He floated up so fast I didn’t have a second to think—suddenly his body was under mine, arms and legs spread. We soared up together to the surface, where the water turned us, forcing us once more against the wreckage of trees and rocks.
His head was inches from my own, slumped onto his chest but out of the water, his big body sandwiching me there, so terribly cold where his flesh touched mine. Pia and Rachel grappled with him, manhandling him off me, and—all the while kicking and fighting the relentless current—drove him toward the bank. As soon as we could touch bottom, we put our bodies under him. Wore him like a heavy coat. We dragged him to the narrow shore, his feet in their purple-and-green Tevas scoring the dirt behind us. As we did so, I turned my head and glimpsed out of the corner of my eye the bright blues and yellows of the raft, caught on a jutting peninsula of tree stumps and rock a hundred yards downriver. No hot-pink T-shirt flashed in the woods—no sign of Sandra.
“Hurry, let’s get him up here!” Laden with his shoulders and upper body, Rachel nodded at a flat section of beach edged by tall ferns. I clambered to the spot, cradling his head as we awkwardly turned him and laid him down.
Pia stumbled backward into the ferns, hands clasped over her mouth. Staring down at Rory, she whispered, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, help us,” as Rachel fell to her knees. Water bubbled out of his mouth and she shouted at us, “Help me turn him—Pia, go by his feet, Wini, come by me!”
Pia and I dropped down to the ground and rolled him on his side. He felt so big, solid, immovable—how had we been able to lift him out of the water? With a muffled cry, Rachel drove her shoulder into the backs of his knees, bending them toward his chest. River water pulsed out along with something stringy, bits of tuna and chocolate—bile, vomit. She reached in his mouth with her fingers and wiped it away. Grabbed his wrist and held it for one, three, five seconds—screamed, “Fuck!”—and dropped it. “Get him on his back. Now!”
We obeyed. She held her ear over his open mouth, cursed again. Seizing his jaw with one hand, she slid his forehead back with the other, then pinched his nose shut. She clamped her mouth over his, and we heard the rush of her living breath into his chest that looked still as clay. Athletically, she repositioned herself, glasses dangling down by their elastic cord as she hovered over him with straight, stiffened arms, palms aimed at his heart. She thrust down hard and fast on his river-logged body, then hopped back to his mouth, then his chest and mouth again, over and over for countless ungodly minutes until I heard a wet cracking sound. Still she did not stop.
“Can we do something?” I took a step forward.
“Just stay away from me!” Rachel said hoarsely, wretchedly, her matted wet hair hanging down over her face. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she placed both hands by the sides of his neck, then checked his wrists again. She fell forward with a wrenching cry and pounded the earth with her fist, just once.
All the time Rory gazed upward into a dense canopy of birch and alder, waiting to be brought back to life.
21
We stood in a circle, gazing down at Rory in his hush of death. Expectant. As if at any moment he would sit up and tell us what it was like in that other place or wink and smile at Pia and pull her down with him on his soft bed of ferns under his sky of leaves and afternoon light.
Pia dropped to her knees. With a strangled cry she buried her head in her hands and began to sob from the depth of her guts. The grief of the lover left behind, pure shock, genuine loss, fear of what terrors lay ahead, or some combination, there was no way of knowing. I only knew I had never seen her so devastated. Rachel and I just let her cry. The shimmering terror of Sandra’s absence hovered between us; still, we stood riveted, unable to move. Just above us, trilling over Pia’s guttural moans, a songbird chose now to sing its prettiest tune.
Rory lay in speckled sunlight, his moss-green eyes open, mouth slightly parted, so that he seemed about to speak. I stared at him until it felt wrong doing so, and still I looked; we all did. His Michelangelo’s David build, his handsome face; a beautiful boy who would always be twenty, who would never be this beautiful again. He looked even younger dead, his skin moist and dewy, his well-defined muscles seeming somehow tensed and about to move.