I floated along now with a purpose: get myself out. I slapped at the water with my right arm, trying to aim myself the least bit toward the bank, and with some dread, dropped my legs and feet a bit to push off whatever was coming at me so I could start to control my route. Arctic-cold currents mixed with just cold ones now, and oddly warmish ones, all of them running along my body with an eerie knowledge of it. Every now and then, my feet hit bottom and scooted along it as if I were in some watery wheelchair, and in that way I scuttled closer and closer to the bank.
I looked up. To my left, Pia sprinted along a sloping ridge of stone that flattened into overlapping sheets of shale. She was keeping pace with me.
I kicked myself into an eddy, working my body into an area of shallows where the water felt unrecognizably kind. It sparkled in a waist-deep pool the green of old bottles. I realized I could stop fighting and had to redefine myself as something not under the river’s command. I was a pitiful ball of pain.
Pia scrambled over the shallow rock steps. She ran splashing into the water toward me while I was still summoning the strength to stand. Blood coursed from a long, ugly cut across her shoulder, running down her arm and hand and pinking up the water near me.
“Are you okay?” She bent down to help me, comfort me, lift me, I don’t know.
“Don’t touch me!” I wailed. I blinked away the river water and let myself look down at my left forearm, which had a bend in it now, halfway between elbow and wrist. It floated fish-belly white in the water in front of me.
“Shit, Wini, that’s definitely broken.” She glanced up at the barren rocks. “Come on, you have to get out of the water. Put your good hand on my back.”
“Your shoulder—”
“It just looks bad. It’s just messy. Let’s go.”
“Where’s Rachel?” I said, crying. I almost missed the river doing my moving for me. I couldn’t imagine standing.
“I don’t know. Up ahead.”
“I can’t . . .” I started to bawl.
Pia splashed water on her cut. It bled unabated. “Yes, you can. You have to get up. Do I have to carry you?”
I blew snot out my nose, laughing at that. “Even you can’t do that, Pia.”
“Of course I can,” she said, as I realized she could. “But I don’t fucking want to, so let’s go.”
Blubbering, I got to my feet and draped myself over her back, my right arm gripping her shoulder as she half lifted me up the bank and onto the flat stones.
42
I sat gasping and shuddering on the shale. My legs and feet were laced with scratches and small cuts and bled in places, but I couldn’t stop staring at my arm. I held it out, slightly away from me. It looked like someone else’s arm, a broken doll’s arm. I moaned something about Rachel, something about dying.
“Shut up, Wini. Don’t move.” Pia whipped her T-shirt over her head, blood pumping out of her left shoulder. I saw the mouth of the wound, a good four inches long and deep too. I saw the meat of her. She grabbed a torn end of the shirt and ripped it in half.
She glanced at her shoulder, at me, eyes bright with urgency. “Help me with this.”
“What do I do?”
“I want you to hold the skin together before I wrap it.”
She dropped down into the eddy and dunked once before she climbed back out and sat in front of me, facing the water. “Hurry up and do it,” she said.
I reached across her back and gripped her shoulder, already slippery with blood, and tried to draw together the lips of the wound with my one good hand. The iron taste of blood mixed with the cool evening air. Now wearing only her black sports bra and shorts—her helmet tossed aside—Pia slipped the armhole of one of the T-shirt halves over her bad arm and slid the remnant up to my hand that still clenched her wound. I could feel her heart pulsing in her arm.
We stiffened as a sound floated over the boom of the river. “Where are you?” came Rachel’s voice, part scream, part moan.
Fifty yards downstream, helmet askew on her head, Rachel hugged a boulder near the bank. She pushed herself to her feet, her footing bad on the tilted rock. We screamed her name and she waved both arms in our direction, then ducked down and dropped out of sight behind the rock.
“What the fuck is she doing?” I said. “Where did she go?”
“Hurry up with this, will you?” I finally got that Pia wanted my good hand to act as her other hand, so together we tied a feeble knot over the cut and she stood up. In seconds, the improvised bandage was heavy with blood and sagging. “Keep this,” she said, tossing the other half of the shirt in my direction. “I’m going to get her.”
Through a haze of pain, I watched as Pia, clutching the bandage, blundered off into the woods near the river. For long minutes I sat slowly closing and opening my eyes, praying each time that I would spot my friends in the distance. Finally, Pia emerged dragging Rachel up the bank. I shut my eyes and whispered my thanks, opening them to watch Rachel as she tripped along behind Pia, anchored to the back of her shorts.
Rachel collapsed down next to me, panting and shivering. “Pia says your arm is broken.”
I nodded. “How did you get past me in the river?”
“Fuck knows.”