Honey Water
by Sebastian Kunopaski Rayner
[WARNING: Contains references to suicide]
For one week, every year, the Duparster River runs red. When I was in the fifth grade and this had gotten around the school yard, I heard all sorts of stories about what it might mean.
༺ ⚕ ༻
But then, I was a few months more than eighteen, and I knew. It was the end of August, summer’s close: the choice to escape, or to stay and suffocate. That’s how I saw it, at least.
“Are you allowed to be sitting here?”
I looked away from the opposite bank, where officers and paramedics swarmed like flies to honey. Away from the yellow tape behind them, dividing the river from road and town. Had this been a few years earlier, I might’ve felt some spike of panic, but I didn’t. I saw his shoes first, then the dirtied hems of blue jeans. Then I looked up to see him, a boy about my age.
“I don’t know. I do it every year. S’gotta count for something, right?”
He seemed alright enough with that, but I saw him hesitate before he sat next to me. I sort of wished he hadn’t sat. I pulled my knees to my chest, looking across the river again.
“Who d’you think it is this time?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow. They’ll tell us in the paper at the end of the week, too.”
It was only Tuesday. I’d been here yesterday, watched them draw up someone else. This was only the second. It used to be unsettling, but you got used to it. Even still, I didn’t plan on sticking around. I wouldn’t suffocate. I’d got into a school out-of-state, and was leaving come the end of the summer – in around two weeks' time. I couldn’t imagine being one of the ones who stayed, watching them mark down the population on the town’s sign every year with spray paint or permanent marker, before the town actually gave in and replaced it. I’d done that my whole life already.
“It was this girl from my first period, yesterday. They think she did it herself.” He sounded upset about it, almost. As if we all hadn’t known it would happen again this summer. I looked over to him again, sullen brown eyes staring where I had been.
“Don’t they always? It’s not like they’ve ever worked out any other explanation.” But that wasn’t the right thing to say, and I knew as much. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, mouth opening to speak. Only, he closed it again, and nothing came out. I took that as permission to look away.
He came back the next day, too. I don’t know how he found my spot at all, the brush along the bank, hiding me well enough I got away with it. But he did, and he remembered it. His name was Hugo, he was turning eighteen that next month.
We talked about whatever with as few words as possible, as we watched body after body, day after day, pulled from the reddened water. He told me he’d moved here a few years back and I understood then, why he got all choked up. Not all of us grew up with it, and I’d just forgotten that part.
“It was my neighbour yesterday,” I told him on the Friday. He nodded, but I could see his eyes were wet, reflecting headlights and the first responders’ beacons.
We kept coming back to the water, even after the river ran murky blue again. The town’s torrid little affair with certain suicide had come to an end for the year: the rest of it was up to fate, afterwards.
And so, Hugo and I, we’d sit by the water and get drunk on whatever he nicked from his parents, and wait for the day I left. We’d stay for hours, doing nothing at first– talking longer, sitting closer. I convinced him to swim, once, when the water was already cooling off. I liked to watch August’s sunlight on his skin, tossing water at him when he came too close to noticing. He’d laugh, do it back.
I started wishing I could stay, like he was. Or because he was. I pretended I couldn’t tell back then, but I could. I knew who I was, and that made all the difference. I’d worked it out already. So what did it matter if I said it aloud or not? I replaced the words with another shot from the bottle of whiskey he’d brought, and skipped another stone. And he’d smile, because he was better at skipping stones than me, but I tried.
We’d doze off out there sometimes, too sloshed to feel our aching backs. His head on my chest, our breathing synchronising: mine with his, his with the water.
I did end up leaving. But I went back the first summer, and it was as if Hugo knew where I’d go and where I’d know to find him, because there he was down by the water again. I didn’t wait around for the river to run red that year.
I was lucky it hadn’t ever seemed sweet to me. Hugo pretended. I saw it in his eyes, though, and heard it in his words, when he got just a little too drunk. He wasn’t sure anything could be sweeter anymore.
I left early, only because that scared me, but he was something I hadn’t ever known before and I could still hear him whispering ‘Rafał’, praying I would stay. Even long after I’d gone.
I thought about how he watched Duparster River run red on his own that year, in the same place we’d deemed ours. From where I sat at the windowsill of the shitty apartment I’d just barely moved into, I could see the coloured lights of those beacons on his features, and the sheen in his eyes. It ate me alive, so I found something with bigger teeth. Surrendered myself fully to my schooling. How was I to know it’d bring me back?
I was well into my twenties, around the halfway mark, when that happened. My dad wasn’t well, and my latest partner, he’d broken things off. I went home.
༺ ⚕ ༻
The wailing tone rang through the station.
“Duparster Township Fire and Rescue. Delta response for an adult male, still submerged, 14D2. Engine 11, RA 11 to South-West End of Duparster River. PD enroute.”
It was that time of year. I hadn’t been at this firehouse long, ten months or so, though anyone could’ve sensed the shift: everyone was unusually taciturn, a dull anticipation heavy on broad shoulders. And I had known it was coming, anyway. The water would run red today, as it had yesterday, and the day before. We were quick on the road, the ambulance’s sirens shrieking in symphony with the fire engine’s. It was all so fast when we arrived on scene.
I watched as our arrival turned the water a brilliant, flashing red.
In ten months, I had not faltered. But I wondered now, if my crew had grown up with this as I had, or if living here was a choice for them. If the river was like any other for them, and had never seemed something sweet. I retrieved the backboard, a jump bag, rushing to the river’s bank. It was now as crowded as I’d always recalled it being: officers and paramedics swarming like flies to honey.
The fire crew hauled the young man from the water as carefully as they could manage. It was our turn, then, to take over.
“Cudejkocz, assess the victim for signs of cardiac activity.” I was on it before my captain could finish her sentence. Only when I’d been allowed direct access did I realise what it was I was looking at. Or who it was, really. Laid along the backboard was Hugo. He looked the same, so much so it made me ache, but I could see the last near decade on his face. His lips were blue, eyes closed, dark curls wet and plastered to his skin. I did my job, but I could feel how I strained against my own shaking hands.
“He’s in cardiac arrest,” I said, hearing myself with someone else’s ears. My captain was quick to take over: I don’t know how she knew. She pulled me out of the way, with the deftness so inherent to her, so she could administer CPR.
I couldn’t have done it right, anyway. I couldn’t have broken his ribs, not again, like I’d done when I’d left. And, I realised, as the riverside blurred around me, I might’ve taken his heart with me as a souvenir. Was that what’d brought him here?
I watched another paramedic bring an AED around, heard ‘endotracheal tube’ not moments later, and – as if it were instinctual – returned to my knees. Searching through the jump bag next to me. Tilting his forehead back, lifting his chin, threading the tube carefully down his throat: securing it. A bag valve mask fitted to the one end.
I don’t remember much else. Intravenous fluids, sighs of relief at the first sign of stability. I could see our spot across the river, the last bit of daylight filtering away between the branches overhead. I did my job, and ignored the water’s red: the sickening smell of honey somewhere.
It was as if I was waiting for the stability to end abruptly, as I monitored his heart rate and oxygen levels in the back of the ambulance. For him to slip away in a blink, as I’d done to him when I stopped calling.
What if this was some crude requital, for having let him go, when I’d made my way out? I’d known what was wrong with the river, that it could only ever take him because he and I had something different – and he could never admit to it – and I took off without telling him.
“Rafał?” I heard her speak, clearer than I’d heard anyone outside, though I couldn’t look away from him, nor his vitals, to respond.
“I think you should take the rest of your shift off.”
I was there in the hospital waiting room for longer than I would’ve liked, watching the rest of what would’ve been my shift tick away. His parents were the first in there to see him: they were allowed in shortly after I’d met them for the first time. I think they knew, as my captain had. But they didn’t mention it, not even when they came out, telling me he was asking for me. He’d heard my name at the scene, they’d told me.
“Oh, and he evaded most complications, somehow. It’s all just fluid management, now. God had his back.”
“I didn’t know you were a paramedic.” It was the first thing he said, when I stepped gingerly into his room. “I didn’t even know you were back.”
“I wasn’t sure I had any place in your life anymore,” I shrugged, drawing a chair up next to the hospital bed. I could feel the look he was giving me: I’d always been able to feel his eyes. As dark and gentle as ever, there was something doleful in them now. I’d seen it before.
“It’s been sitting vacant, Raf.”
He looked teenaged, again, for a moment. His eyes were wet, glinting under the room’s white lights. I’d missed him. I couldn’t have told you what that one summer was for us, or where it’d changed. I’d left, I’d left, and he’d found a taste for honey.
“I’m sorry.” I was quiet for a second. “I should have told you.”
“I don’t know if it would have changed anything.”
I’d argue otherwise, if it were in me to argue. If I’d told him back then, been honest with him – if he’d known I’d loved him – maybe he would have been okay with existing as he is. There would have been something sweeter for him than Duparster River.
If I’d warned him of the river, the stories, he wouldn’t have been just another one of our sort pulled up from it, come late August. It might’ve been arrogant to think I was his second chance. Especially when I was supposed to be his first. I couldn’t help it, though: not when I never quite worked out how to stop loving him. And maybe he’d never quite worked out how to stop loving me.
“Was it sweet?”
“I thought it might be.”
I sank deeper into my seat. His hand reached out to the arm of the chair, where my own lay limp – I let him take it, like I did when we were younger.
I saw possibility now, that I hadn’t then. His hold on me said that he might, too. A new place just for us somewhere far from here, maybe, away from sloping banks and small towns. Another version of us way across the river, or at the end of it, even, waiting.
“We could leave when you’re discharged,” I suggested, quietly, resisting everything that cried at me to take him now. “Where would you want to go?”
“Anywhere but here.”
And I’d kiss the honey water from his lips when we did.