You can’t go home again, especially if you never lived there. But in The River Between Us, when forty-two-year-old Tim Anderson is hired to oversee the restoration of a magnificent but fading nineteenth-century Hudson River mansion, on the other side of the river from where he grew up, the staid, meticulous New York City historic preservation architect from humble beginnings, comes to believe he has always belonged there.
Feeling abandoned and alone after his wife leaves him and foundering in a career he was once devoted to, astonished and allured by the splendor all around him—and surrounded by memories—Tim will do anything to reclaim the life he feels he’s lost, as well as his youthful dream of living in the mansion as he and Sally Pike, the family’s beautiful thirty-six-year-old daughter, fall in love. As they do, they encounter each their own painful pasts, yet tremble on that thrilling threshold of living a new and better life together.
That is, until Tim discovers that his elysian fantasy has blinded him from seeing that little is as he had imagined—or hoped—and as he begins to believe that Sally might have lied to him about her past, thus betraying his confidences. Then a nightmare of terror and panic unfolds. Torn by delusions of grandeur and spells of doubt, Tim feels poisoned or possessed as he is taken out of himself and drawn into the labyrinth of the Pike family and, finally, to the brink of madness as he faces his own demons and unravels the psychological puzzle that has really led him back to the mansion.
Blessings and curses. How are we to know which is which at any given moment? On the path to genuine happiness—to be at home in the house of our own heart—some dreams must die, some battles must be lost, and some rivers must be crossed.
Below you can read the Prologue or listen to a narration of it here:
THE RIVER BETWEEN US
By James Kullander
The coin lost in the river is found in the river.
—Yunmen Wenyan (c. 864–949)
PROLOGUE
After my wife left me and I quit my job in the city I was hired to renovate a magnificent relic of a mansion high on an eastern bluff a hundred miles up the Hudson River, and although I knew it wouldn’t be easy, I did not know it would be such a ruin—not what I walked into but what I left behind.
I’d been there once nearly a quarter-century before and I’d never forgotten it. So it was a kind of voyage back, even though I knew I couldn’t go back to a place I never truly left just like I couldn’t lose something I never truly possessed. It felt like I’d spent years huddled day and night alone outside its vast white-stucco walls, unable to tear myself away, yet never allowed inside again. For all that time, everything within me bore the mark of exile from the life I’d wanted more than anything else.
When I was young, I came to believe that my salvation—what little I knew of salvation in those days—lay hidden up in that beautiful house and not amidst the suffocating, pious airs of my mother’s small, spare Quaker meeting house on the other side of the river, where we lived. A frail and quiet enigma to me, she let me know in her tacit, tenacious way that there were many mansions in God’s heaven. And I, a withdrawn and ambivalent presence to her, let her know in my tacit, tenacious way all I ever wanted was one here on earth: Acacia, that haven on high that had set upon my lanky frame an unquiet desire, a cruel longing, a choir of discordant voices seeking harmony that never let me be, even after—or especially after—I’d found myself cursed upon those hallowed grounds I had long venerated from my position sailing with my father on the wide, muddied river far below.
It seemed each time we came about to sail east and the spinnaker ballooned with a brisk west wind, I wanted to be in that house more than I wanted to be on the boat with him. It was not my earliest memory but it became my most indelible. I could always feel that; even now I can feel it. Worse, I believed he could, too. So our Sundays out on the river never went as well as either of us had hoped, each of us so far from the other in such close quarters. And because of this we both despaired of a bond that never reached fruition. It was then that, like a grim prophecy, I began to comprehend how complicated the world was going to be for me, how that failed connection would lead to others, how many things were going to fall apart despite everything I did to hold them together.
Many years later, when I began to restore Acacia that summer—and, in a not insignificant way, restore myself—I had never intended to plunge so quickly or deeply into its care, nor to allow myself to get pulled so inescapably into the life of the woman who lived there. I had long been keen on buildings far more than people, from whom I inevitably kept a lonesome distance, but that summer I was starving for love and purpose and healing, and was drawn to both like matter collapsing around a failed star. Many things I thought I knew about the world and many things I had believed about myself dispersed in just a matter of months into a memory as dim as a distant shore, coming or going I still cannot say with any certainty. The place I had left and wanted to forget was the same place I’d returned to so I might remember.
Only now that I have crawled out from under the wreckage and brushed off the debris, have I come to see that all along what I was seeking was also seeking me. Only now can I say that my signature characteristic for so many years was like a rare, cursed coin minted in the inferno of disquietude, my allegiance given over to no one, not even to myself in any meaningful way. One side stamped with the devil’s trident of damnation, the other with hands held in a prayer for redemption, tossed like a plaything by the thumb of a wrathful god. If I could have, I would have snatched it away and traded it in for a different life a long time ago. And it was not for lack of trying and good faith that I’d failed to do so.
I went off to college—the first male in my family to do so—then to graduate school in the city, found a job doing what I loved, worked really hard, fell really hard for a lovely, intelligent, sensible woman and married her. Against significant odds, most of them within me, I believed I’d made a good life for myself. But this was nothing but patchwork, it turned out, and patchwork never holds up in the long run. The central flaw in the foundation of my being, I see now, was that I would not let myself admit what troubled me so. I simply hadn’t mastered the correct approach to outsmart the catastrophe awaiting me, if that were even possible. That I’d been able to walk away from it all still seems to me nothing short of a troubling miracle, a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one, at least if you were to look at it from the outside and with eyes of dispassion. For me, I felt I’d won my life back. I only wish it hadn’t cost so much.
In my first weeks back in the city at the end of that summer, after I’d been released from the hospital, supposedly cured and sane enough to walk the city’s riotous streets among my fellow citizens again, I spent my days shopping for food along with everyone else, rattling shoulder-to-shoulder on the city’s decrepit subways, walking on my own in Riverside Park where, with the thundering city at my back, I watched for hours the smooth, wide Hudson River flow by. Depending on the tide when I was there, some days it flowed south to meet the vast, gray swells of the Atlantic Ocean; other days it flowed north to the cattails and water chestnuts that choked the shallow banks of Acacia, where they found her body.
Only one time, sitting on a park bench warmed by the late afternoon sun and gazing down at my upturned palms, once so innocent and now bearing the invisible scars of stigmata, did I weep—in mourning, in despair. Mostly, no matter where or when I wandered, I felt in every step and every breath an unspoken relief and quiet gratitude that I’d managed to live through it all simply because I had come so close to dying. As I had the first time I’d been to Acacia all those years ago, when I wished I had died. For if death offered the absolute end of life then I would have been guaranteed never to lose anything more than I already had, and how I coveted that idea, even at so tender an age of seventeen. It left me with a strange, seemingly incurable homesickness that haunted me with the unsated hunger and liminal regions that inhabit the unassimilated refugee, indigenous to a nation they can no longer call their own—if they ever had that right—yet ensnared in the anamnesis of the last glimpse of their leaving.
In all those years I gave no voice to my grieving; silent were my lamentations. It was, I suppose, a kind of coping strategy. It worked, and for a long time, too. By all appearances, I was alive and well. Anyone could have seen that. Year after year—and how quickly they passed—I went about my days as so many others around me did and have done and will do, and found a satisfactory measure of solace in that daily round of quotidian tasks accomplished and appointments met. But inside me, because of the unseen injuries I had inflicted on myself, the open wound of my psyche, I had gradually and inescapably become drained of spirit, like from internal bleeding, until I had sunk close to the bottom of things, or what I took to be the bottom of things. I felt empty, absent, restless. It was agony, actually, that hollow pain, that insatiable hunger. One can only imagine how fundamentally unhappy someone might be whose voices of hope and memory had at a point early in life crossed wires. This exhausting inability to love because my heart was always set on something else, somewhere else. That was me, a hungry ghost, although I’d kept it all very well hidden from everyone, until I didn’t, or couldn’t. I’d simply exhausted all other means of evasion.
These days—at least for the time being—all I want and need to be content is to live for the moment, here and now, steeped in silence and stillness whenever possible, and feel keenly the essence of life’s fleeting pleasures and pains and joys and sorrows that come and go, certain that nothing lasts forever, not even the stories we tell ourselves. This story is about that story.