Notes from My Captivity(27)

“Are we going to make it?” I ask.

“Yes,” he answers, his voice insisting on that fact. “I’m gonna get you home safe and sound.”

“I know you will.” I don’t know that. I look behind me, at the dark shadows that still hang in the canyons before they fill with morning light. “Why did they have to kill them? Why didn’t they just steal our stuff and leave?”

“I don’t know. They may have felt threatened.”

“Or hated Doors music.” My humor sounds hollow, goes nowhere, dies. The faces of the dead come back to me in waves. Every burst of birdsong or tweeting insect makes me jump. Every crack in the forest. Every scrape of the boat against a stone. But nature talking and the hum of the engine are the only things that break the silence, and silence would be even more horrible to bear.

Time is crawling. The seconds and minutes and hours that take us away from camp. I remember Sergei holding my hand, looking out into the water. Sergei was a living, breathing human being with all the good and bad traits humans have. Now everything is gone but his stare and his smile and the way his head was turned.

I shake the thought away. I can’t think like this. I have to look ahead and concentrate. The river is up and swift again. Some rapids. I remember this as the last bit of excitement yesterday before we made camp. A couple of bumps and a steep drop in my stomach, but it was okay, not nearly as bad as anything the day before.

I’m not looking at the trees, marveling at flowers or studying the sky and the clouds overhead. I’m not whispering into my recorder. I am no longer an aspiring journalist. I’m a fugitive, and the only story I want to write is one that heavily features rescue.

I’m shivering. It’s brings to mind an old feeling . . . one I had during that ride to the emergency room after my father was hit by the girl. My mother was driving. She turned on the radio so there wouldn’t be dead silence in the car. My father had used the car last, and it was tuned to sports radio. Neither one of us would turn off my father’s station. She had not adjusted his seat, and she was leaning forward to reach the wheel. I think she was afraid if she brought it forward, she wouldn’t ever be able to push it back again.

There were scuffs on the dashboard I’d never noticed before and I studied them, their size and shape, because they were the most ordinary things I could think of. Every nerve in my body was tense. I could barely breathe. Every time a traffic light turned yellow and we slowed down a cramp would run through my body.

“Adrienne.” The way Dan says my name sounds like he’s been trying for a while.

I turn around. “Yes?”

“I asked you how you are doing.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the motor.” I don’t like the sound of my own voice in the quiet air. I feel like I might draw attention. Here we are, cannibals. Bring your salt shaker.

“I’m doing okay, I guess.”

“Just watch for rocks. River’s getting stronger here.”

“I’m trying,” I say. “There’s one up ahead. Do you think—”

A sudden loud bang and a shudder, and the boat flips over. The shock of the cold water hits me as I go under.

The water is swift and dark as night. I’m blind and helpless.

Dan. Where is Dan?

Panic and confusion. There is a sky somewhere, but I’m not sure if it’s above or below. This suddenly new and violent world, full of sharp things and hard currents. Something scrapes my face, and when I jerk away, I notice a dim glow overhead, the surface calling. My body and brain struggle toward oxygen and sunlight, my arms and legs flailing wildly, the river so strong, holding me under, slamming me into rocks and skidding me along. I know a place where I can breathe, gulp the morning light, but it’s just out of my reach. My fingers dig up toward it, I beg silently for it to come to me, but the water is too strong, holding me back.

My head hits a rock, hard. The rest of my breath sprays out of me, leaving a hurting place in my chest. The pain of not breathing is like someone’s foot kicking into my sternum.

Daddy.

He’d tell me to keep trying, but it hurts so much. That light above me is so real and so close I give it one last shot, lunging for the surface, but my hand claws nothing but black water. I claw and claw again but I’m weak now, slow. I’m nothing but leaves and tiny sticks, a package of nothing smothered by the same river that carries me along. . . .

Something strange is happening. The dull roar of the river is fading. I hit rocks but don’t feel them. And the water is warm. There is not just light above me but around me, orange and yellow. It’s like the sun fell into the river and melted and I don’t have to reach for it anymore. It feels golden and light. It’s summer down here. Summer inside me.

My body lets go. My lungs give up. They don’t work anymore. I don’t have to try to live, and I’m filled with a great peace. This is what my father felt when his heart line went flat and they turned off his—

A hand grabs my arm and pulls me out of the water and into an expanse of strange swift blankness, like sleep but less gentle, without color or sound. I wake up on the gray bank, soaking wet, my clothes heavy and cold, my body aching as though I’ve been beaten. At first I’m totally motionless and then I’m seizing and bucking as I cough up river water and take a goldfish bowl–sized inhalation of pure Siberian air, then another, then another, until the seesaw of life and death slowly levels.