The River at Night(57)

Finally Rachel looked up, squinted in my direction. “Is he gone?”

Pia glanced back at me and said nothing while something like guilt flickered across her face.

“Yes, but he’s coming back in the morning.”

Pia snorted, yanking the raft so hard over the mossy embankment that one corner dipped down, tasting the water. “We’re leaving, Win.”

A cavity opened in the depths of my gut. My head seemed to vibrate slightly. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

Rachel faced the river, away from me, legs planted wide apart in the dirt. With a grunt, she bent down and heaved the raft a few feet forward. It landed half in, half out of the water, resting at a forty-five degree angle to the bank. Already the river wanted it; one more solid shove would set it free. “All of us,” she said, staring at the lagoon-dark water.

“Listen to me,” I said.

No one made a sound. The current sang its burbling song and tugged at the raft, inching it farther from the shore.

“He says he’s going to get us out of here.”

Rachel stepped into the water up to her knees, splashed over to the far side of the raft that bobbed and flirted with the waves. Pia stood at the shoreline, arms folded, watching her.

“Did you hear me? He says he’s going to make us safe.”

“What does that mean?” Rachel turned in my direction. Her curly hair had begun to dry; it stood out in a crazy halo around her head. She looked walleyed and unstoppable. The water rumbled past her waist, yanking at her shirt. “Is he going to kill her?”

Our ragged breathing filled the air. The green pressed in on us as long-legged mosquitoes swarmed our foul, sweating bodies. I watched one bloat to twice its size with my own blood before I smacked it, reddening my thigh. I felt, viscerally, Sandra’s body lying yards away, already starting to become not Sandra, but a part of the earth we stood on. We owed her something, a large and complex debt I was too depleted to face or even comprehend.

“Is he?” Rachel repeated, hate in her voice.

I took a few steps down the bank, my feet stinging and aching on the sharp stones, before I clambered onto the raft, anchoring it to the shore with my weight. “I promised him we’d wait till dawn. He’ll help us.”

They eyed my every move but stayed where they were. Pia’s bare feet were bruised, scratched, and bloody.

“We don’t care what you promised him,” Rachel said. I couldn’t tell which stung me more: this we business again or their refusal to listen; all the time the loss of Sandra stabbed me like shards of glass in my spine.

Rachel rested her arms lightly on the raft, her eyes aimed vaguely skyward toward a point somewhere over the wall of black spruces that crowded the bank. It occurred to me she needed at least one of us to even think of getting out of here. “And honestly, Win?” she continued. “Between you and me and Pia and the trees and shit? I’m not even sure you’re telling us everything Dean is saying. Or not saying.”

Anger rippled through me. “Rachel—seriously? You’re accusing me of—”

“Wini,” Pia said, stepping gingerly toward the water, “don’t take this the wrong way, but Dean is not your brother.”

I planted myself on the raft, glared at her. Still she wouldn’t meet my eye. “So what the fuck does that mean?”

“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.