marrow-freezing water seem almost warm by comparison. When that air hit
her burning lungs, her heart stuttered, her chest clenched with pain,
and the second breath was harder to draw than the first.
Treading water, holding tight to Hatch, Lindsey swallowed mouthfuls of
the river as it splashed her face. Cursing, she spat it out. Nature
seemed alive, like a great hostile beast, and she found herself
irrationally angry with the river and the storm, as if they were
conscious entities willfully aligned against her.
She tried to orient herself, but it was not easy in the darkness and
shrieking wind, without solid ground beneath her. When she saw the
riverbank, vaguely luminous in its coat of snow, she attempted a one-arm
sidestroke toward it with Hatch in tow, but the current was too strong
to be resisted, even if she’d been able to swim with both arms.
She and Hatch were swept downstream, repeatedly dragged beneath the
surface by an undertow, repeatedly thrust back into the wintry air,
battered by fragments of tree branches and chunks of ice that were also
caught up in the current, moving helplessly and inexorably toward
whatever sudden fall or deadly phalanx of rapids marked the river’s
descent from the mountains.
4
He had started drinking when Myra left him. He never could handle being
womanless. Yeah, and wouldn’t God Almighty treat that excuse with
contempt when it came time for judgment?
Still holding the guardrail, Bill Cooper crouched indecisively on the
brink of the slope and stared intently down at the river. Beyond the
screen of falling snow, the lights of the Honda had gone out.
He didn’t dare take his eyes off the obscured scene below to check the
highway for the ambulance. He was afraid that when he looked back into
the ravine again, he would misremember the exact spot where the light
had disappeared and would send the rescuers to the wrong point along the
riverbank. The dim black-and-white world below offered few prominent
landmarks.
“Come on, hurry up,” he muttered.
The wind-which stung his face, made his eyes water, and pasted snow in
his mustache-was keening so loudly that it masked the approaching sirens
of the emergency vehicles until they rounded the bend uphill, enlivening
the night with their headlights and red flashers. Bill rose, waved his
arms to draw their attention, but he still did not look away from the
river.
Behind him, they pulled to the side of the road. Because one of their
sirens wound down to silence faster than the other, he knew there were
two vehicles, probably an ambulance and a police cruiser.
They would smell the whiskey on his breath. No, maybe not in all that
wind and cold. He felt that he deserved to die for what he’d don-but if
he wasn’t going to die, then he didn’t think he deserved to lose his
job.
These were hard times. A recession. Good jobs weren’t easy to find.
Reflections of the revolving emergency beacons lent a stroboscopic
quality to the night. Real life had become a choppy and technically
inept piece of stop-motion animation, with the scarlet snow like a spray
of blood falling haltingly from the wounded sky.
5
Sooner than Lindsey could have hoped, the surging river shoved her and
Hatch against a formation of water-smoothed rocks that rose like a
series of worn teeth in the middle of its course, wedging them into a
gap s-sufficiently narrow to prevent them from being swept farther
downstream.
Water foamed and gurgled around them, but with the rocks behind her, she
was able to stop struggling against the deadly undertow.
She felt limp, every muscle soft and unresponsive. She could barely
manage to keep Hatch’s head from tipping forward into the water, though
doing so should have been a simple task now that she no longer needed to
fight the river.
Though she was incapable of letting go of him, keeping his head above
water was a pointless task: he had drowned. She could not kid herself
that he was still alive. And minute by minute he was less likely to be
revived with artificial respiration. But she would not give up. Would
not. She was astonished by her fierce refusal to relinquish hope,