At the same moment I sensed the two of them about to collect themselves to move toward me: Pia from behind, Rachel from the water. My eyes snapped open to find them a few steps closer to me, Rachel fully out of the water now, dripping onto the sandy bank. I could feel the heat of Pia’s body as she came toward me.
I couldn’t stop a flash of Marcus breaking into the pills at the group home and swallowing them all down with the ginger ale he loved. It was three o’clock in the morning, night’s most desolate hour, only days after we’d moved him in. Was he thinking about his sister, asleep in her comfortable bed a town away? Was he drowning in a sea of loneliness, since no one at the home understood his pidgin mash of “real” sign language and his made-up signs? They told me he must have been asleep in minutes, dead within the hour. As I looked out at the water, the surface purling midstream, I was overcome by the idea that maybe Pia was right, perhaps Dean was just another brother I couldn’t save, and it was foolhardy and dangerous to try.
I pushed myself to my feet and stepped off the raft with slow deliberation. Pia and Rachel regarded me for a few seconds, unsure what I might do next. But I had deflated. My rage had deserted me, and I felt weak in every way. Wordlessly, sweat pouring off their faces, they bent down and deadlifted the raft. At the last second, perversely, I lent a hand, and together we sledded the thing down and out into the waiting current.
40
The river took us faster than it ever had. We seemed to ride higher up somehow, ferried along with a brusque efficiency for half a mile or so of what turned out to be the final easy stretch. We sat on the raft like ticks on a horse, just clinging, no plan at all, until I felt the water surge as the walls of the forest moved in. The river narrowed, and we were swept around a turn.
We could feel the river changing underneath us; I read it in our faces, the effort to ready ourselves for whatever was coming next. Rachel crawled to the center of the raft and sat tight, clutching the leather straps that trussed the logs, while I struggled to get to my feet with the oar, hoping to control the thing as Dean had, but that plan turned futile right away. The river wheeled us completely around as if some laughing devil were spinning the raft for sport, and we tumbled back on our asses and stayed there, cursing and shaking. We dug our bleeding heels into the splintering logs, and it was all we could do to jockey the oar to ward us away from fallen trees and islands of river detritus clumped in nightmarish shapes, all hurtling at us fast.
The air freshened. We didn’t speak. I missed terribly the relative softness and give of our rubber raft, which slid over obstacles or bounced off them. Nothing gave with this primitive bitch of a craft we clung to like animals. There was no bend or ability to coast over the steep drops we’d bested before; it was as if we were caught in a flood and riding on a rooftop, something never meant to float down a river. We were the wrong shape—an awkward square—made of the wrong substance. And we couldn’t stop ourselves. The insanity of what we were doing felt fluttery in my throat. My own death loomed in front of me. I saw Sandra’s face. Her mouth as she spoke her last words.
But really, as fast as we were moving, we hadn’t seen anything yet. We hit another bend, swung around sharp, dropped down. The river began to seethe and boil with newfound energy. It felt malevolent, like it knew all our private terrors, like it relished just what a raw hand it was about to deal us. Rachel’s eyes grew wild; I knew her dread was even worse than ours—we could at least see what was barreling toward us. Rory had told us to always head into the rapids, but the idea seemed nuts. The mineral taste of water filled my mouth.
An island sprang up before us, this angry knot of crags and nested sticks like spears sticking out, and the river—we could feel it—wanted to impale us there. We moved toward it as if notched into a groove and shot forward by unseen hands. Pia scrambled to her knees and held out the oar. It hit me that she had some shit-crazy idea of knocking us away from the thing.
“Pia, stay down!” I yelled, but she didn’t listen or hear. The oar caught in the fist of rock, and the butt of it slammed back into her chest. She screamed, fell back, and rolled to the edge, one leg fully in the water, spray flying up at us. We spun around and hurtled on past the island.
“Wini!” she shrieked, her eyes sick with fear as I caught her arm and held on with nothing to brace me. Rachel grabbed my waistband with one hand, a rope with the other, heels jammed into the wood as I wrestled gravity and centrifugal force to drag Pia back onto the raft. My shoulders nearly wrenched from their sockets, but by God I had her, pulled her up hand over hand till I caught at her belt and heaved her toward me with a strength foreign to me. Pia tucked her legs up to her chest, rolled over to Rachel, and curled in a ball, shaking.
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” she cried as she struggled to get back up. She said something else, but the river erased her words.