“Nothing good without a little danger,” Nick said, grinning, Juniper panting at his heels.
By the time they reached the point, the heat had built to a dizzying height, radiating off the rocks, only the wind sweeping upcanyon offering any relief. Nick sat near the edge, and Silva cautiously settled next to him, hypnotized by the roar of rapids below, surging like a blood-beat. The coiling entryway of this dry-heated underworld—a force so much bigger than everything else, so much more patient.
“My mother used to bring me here when I was young,” Nick said, leaning forward, close enough to the edge that it made Silva’s stomach tighten with nerves. “Told me the story of the Suicide Point lovers cast out by their tribes—a young warrior and a beautiful woman who fell in love but weren’t of the same tribe. They were told they must not be together, that it was against the ways of their people, but they couldn’t stop loving one another, so they were thrown out. They had nowhere to go, no family, no protection, only each other. So they went to the highest point they could find, braided their hair together, held each other close, and jumped, perishing in the rapids below, their bodies like the salmon, nestled forever together in the roll of the current.”
Silva peeked over the edge, feeling the steep plunge in her gut, the current waving and twisting, bucking into spray. She thought of two bodies in a honeysuckle’s trunk, twined around each other in endless embrace. “It wouldn’t take much to fall,” she said, pulling back.
“Sometimes you don’t have a choice,” Nick said.
They sat quietly together, waiting for the rafters to appear, Juniper holed up in a pocket of shade, the day too hot and sunny even for snakes. At least there was that much safety—the mammalian acclimation adaptability—the ability to regulate one’s core temperature to threat.
Suddenly standing and looking upriver intently, Juniper was the first to spot the rafters. Following his gaze, they saw them, too—two bright blue smudges bobbing along the water.
“Here they come,” Nick said, shading his eyes. “And we have the best seats in the house.”
The rafts grew more distinct as they drew near—five in each boat along with the oarsman, paddles and helmets gleaming. They were enjoying the ride, hooting and hollering as the current swept them over white-capped swells channeled toward the rapids below the bluff.
As they got closer, one boat drew ahead of the other in order to maneuver the line they needed to take. The oarsman of the first boat looked up, spotted Nick and Silva watching, and yelled for Silva to jump and they would rescue her. A boatload of grinning faces turned up, spray bucking in front of them, but their attention was short-lived, drawn back to the river as the current wrapped sharp, boiling white-peaked, sweeping them into the first slough of real rapids, the raft like a toy bobber, nearly upending in the steep troughs and then rising precipitously to peak again, the river surging and banking in a roil of water around them.
The passengers woo-hooed, gripping the rope strung along the raft’s sides while the boatman worked the oars, digging in with his whole body, aiming the raft for the left channel.
The raft followed the water, but instead of sweeping wide like they needed to, they rounded the bend heading directly for the mid-river shallows—a submerged gravel bar clogged with the detritus of spring washout, snags and branches as well as a root wad aimed upriver.
The oarsman leaned back, pulling with all his strength, trying to avoid the mass, but the power of the current swept the raft straight into the root wad and pinned it. The raft upended almost immediately, standing vertical in the middle of the river like some rubber appendage, water boiling around it, passengers and boatman pitched like rag dolls into the river, arms wheeling until they disappeared, bright-colored vests and shorts and helmets subsumed by the water until only the raft was left in its surging stand, the steady sweep of water around it.
First one, then the other rafters surfaced on either side of the tree, swept and dipping through the rapids and rocks, barely able to keep their heads above water. The boatman was pitched close in and grabbed a handful of branches, holding himself to the tree in the middle shallows.
Nick started running back down the trail, and Silva followed. The water was still cold and the undercurrents strong enough to hold on to anything that crossed their path. The river wouldn’t offer any forgiveness.
At the bottom of the trail, Nick rushed toward the shore through a maze of boulders that had tumbled down millennia before. The other raft had now entered the channel. They’d come around the bend just as the wreck happened, and that oarsman stood, oaring hard to keep his raft to the left of the root wad. His passengers yelled frantically, and he tried to oar toward the people in the water, but they were swept far out of reach, moving fast. Finally, below the rapid set, he worked hard and made it to two swimmers, hauling them over by their vests. The two they’d missed were swimming toward shore. Those were the ones Nick and Silva aimed for.
Nick got there first and plunged into the water. The second raft beached a hundred yards below, everyone yelling for the swimmers. Nick made it to a rock shelf and grabbed a struggling woman. He pulled her up, helped her stand. She was shaken and weak, thin streams of watery red streaking down her legs where she’d bloodied her shins on rock.
The other swimmer made it to a side eddy that washed him closer to shore. He crawled up the rocks as Nick held the woman’s arm and guided her back through the water. Silva met them and took the woman’s other arm. On shore, they helped her sit next to the man, who was bent over and heaving, both of them coughing.
They were older than Silva expected—gray hair plastered to their heads, faces haggard with exertion. The woman’s skin was as translucent as Eamon’s had been in the end. This wasn’t the typical college raft party—young kids out for an adrenaline rush. These were retirees, in their late sixties at least, maybe older. Silva took off her shirt and wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders, leaving her own exposed to the sun.
At a muffled shout, they all looked to the boatman still in the center shallows, hanging onto the tree that stretched below the upended raft. He was trying to stand, pulling himself along the tree’s submerged branches, struggling against the current that tried to take out his legs. He shouted again, a deep, wounded-animal noise, never taking his eyes off a spot in the water just ahead of him, a wash of yellow pinned in the tree’s roots.
The woman with the bloodied shins held her hands to her face. “It’s Mel, oh my god, it’s Mel,” she cried out, her voice hoarse and quavering.
The oarsman clawed against the water, but the current kept threatening to sweep him back, and he couldn’t get enough purchase to get any farther. In a final effort, he lunged, grabbing for a thick branch, but his hand missed and the water caught him and spun him down twenty feet before he could dig his feet in again and grab something to stop himself.
Nick took off, running up shore until the bank grew too steeply angled into the water to go any farther. Parallel to the stretch of water pushing headlong into the gravel bar, he rushed in up to his thighs. When he took another step, he lost his footing on the submerged rocks and nearly pitched into the current that swept outward a foot past him.
Silva ran up, stopping just below him. She held out her hand, trying to stay composed. “Nick,” she said as carefully as if she were talking him down off a ledge. “Nick. Please, don’t.” Her hand shook, but otherwise she held completely still.
He looked out, gauging again the water in front of him, tensing his muscles against the current. Twenty feet to bridge the gap between him and the trapped woman. The distance like a chasm. Water strong enough to pull a person in two.
“Please. You can’t make it from here,” she pleaded. She wouldn’t lose him, too, the water taking back anything it might have given.
Water surged past Nick’s legs. She remembered the dream she’d had—the gray fish-woman swimming upcurrent, her mouth open in an underwater cry. Silva had thought it a dream of her mother, of what she’d
almost become herself, but now it seemed something more. The weight of certainty settled on her chest, a pressure against her lungs like choking. When Nick turned and waded back, she felt as though her legs might give out.
The second boatman and a few passengers portaged the raft upriver, scrambling as fast as they could. The second boatman hollered to the stranded oarsman to stay put, they were coming, but the oarsman was still trying to make his way up the gravel bar, struggling ahead a few inches at a time. The second boatman had called in the accident on his emergency radio, and the radio hung from his side, crackling with coordinates and urgent voices as the rescue effort took shape a hundred miles away from them.
Nick helped hoist the second raft until they were above the upended raft, the sieve of roots and current still holding it there, the spot of yellow undulating in the current below it.
Silva stood, her arms crossed and shivering, watching as the boatman, Nick, and two other passengers oared hard into the current. Nick grappled in the bottom of the raft and found a vest while they angled around the center channel to the left of the other raft. He braced himself by holding the side rope. Silva was glad for at least that much security.
They drew out of the current into a backwash, and when they steadied there, the boatman threw a rope to the other oarsman still struggling in the shallows, yelled for him to take hold. He caught the rope and tried to walk, bracing his weight against it, but he fell facedown, rolling in the water like a log. Nick and the others worked to pull him in against the drag of the current while the boatman backstroked hard.
When they finally got him in the boat, he said, “She’s right there,” pointing, breathless and choked. Silva could see her—caught in the tree, not a foot under the water. She imagined being held underwater until she sucked in, breathed the river into her lungs. She couldn’t look. She made her way back to the group knotted together, pallid faces watching for their friend.
The upended raft was stable in the back current, close to the tree. The boatman gave directions—throw the rope, tie off, hold steady. She was caught in a logjam of roots and current. They worked together, two of them leaning into the water, reaching both hands until they got holds on the vest, clothing, hair, whatever they could reach. Nick heaved with everything he had, but the woman’s body wouldn’t budge, the suction trapping her there. It took three of them to pull her free. Her helmet was gone, her shoes. She was naked from the waist down. The water had stripped her of everything but her vest.
Silva tried not to look at her pale body slipping over the raft’s edge like some fish they’d caught and hauled aboard. Bile rose in Silva’s throat.
They put the woman in between the thwarts, and the boatman knelt and unbuckled her vest, exposing her wrinkled breasts, flattened on her chest. He tipped her head to the side, her eyes open and staring, her face pale, her fingers tangled with bits of hairlike roots. The oarsman pushed down in a series of chest compressions, then centered her head, pinched her nose, and breathed into her mouth while the current swept them back out, the oarsman continuing his constant rhythm—pump, pump, pump, breathe, pump, pump, pump, breathe. A rhythm Silva knew well, Eamon swallowed under wires, cords, his knobby hands thin-skinned and utterly still.
Nobody said anything as the boatman strained on the oars, heading for shore. Silva concentrated on the approaching rock shelf, their steady progress toward the bank.
When they cleared the main current and oared into the shallows, Nick jumped out and walked the boat, the river lapping at his shins. Silva didn’t want to see the woman, didn’t want any of them to see her, but there was no helping it.
The men carried her out of the boat and laid her flat on a rock, and the boatman continued CPR, tipping her on her side every so often. The rest of them stood helpless, hoping for the woman’s lungs to work against the water, the miracle cough and choke. But there was nothing but the deadening rhythm of the compressions and breaths, of the river rushing past. The woman’s chest made a startling depression with each push, her eyes staring up at nothing, her nakedness a blending of gray. The boatman’s sweat dripped down his face as he worked, pumping and breathing under the glaring sun.
Silva went over, put her hand out. “Stop,” she said, quiet. She took his clasped hands in her own. “Stop,” she said again, holding him still.
He looked at her and shook his head.
“She’s not coming back,” she said, the woman with her fish body, swimming the current.
There was silence. The man lifted his hands from the woman’s chest and stepped backward, almost falling before he sat down heavily.
Silva shaded the woman from the sun. She reached out and stroked the back of her fingers against the woman’s cheek until she reached her eyes; she closed them gently, then smoothed back the woman’s wet hair. Someone brought towels, and she folded one to put it under the woman’s head, then carefully draped the other over the woman’s nakedness, covering her.
They were all quiet. Someone gestured toward the river, and they all watched as the pinned raft wobbled and tilted loose, finally shimmying free of the water and root wad. It flipped and floated belly-up, bobbing high over the rapids, skimming fast with no load. One oar was still locked in, and it angled back like a broken arm, making the raft float sideways, bumping into rocks as it swept downriver. They watched until it was gone, the river clear, no evidence left behind of what had just happened.
The first oarsman was sitting with his head in his hands. Juniper sat next to the woman Nick had helped ashore. She buried her face in the dog’s neck and started crying, sobs that shook her shoulders. Silva felt a deep choking dread, the woman’s sorrow as familiar as her own heartbeat, everything around her always seeming to come undone.
It took another half hour before the helicopter broke the canyon into reverberations. It landed on a bit of shore below them, beach grit blowing out from the wash of its blades.
A young, clean-faced EMT dressed in an orange rescue suit jumped out and ran to the woman. He uncovered her, checked her pulse, listened for breathing, then did a series of deep, violent chest compressions. Between pumps, he asked the boatman what time he’d started CPR, had he fully compressed, had he breathed after fifteen compressions.
Silva turned her head as the pilot brought a spine board and they loaded the woman, stabilizing her head and securing her arms and legs, strapping down her body before lifting her. They said a sheriff boat was on the way up from Kirkwood Ranch, said they would need Nick’s and Silva’s statements before they hauled out the crew and passengers.
When the helicopter rose, Nick came to Silva’s side and pulled her into him, put his face against her hair.
“You did all you could. There was nothing more you could have done,” she said quietly.
He shook his head against her. “There’s always more you could’ve done.”
She knew it too well. Each sorrow coming from a set of circumstances that might have been prevented, another choice in one moment.
When the sheriff’s jet boat arrived, the deputies handed out drinking water and emergency bags full of supplies: Gatorade, crackers, little red plastic cups of Jell-O—things for people in the hospital, recovering from illness. They took statements—the raft hitting, passengers thrown. A matter of seconds. The sheriff thanked Nick and Silva for their help, gave the number where he could be reached if anything else came to mind, and then helped board the passengers, who were wrapped in blankets, shivering despite the afternoon heat. The river was a dark swath, fish—bug fat and greedy—slapping its surface. Nothing to say a life was lost.
Silva had to sit suddenly, her legs no longer able to hold her up against the familiar weight pressing down. Pain she knew like a second skin.
When they finally got back to the ranch, it was dusk, and across the river, a fishing boat idled, drifting in the current. She wondered if anglers downriver had seen the empty raft float by, if they’d snagged bits of cloth on their hooks, cursed the false weight on their lines.
>
Nick unpacked and put up the horses, and they went to bed before it was dark, lying curled into each other, Nick trying to whisper comfort to her, but it was as if the woman’s death had dredged up everything Silva had packed away. She couldn’t shake the feeling of dread, couldn’t pull herself from the feeling that she was the one drowning, one breath at a time. She let Nick hold her, tell her it was going to be okay, that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. She wanted to believe him, but she knew, as much as he wanted to give, some things weren’t there for the offering. Some things were outside of anyone’s control.
CHAPTER FORTY
* * *
Join hands, join hearts, join minds, fingers intertwined, a circle unbroken, a ring of holy women. Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Spinning and spinning, you run, tiger got you by the tail, a churned blur of butter underneath the circling tree. Rise up! Rise up! Their fingers brushing you, wings of light and dust, a garland full of mourning. Be healed! Child of God, be healed of yourself! Their breath like fire, their fingers like gold, your woeful self a sickness, a curse, a dark hole, your tongue seized and swollen, your words like lead inside your head. Be free and rise up! Sing your praises to the Lord! Your new self a blank slate, your purity your veil, your marriage bed your covering, your life not your own. May he find you worthy, may he find you pure, may he find you a vessel he might fill, your breath his breath, your body his body, your soul his soul, your mind his mind. You must die to him in order to rise again. This, your final fall. Circle of women, circle of light, circle of blood, circle of life.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
AUGUST 2001
Mack came early the next morning, brought the paper with him. “Front-page news,” he said.
WOMAN DIES IN HELLS CANYON was written in huge black letters across the top of the paper. The title on the article read, DEADLY RAFTING ACCIDENT CLAIMS ONE, and was accompanied by a grainy picture of Silva and Nick and a few of the rafters clustered together. Underneath the picture, the caption stated, Nick Larkins, local outfitter, and Silva Merigal, caretaker of the Larkins Ranch, on scene, helping with rescue attempts.
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