The River at Night(61)

“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.”

“Are you all right?”

“Still blind, but compared to you guys I’m really good.” Her bare feet were scraped and blotchy with bruises. It hurt to look at them. She tossed aside her mangled helmet and repositioned herself, squatting on a ledge just below me. “Let me see your arm,” she said as she moved in close, her head inches from my arm as she first scanned it with her eyes, then fluttered her fingers over it. Pia stood over us, a bleeding sentinel.

“You don’t have to break it again or any of that shit, do you?” I said, realizing I was still crying, and that it had become almost perpetual.

Again her mop of drenched hair tracked up and down my forearm, dripping on my gooseflesh. I tried to leave my body for a bit, but, no. Even though I could feel the wisdom in her fingers, I shuddered with pain at any touch, including her hot breath on me. As she uttered the words “This’ll just take a sec,” she gripped my wrist and elbow, leaned in with her shoulder at the break, and with her body weight snapped my arm back into place.

I screamed. Partly from surprise, but mostly from agony. Pia slapped her hand over my mouth. “Quiet, Win, come on, you have to . . .”

I wailed into her palm.

Cradling my arm, I rolled over onto my good side and stuffed my screams back into my throat and down into my body. My cheek pressed against the cold stone. A balm. I floated in and out of consciousness, maybe to grab a few seconds away from detonating pain. From far away, I heard Pia and Rachel shuffling around me, talking in low tones.