The River at Night(65)

“Go to the river!” Rachel shrieked as she flew toward the water, dropping onto the bank mud and rolling in it as she howled. Pia jumped into the current, but like Rachel I never made it that far: stabs of pain on my face, arms, legs, and back sent me tossing myself down into the muck, skidding and flipping over and over to coat myself with slimy black grit, insects crunching under my flesh—my arm screaming but what could I do?—anything, anything to get them off me. Mad minutes later, the hornets lifted up from us as if by some sudden instinctual decision, leaving us twisting and writhing in the filth as they dispersed and rose up in a cone shape together, swirling in a black tornado downriver. I crawled toward Rachel and pulled her to me with my good arm—her pale blue eyes blinking in a black mask—hugged her as I brushed the last remaining hornets from her, her heart slamming against mine.

“Are you okay?” I said. Clearly I had been stung a dozen times or more, but it was just pain, and I was getting used to it.

She nodded, too terrified to speak. I’m not sure she’d even seen the nest, only felt the onslaught of enraged insects from nowhere.

Simone staggered from the woods, cursing, tears running down her face. Welts bloomed on her forehead and chest. She shook her hair like a dog; spittle shot from her mouth. “You bitches!” she screamed, then, weirdly, seemed to calm. She pulled the odd hornet out of her hair, tossed it behind her. “The indignity of it all.”

Pia stood to her waist in the river, splashing her face and body, brushing off the remaining insects that clung to her.

“Well, there you are,” Simone purred. “The alpha female. Of course I should have killed you first.”

Wild-eyed, Pia dove into the river and let it take her. She bobbed up once in a channel of vigorously moving water, glanced back at us, then disappeared.

“Pia!” Rachel shrieked, her voice raw as meat. She stumbled forward toward the water’s edge but I grabbed her shirt and dragged her back.

Simone raised her arm, the baggy sleeve of her sweater swinging down low like a pelican’s pouch. She aimed the gun with a steady hand and fired at the last place we’d all seen our friend alive.





45


A brightly colored object—azure blue and finch yellow—-whistled by my face. Simone’s hand jerked up and away, the gun arcing up into the sky. It took me a second or two to understand that an arrow had torn off the sleeve of her sweater and sent her tumbling onto the rocks.

Hugging the bank, Dean climbed up and over a pile of boulders downstream, bow slung over his shoulder. Simone lay on her back propped on her elbows, sputtering, one filthy arm exposed. She watched him till her shock wore off, then scrambled to her feet, ignoring us.

“Dean!” she cried with genuine longing and pain. “Dean, what are you doing?” She hazarded a few steps toward him. “Why did you do that? I wasn’t going to hurt them.”

He signed something to her I couldn’t catch; he was still too far from me and her body partially blocked my line of sight.

“Get away from you?” Simone shifted from a position of -supplication—arms outspread, one foot forward—to one of caution and circumspection. She huffed to her full height, shaking out her hair under her ski hat with an odd vanity. “Why should I get away from you? You’re my son. I love you.” Her voice thickened with cloying sweetness.

Rachel grabbed my arm, whispered, “The gun . . .”

I mentally replayed the image of Simone, her body and arms flying back, the gun jettisoning skyward. I’d heard no splash, no clanging of metal on rock. Had it landed as far back as the trees?

I stumbled forward, pretending to still be favoring my arm, to get a better view of Dean. He signed to his mother, “You kill girl with smooth black hair. I love her.”

Simone rolled her eyes and spat. “You stupid boy. You didn’t love her. You didn’t even know her. She was nothing to you—a fantasy. Come on, come to me.” She walked toward him with arms open wide, as if to engulf him.

He flipped the bow in his arms and came at her hard with it, cracking her forearms with an ugly sound. She cried out in surprise and pain. Balance lost, she windmilled her arms backward, stumbling, then landed on her ass on the rocks for the second time in as many minutes. Stunned more by this than the business of the arrow tearing off her sleeve, she lifted her arms and turned them. Two lines of blood oozed from sharp cuts. She examined the wounds in disbelief before turning to Dean with narrowed eyes.

“Why, you little shit.” She got to her feet quicker than I thought she could, like all big animals that move faster than you can imagine. But Dean was faster. He’d nocked an arrow and leveled it at her before she could rush him. His face ran with sweat, his eyes red and tortured.

“Now you listen to me, Dean. These women here—-including that coward in the river . . .” She gestured in our direction. Blood dripped from her arms and stained her skirt. “They don’t care about you. They don’t love you. They haven’t taken care of you your whole life, fed you, kept you safe from your own father, from all the animals out there, and I don’t mean just the ones in the forest. You know the animals I’m talking about, don’t you? You remember. You were young, but I know you do.”

Dean shook his head, kept the arrow trained on her heart.

Her voice lowered to an intimacy that bordered on obscene. “You know there’s nothing out there for you. There is no family for you beyond these woods. Only savages who would tear you up. Oh, yes, my son, they would have you for breakfast. But here”—she opened her arms to the sky, did a girlish twirl toward the forest and back—“this is ours, Dean. And I’ve told you, it’s not good to meet the people who get lost here. It’s not good to trust them with our story. Because not everyone understands. We’ve seen that, haven’t we? This is our world, Dean. Yours and mine, not theirs.”