“It means we can’t save him too, okay, Win? We have to choose.”
“But I am choosing! Without him with us she will kill us if she finds us, don’t you get that? Either of you?”
Suddenly Pia landed with animal grace next to me, eyes bloodshot, hair wild. “You don’t think she’ll be ripping mad if she finds him still with us?” she hissed, her face inches from mine. “What do you think she’ll do then? Write us love letters?”
I recoiled into myself but stayed where I was, rooted to my seat on the raft.
“She shot at the raft with him on it, for Christ’s sake!” Pia blustered. “He’s no protection at all!”
“What I get,” Rachel said, “is that they’re both out there in those woods that they know—you can’t tell me that kid doesn’t know these woods, where we are and how to get out of here—and they both have weapons, and we’re sitting here with nothing. No food, no warm clothes, zippo. And I will not just sit on my ass waiting to be killed.”
“Weren’t your parents off-the-gridders?” I asked, feeling ganged up on, so—stupidly—making things worse.
“What the hell does that have to do with—”
“Nothing, I just—”
“We grew up in the sticks. There were nine of us, and we were too poor to pay the electric bill. There’s a fucking difference between growing up on government cheese and ripping the heads off wild animals and decorating your yard with them.”
Pia snickered at Rachel’s retort but stayed uncomfortably close to me. I gazed at the tight, complex weave of leather straps that bound the logs beneath me, suddenly queasy as I pictured Dean returning at dawn to no raft, to no one. His disappointment, his rage, and, frankly, what that might turn into. Would he join his mother in a murderous rampage against us? What had he meant by make you safe? What were his plans for her, anyway? Still—maybe because I could communicate with him—I felt safer with Dean at our side than not. Crossing him seemed like the last, fatal thing to do.
Pia stood up but did not back away. “So, Wini,” she uttered in a low voice I barely recognized as hers, “are you going to get off the raft or not?”
Rachel waded closer to me and gave the raft a shove. With my weight she could only nudge it an inch or two deeper into the pulling drift. She wouldn’t look at me. I recalled her ceaseless devotion to Sandra when she was so frail and debilitated after her chemo, and now I couldn’t shake the thought that she might leave me here.
“You guys aren’t thinking this through,” I said. “We haven’t even hit the worst of these rapids. Don’t you remember the map? The roughest part is just ahead! Satan’s Staircase.”
Rachel and Pia exchanged glances, sharing information I was not privy to. Face flushed with the strain, Rachel leaned down and put her shoulder into another push. The raft scraped a foot more down the bank.
“Stop it!” I was screaming now. Violence buzzed in my hands.
“Wini, you have to calm down,” Pia said.
Both of them bent down toward the raft as if gathering their strength for one last assault, a terrifying emptiness in their faces.
“Stop it or I’ll fucking kill you!” I slammed my hands down on the raft. “How long do you think this thing is going to last in rough water? Have either of you taken two seconds to think about that?”
“What’s that got to do with—” Pia started.
“We have no choice,” Rachel said.
“Of course we have a choice. Dean’s coming back and he’s going to—”
“Wini,” Pia said darkly. “Get off the raft.” She put her hands on her rangy hips and glowered at me. I pictured them pushing off into the river, their faces receding into darkness and me alone in those hellish woods. I thought, If this is my real family—the people I choose to be with—then how much more devastating to be abandoned by them?
I looked up at Pia, considered for the first time her size and strength as something to possibly fend off. She loomed over me, expression unreadable, eyes cloaked by the shadow of the trees, the lowering sun. Rachel, though weakened as we all were, looked sturdy and capable. As purblind as she was, she glared with a fury I’d never before witnessed into the vicinity of where I had installed myself. A light-headedness came over me—hunger, numbing fatigue, shock—for a few seconds I closed my eyes.