And in that sudden stillness, I’m with Parker.
A memory, one I know well.
We’re lying in a hammock in our backyard, the oak tree shedding rusty yellow leaves onto our hair. We’re wrapped up in a quilt my grandma made from T-shirts I’d loved to pieces when I was a little girl. Parker and I have just had brunch at our favorite neighborhood spot, a place famous for their over-the-top Bloody Marys. The late morning autumn air is chilly, but with Parker and the quilt wrapped around me, the faint buzz from the cocktails, and the creaking of the swaying hammock, I’m warm, sleepy, and safe.
It’s the year before the accident, the year everything felt possible and beautiful. At brunch, we talked more about starting a family. “Just imagine,” Parker says, “By this time next year, there could be three of us in this hammock.” When I turn my head to kiss him, his face is washed in dappled, golden light.
“What if it’s a girl, and she hasmyteeth andyourchin,” I murmur. “Oh, and your dad’s hairline.” I laugh, remembering the headgear and dental implants it took to fix my smile back in high school. Then I fit my thumb into the dimple of Parker’s endearing cleft chin.
I wait for him to laugh along with me. Instead, he sighs and lays his cheek against mine. “She’ll be so beautiful. Just the most beautiful little girl.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and lay my head on his chest, his heartbeat beneath my palm while I nuzzle against him,taking in the smell of leaves and the last of the tomatoes unpicked in our little garden behind the oak tree.
We sway for another minute before going back inside. But I don’t want to go inside. I want to stay in the hammock forever, watching the light on his face.
The memory blurs, then veers somewhere it never went that day.
“I’ve missed you so much,” I tell him, stroking the soft skin of his cheek where it meets the stubble. “This past year without you …” I try to continue, but emotion stings the back of my throat.
He holds my gaze and nods, taking my face in his hands like he does after we fight, when it’s finally time to apologize and find each other again. “Oh, baby,” he says solemnly. “You’ve been holding your breath for so long.”
“But I’m drowning,” I tell him, my voice breaking.
He trails his fingers across my cheek, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “No, baby.No.You’re still alive,” he says. “It’s okay to breathe again. It’s okay to want to.”
I cling to those words, even as they give way to reality.
I feel hands on the back of my life jacket, fingers digging into the straps and yanking me from the river.
I close my eyes and wrap myself around Parker’s words as I cough up the water in my lungs, clawing for oxygen again and again, unwilling to waste any of that air on a scream.
Then I hear a sound that makes my eyes fly wide open.
“In the literature of river rescue, there are stories that defy explanation. Bodies recovered miles downstream from where logic says they should be. Survivors pulled from waters that should have killed them. The river keeps its mysteries.”
—The River Guide’s Almanac
30
Through the water in my ears, I hear a voice. No,voices.
Women’s voices.
Deborah’s low, scratchy bass, and Allie’s fast, birdlike cadence.
“She’s alive!”
“Hurry, get her in the boat!”
“Oh my god!”
“Make some room, get this crap out of the raft!”
I blink as the sky whirls, blinding blue and white above me, while fumbling hands pull me over the side of the raft by the lapels of my life jacket.
I can’t quite believe what’s happening.
It’s not Leo. It’s my friends. They’re here with me, somehow. And I realize, in a daze, that they aren’t sitting in the wrecked orange passenger raft. They’re in a neon green gear raft.
