Some animal hunger for life took over. I drew my knees to my chest and thrust my legs down, hoping to launch myself to the surface that way. Instead I sank to my shins in sludge and roots, trapping myself. I waved my arms like seaweed, my head a knot of pain, air gone. I blinked up at the light, my will fading. Would this be how it would end? Entombed in river quicksand, dead forever standing up? A visceral memory pushed panic aside for unreal seconds. When was the last time I was trapped this way, airless, gazing skyward through blue space, reaching up and grabbing at water to pull myself up?
I flashed on the moment my father, with his signature casual cruelty, “taught me to swim” one afternoon at the community pool when I was eleven. Marcus by his side, he threw me—without warning—into the deep end. Terror turned to fury as I sank like something weighted, Marcus’s shocked face squiggly above the water, his mouth an O, his hands reaching down for me. In a cyclone of bubbles, I kicked and punched at the water, willing myself to rise up. Rage taught me how to swim; fierce love brought me to the surface, back to my brother.
Dimly I realized one foot was wedged in deeper than the other, but if I pointed my toes down like a ballerina, I could wriggle both feet. Kicking hard as if I were doing some frantic dance, I felt one foot come free, then the other, deplorably free of both water shoes. I exploded up and out into sunlight with too much noise, gulping at the air while fully expecting to be shot in the neck and die instantly. In fact, the old me—the part that was good buddies with giving up—wanted it badly, the oblivion, relief from the responsibility of staying alive any longer.
But no bullet came. In the seconds it took to fill my lungs with air and submerge again, I glimpsed Rachel and Pia huddled close several yards away near the bank, their heads barely above water as they took cover under a nest of fallen branches. Doubled over with the strain, the rope scarring his back, Dean clambered ashore dragging the raft behind him. Sandra’s body lay spread-eagled on it as if she were making a snow angel.
I swam toward the memory of Rachel’s and Pia’s ghostly faces bobbing by the shore, and with two or three hard sweeps of my arms I reached them, popping out of the water. They yanked me under the cluster of branches where we herded together, arms around each other, crying. Dean stepped out onto the raft, now resting on the bank. He lifted Sandra’s limp body over his shoulder and carried her into the forest.
? ? ?
We knelt in a circle around our friend, weeping but as unaware of our weeping as young people are unaware of time, and I remember trying to clean her face with whatever we had, leaves or pieces of our own tattered clothes, and combing her hair with our hands. The last time I’d done so had been right before her wedding, because the stylist she hired to do her hair had made her look ridiculous, all poofy and fake. Minutes before she walked down the aisle, in the back of the church in a dim bathroom with a greasy mirror, the three of us—giddy with nerves—deconstructed the silly updo. We set aside the waxy white flowers pinned there as we restyled her hair, then clipped the flowers to the side of her head. It was one of the most intimate things we had ever done for her, and she had never looked more beautiful than she did smiling back at us in that badly lit restroom. This was her real, about-to-get-married self. Still our Sandra, but about to change that too. We all knew she wasn’t 100 percent sure about this man waiting for her a room away, but we also knew she saw enough good in him for a marriage. I felt her trepidation as well as her passionate love, and it had worried me, but what could I do? We could already feel her moving forward, swept by relentless time into her own future with her own children (one already nestled in her and growing), so really, who were we to stop her?
What had remained of Rachel’s glasses was gone. Washed away. She knelt down, her face close to Sandra’s as she caressed her cheek.
“I slapped her,” Rachel said hoarsely. The rest I couldn’t understand because of her crying.
Pia fell on her knees beside her. “It’s okay,” she sobbed. “She knew you loved her.”
“Did she?” Rachel breathed, and was again lost in a paroxysm of grief.
I picked up Sandra’s hand, so cold, white, and small, fingernails black with dirt. Really not in my right mind, I tried to warm it pressed between my palms. Rachel dropped into a little ball next to her, rocking back and forth on her heels, moaning.
As if wrenching herself from the earth, Pia pushed herself to her feet, eyes red with sorrow. With rough movements, she wiped her face with her hands, only making it grimier as she striped the dirt across her cheeks and forehead till she resembled some sort of warrior, frightening to look at. “All right.” She glanced around the glowering woods. “We have to move.”
Dean squatted nearby. He held his head in his hands, mouth agape, with such a look of sadness in his eyes I thought of comforting him somehow, but didn’t. He rubbed his closed fist in circles around his heart, again and again, the sign for “sorry.”
“I know,” I said to him.
He signed, “Tell them sorry.”
“Dean is saying how sorry he is,” I said quietly.