Some of the women trail off into the darkness, but most of us linger in our seats a few minutes longer, processing. I feel a little sick to my stomach. It’s not fear, exactly—Kellen Stroop is dead. If Allie and Nikki don’t doubt that, neither do I. But any curiosity I had is more than satisfied.
The fire is little more than a bed of smoldering coals by this point. As I watch a trail of smoke swirl toward the inky sky, I get the same feeling I do when I’m watching a movie, and I just know something awful is about to happen.
I push the feeling away forcefully.
There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” I say finally, tilting my head up one more time to see the heavy half-moon and the stars sprayed across the sky. They wink back at me like pinpricks through a cloth, hiding the heaven I wish I still believed in.
7
It’s harder to fall asleep than I expected.
Not because I’m afraid, though. Ever since Parker’s death, my grief has been strong enough to filter other emotions out—even fear. So despite the gruesome details crawling around in my mind, my thoughts inevitably turn back to him. It’s Parker who keeps me tossing and turning.
The remote river brings his memory rushing in, flooding the voids I usually fill with work, or scrolling on TikTok. My heart aches more than ever for his presence beside me, but I feel closer to him here, too.
Trying to ignore the uneven lumps of sand beneath my thin sleeping pad, I study the wash of stars visible through the tent’s open rainfly. Through bleary eyes, I trace the line of Orion’s Belt and whisper, “Prove me wrong, Parker.”
I haven’t said those words for a while, and it’s a little embarrassing to say them now, even though no one can hear me. It’s the whole “atheists praying in foxholes” situation, and I know it. But what’s the harm? I said it every night for the first few months after he died, desperate for a sign that he was still out there in the universe somehow, desperate to see him again even if it was only in my dreams.
It never worked. Not even once. And after a while, I gave up.
There was one stage of my grieving process that involved diving headfirst down a rabbit hole of the unexplained: near-death experiences, communication from the other side, any kind of evidence that human consciousness somehow survived beyond the grave.
I watched documentaries about car accident victims who were clinically dead for five minutes and saw passages of light, their grandmother’s outstretched hand leading them into paradise. I listened to TED Talks about Third Man Syndrome, a phenomenon where people in traumatic situations were inexplicably led to safety by a loved one, who appeared just when they were about to give up. And I read obscure but peer-reviewed articles by scientists arguing that consciousness itself was evidence of a soul.
Then I watched the documentaries debunking all the so-called near-death experiences, explaining them away. Those scientists insisted that it was the simple firing of neurons and dopamine, just a comforting projection in a time of need. A hallucination. An evolutionary safety mechanism. They claimed that the striking similarities among most near-death experiences wasn’t proof of life after death, but proof of a shared human hope across cultural traditions—the hope that no one is truly gone forever.
I came away resigned to the idea that consciousness was just complex, creative neural activity. And our desire for meaning—our hope, even—was just a manifestation of our fear of death, an awareness of our own mortality. Even the mysterious Third Man Syndrome was just the brain’s attempt to break through panic and terror, creating a hologram of a loved one to rally us for survival.
Still, my pain was so deep that even after my research deep dive, I still thought to myself,Let those neurons fire.
It’s what I’m still thinking now, as sleep finally coaxes me into unconsciousness.
And maybe it’s these thoughts, combined with the rushing of the wild river, that finally gives me my dream.
As it begins, I’m sitting at the front of a raft, tipping into the first spit of whitewater at the Devil’s Stairs. But the canyon isn’t right. It’s changed, warped into something I don’t recognize. Where earlier I’d seen neat stair steps from the portage trail, there’s now a wide, hungry river dropping straight onto a mess of boulders. The water snarls around the black rocks at the bottom, frothing and churning, waves smashing in from every direction.
I know in an instant, before we even hit the drop, that we aren’t going to make it out alive. The rapid is way too steep, the waves too wild, too big. We should have portaged the raft while we still had the chance.
We’re going to die.
“Help!” I scream, knowing that no one can save me. There’s no way to turn back now.
I whip my head right, then left, searching for my fellow rafters—wondering how they can stay so calm while the raft bucks. But there’s no one. Just flimsy plastic paddles jammed into the raft, life jackets drooping limply off the T-grips like lowered flags. I’m alone.
Then I hear his voice.
“Kaia! Focus. You’ve got this. Give me five left, now!” he booms from behind me.
I spin around in disbelief.
Heaving the oars at the back of the raft is my Parker.
He flashes me a reassuring smile, his wide grin perfect except for the tooth he chipped while riding horses on his grandpa’s farm. He’s healthy. He’s strong. Nothing like the ruined, unrecognizable form they’d pulled from the cave after the failed twenty-four-hour rescue mission.
My relief abruptly sours. Even dreaming, I know he’s dead.
