Lava Falls

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “Look!” Laurie cried.

  The sight of Howard and Brynn’s blue raft, poised at the top of the falls, aborted the chorus of laughter. The women hadn’t seen the couple in several days and they seemed unreal, as if appearing out of nowhere. The boat hovered at the top of the rapid for an unnaturally long period of time, as if that were even possible, trapped in a bubble of anticipation.

  The blue boat seemed to almost levitate briefly before dropping into Lava. Unlike the previous boatload of women, Howard and Brynn were utterly silent as the water wrapped the boat, sunk it, disappearing the two humans, leaving just the violence of water slamming over rocks, churning so much air the upheaval was as white as clouds.

  They were in the hole.

  The boat popped to the surface, upside down, surging in the spot just below the tongue where the river magnificently flipped back on itself. Then the boat twisted, caromed all the way out of the water, and landed right side up again, spun in circles. The passengers were gone.

  The women sat bobbing in their peaceful eddy, studying the stretch of whitewater and calm green below, searching, searching, searching.

  Her head appeared first, bright strawberry blond hair plastered over her face, her mouth a red gasping O, her hands wheeling the air rather than the water. She washed headfirst downstream, maybe in shock, completely forgetting to turn onto her back and travel feet first.

  “I got her!” Josie boomed in a deep commanding voice, thrusting the oars in the water and committing her entire body to rowing, the focus on her face compelling and beautiful, heading straight for the swimmer.

  Marylou, Kara, and Paige stayed behind, looking for Howard. He hadn’t surfaced and Kara feared that he was trapped underwater in the cement mixer turbulence of the hole.

  There! He emerged swimming ferociously, his glasses gone, but his eyes scanning like an eagle’s. “Brynn!” he choked out, not once, but two and then three times, sucking down more water in his desperate attempt to reach her with his voice.

  When Josie got to Brynn, she tossed the oar handles at Laurie and leaned over the fat lip of the raft. Brynn flailed in the water, gulping too much, slapping the slippery rubber of the boat as if she could gain purchase on her own. Once she realized Josie was trying to help, she grasped wildly for her instead of the boat. Brynn thrashed desperately, heaving and gurgling, out of control and unmanageable. Josie had no choice: she slapped her to quiet the wildness. She’d never forget the look on Brynn’s face. Not just shock. An outrage. As if an entire conspiracy had prompted the slap, rather than just one woman trying to save her life. It worked, in any case, and Josie fisted the two shoulder straps of Brynn’s life jacket and hauled the young woman onto the boat, her belly slithering over the gear like a dead body.

  Marylou, in the other boat, rowed hard and reached Howard a moment later. Once they let him know they had Brynn, he calmly let himself be rescued, although hefting him into the boat was considerably more difficult. It took all three women pulling, two on his life jacket and one on the waistband of his shorts. He shouted guttural exclamations of pain as they heaved him, inch by inch, on board.

  Both boats made their way to the nearest beach. Laurie helped Brynn out of her wet clothes and into a sleeping bag, murmuring reassurances, while the other women hastily made camp. Howard didn’t even change out of his wet shorts and T-shirt before hiking downstream to fetch his boat, which luckily spun out in an eddy not too far away, the oars still attached. There was no telling how long it would stay stuck there and so none of the women stopped him, though surely he was hypothermic.

  Laurie handed Brynn a bag of Oreos, but Brynn wouldn’t eat. She was furious, muttering oaths under her breath and trembling with rage, even as the hot sun and sleeping bag restored her body temperature to normal. Laurie let the young woman seethe. She was more interested in watching Howard’s progress as he climbed over massive boulders and even had to wade, waist deep, through one stretch of the calm river. She was relieved when she saw him grab the bowline and drag the boat to a nearby beach, where he tied it up. They could ferry the couple to the boat in the morning. Meanwhile, Marylou and Josie fired up camp stoves to cook everyone a hot meal.

  Howard returned, hauling two dry bags containing spare clothes and the couple’s sleep kit. He approached Brynn, who still sat on the beach huddled in a sleeping bag, but she said “don’t” with such ferocity he veered, continuing into the stand of mesquite at the back of the beach. After setting up their tent, he returned with dry shorts and a T-shirt, both obviously belonging to him, not her. She dismissed him and the clothes with a forceful hand wave. She’d already changed into dry clothes supplied by Kara.

  He performed a couple of supplicant head bows, apparently at a loss for words, and then stepped back and looked around, as if for an escape route. The man dance infuriated Brynn.

  She leapt to her feet. “You fucking said you knew how to do this! You fucking lied to me, you asshole!”

  Howard froze with masculine panic.

  Brynn’s rage, fueled by a survival-level terror, broke free. She appeared to have lost all control of herself when, speaking in a hot hush, she finished with, “I know who you are, Howard. I know what you do.”

  Paige grinned, delighted and all too ready to vicariously enjoy a big whopping drama.

  Marylou closed her eyes, wishing she could make the couple go away.

  Kara searched the cliffs above camp, hoping to see a mountain lion, although she knew the odds were one in a million. It couldn’t hurt to keep looking. There’d been so much magic already on this trip.

  Like Paige, Maeve stood and watched, although with a sad amusement, as if the behavior of humans never ceased to disappoint her. Still, people were always interesting.

  Josie busied herself with cooking and didn’t even watch the developing theatrics.

  Marylou asked Paige to help her set up the camp chairs.

  When Brynn picked up a stone and made as if she were going to throw it at the still statuesque Howard, Laurie stepped forward, sighed loudly, and said, “Put the rock down, Brynn. Howard, why don’t you have a seat.”

  Howard sat.

  A moment earlier, she’d intended to gather up all the women and suggest a short walk, leaving the couple to sort out their conflict, but there was really no easy place to walk. Anyway, Marylou and Paige were setting up the camp chairs in a circle that included Brynn and Howard, and Josie announced that a makeshift dinner was ready. Clearly everyone else intended to let the events of the evening swamp over the couple’s problems, which after all weren’t the women’s problems. Fine. They were right. Everyone filled a plate and they ate in silence.

  Until Laurie couldn’t stand it any longer. “So you’re a geology student?” she asked.

  Everyone stared at her like she was an idiot. Well, you had to start somewhere, and sometimes the best place to start was with the obvious, with a question that could generate an easy yes.

  “He’s a fucking geology professor,” Brynn said.

  “I meant you.”

  “Me? Hell no.”

  Laurie was confused, which she didn’t like to be when it came to relationships.

  “They’re married,” Paige said with an inappropriate grin.

  Laurie felt punched in the stomach. Which she knew was a ridiculous response. She didn’t know this man, didn’t have even a tiny right to his attention. He looked directly at her now, as if reading her thoughts, and for some crazy reason she nodded at him, an absurd affirmation of nothing. He nodded back.

  Brynn dropped her empty plate in the sand beside her camp chair and said to Howard, “I’m sleeping out.” She marched back across the sand to their tent and yanked out a sleeping bag, which, Laurie noticed, hadn’t been zipped together with the other sleeping bag, and then shimmied the plastic ground cloth out from under the tent. She dragged the tarp and sleeping bag far away and laid them out in the sand.

  The rest of the women busied themselves doing dishes, stowing food, and
setting up their own tents. Laurie stayed right where she was, in the chair next to Howard, weathering a huge wave of grief about her mother’s recent death.

  “So you two are married,” she said.

  He rubbed his eyes, blinked hard, as if he could will his vision into focus without his glasses.

  “For how long?” she asked, again fully aware that it was neither any of her business nor a particularly appropriate question. But clearly the couple didn’t know each other well, and she wanted to understand what was going on, she just did.

  “We met six months ago.”

  “And you fell in love.”

  He glanced at her, his eyes soft with misery and nearsightedness. “Sort of.”

  “How do you ‘sort of’ fall in love? In my experience, falling in love is a full body, heart, and mind experience.”

  He rubbed his hands back and forth on his quads. Despite the shock in learning he was married, despite how very sad she felt this evening, Laurie apparently couldn’t stop herself from admiring the man’s good features, and his muscled legs were one of those.

  “We both hung out at the same café,” he said, further surprising Laurie by being forthcoming. “I was working on an article. She was, just, I don’t know, drinking coffee. We were both regulars. So we eventually started talking. She asked what I was working on. It doesn’t take much to get me going.”

  “Apparently.”

  He grimaced. She thought it was maybe an appreciative grimace.

  He said, “I mean about geology. She was really interested in the geology, is really interested, and okay, that’s a hook with me. It just is.”

  “But marriage?”

  His swimmy blue eyes settled on her face. “It was her idea.”

  “You foolish old man.” She spoke softly, saying what she could never say from the chair in her office.

  He almost smiled.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He kept his voice low and glanced around camp, wanting the confessional but not wanting to be overheard. “I’ve been married three times. Each time it’s meant something different. That body and soul thing? That was the first time. You recover from that—actually, you don’t, but let’s say you do.”

  Laurie kept herself from interrupting, as she would if she were working, to ask him to stop using the second person, to simply say “I” rather than trying to generalize by saying “you.” She did use eye contact and gentle head nods to keep him talking.

  “That second time you have this overwhelming feeling of relief, like you’ve been saved, like you’ve fixed whatever it was you did to fail so badly the first time.”

  The phrase “whatever you did” was a huge, hard-blowing red flag. His vagueness, the not taking responsibility by naming it, perhaps the actual ignorance of what “it” was. But again, she was in her own life, not in her chair. She nodded, as if she understood, and the truth was, she did. His guilelessness in telling her this story made him all the more appealing.

  “But of course you haven’t fixed it,” he said. “You just flung yourself desperately.”

  Ah, so he knew this. She resisted the urge to touch his knee in agreement. Nothing wrong with indulging her crush, silently, secretly, but hands to herself.

  Still speaking quietly, he said, “So when Brynn said let’s get married, it was like jumping out of a plane with a parachute. A lark. A trip of sorts, a place to go for a while. You asked why. Why not?”

  Laurie loved the image of sky diving and felt herself drifting high above Earth with a parachute ballooned over her head. Holding her. Easing the fall. Allowing a magnificent view on the way down. Knowing the whole while, of course, that your feet would return to the mundane earth.

  She reached out and, with just two fingertips, touched his knee.

  “Brynn is thirty-four and has never been married. I suspect she was worried about that. In any case, it was her idea.” Yeah, Laurie thought, you’ve said that, a couple of times already, almost proudly. “She hinted about wanting to do a Grand Canyon trip, and so I put one together. Then she just—” The memory of that moment moved him. He paused, almost unable to go on, and his voice turned husky when he finished with, “She just said, ‘I want to marry you.’”

  His need for full divulgence was interesting. Laurie suspected he knew he’d acted rashly, made a big mistake, in spite of how much Brynn’s attention pleased him. “And you said, ‘Why not?’”

  “I did.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  He looked over his shoulder to the place where Brynn had taken her tarp and sleeping bag, but she was nowhere in sight. “No. She has this amazing eagerness to learn. She loves life so much. I mean, she just wants to do everything.”

  “She makes you feel young.”

  The blue of his eyes hardened into a shell and he set his mouth. He felt judged. But he allowed, “I suppose she does.”

  And what, Laurie silently asked herself, is wrong with that? She forced herself to admit that he made some good points. What if people were more nimble about marriage? Rather than approaching it like sinking an anchor. Marriage didn’t have to be on par with death and taxes. It could be a dance. An episode. A stretch of the river!

  “I’ve been married three times, as well,” she told him.

  He smiled an acknowledgment of their shared experience.

  She imagined herself married to Howard. He’d talk too much. His blind spots were obviously vast. But he was gainfully employed. He had a passionate interest in geology, which meant he’d have his own thoughts, his own activities, his own life, and wouldn’t expect her to supply those fundamentals. He was fit and adventuresome. If he could come to her bed with the ardor he applied to rocks, well, that might carry her around a few bends in the river. She pictured the two of them in the cab of a small camper, the wind blowing through the open windows, driving from one natural wonder to another, camping and hiking.

  They could be each other’s number four.

  She laughed out loud at her preposterousness, and startled Howard.

  Thinking she’d been laughing at him, his voice rose to a near bellow. “I am foolish. I’ll grant you that. But I’m not as foolish as you think. The Grand Canyon blasts your heart open. Have you seen anything so big or bright or deep or storied? The place slices right through time, erasing that elusive dimension altogether. I’ve been down the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, many times. You wouldn’t know it from how I ran Lava today. But that’s exactly why I have a love affair with this place: it’s different every single time. The river, never the humans, has the upper hand, calls the shots. In this context, what’s marriage? I guess, given how she and I talked about the river and the canyon so much, I sort of thought Brynn was asking to marry the river, not me.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “It is,” he said, calming down again. “It’s absurd. But I like to think of it that way anyway. Is it any more absurd than anyone else’s notion of love?”

  Probably, Laurie thought, but maybe not.

  “I wanted her to fall in love with the canyon. I wanted to watch her do that. I would like, one day, to meet someone who looks here—” He threw out his arms, one toward the north cliff and one toward the south cliff, as if he could touch them with his fingertips. “—for their answers. Not here.” He touched his chest, humbled now, grinning like he owned his own foolishness.

  Laurie thought she might kiss him. That would make her a foolish old woman. He was right. This place scoured out the plaque built up around your heart, leaving it pink and tender, thumping away over life itself. God, she missed her mother. The grief, mixed with the Grand Canyon effect, catapulted her toward recklessness. It was daft, this feeling, this desire, at her age, to kiss a married man. To kiss a married man, it must be noted, who had married a woman half his age. To kiss a big old fool.

  Howard stood. He was done talking. He looked, quite suddenly, as though he wanted nothing more than to walk away. But he forced himself to look squarely at her, a
s if that would be acknowledgment enough, a kind of thanks for her having listened to him. Laurie saw him see her desire. She saw him recoil. He didn’t even say goodnight, just turned and walked in the orange heat of late afternoon back to his tent.

  Laurie sat in the camp chair watching the last of the sunlight tinge the rimrock, far above the river, and she stayed there too as the lavender twilight softened the sharp edges of everything.

  Kara and Josie walked away from camp into the starry night. The beach was backed by cliffs, and no nearby stream had carved a pathway through the rock, but they found a climbable seam. It wasn’t so smart to climb without ropes. If they fell they’d probably hit the sand at the bottom, but they’d get seriously knocked up on the way down. Kara wasn’t going to be the one to suggest caution. She climbed, shoving her fingers and toes into the seam, grabbing knobs of rock where she could find them, and they reached their goal, a rough, relatively level ledge. Both tried to control their breathing, pretend that the climb hadn’t challenged their lungs, and then they laughed, let go, and just panted. The risk heightened all their senses.

  The moon wouldn’t rise for another few hours, allowing even more stars to pop against a deep purple sky. Two ravens perched on the smaller ledge above them and vocalized their claim to the territory. Kara cawed back at the birds and Josie laughed.

  “I wish I’d been in your boat for Lava Falls,” Kara said.

  “I wish you had been, too.”

  “Marylou wanted me to ride with her. I guess for moral support.”

  “Must have worked. You all didn’t flip.”

  “I didn’t do anything other than hold on.” Kara paused, wondering if she should say it. “But I did have this secret feeling of invincibility.”

  “Secret?”

  “Secret because I know invincibility is a deception.”

  “That it is.”

  “So it was kind of alarming to feel it. Especially given how our boat buckled and spun.” Josie just smiled. “You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”