Long Bright River

“This was the secret I learned that day: None of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping.”

Mickey has just saved Kacey from dying of a drug overdose. The elder sibling is only beginning to understand the motivation behind addiction. Kacey finds the world so unbearable that death is a preferable alternative to life in Kensington.

“It was a choice meant to assure my peers of my independence and myself of Kacey’s proximity. Her presence in any situation, familial or educational, tended to reassure me.” 

As children, Mickey tries to stick close to Kacey. The quote explains her motivation and illuminates her later frantic quest to find her sister. Kacey is the only link to a real family that Mickey has left, and she refuses to let go.

“But when I said this, Kacey only buried her head in her hands and said to me, ‘It’s different, Mickey, things have always been so different for you.’ To this day, I don’t know what her meaning could have been.” 

Kacey’s statement raises the issue of nature versus nurture. Both girls were raised under identical circumstances. One turns to addiction while the other does not. The author seems to imply that a person’s inner perception of a situation will dictate their behavior rather than the objective facts of the situation itself.

“But if I was self-conscious about my appearance, I was proud of my intelligence, which I thought of, in secret, as something that rested quietly inside me, a sleeping dragon guarding a store of wealth that no one, not even Gee, could take away. A weapon I would one day deploy to save us both: myself and my sister.” 

This quote echoes Mickey’s first statement describing herself. She knows she is smart and believes her intelligence is the one trait that might save her from succumbing to despair. She also sees Gee as a threat to her desire to evolve beyond Kensington. This fear has some basis in fact since Gee tries to dumb down Mickey by preventing her from going to college.

“I’ve had a certain bad habit ever since I was a child. I duck what I can’t bring myself to acknowledge, turn away from anything that causes me to be ashamed, run away from it rather than addressing it. I am a coward, in this way.”

Mickey can’t bear to be embarrassed or ashamed. She calls her reaction cowardice, but it seems more an indication of her perfectionism. While Kacey grows angry when Mickey judges her, the latter is an even harsher judge of her own deficiencies.

“Enough of this, I vow. Enough. No more. Kacey’s life is her own to protect. Not mine.” 

While Mickey certainly has a right to be disgusted by her sister’s risky behavior, she never stops searching for her. Mickey fails to see her own agenda in protecting her sister. Kacey’s presence in her life allows her to feel grounded. She is afraid to be without family and alone in the world.

“There is a particular insult that the O’Briens often use to describe people they don’t like: She thinks she’s better than us. Over the years, I fear that it has been used about me.”

Gee’s desire to limit Mickey’s prospects is apparently a family trait. All of the O’Briens share the desire to keep everyone in the family at the same level. This way, they don’t have to examine their own failures or feel guilty about their own lack of initiative. Mickey’s life choices are a reproach to them all.

“Seeing her this way, I often had the urge to clap my hands, loudly, in front of her face. To hug her tightly, to squeeze out of her whatever darkness was making her want to dull her life so completely.” 

Mickey’s reaction is indicative of her tendency to take action when confronted by a problem: She tries to solve it. Kacey’s retreat into drug addiction shows an innate passivity in the face of trouble. She wants to escape problems rather than solve them.

“In a moment of clarity, once, Kacey told me that time spent in addiction feels looped. Each morning brings with it the possibility of change, each evening the shame of failure. The only task becomes the seeking of the fix.” 

The concept of a loop is that it is eternal. One cannot reach a journey’s end in a loop. Rather than seeing addiction as a downward spiral, the notion of looping implies stasis. One doesn’t go up or down. Addiction is a perpetual limbo in which nothing gets worse, but nothing gets better either.

“I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.” 

During this period of her life, Mickey is sharing her home with Kacey, and Simon visits her house frequently. She refuses to acknowledge either her sister’s potential addiction or her boyfriend’s deceptive behavior. What Mickey wants more than anything else is family stability, and she is willing to delude herself that she’s achieved it.

“She disappears around a corner. And for the first time in my career as a police officer—a profession of which I have always been proud—a sickening feeling descends upon me: that I’m on the wrong side of something important.” 

Paula has just declined to make a statement about the dirty cop in the neighborhood. Her fear of the police alerts Mickey to the power the force exerts in Kensington, for evil as well as good. Tuman will later come to the same conclusion about his colleagues.

“But his words only serve to make me feel worse. I dislike the idea that I am a ‘victim,’ in any sense of the word. I dislike the attention, the sympathy, the hushed tones it elicits. I would prefer, in general, not to be spoken about, by anyone, in any way.” 

Truman has just sympathized with Mickey over being taken advantage of by Simon. Her defensive reaction is once again indicative of the protector role she has assigned herself in life. Both as a police officer and Kacey’s big sister, she refuses to acknowledge any vulnerability in herself.

“It’s easy to forget that the system isn’t right. I’m not just talking about Philadelphia. I’m not just talking about these particular homicides. I’m talking about the whole thing. The whole system. Too much power in the wrong hands. Everything out of order.” 

Truman is echoing Mickey’s earlier observation that something is wrong with the police force and the system that allows abuses within it to exist. People who are attracted to police work sometimes take the job for the wrong motives. Both Mickey and Truman will end up quitting because the abuses are so intrinsic to the system that neither one feels capable of effecting lasting change.

“I have never trusted words, especially not words that are used to describe internal emotions, and something about the phrase feels artificial to me. Phony.” 

Thomas has just told Mickey that he loves her. Given her own cold upbringing with Gee, she recoils from the statement. Her own childhood was so devoid of positive emotional expression that she interprets the words as highly suspicious and potentially manipulative.

“—I was soft, I say, and you made me hard. Gee nods. That’s good, she says. The world is a hard place. I knew that was something I had to teach you, too. —You did, I say. She looks away. That’s good, she says again. That’s what I wanted.” 

It never occurs to Gee that the world might be something other than hard. She prides herself on withholding love from her granddaughters for fear that they might become soft as a result. This warped perception of how the world works is at least partially responsible for Kacey’s descent into addiction.

“I sensed even in that moment that the two of us were at a crossroads. The map of our lives stretched out before us, and I could see, quite clearly, the various paths I might choose to take, and the ways in which this choice might affect my sister. In retrospect, of course, the path I chose was wrong. Dishonorable, even.” 

Kacey has just disclosed that she is pregnant with Simon’s baby. Mickey accuses her of lying. The latter wants to believe her boyfriend is honest, even at the expense of sending her sister back into another spiral of addiction. Mickey’s decision is a desperate attempt to maintain the emotional stability of her world. Of course, it doesn’t work.

“Because for the first time I understood the choice my own mother had made to leave us—if not by design, then by her actions, her carelessness, the recklessness with which she sought a fix. I understood that she had held me—us—in her arms, and gazed at us as I was then gazing at Thomas. She had held us like that and had decided to leave me, to leave us, anyway.” 

Mickey recognizes the sad truth that her mother’s addiction mattered more to her than either of her daughters. The need to escape the hardships of reality took precedence over the lives of her children. Mickey vows not to let the same thing happen to Thomas. This is the one positive result of such a grim realization.

“I look at my surroundings, and I have difficulty believing, suddenly, that this is where I spent the first twenty-one years of my life. This cold and unwelcoming house. This house that is no place for children. Every part of me begins, then, to send a simultaneous signal: get out, get out, get out. Get Thomas out. Don’t ever come back to this house, to this woman.” 

Mickey decides to leave Gee and her home forever when she and Thomas flee on Christmas. Her description of the house as “cold” echoes her similar descriptions of all the abandos in Kensington. Gee’s home may not be physically abandoned, but it is emotionally devoid of life.

“A slow humiliation spreads from the center of my chest outward, a sensation I recognize from childhood, so potent that it almost makes me cry. This is the feeling that being around the O’Briens has always given me. That I’m an outsider, a foundling, someone who doesn’t belong.”

Mickey has just learned that the O’Brien clan knew Kacey’s whereabouts and lied to Mickey on Thanksgiving when she was frantically searching for her sibling. Not only does her intellect and education separate her from them, but her status as a cop means that they don’t trust her. Mickey has never been able to identify herself as belonging to this family.

“I have thought of this story every day of my life on the job. I picture the drug as the Piper. I picture the trance it casts.” 

Mickey recalls first reading the fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She explicitly draws a parallel between the piper luring the village children to their doom and the drug culture of Kensington destroying the next generation of the district. In both cases, the citizenry is culpable for the tragedies that ensue.

“I think of the choices my own mother made—and realize, painfully, that I am not so different from her after all. It’s only the nature of our respective addictions that diverged: Hers was narcotic, clear-cut, defined. Mine is amorphous, but no less unhealthy. Something to do with self-righteousness, or self-perception, or pride.”

Mickey chooses to see her addictive need to find Kacey as the consequence of her pride. She feels that her own competence requires her to act as protector. In reality, she is fearful of losing the family stability that Kacey provides in her life.

“—Connor can do bad things, Kacey says, but he’s not all bad. Almost nobody is. I have nothing to say to this. I picture Mrs. Mahon, her hand tipping back and forth in the air above the chessboard. They’re bad and good both, all the pieces. It is possible to acknowledge, on some level, the truth of this.” 

Ambiguity permeates the novel, and the metaphor of chess pieces seems appropriate to describe the contradictory behavior of its characters. Gee is both protective and obstructive. Kacey is both an addict and a shrewd judge of character. Mickey is both capable and vulnerable. The police defend and exploit. There are no simple answers.

“People with promise, people dependent and depended upon, people loving and beloved, one after another, in a line, in a river, no fount and no outlet, a long bright river of departed souls.”

Mickey is alluding to the list of drug overdose victims. Her mention of a long bright river is an allusion to Tennyson’s poem, which is, in turn, is an allusion to the lotus-eaters from the Odyssey. The reference to a river also carries overtones of the Pied Piper legend. In some versions of the tale, he lures the children of Hamelin to their deaths in a nearby river.