The River at Night(67)

Dean had begun to take notice of us.

“Jesus Christ, Pia, snap out of it,” Rachel said, her face blanched with terror. “Wini? Help me out here!”

She was right. I exhaled all that ugliness. “Let it go, Pia.”

Pia nodded, but kept her eyes on the ground.

“Look at me, Pia.”

“I could do it, you know.” She stared at Simone, a writhing pile of hair and stink.

“We work as a team. Rory said that, remember? That’s how we survive.”

Eyes still downcast, Pia shook her head and wandered to the bank.

Dean finished with the ropes and stood back from his mother. Her fury seemed to leave her. She dropped her head and rested her chin on her chest, big shoulders sagging. Phlegmy sobs bubbled out of her as crocodile tears bloomed on her cheeks and ran down her face in impressive volume.

“You women—well, I don’t think I’d put anything past you,” she said, voice clogged with tears. “But, Dean . . . you? You would leave your own mother out here to die? To—to freeze to death? Die of exposure? Thirst? You want me to starve to death?” She tried to wipe her eyes against her bare shoulder. “Look, I know I’ve made some bad choices, but I don’t think I deserve this.”

Dean looked at me, panic in his eyes.

“We’ll send someone for you,” I said.

Simone ignored me. “Dean, son, it’s not too late to let this whole thing drop. You made a mistake. It’s over. Forgiven. History! Come on, honey, untie me. I won’t be angry.” Her neck corded as she strained at the ropes.

“She’ll be okay, Dean,” I said, my eye on Pia’s rangy profile. She stood a few yards away by the river, watching the water sort itself out midstream.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Rachel said to Dean with uncommon softness. “You’re being brave.”

Disgusted, Simone let her head drop back against the tree and gazed up into the branches above her head. A subtle change washed over her face. A widening of the eyes, lips ever so slightly pulled back. She had seen something. I should have known what it was—so obvious later!—but my concern at the time was Dean and his wavering.

“Are you hungry?” he signed to her.

“Starving!” she whimpered.

Dean loosened his leather sack and pulled out a handful of long, stringy objects, each with a webbed foot on the end. He approached her with them, but she turned her head away in a pout.

“That’s all you have? Dried frog?” She spat into the dirt. “You know that’s not Mom’s favorite. Go catch me a fresh trout. Won’t take you a minute. They’ll be jumping in this rain.”

Dean stuffed the pieces of frog back in his pouch, his face ashen, concentrated. “Let’s go,” he signed to me.

“But, Dean,” she wailed. “Your mama’s starving! You’re killing her!” She lunged at her ropes, shook her head, kicked like a tantrumming child.

He turned to leave but just as quickly swung back around and approached her, just out of range of her thrashing limbs, and sank to his knees. He fell forward onto his hands like a penitent, head down, sobbing silently, his body shuddering. She grew quiet, watching him with an expression between a snarl and hope. Fog hung in ghostly shrouds around us as we watched them, transfixed.

He signed, “I will come back for you.”

She stopped kicking at the dirt, quieted, then lifted her head. For just one moment, her face softened and the insane glint left her eyes. I could almost picture her as a normal mother speaking to her son. She whispered, “In my dreams, I never laid a hand on you. In my dreams, we could go home.”

Dean pushed himself to his feet, wiped his wet eyes, and gazed off into the thick woods. He seemed done with her, with all of us.

“Dean, please—” she cried out to him.

But he had already turned, vanishing into the green. The forest settled around the place he’d stood as if he had never been there.

“Pia!” Rachel yelled. “Let’s go!”

Without a backward glance, Rachel and I took off after Dean, Pia at our heels. Soon she ran past us, calling for him. I clutched my broken arm to my chest with my good one as I stumbled down a densely wooded hillside, finally descending into a copse of dwarfish pines, all but their sad drooping tops obscured by fog and mist. Inhuman sounds—Simone’s unearthly caterwauls—echoed from the river behind us. I could just make out Rachel’s form only a yard from me as she clung to Pia’s waistband.

We slogged along for a good half hour that way, dropping down and down through the hemlock forest, the hush of the river to the right our only constant.

“Dean!” Pia cried, exhaustion in her voice. “Where are you?”

We stopped and listened to our ragged breathing and Simone’s wordless howling. Rain banged down on us. We looked like savages. I remembered something Richard had shot back to me one day as I complained about something stupid like a parking ticket: Pain and suffering is simply the human condition, didn’t you know that, Wini?

I yelled Dean’s name. Nothing.

Pia bent over to catch her breath, pale and shivering in just her athletic bra and shorts. “We are so royally motherfucking fucked.” Her wound did not look good, the edges whitish and swollen as the rain diluted the blood into orangey rivulets down her arm and legs. Rachel gazed blankly into Pia’s back, hair hanging in her face like a lunatic.