In the Same Boat

by Holly Green

  He resurfaces.

  “Hold on to the boat,” I say, and he doesn’t argue.

  I slide my feet into the water and lower myself until they reach the rocks and slippery mud. I’m so wobbly. It takes a minute for me to get my balance back, then I inch across to Cully’s seat, shore side of the boat, hoping I don’t step on any broken glass down there. Or a snake. The only thing I want to feel is the end cap. Cully moves toward the nose.

  I drop down under the surface and grope blindly with my hands. It’s all a jumble of roots and rocks and mud. When my lungs burn for oxygen I surface, gulp down a big breath, and go under again. With every failed attempt the sun sinks lower. The sky grows a little darker. The stone in my stomach grows a little heavier.

  We take turns, but finally I’m shivering cold. The voices of another boat travel down the river. Two boats. We’re about to move back two places.

  “It’s gone,” I say. “Let’s just go.”

  Cully studies his fingers on the rim of the boat. “It’s like trying to use someone else’s hands.”

  “I know,” I say.

  I let out a heavy breath as we climb back into the boat. My feet are ghostly white and wrinkled and don’t want to go back in my shoes. I dig out my headlamp.

  A minute later we’re paddling away with one flashlight angled off to the side, because the whole system was made for two lights and Cully can’t manage to get the remaining one centered.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  My mouth fills with a million mean things I could say, each one more biting than the last, and I swallow them all. “It’ll be fine. One light is all we need.”

  Before the crash last year, I never gave much thought to lighting. But after it, I worked so hard to get this lighting system right, researching flashlights and lumens. So many test runs on the water at night to get the angle of each light perfect.

  Now it’s the second night, we’re coming up on the place Dad and I wrecked, and the left side of our boat is going to be a dark void.

  All I can do is repeat my stupid mantra in my head over and over again.

  I’m not afraid of paddling in the dark.

  I’m not afraid of paddling in the dark.

  * * *

  It’s dusk now.

  “Want to go ahead and click the lights—light—on?” Cully asks.

  “Let’s wait a little bit longer,” I say. Just to save on batteries.

  “What’s—ugh—what the …”

  And then I see it. A buzzy cloud and we’re heading right for it.

  Cully swats at his face.

  “Mayflies.”

  I should have already put my bug net on, but they don’t come out every dusk. It’s a crapshoot every year whether you’re going to run into a hatching or not. We cruise right into it.

  They buzz in my face and tickle my ears and my neck. They’re on my shirt. If I opened my mouth, I’d end up with half a dozen perched on my tongue. I’ve already got my hat back on. I dig one-handed in the space behind me for my bug net and slide it over my head. My hat brim keeps it from sticking to my face. Mayflies bounce around on the inside of the net now. I squish a few of them between my fingers and shoo the rest out before I tuck the ends of it into the neck of my shirt. The bag comes with a drawstring, but I’m never comfortable having something tied around my neck on the river. If I fall out of the boat, it could snag on something.

  “Do you have a mosquito net?” I ask.

  “Nobody ever mentioned a mosquito net.”

  Which sucks for him. But if he’d asked around enough, someone would have told him.

  “Not everyone uses one,” I say. “My dad doesn’t.”

  I think Dad likes that part of the Odyssey. I think he kind of likes anything that makes it harder. When I was a kid and he would race, bank crews weren’t allowed to give anything but water and ice socks. They couldn’t even put electrolytes in the water. Racers had to do that themselves. Racers had to take all their food the whole way down the river. Run out and you were stuck making some tough choices. It rubbed Dad wrong when they started allowing bank crews to resupply food. Like they were making it too easy on the paddlers. But I get it. What if you lose your food? What if you were trying to save some weight in the boat and packed too little? Drinking water and not replacing electrolytes can lead to hyponatremia, water poisoning. And there are plenty of people who do this race who wouldn’t even think of backing down if they lost their food.

  Cully puts his paddle down and sprays himself, and a second later I’m gliding through a cloud of woodsy-smelling bug spray. I hold my breath but still get that bitter bug spray taste in my mouth. He reaches for something else, and a moment later he wraps a bandana around his face and ties it behind his head.

  He picks up his paddle again, but then flaps his arm like a chicken wing.

  “They’re in my armpit.” The bandana muffles his words.

  “They’ll chill out in about half an hour,” I tell him.

  “Where were they last night?” he asks.

  “Rain probably kept ’em away. But sometimes they don’t come out at all. Sometimes they come in the morning.”

  We keep moving, trying to outrun the mayflies, and the sky grows darker and darker until Cully says, “Let’s turn the light on, okay?”

  I steer us to the right and we pull over. The button on the light is so far up, Cully has to balance on the bow to reach it.

  Light explodes onto the right bank ahead. The left stays dim with the dusk. Not completely, because I set up the lighting with some overlap. But not enough.

  Okay. This is it. For the second night, this is it. While we hallucinate. While we pass the place I wrecked with Dad. While all we want to do is stop and sleep. This is it.

  9:47 P.M. SUNDAY

  The sky goes from dusky to dark. The mayflies move on, and I take off my bug net and hat. Cully takes off his bandana. The sky is fully dark when we see the headlights zooming by on the bridge up ahead, and I know we’re coming up on the Nursery stop.

  I remember Nursery that year. It was the first time I realized something was wrong between Dad and Johnny. They got there around dusk. Tanner, Cully, and I were killing time playing cards. My grandparents were coming to pick us up later and take us back to their place in Victoria to spend the night so Mom and Leslie could meet our dads at all the overnight water stops.

  They brought a dark cloud with them. Figuratively. Dad was all business at water stops. I was used to that. But before he left, I’d always blow him a kiss. I’d done it as long as I could remember. He never blew kisses back. That’s not Dad. But he’d catch it and tuck it in his pocket. It made me feel like he was thinking about me, even though he was so inaccessible. That when this was all over, everything would go back to normal.

  But this time Dad and Johnny were hard faced. He didn’t even throw a glance at me when I called, “Dad! Dad!” My kiss went uncaught.

  This year we’re pulling into Nursery just after dark. Someone’s put a lantern onshore, lighting up the bank crews and a couple of spectators. And a unicorn.

  “I thought the hallucinations started a bit later,” Cully jokes when we pull up next to the costume lady. Her horn glimmers in the lantern light. I would have loved one of those horns when I was a kid.

  “You feeling any better?” Erica asks.

  “I’m eating again,” I say. “No more puking.”

  She’s still got that wrinkled-face look about her.

  “Here,” she says, handing me a cup of something with a foil lid. Jell-O. I rip the lid off and tilt my head back, shaking the cup until it falls into my mouth.

  “Thanks,” I say, once I’ve managed to swallow it.

  Erica and I change out water and food. I’m not sure why she gives me two bottles, but I take them, and then I’m ready to move. I’d leave right now, if Gonzo and Cully weren’t still talking.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  Erica puts a hand on my arm, like she’s trying to stop me.
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  “Give me a couple of minutes,” Cully says. He doesn’t get in the water, but he stretches up in the front.

  “What do they spend all this time talking about?” I ask, trying to avoid whatever Erica’s building up to.

  “Gonzo asks how Cully’s doing. Cully asks how Gonzo’s doing. Some of Cully’s friends are texting messages for him to Gonzo and Gonzo passes them along. I get the feeling Cully’s pretty starved for conversation up there.”

  “Oh.” This is such a foreign way to do water stops. And also, we’ve been talking. “So, um, how are you two holding up?”

  “I think it’s time for you to pull over and rest. Sleep for the night.”

  “What? No.” I am not one of those people who pull over to sleep on the side of the river. I’m a competitor.

  “Sadie, you look like hell, you puked your guts up at the last water stop, it’s freaking dark outside, and you’re in the boat with a novice. I don’t think it’s safe for you to keep going.”

  My insides crumble. What happened to that night we made the flowers when she said I was invincible?

  “Looking good, Leo!!!” the unicorn shouts.

  Erica looks over her shoulder at the boat coming in.

  We have to go now, before she tries to pull us out of the race.

  I put my paddle in the water and pull. “Let’s go, Cully.”

  “What?”

  He scrambles to get in position as I paddle our boat away from shore.

  9:54 P.M. SUNDAY

  We’re a little way past Nursery and it’s fully dark now. The stars come out, one by one, and I guess that’s the beautiful thing about being out here at night. The moon and the stars. The frogs croaking. The crickets. Those are the things I might appreciate if I were putting in right now, planning to take out again in an hour or two. If I were here for a pleasure cruise.

  Last year when my English teacher found out I was training for the River Odyssey, she told me, “I’d love to do the nights. To be alone in a boat with the moon and the stars. It sounds like heaven. Like meeting God.”

  She conjured up this romantic picture, and even though I’ve heard my parents and their friends talk about the race my whole life, she kind of sold me on that image. I went into it last year thinking about that.

  Now I know what we have ahead of us. Pain and fear, confusion. The ghost of last year’s race. My best friend losing faith in me.

  She’s probably right.

  It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far.

  Last year Mom pulled us out of the race at Victoria, our next checkpoint. There’s this sick feeling in my stomach that I won’t make it any farther this year, either.

  Over on the right, a little gnome stands on the water ahead, waving at me, and it’s not until we come up even with him that I realize he’s just a tree root, a cypress knee, sticking out of the water, and I pull the name out from somewhere in the back of my brain. Stump people. Dad says they’re always the first thing you see when you start hallucinating.

  Light creeps into the space on the left. Real light. Leo, the guy the costume lady is cheering for, pulls up even with us for a while and hangs out on the left so we can see better. It’s his girlfriend dressed up at all the stops. She wants to keep his spirits up because it’s his first time soloing. His brother is his bank crew. It’s nice, cruising along next to Leo, because it’s not so dark. Because I don’t have to think about what’s coming. Because he’s company. But when he stops paddling for a snack, we keep moving.

  Time passes slowly. A light bobs ahead of us sometimes on the straight sections of river, and I don’t know if it’s another boat or my imagination.

  Last year I did my best to ignore my hallucinations. But now we’re rounding a bend, and I swear to god there is a giant cat sitting at a table having a tea party with a little girl. They stare at me as we pass by and I stare right back.

  “You hallucinating yet?” I ask Cully.

  “It’s normal down here for the trees to be full of panda bears, right?”

  I pop my paddle across the water and splash him as we round a bend to the right. Teasing Cully is better than thinking about how freaking scared I am.

  “Hey, I’m going to get cold th … Wait, I don’t know where the river went,” Cully says. I wince. “Left,” he says. “I think. Maybe.”

  I know that sinking feeling at night where the river just seems to disappear. I squint ahead of Cully, into the night. Into the river lit by the flashlight, but all I see is a wall of trees ahead.

  We paddle a few more strokes before Cully says, “Okay, left. Definitely left.”

  I line us up for a left turn. It’s my job to get us in the right vicinity and his job to draw us into a good spot so that we’re in the current but can jump into the eddy if we get into trouble. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that part, because I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself.

  My stomach’s still not quite right, but nothing’s right. My shoulder, the blisters on my hands, my lower back, my butt. My ant bites itch. It takes so much work just to hold my head up. And I know it’s just a hallucination, but the wet splotch on the back of Cully’s shirt has turned into my dad’s face with that horror movie look it had right before I left for the race.

  Nobody thinks I can do this.

  Not even me.

  “Sweeper,” Cully says.

  We’re headed straight for a giant fallen log stretching halfway across the river, its trunk a foot above the surface and branches digging into the water every few feet.

  “Draw left. Draw left!” I press the rudder pedal to steer left. We need to get in the slow water.

  If we had both lights, if we could have seen what was on the left, we would have seen it in time.

  Cully fumbles his paddle as he switches sides, but then he draws left. We both draw over and over, but the current grabs the stern. We’re moving sideways with the current. My heart hammers. It’s pushing us straight for the tree.

  “Jump!” I yell. “Upstream!” If we’re in the boat when it hits the log, our weight coupled with the force of the current will wreck it. Wreck us. “Don’t go under!”

  I bail upstream, away from the sweeper. The water is deep and swift. My head goes under. It’s last year all over again. I brace for the impact. For the rock. It doesn’t come. Get your head above water. I pull and kick until I break the surface and the cool air gets my face. Don’t get caught in the current. It’s too dark to see. I click on my headlamp. There’s the shore.

  “Cully!” I yell. “Cully, get to shore.”

  I swim freestyle, head out of the water, and kick and pull as hard as I can. The current tugs on me, but I’m moving. I swim my way out of its grasp.

  The current slows, and my feet touch the riverbed. I stand. My chest heaves. Not enough air.

  Where is he?

  “Cully!”

  Nothing.

  I scan the river, but it’s dark. I can’t see him. Can’t hear him.

  “Where are you?”

  A sick feeling seizes my stomach. He could be underwater. He could be caught in a branch.

  “Cully!”

  His headlamp clicks on and glows dim in the shallows downstream. “I’m here,” he says.

  The light sweeps the riverbank and falls on me. It grows blurry. Hot tears on my cheeks.“You okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, you?”

  He’s moving toward me. I want to crash through the water and pull him into a hug.

  I take deeper breaths. Everything slows down. My heart. My mind. The tears.

  Back to the race.

  The headlight on the boat is still, lighting up part of the log. My headlamp lights the rest. It’s not just a log, it’s a tree. It has eyes and teeth and a million spindly arms and it’s holding my canoe sideways in its mouth. Any moment it’s going to chew my boat to bits.

  I don’t know how to get the boat back.

  God, I wish my dad were here. Wish I weren’t the one in charge. The one who’s supp
osed to figure this thing out. The responsibility is like a sandbag around my shoulders, pushing me into the ground.

  Cully reaches out, fingers spread and arm shaking as if he’s trying to lift the boat using the Force, then drops it, feigning exhaustion. He laughs a little to himself, like we weren’t just in mortal peril. Like this is something to joke around about.

  “This is serious.”

  “Just trying to lighten the mood,” he says.

  “Well, I’m sick of being the only one who cares.”

  “I care.”

  “Then act like it,” I snap.

  “Oh, exalted leader,” he says in a solemn voice. “How shall we retrieve the boat?”

  Asshole.

  I’m not about to get back in that current, so I make my way onto the gravel bank where the trunk meets the ground. Cully splashes behind me. I climb onto the trunk. It’s fat enough to walk across, but my legs are Jell-O. I crawl on my knees. The bark presses into my raw hands and scrapes at my tights. God, this hurts. My headlamp shines on the first branch sticking out vertically into the air. A few feet past that, the boat is stuck against a couple of branches that jut into the water. The water sounds faster running through the branches.

  I lie flat on my stomach, wrap an arm around the far side of the trunk, and reach with the other. My fingers slip off the hull. I need to get closer to the middle of the boat, where it’s widest. Where it’ll be easier to get a grip on the gunnel. I scoot forward and reach again. Still too far. I scoot farther, to where another branch shoots into the air. I wrap my legs around the trunk, hook an arm around the branch, and reach. My hand clamps down on the gunnel and I pull, feeding the boat toward shore. It moves. I scoot my hand farther down the gunnel and scoot it again. And again.

  “Got it,” Cully calls.

  I look back. He’s on the tree with a hand on a gunnel, pulling up.

  Cully straddles the log, scooting toward the shore with the boat. I follow behind.

  We examine the canoe with our headlamps.

  “Do we have something to fix that?” Cully asks, running his finger along a crack in the hull. The same crack I patched up last fall. The one Dad and I put in the boat last year. The pain in my side hits me again.