Chapter Thirteen
“Don’t do it, Sloane,” I warn, as she closes in on my boat like Jaws.
We’re in a calm patch at an elbow in the river, the water deepening from the foamy pale green of the rapids to a more tranquil sea-glass shade.
Tall spikes of purple loosestrife show their first few flowers near the flat brown shore, the muddy sand quickly giving way to aspen and baby cedar trees framed by distant snow-dusted peaks.
I can’t make any big moves when there are this many people in the water. Also, paddling away from a swimming client seems like a bad PR move when Brent’s watching.
“Sloane! Don’t do it! I need to be in my boat so I can help—”
She levers herself out of the water, pressing down hard on the gunwale and sending me flying.
“Nooo—” My yell cuts off as I go under, replaced by bubbles and rushing water and the ice-pick ache of glacial runoff against my forehead. The noise of my thoughts subsides, turning dull and muted like the knock of a paddle against a canoe.
When I come up, all I can hear is my sister laughing.
“Sloane! You psychopath! What did you do that for?” I whip a curtain of water in her direction.
“You looked too dry. Also too warm. So I decided to help out my s—uh, my instructor in her moment of need.” She splashes me back, then turns around and soaks Dereck, who’s clinging to the side of the canoe.
“Hey!” Dereck protests. “What did I ever do to you?”
“You dumped a pound of sand down the front of my shirt.” Sloane scrapes her fingers under her collar and comes away with quite a bit of evidence to support her accusation.
“I did it by accident!”
“Yes. Me too.” Sloane backstrokes away, laughing. As she passes Brent, floating on his back with his toes in the air, Sloane pulls off his recovered shoe and keeps going, waving it in the air.
Within ten seconds, everyone’s splashing and screaming. Even Lori yells bloodthirsty sports chants from the shore, kicking big rooster tails of water that only hit her and Mitch, and also Dereck, who’s sourly paddling toward land.
Downstream, Trevor and Petra have made it to the riverbank. Their excited jumping settles into a surprised stillness, then he pulls her close, fastening his lips to hers in a back-bending, mind-melding kiss for the ages.
I look away, feeling like I’ve invaded their privacy. Remembering how when I kissed Lyle, the whole idea was to get someone to invade ours. I wish I could take that kiss back. It feels cheap compared to the real thing.
Lyle pulls up in his canoe. Babe leans down to give me a businesslike lick on my cheek, and I draw back, startled.
“Babe thinks that was a good exercise,” Lyle says. He smiles as Sloane sneaks up behind Willow, toppling her into the water with a shriek.
I look up at him, feeling so strange. I want his praise very badly, but I may not deserve it, considering.
“Really? Was she listening when I hijacked your lesson and made everyone do something they’d never practiced before and didn’t want to do?”
“No. But she can see people are turning something bad into something good. She likes a therapeutic breakthrough as much as the next dog.”
I look again, but with Lyle’s eyes. I’ve never seen Sloane laugh as hard as she’s laughing now, playing keep-away with Brent’s shoe. Willow’s gotten her hands on a bailing bucket and is very capably defending her position halfway up a large boulder. Lori’s chafing Dereck’s arms in a motherly way.
“Sometimes… sometimes people need to go in,” I say, holding on to his gunwale, stunned to hear his words coming out of my mouth. Huh. When I look up, Lyle’s smiling, but his eyes darken like they did after we kissed, smoldering an inch away from mine.
For a second I think he’s going to lean down, and I’m going to pull myself up, and we’re going to make that first kiss irrelevant, right here, right now.
And that’s when I spot a one-person kayak heading our way.
My asshole detector starts alarming. No one should be coming down the rapids when we’re in the water. We’re not blocking their line of descent, but even so, they should give us a chance to get clear, for safety.
The paddler parks their boat in an eddy, then positions a a long-lensed camera to capture action shots for a flotilla of bright-blue boats assembling above the rapids.
Their optic-yellow safety gear shows beautifully against the pale foaming water, the dark-green forest, and the gray rocks.
Even their paddles have blue shafts and yellow blades.
Until now, I liked how Lyle’s aversion to photos made the Love Boat feel less performative than other expeditions I’d worked on.
I’d seen people’s faces fall when the photos weren’t what they’d hoped, as if one image of themselves making an awkward move had the power to erase every moment of joy they’d had in the boat.
Up against the other group’s sunny, unified colors, our rainbow fleet looks amateurish. A little like we bought the canoes secondhand and couldn’t get them all the same color.
I shake the water out of my whistle and give one long blast.
The water fight dries up when people realize what’s happening, and the fun evaporates completely after the first two-person kayak successfully challenges the rapids.
The paddlers have the inefficient movements of beginners, but kayaks are nimbler than canoes.
The Rolling Stones look a lot easier for these people than they did for us, with our switched-up boat positions, bad timing, and sketchy communication.
At the outwash, the paddlers’ heads turn to our bunch, soaked and shivering, half the boats still not retrieved. Much like the unfortunate action shots I’d seen on other expeditions, their pitying frowns show us what we look like.
Sloane limply tosses Brent’s shoe at him and wades toward land.
Brent swipes for the shoe, misses, and has to swim after it.
On the shore, Dereck strips off his sodden shirt, balls it up, and throws it to the sand like he’s done with this forever.
Even Lori takes an apprehensive step back, joining Mitch at the forest’s edge.
When the next kayak reaches the outwash, Lyle shudders like the Titanic throwing its engines into reverse. “Stellar. I need you to get back in your boat and rescue the canoes. Make it look like we meant to stop here. Please. As fast as you can.”
“What’s wrong?” He so rarely asks for anything. To hear him sound unnerved… it’s unnerving.
“No time. Go,” he says, a desperate undercurrent in his voice.
My boat is near the sandy bank. It’ll take me a couple of minutes to swim over and get back in with no help.
A third kayak arrives in the wash, bearing an instructor type and a straight-backed person who’s not paddling particularly hard.
“Having some trouble, Mr. McHugh?” the stiff man enunciates over the rush of whitewater, pale lips pursed in satisfaction.
The man’s voice is pleasant, yet I’ve never heard so many insults packed into so few words.
His diction is precise in the way of people who want you to know their vocabulary words have more syllables than yours.
It can’t be. Then again, who else but Lyle’s douchecanoe of a PhD advisor would call Lyle “Mister” with the same malice he flaunted in Brent’s article?
I pause my life jacket–hampered front crawl to take a closer look at the one human on earth who truly, deeply hates Lyle.
He’s maybe fifty-five or sixty, villainous in a picky, particular way: navy wool shirt double-buttoned at the wrist, hollowed cheeks, fresh shave. Yellow sport lenses shield his flat, dead eyes. Somehow, he gives a neon whitewater helmet the vibe of a Tilley hat with the chin strap pulled tight.
In his outsize custom canoe, Lyle is taut with stress. I’d be rigid, too, if someone had pulled “Mr. McHugh” on me for the second time.
“Professor Fisher,” Lyle replies. His courtesy makes me want to swim over there and capsize the professor’s boat the way Sloane tipped mine.
I couldn’t tip them, though. The kayak is wide and flat, with two full-grown men as ballast. I don’t have the power to defend Lyle, like I didn’t have the power to defend anything else I loved.
In an instant, I’m furious. Rage pours from my heart like an oil spill, contaminating everything in sticky blackness. Any spark now will send me sky high.
I bolt my mouth shut and focus on breathing through my nose.
“Well,” Fisher says, glancing delightedly down his long, thin, sunburned nose.
“Too bad we caught you at such a difficult moment. But no better time to introduce you to the River of Love, our research-expedition-slash-relationship-counseling pilot project. Over the next year, we’ll publish three to five papers in major journals, then follow up with my second book. ”
All the locks holding my mouth shut fail at once. “What?! You can’t publish our idea. That’s plagiarism, you jackass.”
The professor fixes his fishy eyes on me. “The idea was generated and refined in my lab, under my supervision. I have a right to use it. Perhaps more right than you do, Miss…?”
I turn to Lyle, who looks stricken. “Is that true? Can he… can he do that?”
Before he can answer, another tandem kayak successfully challenges the Stones, the bow paddler whooping with exhilaration.
That voice. For some reason, I know it, but I can’t put a face to it until she whoops again, and the rest of the group whoops back.
I picture a white woman on a stage, wireless microphone in hand, the picture cutting between her open-mouthed excitement and the studio audience’s wild, screaming applause.
And there she is, drifting up to the professor, her cheeks round with a huge smile.
Renee Garner. That is Renee Garner, who screwed us by pulling her people out of our course at the last minute, apparently so she could join forces with the person whose lies made our company look bad in the first place.
The other team must be able to handle her security when we couldn’t—yes, there’s a boat full of earpiece-wearing goons in an eddy.
It’s too much. Instead of doing one of the few things Lyle’s ever really needed from me, I float there, stunned.
Fisher has our idea, and our location, and our fucking celebrity endorsement.
I’d bet my boat he’s got a generous research grant.
No wonder people are backing out of the Love Boat. He’s probably stealing our guests, too.
Renee turns her big smile our way. “Great day on the water! Are you all having the best time, too? Oh!” She takes a surprised breath. “Dr. McHugh. So nice to run into you.”
I let out a high, disbelieving laugh just as a familiar voice says, “ Stellar? ”
My heart drops through my body like a rock. I wish I could sink to the bottom of the river with it.
“Kat,” I say hoarsely to the person bobbing in a solo kayak. “It’s been a while.”
She looks the same as the last time I saw her at Grey Tusk General.
Better, even. I’d shared my investigation with her; she’d promised to have my back in the departmental meeting.
But every time I spoke up, she said nothing.
Over and over, I tried to catch her eye as the painful realization bloomed like a bloodstain: she was looking away on purpose, protecting herself while I hung my ass out to the breeze.
I want to help Lyle, but Kat knows things about me that could do a lot of damage if she said them in front of Fisher. I kick away from the boats, drawing her with me.
“You’re doing… the same thing we are?” she asks, biting her lip. “I’m the team doctor for the River of Love. Are you the doc with your crew, too?”
“Seems like it,” I say grimly.
“Oh, that’s good. That’s great,” she gushes. “I heard you were working for… you know what, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad to see you’re back in medicine.”
I feel the tug of my old life like there’s a suture knotted around my breastbone, and Kat has the long tail wrapped around her fist.
And the worst of it is, I want what she’s got.
Everything I loved and lost: belonging, fellowship, the secret language of medicine.
Colleagues excited to share an impossible blood gas result or the subtlest triangular whisper on a chest X-ray, almost missed—a bad diagnosis caught in the nick of time.
“Thanks.” I can’t trust myself to say more.
“Do you need help?” She looks around, clearly uncertain whether she should do her job or mine.
No way am I getting in her debt, now or ever. “This is actually a planned exercise,” I lie. “The whole point is not to help them. So thanks, but no thanks.”
She blinks at the sawn-off barrel of my refusal, her smile faltering. Guilt nips at my conscience. What happened with the milk wasn’t her fault, and of the two of us, I could argue she was smarter. She kept her head down and kept her job, while I exiled myself to Brittle Rock to finish burning out.
I want to get back to Lyle. He’s probably refusing to defend himself against the professor. He needs someone angry and quick on her feet who’ll say the things he can’t.
“I should g—”
“You never answered my email,” Kat interrupts.
“I never got an email from you.” The department deactivated my work email the day I left.
A few months later, I blocked the hospital domain on my personal email.
My therapist said it was better for me not to see that no one had reached out to say Hi or How are you or We miss you , not even the nurses.
Sometimes I’d get fury-inducing donation requests from the hospital’s charitable foundation, or an announcement about someone’s promotion that brought a toxic flood of longing and shame.
“I’ll resend. Things have changed since you retired from the department,” she says brightly, as if I chose to leave and they threw me a nice party. “I’m the head of human resources now. It’s a whole new ER. Clean slate.”
The sting of it, especially coming from Kat. She should know only some people get their slates wiped clean.
“Kat, I can’t—I have to go.”
“Check your junk folder!” she calls, paddling off after the rest of her crew.
I swim back to Lyle, who’s floating on his own, Babe worriedly licking sunscreen off his cheek. “Hey. Let’s regroup and reset. Take lunch, maybe.”
He watches Fisher and Renee skim away, saying nothing.
On shore, Sloane’s stripped down to her sports bra, wringing half a river out of her sun shirt.
Brent limps dramatically out of the water, one shoe in his hand.
Trevor and Petra have made it back to the group, but they’re unhelpfully gesticulating to where their canoe is drifting toward a sieve—a downed tree whose branches dip dangerously into the current.
We look bad. We look weak. Like they can push us up against a locker and take our lunch money anytime they want it. Like they already did take our lunch money.
We are so, so fucked.