Chapter One

“It’s a lovely stream,” Christie would tell her friends. “A shining bayou with steep, steep banks. Oh you should just see it in the spring time when the clover covers the ground and the graceful white birds wend their long-legged ways through the water. In winter, it’s even better—the grass turns bare and brown and stark, and the sky is bleak and fierce. If you lie back and look up at it, you can imagine all sorts of strange and beautiful things.”

Christie wasn’t lying. But the picture she was conjuring up the minds of her listeners wasn’t particularly accurate either. She meant every single word she said, but her “shining river” was really a drainage ditch. Oh, the clover and the white birds and the fierce sky existed all right, but the steep banks were really just a way of keeping the water contained during a hard rain. Well, you take what you can.

When Christie had moved from a small rural county at the age of five, she had been used to real rivers, real wildlife. On finding a “river” right outside her backyard, she decided that suburbia wasn’t that much different from her old town, and promptly made herself at home. The huge metal pipes set in concrete slabs at intervals along the banks of her river, though they were rather spooky, didn’t bother her a bit. After all, what were a few insignificant bits of concrete compared to a whole stream to watch and follow and play about?

As she grew older, Christie did not lose her love of her river. She would climb up and down the deeply sloping banks over and over again just for the joy of the grass and the earth and the sky above. In the evenings, with her homework done, she would bring a book to the concrete slab directly behind her house and read until the sun went down. When it rained, she would walk out her back door, across the yard, and through the gate and gaze over the edge of that steep, steep bank to see how high her river came.   

Funny thing though. One day, Christie decided that it was time to share her paradise with some one else. Joggers and walkers huffed and puffed down the bike path on the opposite side of the bayou all the time, but they couldn’t possibly notice anything really, being so busy losing weight and all. With great secrecy, lest her private retreat become an elementary school tourist attraction, Christie invited her friend Lainy to come play at her house, and when the time came, opened the back door with great ceremony. They padded almost reverently through the yard. Christie slowly opened the sturdy gate. They took a few more steps and looked over the edge… 

“How do we get to the river from here?” Lainy inquired. After hearing about this place so much, she had come determined to make Christie take her there, though the scuttlebutt about the fifth-grade room was that no one but Christie had ever been there. Otherwise, they reasoned, it would already be a state park or something, right? “I thought you said it was really close to your house, but there’s no river anywhere near this subdivision. Do you ride your bike there?”

Christie looked at her friend with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Neither girl said a word, but, in the intervening silence, Lainy’s sharp brain began to register her surroundings.

She suddenly saw the water for the first time, and then started laughing, though not unkindly. “Oh, that’s hilarious,” she said. “You really drew us in. Don’t worry,” her merry eyes danced, “I’ll play along. Now that two of us are in on it, it will be even easier to fool everyone else.” Full of mischievous planning, Lainy pulled Christie back to the house, never glancing at the leaf just rising up off the grass in the wind, or the blackbirds along the power lines on the horizon. She spent the rest of the visit alternately laughing at Christie’s supposed cleverness and her own gullibility, and plotting how best to carry on the illusion. Christie tried her hardest not to let this confusion go on.

“That really is my river, back there.”

“Right! Good thinking! If we carry on basing everything we say on the ditch, then we won’t ever have lied. Just like what you have been doing.”

“No, I mean, I love that place. I spend a lot of time back there. It’s amazing. This week, the river has been rising, because of the rain, and the birds…”

“I know, you’ve told me before. I believed you, remember? You’re very good at it. Just keep on doing what you’ve been doing. This will be great. We need to keep track of how long we trick them.”

Finally, Christie dropped the subject. She had tried to explain herself, and in the end it might be easier this way. For some reason, Lainy simply could not see her river.

When the other girl finally left, still chattering about her game, Christie waited just long enough to wave the van out of her front yard before letting tears of bitter disappointment run down her face. She walked, then, into the back yard, out behind the house, and then down the snaky strip of grass above the bayou’s banks. As she walked, she took stock of everything she saw around her. The river still looked like a river, and the birds were obviously birds. Everything was its perfect self, and Lainy had seen a ditch.

Lainy’s enthusiasm for Operation River soon faded, as Christie expressed little interest for the project, even ceasing to mention her paradise at all. The idea was forgotten, or at least Lainy ceased to remember it. Christie, however, filed it away in her mind as a warning. Never again would she discuss the river with anyone, she decided. She became a wee bit selfish, discovering that she preferred having her bayou all to herself. In any case, her parents noticed that she spent more and more time out behind the backyard, sometimes on the slab, sometimes just wandering around staring up at the sky or down at the ground. Soon, none of her friends even remembered that she had ever mentioned such a place.