The River at Night(35)

Something grabbed my sleeve, yanked at me.

Rachel popped up like a cork to my right; Pia next to her. “Let’s try from here,” Rachel said breathlessly. “Maybe it’s better.”

It looked like a worse angle to me, but we three dropped down and under. This time we could touch bottom and that made all the difference. We all came up hard under the log and with our footing leveraged it high enough so the water worked with us now, helping us force it up just a few inches, enough to roll it onto a slab of rock that sloped down in the opposite direction.

We looked on in horror as Rory’s orange shorts stayed bobbing up and down exactly as they had been, head and shoulders still submerged under the cascade of water.

I am a swimmer, I thought, so now is when I swim.

Against all instinct I dove back in; let the mad current take me. In seconds it thrust me on top of him, pasted me against the snarl of river detritus. His helmet glimmered in the water beneath me, his arms floating in a T shape to his sides as if he were flying underwater. I sucked in a lungful of air. Dropped down and hauled myself toward him, hand over hand, by the odd root and branch. Don’t think, I told myself. Just do. One step after the next. My body held fast against the wood and stone, I reached under his chin and unbuckled his helmet.

Nothing happened. Of course he didn’t float up! The helmet still encircled much of his head, and two fat stones gripped the helmet while another imprisoned his shoulder. Pounding water held his body in place.

Other hands touched my back. Someone swam over me. Was I being held down? White stars danced in front of me. Panic tasted like blood in my mouth; I forced it away. Blinked, surfaced, dove down again.

Rachel swam beneath me, treading by Rory. The water exploded to my right, and I saw Pia, her long form swimming down to us. She hauled his right shoulder from under the rock as Rachel grabbed his left, their white cheeks bulging with air, their eyes huge as they strained. Together they pushed his body down and away from the helmet, which remained wedged between the stones.

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.