The crescent of light dimmed. Her brain was shutting down. The pounding from her heart eased to a soft rush, waves breaking lazily against sandy beaches. Bands of pressure within her lungs pressed outward, attempting to break through to the air.
When she was asleep, she would breathe in the lake.
Ophelia.
HOOKS CAUGHT IN HER MERMAID MOUTH, cutting the flesh and trying to drag her from the sea. Anna tossed her head from side to side. Fishes chewed at her face; she felt the ripping but not the pain. A hammerhead shark rammed into her chest and the air blasted out of her.
And in again.
“Annnhhh. Annnh.”
Breath out and in and vomiting, her lungs caught fire, her throat burned with charred flesh.
“Annh. Annnh.”
Hot lead spewed from her scalding her tongue, blistering her lips.
“Annhh. Anhhh.”
The noise maddened her, and she knew she was crying as she descended to hell in fire and ice. Her eyes would not open, as in dreams of blindness they had been sewn shut. Screaming, she forced her lids wide.
She was out. She was on her side, one arm stretched over her head. Her right eyeball was so close to the ice, she could see crystals moving by in fits and starts. The endless embrace of the lake was being scraped off. A machine gun battered through her head. Her teeth were chattering.
“Annnh.”
Anna had not made that sound. Fish did not speak. Fish got fried over hot coals. She was looking forward to that.
“I’ve landed four-hundred-pound marlin that were easier to reel in than you.” This was grunted. Anna had been caught by a bear. Too bad. Bears ate their fish raw.
“Are you alive?” The bear pawed at her and she was rolled onto her back.
“Hey, Bob,” she said when she saw his red, sweating face.
“Are we going to have to get naked in a sleeping bag together?” he asked.
“Throw me back in,” Anna croaked.
13
Bob was a hero.
When Anna had gone under, trap and line snaking after her, he’d stomped on his end of the chain to stop it. For a nanosecond, he waited to see if she would resurface.
“Nanosecond” was Bob’s assessment of the time. Anna was fairly sure it had been at least five minutes, never mind that she could only hold her breath for two, and that was under ideal conditions.
The ice was paper thin, Bob told Robin and Katherine, and he’d tugged on the chain so Anna would be able to see it, then pulled her from the lake bottom.
Anna was sufficiently grateful to have been saved from a watery grave that, for a while, she forgot it was Bob who’d put her there. She chose not to remind him of this because he had raised not only her from the dead with nothing but brute strength and determination but her pack as well, trailing behind her by a single shoulder strap.
She remembered nothing of their return to the cabin but knew without a doubt she would have died if Bob had not taken quick action. He’d cut her free of the backpack, stripped her wet coat from her, wrapped her in his own parka and carried her back to Malone Bay.
Clad in dry clothes and propped on the bottom bunk in a sleeping bag, a fourth cup of hot Ovaltine in front of her – the first she’d been able to hold all by herself – Anna listened as Bob again told Robin and Katherine how he’d run the two miles.
“Flat out,” he said. “I knew she was going to die.”
Anna doubted he’d managed to sprint the whole way, but he had covered the ground rapidly. And he was right: she was going to die and now she wasn’t.
“You saved my life, Bob,” she said. “Remind me to buy you a beer sometime.”
He grinned hugely, tucking his chin back into his neck. Anna’s words had been meant to sound grateful and they did. She was. There was no arguing with the feats of strength he had performed. The man was powerful and she was grateful to him. Grateful. For some reason, she had to keep reminding herself of this, and felt small and mean because of it.
Bob Menechinn mystified her. One moment, he was a coward shaking in his boots, a streak of yellow down his back so bright it shone through his thermal undershirt. The next, he was carrying a damsel in distress miles through a storm to safety. Anna had long known that everyone has a panic button. Those who are considered brave are simply people lucky enough to wander through life without theirs getting punched. She’d known men who would scale precipitous cliffs, only to fall apart when a water snake slithered into the tent; women who marshaled the combined forces of Boy Scouts and church camps but would faint at the sight of their own blood.
As near as she could figure, Bob had two Achilles’ heels: he was terrified of wild beasts who were better armed than he and women who knew he was terrified. Watching him bask in glory, Anna wondered if that was why he loved hunting – killing them before they killed him – if that was why he kept Katherine under his thumb.
Fear made some people brave and some dangerous. Bob was in the latter category. Because he was strong, he’d not been afraid he couldn’t carry Anna a couple of miles. He’d also known fishing her out with trap and line would not put him in any danger. And there was no risk of failure. Either he’d succeed or the witness to his humiliation would be dead.
Anna took a sip of the oversweet Ovaltine. The drink was hot, the cabin so warm the others had stripped down to trousers and T-shirts. Anna was packed in goose down and surrounded by plastic bottles filled with water heated on the stove, yet the core of her was still on the bottom of Intermediate Lake.
“I was looking for tracks up in the rocks when I heard that ice crack,” Bob embellished his tale. “I was on that ice like a man shot out of a cannon. What a noise! I didn’t think anything but a Remington could crack like that. Anna was trapped, yelling, ‘Bob, Bob,’ and the ice was so thin I couldn’t get to her. Man,” he said and shook his head.
“God, I’m sorry,” Robin said to Anna.
“Not your fault,” Anna told her.
“The ice on Intermediate is good. You shouldn’t have broken through.”
“It happens,” Anna said. Then, to make Robin feel better: “I jumped.”
“I can’t figure out what made the ice break like that. It should have been fine. You were where I said to place the trap?”
Anna nodded and took another sip of Ovaltine.
“It makes no sense. I am so sorry. You could have died.”
“Nah,” Anna said. “Bob’s making it all up. We formed a polar bear club and he chickened out at the last minute.”
“Don’t joke,” Robin pleaded. “You really could have died.”
Robin was obsessing and Anna didn’t know how to stop her. As a young woman leading her first backcountry trips, Anna had felt the same way a few times when people in her care, following her instructions, were endangered. She hoped she hadn’t carried on as much as Robin was. The biotech was three pews short of banging her heart with her fist and crying, “Mea culpa, mea culpa.”
“Lots of things don’t make sense,” Anna said reasonably.
“It couldn’t have broken.” Robin shook her head, her hair swinging in the silvery light from the window over the small dining table. The sun had creaked out, making an appearance between fronts. They had been without showers for days, during most of which they wore hats and hoods crammed on their heads, yet Robin’s hair was shining, silken.
“Go figure,” Anna said aloud. She didn’t bother to explain she was remarking on the hair. “Go figure” was one of those contentless statements that mean whatever the listener chooses to believe they mean.
During Bob’s regaling, Robin’s breast-beating and Anna’s slurping of hot drinks, Katherine had been unusually quiet. She was retiring by nature, but since Anna had been dried, warmed and declared officially among the living Katherine had not uttered a word. She’d not congratulated Bob on his bravery or marveled at his Samson-like strength; she’d not asked Anna what it was like to die or live. Like the Cheshire cat, she had slowly disappeared, till all that remained was the reflection of the window’s light on the rim of her spectacles. Wordlessly, making eye contact with no one, she’d drifted from the stool by the door to the straight-backed kitchen chair tucked next to the water heater to a footlocker jammed into the space between the foot of the bunk beds and the wall that was so narrow the locker had to be pulled out to be opened. On this low bench, Katherine had drawn her back to the wall and her feet up on the locker, a folded bit of woman tucked in a dark corner.