Out of the deep silence comes a sound. It is instantly recognizable and makes my insides melt with adrenaline. It’s the sound of a car. A car moving fast, driving on a smooth highway. But it seems to be coming from behind me.
Confusion spins my head around, and I see headlights floating through the fog. The car is behind me. Far behind. I must’ve drifted through the span of a bridge without the vaguest clue I was near a highway.
The car passes over the river and disappears into the forest without a second thought to me or my plight.
Swinging from paralyzed to panicked, I take my stick and try to push toward the left bank. The stick does nothing. The water is too deep for it to touch bottom. I put my arms in the cold, cold water and start paddling. My shoulders hate it, they hate it so much, but it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is getting to solid ground, getting to the road.
I’m breathing hard by the time I grab on to a tuft of grass. The water is too damn deep here, the bank at too sharp of an angle. A tangle of rhododendron branches reach out to me, but they’re only in my way. If my freaking shoulders worked, I could pull myself up and out, but there’s no way that’s going to happen. Instead, I use the branches to pull myself downriver, looking for some spot to clamber out.
Forty yards down there’s a place with something like a slope to it. There is no graceful way to do this. Using my left leg and my left arm, I hoist myself into the branches, onto the dirt. My boat bobs out from underneath me and my right half dunks into the frigid river. The smack of icy water pushes me to fight through the pain. With a scream I pull myself out of the water.
Clinging to the rhododendron, I turn to see my empty boat drift away into the foggy darkness. It looks like home, like safety and something good, and I’m sad to see it go. Surprisingly sad to see it go.
“Good-bye, little boat,” I say. “Thank you.”
It disappears into the night, gone from me forever.
The climb up to the road is brutal. I am climbing through as much as I am climbing up. Rhododendron and mountain laurel cover the steep hillside, creating an almost impenetrable thicket of rough-barked branches. Every ten feet I stop to breathe. The road is so far away, but at least it’s there.
It’s amazing that car drove by when it did. Otherwise I never would have known I’d sailed past what I spent so long searching for. What if it hadn’t gone by at that moment? Where would I have found myself? Lost in a wilderness too thick to escape? Possibly. I must be thankful and know I’m in God’s hands. That car feels like proof that providence will lead me to safety.
These good feelings of meant-to-be keep me going up the side of the embankment, keep me going all the way to the guardrail. I pause to touch the metal. It’s like a blessing, although whether the guardrail is blessing me or I’m blessing it, I couldn’t say. It’s just important to mark this occasion. The road is before me. I’ve made it.
Five Years Ago
EVERYTHING IS PACKED UP AND ready to go. The horse is in the trailer, one last check to make sure taillights and blinkers work. The girl has opted to ride with the boy and his mother. Her grandmother is riding shotgun, so she climbs into the backseat of their station wagon, next to the boy. She is exhausted. So, so exhausted.
There is silence for a few minutes. All she wants is for that silence to go on forever, to go from Oklahoma to South Carolina.
The boy’s mother decides to make conversation. “So, school is around the corner. Are you excited to go to the new middle school, Ruth?”
“Haven’t thought about it.” She uses the tone of voice that means stop talking, and the woman takes the hint.
The girl looks over at the boy, in his old Wranglers and stained white T-shirt. He is never going to change. He is going to be a social liability for the rest of their lives.
The boy turns to look at her, smiles. He’s wearing the cross he’s worn ever since his father left. She has spoken to him about the Wranglers, but she wouldn’t dare address the cross. And it’s not that she doesn’t share his faith. She does. They are in their church youth group together. But the boy is the president of the youth group, and he isn’t shy about that fact. He’ll tell anybody all about it.
She doesn’t mean to, but she sighs.
“You okay?” the boy asks.
“I’m just tired. Really, really tired.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN