When finally he does get to the water, riding a cascade of rock and mud — and what’s it been, five minutes, ten? — it’s all he can do to keep from being swept away himself. As it is, he plunges in up to his waist before he can catch hold of the embankment with one hand and the crown of a slick streaming willow with the other and still he can feel the current tugging at him as if it’s alive. There are shouts from above. Tumblings of pebbles, sticks, brush. He looks up, outraged, to see that two of them — Cammy and Josh — are working their way down to him. Don’t they understand? Don’t they realize the danger? “Go back!” he roars, never so furious in his life.
It is then, even as he jerks his legs from the water and lurches upright in the clinging unstable mud that keeps giving way underfoot as if he’s on a treadmill, as if he’s running in place in a waking nightmare, that the magnitude of what’s going down begins to hit him. If she’s hurt — Kelly, and all he can think of is the way she went over the side as if she’d been snatched by the collar, helpless, utterly helpless — there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do. To the Coast Guard. The cops. The newspapers and the membership of FPA and everybody out there who’s going to do the hard calculus that measures the fate of the animals against human suffering, human life, and what are they going to do, interview her in her hospital bed? Autograph her cast?
It’s a mess. A fucking disaster. And he’s moving now, humping low along the waterline, clinging to whatever he can catch hold of, frantic to find her, save her, get her out of this and back to the boat, wrap her in blankets, feed her hot soup, anything, brandy, crank the heater, and the one thing he won’t allow, won’t even think of, is the darker apprehension that Kelly, with her eager face and pear shape and the patch she wears on her sleeve—Animals are not ours to eat, wear or experiment on—is beyond any help he or anyone else can give her.
The rain has slackened to a drizzle, the light fading from the sky, the harsh clawing rush of the river the only thing he’s ever known — bonecold, aching, sick in his soul — by the time they find her. She glows against the dark tumbled backdrop of torn brush and brutalized trees, pale as a mushroom, because what the water has done, the force of it, is strip the clothes from her so that there’s no trace left of her sweatshirt, her shorts or the khaki rain slicker either. He’s the one fighting the current to reach her while the others form a human chain and pay out the rope somebody found in the bottom of a daypack, and he’s the one to touch her, her cold naked flesh, and see the way the rocks have treated her and how her face rides low in the water while a willow branch, caught in the crevice of her underarm, waves back and forth in an imposture of animation.
She’s been carried all the way down to where they started, where the resuscitated river undercuts the rock on one side and sweeps wide to fling its refuse on the other — if only they’d known they could have gotten to her sooner. But they didn’t know and they had to work their way down-canyon foot by foot, scanning the banks and calling her name till the voices died in their throats. Is there irony in that? He doesn’t know. All he knows is the moment and the moment is as bleak and sorrowful as anything he’s ever had to live through on this earth. When he takes hold of her, thinking of how Cammy kept saying she knew CPR — she’d been in junior lifeguards when she was in high school and trained on dummies, that’s what she kept repeating, her eyes tearing, her breath coming fast — he has to brace himself against the bottom, the heavy freight of the water at his back, pushing him, jerking his legs out from under him, though it can’t be more than five feet deep here, and that’s another irony. He wraps an arm round her shoulder but can’t really get much purchase — she’s stuck fast, tangled in the branches, that’s what it is — and his impulse is to be gentle with her, but gentle does nothing, and so he tugs, actually tugs at her as if this is a game, a contest of wills, as if she’s tugging back. From the bank, Suzanne’s voice, thick with phlegm: “Is she okay?”
He is racked with the cold, hypothermic, losing it, but he will not give up, jerking and twisting at the soft obstinacy of her till all at once she breaks free, a disjointed branch of the willow coming with her in a cortege of gently nodding leaves, but he can’t hold her, her face revolving to fix a censorious stare on him as the current tears her away. There’s a cry from shore, frantic activity, but he’s lost his hold on the rope too and what’s left of the tree gives way under his frantic clutch. He’s adrift. Churning his feet, windmilling his arms, fighting it, but the river has him and the river is going to do what it will. Something clutches at his groin beneath the surface and then there’s a hard fist of wood coming up on him to pound the side of his head and then there’s another and another and now the river has him by the neck and his face is being pushed down in the murk and for one annihilating moment he can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t find his way up.
Then suddenly the pushing stops and he feels himself flung atop a vast bristling sieve of debris, the current sucking away beneath him. He snaps open his eyes, thrashes his head back and forth to clear it. Kelly is right there beside him, so close he could reach out and touch her. She’s on her back, her limbs splayed, her face turned to the sky. Her breasts sag away from her rib cage, her pubic hair smudges her crotch. And her skin, her skin is flayed and raw, the meat showing through in a long scything gash that runs from knee to hip. One foot, the one nearest him, has managed to retain its hiking boot. There’s something — a scrap of material, blue, polka dots — cinched round one thigh. Her fingers are clenched. What he wants is to push himself up, up and away from her, to get out of this, to run, but he can’t — it’s as if his muscles are locked, as if he’s had a stroke, as if the sky has fallen in on him and he can’t get out from under its weight. And so he lies there for the longest moment of his life, studying the tight twist of her laces, the sock shredded at the ankle, the waffled grid of the sole of her boot that’s been washed so clean it might have been new from the box.
He does get up finally, of course he does, and when he gets up Josh and Cammy are there, picking their way through the black tangle of branches while the other two, Suzanne and Toni, look on helplessly from the far embankment. There’s the sound of the water, the smell of it. Josh’s face is expressionless, his skin the color of lard. Cammy, the slicker gone, her clothes clinging to her like shrink-wrap, her feet bare as a penitent’s, is crying, crying still, and she left her shoes behind so she could swim, so she and Josh could swim across no matter the risk and be here to help, to pitch in with her CPR and her red-rimmed eyes.
“She’s dead,” Josh says, his voice as cold as he can make it because he’s on the cusp of breaking down himself, “isn’t she?”
“What the fuck you think? Look at her, for Christ’s sake.”
And here’s Cammy, bending to roll her over and pump at her shoulderblades, as if that’s going to do any good, and maybe his voice is harsher than it has to be, maybe he should just let her play out the charade and focus on what comes next, but he can’t. “Get off her!” he’s shouting, yanking at her arm till it feels as if it’s going to twist off in his hand, and when she rises under the pressure of it he flings her away from him, his heart slamming at his ribs and every curse he can think of spilling uselessly out of him.