The week is filled with orientation activities, but on my first free afternoon, I slip off to the Charles River, a fifteen-minute walk from my dorm. When I cross Memorial Drive and arrive at the riverbank, I realize there are a lot more bridges over the Charles than I anticipated. I have no idea how I’ll find the plaque. I’ve searched online, but this is a time when the internet feels like an unfinished house, framed out but only partially filled in.
I choose the closest one and cross it slowly, scanning the broad cement railing and brick walls on both sides. The bridge doesn’t look high enough off the water for a suicide. Couldn’t he have swum? Then I remember Quentin tied flatirons to his feet.
Back on Memorial Drive, I discover a wooden boathouse with several doors to its cavernous maw rolled open. I wander into the musty half-darkness, racked with slick, inverted shells. At a desk, a dark-haired woman lifts her gaze from the cambered wings of an enormous textbook. “Can I help you?”
I clear my throat. “This is a weird question, but I’m looking for this plaque that’s supposed to be on a bridge across the Charles, commemorating someone who died in the river. Is there any chance you know which bridge it might be on?”
“That’s awful,” the woman says. “Was it a student? Do you know what year?”
I decide not to mention I’m referring to a fictional character. “Yeah, but it was a long time ago. 1910?”
The woman frowns. “Chris might know. Chris knows everything.”
Chris doesn’t know either. “Sorry,” he says, with significantly less personal investment than the woman at the desk. He wears a Harvard rowing shirt. “What I can do is teach you how to scull. We need people for the club team. You’re a student, right?”
I show him my brand-new ID card. Soon, we are out on the Charles in a wherry, and he instructs me in proper form: catch, drive, finish, and recovery. The river feels spectacularly removed from the rush of vehicles sliding by on Memorial Drive, and I feel I have stumbled on a treasure unknown to any students not already on the varsity or club teams.
I begin sculling several times a week, advancing from the wherry to a sturdy Wintech single, until I persuade Chris I’m ready for a Dolphin—the lightest and most expensive shell available for student recreational use, and the easiest to tip. Chris persists in his attempts to recruit me for the rowing club, but I gently decline. I prefer being alone on the river, the sense that once I’m out of sight of the boathouse, no one but God knows where I am.
My mother still calls every day, often twice a day, on the chunky black Nokia she bought me for this purpose. She tells me how lonely she is, how much she misses me.
“I feel like Job,” she says, and I want to point out the ways she isn’t like Job, that she still has a daughter, for example, and doesn’t have blistering sores covering her body to pick at all day in misery. What she means is she feels she’s been abandoned. What she means is she’s never been properly loved.