But Casey’s already out of the car, calling, “Are you coming or not?” over his shoulder, running towards the river. Will jolts back to himself and, hurrying to catch up, doesn’t bother to close the passenger-side door. Casey didn’t shut his door, either, or cut the ignition, so this leaves the car still on, engine humming, both doors wide. Backlit by the latest flash of lightning, it’s like a still from a horror movie, as though someone has just finished abducting them. Part of Will—a young part, and, in another way, an old part—wants to hurry back and close things up before he can get in trouble for whatever mess is left, but he pushes that down, ignores it. The interiors will get a little wet, probably; it’s not as though it matters. It’s not as though it’s really important.
Will dashes forward, working hard to make good time through the thick, sinking soup the storm’s made of the ground, until he finally catches up with Casey, who, still running and annoyingly much less out of breath than Will, says, “I thought about calling out to him, but if he’s in the water, is there any point?”
“He might not be,” Will points out, even though he thinks his out-of-shape lungs might blow up like a pufferfish and kill him if he tries to scream Todd’s name, just to put themselves out of their misery. “Maybe he pulled himself out. Can’t hurt to try.”
“Christ. Yeah, you’re right,” Casey says, his footfalls hard,his neck telescoping left and right as he runs, seeminglyquite easily, at a speed that for Will is an all-out sprint. They both scream out Todd’s name several times, Will’s lungs sending him a series of increasingly upset memos about it, but then Casey’s voice cracks and he snaps, “I’m too close to this tothinkclearly. I keep cycling back to statistics about—” He whips his head around to give Will a desperate look. “I understand that you don’t like me, and that’s fine, I can’t say I like you so much, either. But if you help me get Todd out safe, I’ll—oh,Idon’t know. Clear out of the damn house, if that’s what you want, or?—”
“Oh my God, do I look evil to you? Did I grow some little goatee overnight I’m not aware of? I don’t need an incentive for keeping teenagers from dying! Why do you think I got in the truck in the first place?” Will snaps, trying to rein in the part of himself that he knows is veering towards absurdity and hysteria because it doesn’t want to face the sobering realities of the present. Giving himself a little internal slap, he says, “Look, I’m happy to help, but where are werunningto? Did Mere give you coordinates? Or just?—”
“She said back half of the property, across from that little picnic area on the other bank of the river.” Casey reaches the edge of the river as he says this, the closest he can get to it without actively wading in, and doesn’t exactly stop running; instead, he switches to jogging in place, whipping his head around to try to see as far as he can in either direction, as though afraid to waste a single moment being still. Will, a few steps behind him, thinks that’s fair, but he does have to pause briefly and gasp for breath as he, too, looks around to orient himself. Casey sounds like he’s starting to really panic, a thread of terror in his voice Will wouldn’t necessarily have expected from him, as he says, “She sent me a screenshot, but it’s just a radius, and I’ve never spent that much time back here, except dealing with the corn, and?—”
“Okay, there’s two places he could be stuck, unless they’ve significantly changed this since I was a kid,” Will says, certain now of where he’s standing. You couldn’t spend a whole summer fruitlessly dragging a section of river for a variety of tractor parts your father had drunkenly chucked in there andforgetit. He shades his eyes and looks upriver, pointing as he talks so Casey can follow him. “See that bend? Past that, there’s a grate, which filters anything big that gets thrown into the river—trees, debris, whatever. That’s so nothing big spits out at theotherplace he could be stuck, which is at the property line.” Will winces, and adds, “Have to hope it’s the first option—the water fence at the property line is basically a net with hooks on it. And on a day like this—I mean, that grate’s only so tall, and a lot gets past it when the waterline’s this high. The backup at that water fence is probably…pretty gnarly, by this?—”
But Casey’s already running again; Will is sick with the urgency of the situation, but he’d be lying if he said his body was designed, or at least conditioned, for much in the way of thrilling danger, cardiovascular exercise, or becoming soaking wet and covered in mud for the second time today. It sends up a variety of objections when Will, too, begins running again, all along the lines of,I am considering going on strike, andThese conditions are not workable and I’ll sue.A kid’s life is at stake, so Will ignores them, but it’s more of a struggle than he’s strictly speaking proud of.
When he was a teenager, he remembers suddenly, as thunder roars overhead and rain seems to blow directly into both of his eyes, Will could run for miles. He’d wanted to join the track and field team, had been practicing. The memory’s there and gone again as quickly as breathing, popping into his mind incongruously the way things sometimes do, when the stakes are high and the chips are down and a little part of you can’t quite bear to get with the hideous program. He’d forgotten all about it, the long hours alone, his feet thwapping hardagainst the pavement and asphalt of Glenriver in order to be anywhere but at home.
His feet don’t thwap now; theysquelch, and it takes all the energy his thigh muscles can muster to scramble after Casey without pitching face-first into the mud. But even the desire to stop running doesn’t ease the way the bottom drops out of Will’s stomach when, as they reach the bend in the river, Casey groans, “Oh,God.”
Will looks up, and grimaces. A little ways up the river, a large eastern cottonwood has toppled over just past the filtering grate, but before the water fence at the property line. It’s obviously been blown down, an awkward skirt of dirt and ripped-up roots ringing the base of it and billowing loosely in the harsh wind, and is still tethered to the earth—barely—by the few larger flat roots that haven’t given way. Otherwise, though, the cottonwood is mostly in the water. It is—or was, anyway—a tall tree, but not aredwood, so it doesn’t fully span across the width of the Glen River, swollen and thrashing and furious. But it’s most of the way across, at the perfect angle for the sway of the river to act as a horrible kind of leverage, and Will can tell even as he runs that the roots holding the tree to earth are losing their grip splinter by splinter. The whole enormous thing is obviously ready and eager to be swept back into the property line net and cause all sorts of problems.
And there, pinned to the center of the trunk by the sheer force of the rushing water, is Todd Gunderson.
All of Will’s bodily complaints abruptly cease, except for a roiling sense of nausea that, counterintuitively, seems to make his feet move faster than they were before. His aching muscles, his overtaxed lungs, the little alarm trying to let him know that he is a bit colder than a person is supposed to get—all of it fades away, so much less urgent than reaching Todd as to be rendered unimportant. Will’s mind, which had been pinging from thought to thought, fills with a fuzzy static heassociates with hospital rooms, and devastating professional meetings, and phone calls where someone tells him his father is dead.
Todd isreally in the river. He’s alive, clearly, because you have to be alive to look that frightened, but it’s a miracle he is, and how long he might be able to remain so is anyone’s guess, and—God, Will would feel sick with dread for anyone, but he’s only a kid, and he’sMere’skid. Before today, the last time he’d spent time with Meredith was when the two of them were barely older than Todd is now, and it makes it worse, somehow. All Will can see, as he pelts forward through the rain next to Casey, is Meredith’s younger face, crumpling in heartbreak.
Will feels one of his legs sink in well past his ankle within the first few steps, but he wrenches it back up, ignoring the mud, trying to think of a plan as he goes. Resources—nothing—maybe some rope in the back of the truck but it’s nothistruck, or his dad’s truck in1994; Will can’t count on it. No time to go get anything else; Will’s no arborist, but the tree can’t have more than a few minutes left before it breaks free of the stump.
“TODD!” Casey bellows as they go. “WE’RE COMING, DUDE! HANG TIGHT!” While Todd’s clearly both awake and scared out of his mind, he doesn’t respond; Will thinks there’s a decent chance he can’t hear anything over the cascade of water, close as he is to the river’s rushing surface.
Someone else hears them, though, or maybe just spots them, because suddenly Will can see, on the other side of the river, a tall figure wearing a lime-green rain jacket jumping up and down waving his arms. It looks like his mouth’s moving, but—God, between the wind and the rain and the river he could be saying anything?—
“Sandy,” Casey says tightly. “Todd’s dad—I know the coat. I don’t think he can—oh my God,phones—” He fumbles in his pocket as they approach the riverbank, and as he struggles with that, and to scroll to the right number on the already rain-slicked screen, Will casts back to his still-percolating plan.
Okay—outdoor crisis—no supplies—that’s the moment any reasonable adult botanist turns to vegetation. So he just has to remember which plants are around, which, God, Will knows this, he grewuphere. Wasn’tAesculus glabrathe first Latin name he ever looked up in the Glenriver library, wanting a softer, less sports-associated name for such a lovely tree than “buckeye”? Didn’t he run a comprehensive three-year sample of every wild aggregate berry bush in the area, keeping detailed field notes on flavor, density, change over time? Hadn’t he spent six months as a teenager testing the tensile strengths of vines of Virginia creeper that he subjected to various?—
“Oh!” Will says, because suddenly, he has it. Casey is talking to Sandy, Will realizes, probably. He’s not processing what’s being said; he doesn’t need to know, not right now. He needs to know where he can find some—ah, yes, there it is. It’s never hard to find the Virginia creeper in this part of the state, not if you know what to look for, and Will spots some working its way around a tree a few yards away. Quickly, he turns on his heel and dashes over to it.
“Where are you going?” Casey calls; Will hardly notices. He’s busy fishing around in his pockets for his pocketknife, before he remembers that this is a pair of borrowed sweats, and he doesn’t even have his wallet. Shrugging, and resigning himself to the possibility that his hands might not thank him for it, he settles for pulling his sleeves over his palms as he reaches and grips the nearest tendril of creeper. He knows it’s one of those plants that has the tendency to bite back, shooting out sharp little raphides of calcium oxalate whenever it’s damaged, but the situation is too urgent to be concerned about sensitive skin.
“Jesus, I think this guy’s lost his mind,” Casey is saying into the phone, behind him. “Will! What are youdoing,man? We’ve got to figure out a way togethim. I’ve got a couple feet of rope in the truck,maybe, but Sandy thinks?—”
“Working on it,” Will grunts, pulling on the vine as hard as he can. It barely budges—too tightly wrapped around the tree—and then a thought occurs to him. “Hey—you got a pocketknife?”
Casey, sounding annoyed now, stomps into Will’s eyeline and snaps, “This is not the time forbotany!”
Grunting slightly in frustration and wasted effort, Will, with his full weight hanging off the stubborn tendril, turns his head without letting go of the vine. “It’s arope, okay? If we can get it off the tree, anyway. It’s strong—should work—pocketknife—” At this, Casey blinks and then pulls one out, flipping it over in the air and opening it in one smooth movement. He doesn’t hand it to Will, just holds it hovering over the plant, then cuts the vine in a single place where Will indicates to him with a sharp little nod.
It’s exactly where Will wanted him to cut, exactly what Will was silently asking him to do, but Will undercounted how quickly the vine would give up. He also forgot that his full weight was still hanging from it. The creeper comes loose at once and Will stumbles back wildly, reeling, one step—two—he’s overbalancing, and is going to land on his back in the mud, and?—
Casey catches him, stepping behind him easily and solidly, like it’s nothing at all.
“Oh,” Will says, stupidly, as he registers the warm brick wall of Casey against him, the iron bar of his arm reaching to keep Will steady. “I… Thanks.”
“No worries,” Casey says, and for a second, his voice is low; then he seems to shake himself all over, stepping away, already winding the vine over his arm as fast as he can as he adds, “You good?”
“Yeah,” Will says, blinking. “I… Yeah.” Hurriedly, he starts pulling more of the vine loose, making it easier for Casey to wind up quickly. “These things can go to fifty or sixty feet, so I thought—tied around one of our waists—then the other one climbs out on the tree—scoops him up and brings him in?”
