Where She Has Gone by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page A

might look like. Those rolling hills and little villages.”
    She had been to England a few years before, to see Mrs. Amherst’s family.
    “I wouldn’t have thought England, exactly. But I suppose from here it might look that way. All those old buildings and things.”
    Mrs. Amherst was travelling to England for Easter, with the thought of looking into her possible return there. Rita hadn’t spoken much about the trip; there had been some talk of her and Elena going along, but more, it seemed, as a matter of form than as a real possibility. The few times Rita had spoken about her previous trip, it had always been in a forced positive tone that had suggested its opposite.
    “Elena was thinking of having a party at our apartment on Good Friday,” she said. “Since Mom won’t be around for us to go home. But I guess you’ll be going back to Mersea then.”
    “I don’t know. Maybe not.”
    “It’ll be her friends, mainly. Though I think she wants it to be a sort of birthday party for me.”
    “That’s right. I forgot.”
    There had never been any sort of protocol for us around Rita’s birthday. Every year it came around less as a day I remembered than as one I passed through: it seemed too intimate, somehow, to commemorate a birth which I’d seen the blood of, which our mother had died from.
    “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Rita said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”
    So she’d met a boy, then. I was surprised how casually she’d brought him up, how much her casualness hurt me.
    “Is it someone you’re seeing?” I said, though in a tone gentler than I’d intended.
    But she blushed.
    “It’s nothing like that. He’s just a friend.”
    There was an instant’s awkward silence.
    “I’ve told him about you,” she said.
    “What’s there to tell?”
    “Oh. Stuff.”
    It was already late afternoon by the time we arrived at Niagara Falls. The town looked smaller and meaner than I remembered it from when I’d come with my family as a teen, although then, too, we had come in the off-season, half the sights closed down and the town giving off an air of desolation like after the departure of a circus or fair. I remembered my father on that trip being in unusually good spirits, pulling wads of tens and twenties from his wallet to get us into museums and laughing with Uncle Alfredo over the exhibits in Ripley’s and Madame Tussaud’s. But it had already been years by then since Rita had left us.
    There was a huge parking lot, nearly deserted, across the road from the falls. We pulled up there and stepped out from the comfort of the car into a bitter, mist-soaked wind. Even at this distance the spray from the falls fanned out in great, gusting sheets, rainbowing in the setting sun before falling frozen to the pavement. The path down to the observation lounge and shops at the edge of the falls was a treachery of ice despite the heaps of salt that had been sprinkled there. Inone of the thicker patches Rita instinctively hooked her arm in mine for support, but then let go apologetically when the pavement cleared.
    “I suppose it’s not the best time of year to have come,” I said.
    “I don’t know. You could write something about it. The power of nature and that. Like the letters you used to write me from Africa.”
    “You’re making fun of me.”
    “No I’m not. I thought your letters were beautiful. Really. Sometimes they were the only things I had to look forward to.”
    We had come to the falls. Out in the islanded shallows upstream, the river was covered with ice and snow. But here at the brink the water coursed freely. It was such a relentless thing, this surge and surge and surge, this aeons-ancient heaving forward like the bloodrush of a continent.
    The spray had built up massive pillars of ice, great phantom shapes that loomed up from the folds of rock at the falls’ edges like rising spirits.
    “It’s pretty amazing,” Rita said.
    We stood a few moments without speaking. A sudden