Chapter Ten
They may not have worked for Imogen’s color palette, but Mandy thought the yellow rafts looked downright cheerful. The two
rafts were identical, maybe fifteen feet long, one piloted by Katy, the other by Thor, while Big Pete scrambled back to his
set of oars on top of the massive supply boat, now loaded down with all their personal gear. Each raft had three squat rows
of inflatable benches, or thwarts, as Thor called them, but he explained that sitting directly on them was a recipe for flying
into the river. Instead, he showed them how to perch on the perimeter of the raft, riding the thick rubber tubes that formed
the sidewalls, their feet jammed in under the thwarts across the middle.
According to Thor, the front was where the excitement was, so that was where Mandy staked her claim. She and Liv bookended
the front bench, then Imogen and Lucinda in the middle, and Fiona on the third bench, balanced along the left outer tube.
Thor perched on the very back of the raft, one sandaled foot tagging the spray, his paddle serving as a rudder behind them.
The other raft, piloted by Katy, pulled ahead of them into the quiet heart of the river. Charlie and PK were in front, followed
by Devon and Stefan. There was a gap in the third row between the guests and the guide, where Babette should have been. Then
again, if Babette had arrived on time, Mandy imagined she’d be commanding the helm of the other raft. Her raft. That was how everyone would see it. She wondered which of Babette’s compatriots would be displaced from the front when she arrived. If she arrived?
Mandy wished her sister hadn’t been so quick to discount her theory about Babette being kidnapped. Not that she believed it,
not really, but she wanted Liv to at least acknowledge something strange was going on. Babette’s absence had a shape to it,
a buzzing energy that elevated the trip from standard-fare excitement to the potential for something bigger. The most likely
answer—that Babette was delayed, that she’d join them later—would make it small again. Which was fine. Mandy didn’t want Babette
to have disappeared. But she wanted the thrill of entertaining the possibility.
But maybe the act of rafting the Grand Canyon was thrill enough. They were a small yellow dot winding through the pumping
heart of the river. Their first mile was a lazy cruise in the sunshine, Thor giving a half-hearted stroke every couple of
minutes to keep them pointed forward. Everyone else held their paddles like extras on a movie set. Mandy looked up from the
water to the sky above them. It was impossibly huge, the canyon walls framing a pale vacancy that made it feel as if she was
at the bottom of an endless glass, a vessel filled with light.
“Are we just floating for an entire week?” Imogen asked.
“Not quite.” Thor smirked.
A warm breeze tickled Mandy’s neck, separating each tiny hair from its neighbor. While she appreciated the free ball cap,
she found herself envying Fiona’s full-coverage visor, longing for Lucinda’s huge straw hat and protective rafting gloves.
In Austin, the heat hugged her shoulders like a heavy blanket in summer. Here, it was so dry that the sun seemed to do the
opposite, stealing every ounce of moisture from her body.
“That wind you feel, it’s the whitewater up ahead.” Thor’s voice was a smoky drawl, and Mandy craned around to hear him speak.
“Horn Creek’s no kiddie pool. When I say forward, everyone dig in and paddle. You girls in the front will set the pace. If
I say left, people on the left side stroke forward. Same with the right. If things get really dicey, I’m going to yell for
y’all to lean in. Let me show ya.
“LEAN IN!” Thor dropped and curled up in the bottom of the raft, head down, like a hedgehog braced for impact.
“When will we need that?” Liv’s voice was clipped. Mandy looked across to where her sister was sitting ramrod straight, clutching
her paddle tightly.
“Just if we get stuck in a hole. Or a giant wave. Flow’s high this week.”
“The itinerary glazed over how extreme this is,” Liv muttered to Mandy. “We should have trained.”
“Relax. We’ve got this,” Mandy said.
“You have no evidence for that.” They were still floating peacefully, but Liv’s body was rigid, her eyes straining to see
the rapid Thor told them was up around the corner.
Pete’s giant supply boat pulled up in front of them and took the first position in the lineup. Then Katy’s raft. Then theirs.
Liv leaned all the way forward, over the front edge of the rubber lip.
“What do you see?” Mandy asked.
“Ripples,” Liv said. “But that feels worse. Knowing it’s out there and not knowing what it is.”
Big Pete gave a whoop and took off. Katy’s raft peeled around the corner next. Mandy watched the boats vanish into the unknown
and licked her lips.
Finally, it was their turn.
“Forward!” Thor called.
The surface of the river started to feather white in front of them, the sound of it sliding from babble to roar.
“Forward!” Thor yelled again.
They stroked. It felt good. Mandy glanced over at her sister.
Liv’s fingers were bone-white around her paddle.
“It’s coming,” Liv whispered.
“Yeah,” Mandy said. But she wasn’t scared. She was excited. She was a shaken-up bottle of champagne at midnight.
The boat dipped, and Thor’s voice shot out over the roar.
“STOP!”
Mandy lifted her paddle. The momentum of their strokes slammed the boat into its first wave, blasting her with water. It was
wild and delicious, colder than she’d imagined. She glanced to her side again. Liv looked sick. Or paralyzed. Mandy needed
to find a distraction, something to tear her sister’s terrified eyes from the lineup of waves in front of them, a devil’s
staircase of whitewater.
“Keep your eyes on Katy’s boat,” Mandy prompted. “Tell me three things you see.”
“It’s skirting a giant hole of water—are we going to get stuck there?”
“LEFT TWO!”
“Forget the hole. Look at the boat. What do you see?”
The water started speeding up, cresting into waves that rose and fell in place, hungry mouths slurping at the edges of the
raft.
“FORWARD!”
One stroke. Another. Mandy strained to pull her paddle through the surging water. To her right, nothing but foam and fury.
To her left, Liv was paddling mechanically, barely looking at the waves, her eyes locked on the raft in front of them.
“What do you see?” Mandy asked.
“I see Charlie and Devon.”
“FORWARD HARD!”
Mandy dug her paddle in. It felt like the river was tearing her arms from their sockets. She was slipping, and the waves kept
building, the raft diving into holes and flying up into nothingness. Sometimes her paddle slammed into a wall of water. Other
strokes grabbed nothing but air.
Liv didn’t seem to notice the hellscape around them. She was paddling like a possessed robot, unceasing even as a wall of
water slammed the side of the raft and drenched her in an icy cascade. “I see her reaching toward him. Is she—”
The front of the boat crashed under the pounding water again, taking whatever Liv said next with it.
They popped back up, and Mandy wanted to look over, but a huge wave leapt in from the right and Thor yelled “STOP” and she was holding her breath and clutching her paddle and the small raft flew into the air like a roller coaster without a track.
Waves rose on both sides of them, two wild devil horns of water, and Thor was steering them into the biggest ones, driving them up surging walls of whitewater, paddle and stop, paddle and stop.
Mandy was trying to keep her feet from sliding out, freezing water was pouring over the sides of the raft, and Liv was babbling about something, but they were marooned on the very brink of life and death and—
“NO!” Liv yelled.
Mandy looked left, worried she’d see empty air where her sister had been. But Liv was leaning forward, her eyes shining. The
raft spun and slowed, and the water calmed abruptly, as if someone had switched off its fury.
“We did it,” she said to Liv.
Her sister nodded uncertainly, as if she couldn’t decide yet if she agreed. Her eyes were still trained on the water. Mandy
turned to the others in their boat.
“WE DID IT!”
Lucinda and Imogen looked just as exhilarated as she felt, soaked and smiling. In the back, Fiona adjusted the brim of her
visor and gave a crisp nod. At Thor’s insistence, all six of them tapped their paddles together in the air in a dripping high
five. They’d made it through. They’d all made it through.
And then Mandy heard it. A scream, rising from the bucking waves of Horn Creek.