40
Deborah crumples to her knees beside Imani. Her cries cut off in a sharp gasp. From what I can see, the arrow has buried itself in her left shoulder, and blood is already spreading across her white tank top in dark stains.
“Oh, god!” Pam wails, dropping beside Deborah, frantic.
Macy stumbles in front of the group, as if to protect them, but she’s shaking so violently I can barely believe she’s still upright.
Leo teeters where he stands, clearly dazed, blood streaming down the nape of his neck. But when he whips his head around to look at Allie, his eyes glitter in the moonlight with a rage that makes my stomach twist.
He nearly loses his balance on the steep trail, then recovers. He turns back to the women on the beach and reaches for another arrow.
My eyes follow his every movement.
I clock the fact that he has only one arrow left in his quiver.
“Run!” I scream, feeling the words rip through me before I even know what I’m going to say. Inside my head, Parker’s voice screams the same word at the same time.
Pam and Macy startle at the sound of my voice. I rush forward, pointing toward the river behind them, yelling all the way. “There’s a kayak tied around that boulder! Get it! Get out of here, now!”
I have no idea if any of the women can get into that kayak quickly enough to escape Leo.
But if even one of us gets away alive, it’s better than none.
Leo takes another lurching step toward the women on the beach, holding the nocked arrow at his shoulder like he’s ready to let it fly. Then he seems to think better of it and abruptly changes course—barreling back up the path toward me and Allie instead.
Terror zings through me at the sight of his bulky form rushing up the path, but Allie and I are already scrambling, gathering more rocks. She stands, cranking her arm back to send a second rock flying—at the same moment Leo lets the final arrow sail through the air.
Adrenaline floods my system with a familiar, sickening electricity, seeming to slow everything down. The pain in my aching arms, my bruised body, my burning lungs, disappears. I whirl around and dive toward Allie, trying to shove her out of the arrow’s path. But the time warp is an illusion.
That desperate, fleeting rush of adrenaline races through me a fraction of a second slower than that arrow.
And it flies true.
Allie’s arm is still cocked back, rock gripped in her fist, when the steel tip punches into her chest.
The impact drives her backward like a rag doll. The rock tumbles weakly from her hand.
She looks down at the arrow protruding from beneath her collarbone. Blood wells up in dark bubbles around the wound. She makes a confused, gasping wheeze, her face screwed up with shock. Then her knees buckle and she goes down hard, her body sliding on the loose dirt.
I force my gaze away from her, already yanking back my arm to throw my own rock. I won’t miss this time.
But Leo isn’t coming this way anymore. He’s dropped the bow, spun on his heel, and is sprinting in the other direction.
He races back down the trail toward the two figures lying next to each other on the sand—and the two others, who are chest-deep in the water, freeing the impossibly small kayak from the boulder and pulling it against the current.
“Hurry!” I scream uselessly, already knowing Leo is going to reach them before they can get away.
I crouch next to Allie, helplessly stroking her forehead, my chest clenching as her eyes find mine. They’re wide and terrified. She tries to rise, but cries out in agony instead. “Go help them,” she rasps.
“Stay here,” I tell her, as if she could do anything else. “I’ll come back,” I stammer through my tears. Then I rush down the trail toward Leo and the others, knowing those might be the last words she hears.
Macy and Pam struggle through waist-deep water with the kayak, returning to shore. Refusing to leave Imani and Deborah.
Leo is nearly at the beach, almost on top of the two prone women.
“Leo!” I scream, trying to get him to slow down, to look away, to give Macy and Pam a few seconds longer to make an impossible choice.
They have to get in that kayak and go—now. There isn’t time to save Imani or Deborah. Or Allie.
Or me.
Leo doesn’t look back. And he doesn’t slow down as he passes Imani and Deborah’s motionless forms.
“Go!” I scream again at the two women by the kayak, my voice breaking at the edges. “Get out of here!”
Leo splashes into the water, one arm raised, holding what I’m certain is his pearl-inlaid knife.
I raise my fist and throw my last rock as hard as I can.
It lands with a harmless thud, closer to Imani and Deborah than to Leo.
Pam is halfway inside the kayak, her shape a dark blur as she struggles to situate herself.
The deep water is calmer near the shore, but her legs thrash it into a froth as she flounders.
Macy tries to hold the inflatable boat steady, her head whipping between Pam and Leo, trying to push the kayak farther into the river where the current moves faster.
As Leo enters the water, Parker whispers: “Fight Night.”
Leo lunges through the water. He’ll be on top of them in seconds. I fly down the last of the steep portage trail, rushing past Deborah and Imani’s dark shapes on the sand.
Again, Parker whispers, “Fight Night!”
I barely understand what I’m saying as I scream the words out loud.
Macy suddenly freezes where she stands waist-deep at the front of the kayak. Does she understand what I’m saying?
I don’t. Not yet.
Then Leo is leaping onto the center of the kayak, the force of his landing nearly sending Pam tumbling out and into the water.
In the split second Pam manages to catch herself and sit back up, I notice something: Between Pam’s weight and Leo’s, the kayak is severely unbalanced—teeter-tottering heavily toward the back.
I understand now what Parker is saying. I only hope Macy does, too.
She has to move now.
Pam tries to whack Leo with her paddle, but he catches it easily, pulling himself closer toward her and raising his knife to strike.
At the same moment, Macy hunches down in the water, then abruptly propels her body up and forward, leaping like a mermaid—and landing hard, stomach down, on the front of that inflatable kayak.
The impact from Macy’s leap doesn’t pop Leo off the kayak completely, like I hoped it would. Like I imagine it did in her Fight Night story. The kayak isn’t big enough for that, and Macy’s too slender to launch Leo very far.
But the impact is enough to send him momentarily off-balance, tipping him sideways into the water—along with Pam.
Water sprays everywhere as I splash into the shallows, racing toward them.
Pam quickly scrambles to her feet in the sluggish current—and brings the point of her elbow down like a brick on Leo’s head as he tries to surface.
A second later, I reach them, my hands clawing under the water until I feel the fabric of his shirt in my hands.
Macy is on him too, diving down to grab hold of whatever she can.
Once I manage to lock onto a handful of his shirt, I don’t let go, not even when his fingernails tear into my bare skin.
Not even when I feel a sharp pain in my side—a hot line of fire—a blade, slicing across my ribs.
Macy attaches herself to Leo’s back like a monkey, holding him down while Pam plunges the T-grip of a paddle down into the water like a fishing spear, over and over, aiming for the tendrils of bleached-blond hair that surface as Leo thrashes.
All I can feel is adrenaline. Even the pain in my ribs fades. I hold on.
Leo twists violently against me, kicking out at Pam, dunking Macy underwater, and momentarily wriggling free of my hold on his shirt.
His head breaks the surface, water streaming down his face as he sucks in air. My gaze locks on his teeth, bared like an animal’s. And then we’re on him again, pushing his head back underwater as hard as we can. For Deborah, for Allie, for Imani, for everyone we left behind on the river.
Water blurs my vision as I fight to hold on, rage and loss and pain ripping through my throat in a ragged scream.
Will it ever end?
Are we strong enough?
After a horrifying eternity, his thrashing finally slows, bubbles streaming from his mouth and nose, his hair floating like a halo just beneath the churning surface.
Then the struggle stops altogether as his body sags beneath the combined weight of our hands and bodies.
Pam lets go first, the paddle slipping from her fingers as she gasps at the dark shape lolling in the water between us.
His eyes are open wide, staring at nothing.
A thin stream of water dribbles from his slack mouth.
Macy lets go next, coughing, her swollen face streaked with water and blood and a feral expression that slowly loosens into disbelief.
I finally let go too, unwinding the shirt from my numb fingers and staggering backward in the water.
I stand there panting, closing my eyes for only a moment before hurrying to retrieve the kayak that’s nearly floated into the current. As I reach for it, the pain in my ribs roars back to life. My heart pounds in my chest.
I press my hand against it. Alive. Still alive.
Thank you, I tell Parker, tears spilling down my frozen cheeks as I struggle toward the others.
I suddenly know that I would still be thanking him even if it were me face-down in that river. Even if it had gone a different way, I’d be grateful with my whole heart. The same way Parker must have felt at the bottom of that cave while we said our goodbyes.
Thank you for staying with me, I tell him. Then I reach out for Pam and take hold of her outstretched hand.
And he really has been here on the river with me this whole time. I know that now.
I no longer feel the need to understand whether I’m hearing his voice because of “Third Man Syndrome” or because his soul is reaching through the universe to find me.
Maybe neither of those things are true. Maybe both are true.
All I really know is this: I’ve been hearing his voice so clearly not just because I want to survive, but because in a very real way, he still lives in the deepest parts of my mind and body that he shaped by loving me so long and so well.
Every conversation, every shared silence, every night I tucked myself against him before bed—all of it is recorded at the most intimate, cellular level.
I haven’t been imagining him. I’ve been keeping him with me everywhere I go, so deeply that his voice can still speak to me, urging me to fight, begging me to keep going, even warning me to play dead, asking me to stay and survive in hopes that I’ll find the sun again somehow after the darkness.
It means there’s some part of Parker that will stay alive as long as I do. His kindness, his strength, his humor, his love for me, his sense of adventure, the sound of his voice are all woven into my heart. And that’s real enough for even a skeptic like me.
I don’t hesitate as Pam helps me into the kayak, thrusting a paddle into my outstretched arms before getting in behind me, while Macy splashes toward the women back on shore.
Pam winces, staring at the blood trickling down my side. “Are you okay? Do you want to stay behind—”
I shake my head. The wound at my ribs is bleeding steadily, and it hurts like hell, but it isn’t deep. “We’ll get there faster if we row together,” I say.
And I’m strong enough to keep going, I think to myself.
In the distance, through the moonlight, a black streak circles above in the canyon overhead.
It’s probably not a hawk. They usually don’t fly at night.
But my chest aches with love anyway as the breeze lifts the winged creature up, up, far beyond what my eyes can see.
Hi, Parker, I mouth.
“Let’s go home,” he murmurs in my ear, fading into the dark as we run the last stretch of river in the dark.