The River at Night(58)

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.

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.