Chapter Forty Three
FORTY-THREE
It takes two seconds to drop. Maybe three.
But in anxiety-time, that’s at least a couple of lifetimes.
At first you’re still in the boat, and you hold tight to the slick gunwale with one hand and to Diana’s hand with the other.
The sense of weightlessness sends a surge of adrenaline through your body and a sickening pit to your stomach.
And then, at some point, your bodies separate from the boat and your hand unclasps from Diana’s.
Every muscle you have tenses for impact, and all you can see when you’re airborne is water cascading around you.
It sends up a mist that blinds you from what’s below, so it’s hard to tell just how far you’re going to fall.
Diana hits the water first. You hit next and find yourself fully submerged in liquid ice too deep to see bottom.
You flail around in the turbulent water, and when you open your eyes, you see the bright yellow of the canoe a few feet away.
It’s scraped and dented, but still mostly intact.
You reach out a desperate hand and manage a grip on the side again.
Then you clamp both hands on it and use the weight of the boat to pull your head out of the water.
You pop up, your ears ringing from the cold.
“DIANA!” you scream.
You wonder if you’re going to have to go under to save her when you hear her voice from the other side of the boat, shaky but there.
“I’M HERE!” she says.
That’s all you hear before you’re moving again, shooting the next leg of the rapids while clutching your canoe, which jerks you through the water like an angry pet on a leash.
“Just hang on!” you say.
But you don’t know if she can hear you, or even if that’s the right thing to do.
You look around frantically for the others, but you don’t see any sign of them.
A gust of wind kicks up behind you, and when you turn around, everything is on fire.
The wind is hurling the flames forward, and you can see them burning through everything on the shore in real time.
The rapids keep you just ahead of the fire, but the heat on all sides of you is growing unbearable.
You duck your head underwater to cool off.
You blow air out of your nose and mouth, clearing out the smoke and ash.
The current pulls you around a sharp corner, and your legs brush against some big rocks beneath the hull.
You lift your legs up as high as you can.
Although you can’t see her face, you can see Diana’s hand still holding tight to the gunwale on the other side of the boat.
You just hope she’s able to breathe. Between the wind and the rapids, it’s getting harder to stay above water, and you find yourself holding your breath for longer and longer stretches of time.
Your feet slam into another rock, and this time it spins you and the whole canoe around so that you’re going through the Loop backward.
This is the moment when you’re sure that you’re not going to make it.
You have no sense of where your body is in space, and the surging water has taken away most of your visibility.
You plunge under the water again, and the glacial rapids engulf you.
You stay under until your lungs feel like they’re going to burst, and then suddenly you’re not moving as fast. The current seems to have slowed, and before you can do it yourself, a familiar hand grabs you hard by the hair and pulls your head out of the water.
You sputter and wipe your eyes. Diana is looking at you with hair matted in front of her face. She pushes it back, and then screams:
“LOOK OUT!”
Hot coals and embers are blowing across the surface of the water. You’ve been spit out into a small lake, and there is fire burning all around you on the shore.
“The canoe!” you gasp. “Flip it over!”
You both grab on to the same side and pull, dumping any remaining gear into the churning lake.
It’s hard to tip it, but the burning refuse from the fire is good motivation.
An ember lands on your neck and bites until you splash it with water.
And when you finally get the boat over, you both swim underneath and come up under its domed roof.
Your whole world is tiny and dark. You can hear the percussion of coals and debris hitting the hull, and the scream of the fire eating through everything around you.
It heats the bottom of the canoe like a stove, too hot to the touch.
Diana reaches out and takes your hand again, and then you’re in the middle of a lake, under your boat, trying to keep hell at bay.
You can only hope that the others have created some kind of makeshift fire shelter on their own.
But there’s no way to look for them now without risking a severe burn.
In the chaos that follows, you have no sense of time.
You know you’re treading water, moving your body to stay afloat, but you can barely feel your limbs.
The patter above you sounds like a hailstorm. And you stay under your shell.
“The others…,” you say, trying not to cry.
“We can’t think about that now,” says Diana. “There’s nothing we can do.”
But a pinch in her voice tells you she is very much thinking about it now and wondering if she should risk looking for them. You both splash around for a second, attempting to stay contained in your little pocket of safety without drowning.
“Talk to me about something,” says Diana. “Can you do that?”
Her voice echoes in your little cave, but you can’t quite see her clearly in the dark yet.
“What … do you want me to say?” you croak, surprised you still have a voice.
“I don’t care,” she says. “Anything. I’m freezing and scared and I just need a distraction. Just say something.”
You kick your legs, barely keeping your chin above water. Your clothes are getting heavy, but you couldn’t take them off at this point without going under.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay. I don’t know what to say, so I’ll just say that the answer is yes to your question from before.”
Diana is silent.
“Do you remember…”
“Yes!” she says. “I remember. Just keep talking. What do you mean, yes?”
“Yes, it was guilt,” you say. “That’s what kept me from answering your calls after the funeral. It was a terrible thing to do, and I’m sorry!”
She doesn’t say anything, which you take as your cue to keep going.
“I guess I thought maybe it was better if we just didn’t see each other again. Like, it would hurt too much and it wouldn’t help us heal. Does that make any sense? I don’t know anymore if it does.”
You’re speaking quickly, and in the quiet that follows, a few embers glance off the boat.
“It does,” she says. “But about the guilt…”
Her teeth are starting to chatter.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just going to say it, Case. Because, at this point, there’s nothing to stop me. Do you really think your brother died because we kissed one time in a kitchen? I mean, is that what you think happened?”
Her last words echo beneath the roof of the boat.
“I don’t know,” you say, swallowing a little water. “Maybe.”
The outline of Diana’s face is starting to form in the dark.
“I don’t think it works that way,” she says.
You look down into the water, which is largely still now. You can only see a flash of your kicking legs before the water gets too murky.
“It just felt so wrong,” you say.
“Kissing me?”
“No,” you sigh. “Being … in love with you. It felt like the worst thing I could possibly do. Like maybe it was so wrong that it had the power to destroy things. Even lives. That’s how it felt to me.”
She’s still holding your hand, but she lets go for a moment to tread water more fully. Something large hits the boat and you both gasp, but it doesn’t hurt you. It doesn’t get in. Diana steadies her breathing.
“Man,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s just so sad.”
“Which part exactly…?” you say.
Her face comes into focus, her hair dripping around her.
“That’s not what love should feel like, Case. You know that, right? It’s not supposed to be a curse.”
“I know,” you say.
Only you’re not sure if you do.
You’ve only been in love once, and that’s exactly how it felt.
Feels. Unrequited and impossible and dangerous.
You reach a hand up to touch the canoe, and it still burns the tips of your fingers.
The roar of the fire is dying, but it’s hard to say if it’s safe to open the lid yet.
The fact that you can no longer truly feel the lower half of your body seems like a bad thing.
Up until minutes ago, you thought you were going to be burned to death in a wildfire.
Now you’re starting to wonder about hypothermia.
“I haven’t even felt like a person,” you say.
She grabs your hand again and squeezes hard.
“Since it happened,” you continue. “I haven’t felt human. Like, when I think about myself, I see myself from really high up, like I’m not even totally in my body. My therapist called it disassociation, but I think it’s something even more than that.”
“Like you’re just visiting,” she says.
“Yes!” you say. “Like I don’t live here anymore.”
Diana dips slightly below the surface and comes up spitting out water. She takes a second to recalibrate.
“Hey, listen,” she says. “Listen to me. Sean loved you more than anyone in the world. That doesn’t just go away in an instant. He would have forgiven you. He wasn’t going to hate you forever. Maybe for a little while. But not for good.”
She swims closer.
“Maybe,” you say. “It was hard to tell what he felt.”
“He never let you see who he really was. That’s not your fault. He didn’t do that with anyone.”
“Not even you?” you ask.
“Not even me,” she says. “I caught glimpses like you did, I think. But he kept a lot of the pain in. And then it came out in weird and dangerous ways. I don’t know what we could have done about that.”
You can see her eyes now, and they are right in front of yours.
“We didn’t kill him, Case.”
She closes her eyes.
“In some ways, we barely knew him.”
She puts an arm around you then, and you see as she gets closer that her teeth are chattering uncontrollably.
You press your head against hers. Her skin is freezing, and you’re sure yours is too.
When you kiss, your lips are cold. She kisses you back, and her breath is warm, but it only lasts a moment before the world around you comes rushing back in and you become certain of one thing: If you stay in this water much longer, there are going to be serious consequences for both of you.
You don’t have to be an outdoors expert to understand that.
“Shore,” you say. “We have to swim for it.”
“I think the canoe is too hot to move,” she says. “We’ll have to go underneath it.”
“On three?” you ask.
She points to the water and counts you off.
“One. Two. Three!”
Under you go, back into the lake. You pull yourself through the dark water as best you can with your clothes on.
You’re not sure what you’re going to find on the other side, but still, you come up, preparing for fire and brimstone.
Instead, what you find is the calm of utter devastation.
The wind has stopped. The fire is gone. And everything around you has either been scorched beyond recognition or completely devoured.
It’s a barren, black landscape of burnt matchstick-trees and volcanic glowing coals.
Diana comes up next and stares in awe at the depleted land around you.
She’s speechless. It’s shocking that you’re alive.
“Let’s go,” you say.
You both move sluggishly toward a large rock sticking out from the bank.
You don’t think about whether you can make it; you just have to.
So you propel yourself another fifty feet by way of a glorified dog paddle, barely staying afloat.
But when you get to the wet rock, whatever fuel you have left disappears, and you have to inch yourself onto it with your elbows like a wounded soldier.
Your whole body is convulsing with shivers.
Diana’s is too. You know you can’t go to sleep, but that’s what your body is telling you to do.
It’s only when you hear the quiet voice in the distance that you sit up straight.
“Is anybody there?!”