their wake. I walked around the rusted guardrail and across a metal pedestrian walkway that was probably never used until I crossed it and leaned against the railing, trying to see the underneath the bridge. I disturbed a cloud of flies. The water was clearer than the mud stricken places I had been before, the sun was bright and the trees were so golden that I felt I was somewhere in A. A. Milne’s world.
That Friday my mother and I shoved my bike in the back of her car and drove to Frenchtown. It was a warm, beautiful day that attracted people to main street; I’ve hardly ever seen the town so busy. I noticed Schaible’s Barbershop closed, but my teacher who lived on Second Street told me he wasn’t the most likable character anyway. Still, it was sad to see metal screens on the windows I had walked by so many times, hoping to see a man getting a haircut looking back out at me. My mother and I went to the bike shop to rent her one. The most beautiful dog was in the shop. She looked like a wolf mix and was the purest white. I was petting her and she seemed to like me, which is surprising because most dogs sense that I’m vulnerable and fearful of them. I knelt down to look at her eyes, which were amber, and immediately thought of my kitchen and the baby gate we had in Chelsea circle, when I was the same height as our black lab, Cherokee, and his jaws clamped onto my face. She didn’t try to attack me, though, and the owner remarked about us.
My mother and I biked three hours in total that day along the Delaware. It was flat terrain on the Toe Path, but we couldn’t make it to Lambertville, which is the next town over. I wanted to show her the Wing Dam, but we were too tired and had to turn back. We switched bikes a few times because mine was easier to ride, and she told me the feathers were embarrassing. I stopped short at the sight of another skeleton, but I had no wax paper or anything to hold it in, and my mother said it wasn’t ready to take yet. I watched the river next to me and already missed it. I remember Mr. Smith telling me about climbing up the Delaware where the water was shallow with his wife, Catherine, by holding onto the grass underneath the water.
My father drove me back on Sunday. He asked if I had gone to see my grandfather about the canoe that has been in their garage for decades and I said I didn’t. When I told him I planned to drag it down to Three Bridges and float around there, he said it was large, wooden, hardly seaworthy anymore and could only be paddled by two full-grown men.
I see a span of the Delaware before the road curves into the highway that leads back to Baltimore, and every time the water looks like aluminum foil. The sun is blinding through the trees and the water is liquid silver and metallic leaf. I think melt for that river every time.
