There was a second of silence before Faye said, “In eighteenth-century Louisiana? I haven’t read about any ice houses here earlier than the 1830s.”
Nina’s deadpan cracked, and everybody laughed, because they all had a soft spot for geeky history jokes.
Faye took a step toward the bit of foundation that Dauphine had uncovered. She heard an unwelcome “sploosh” underfoot and stifled a completely unladylike word. On cue, the asthmatic pump that she’d been nursing all week coughed and expired.
“Take a break, guys. I need to resurrect Old Wheezy. Again.”
Her workers scattered like confetti on a gusty day.
Faye stared morosely at the damp (and growing damper) soil at the bottom of the excavation. She knew it could have been worse. They were working near the river, so the water table was conveniently far from the surface, especially for south Louisiana. This had seemed paradoxical to Faye until Joe had looked it up just that morning and explained to her that the land was shaped the way it was, because the river had flooded every year, forever.
A few eons worth of mud had settled out of the river’s floodwaters, lifting the level of the nearby land a little bit every year. This raised ground spread out so gently from the riverfront that the difference in elevation wasn’t obvious, but the dirt she stood on was higher than land further away from the river by several feet. This was called a “natural levee,” and land on that God-made dike had come at a premium for all of recorded history. It was no coincidence that the New Orleans neighborhoods left unscathed by the post-Katrina floods had been the oldest neighborhoods, constructed on the natural levee before all the high ground was gobbled up.
Even though Faye was lucky enough to be looking for artifacts that should be above the water table, there was still a slow constant ooze of groundwater that collected in the bottom of her excavations. This was because, as she was constantly being reminded, every last thing was damp all the time in this part of the country. Old Wheezy had been sufficient to keep things dry, but its decrepit condition had cost her some valuable work time. Faye was the only team member with any mechanical skills whatsoever.
Joe was lying on his stomach, with most of his top half hanging down into the excavation so he could get a good look at…something. Faye got the impression that he was looking for the source of the water, because he was poking first at one stratum of earth, then at another, as if he were looking for a soft, wet layer that was serving as a conduit though drier soil. He was probably correct in his theory about the source, though practical Faye hadn’t given the matter much thought. Even if she could find the offending layer of dirt, there was no way to stop its ooze, so she saw no point in wasting her time on it.
Instead, she was wasting her time on a pump. She aimed a kick at a sturdy part of its housing that she knew she couldn’t hurt. She wanted to express herself, but she didn’t want to break it. Faye was frustrated, but she wasn’t stupid.
Joe lifted his head out of the unit at the sound and asked, “You want me to take a look at that for you? You could go get a Coke and calm your—”
A dark look from Faye sent him scrambling to his feet. “I’ll just take myself a walk till you get that thing fixed. Want me to bring you back a Coke?”
Faye knew that he would interpret her wordless grunt as what it was: a plea for understanding from a woman who needed a quiet moment with her recalcitrant pump, and then a Coca-Cola. He hastened to oblige her.
Faye threw the lid of her toolbox open, hard. It made a satisfying clang. Newfangled tool totes could be bought cheap these days, with pockets that kept tools organized. They didn’t weigh a ton like old-style metal toolboxes, either.
Nevertheless, Faye had not invested in one. “Cheap” was not the same as “free.” Plus, those wussy canvas totes were completely unsatisfactory when a mechanical problem required her to make some noise. She picked up a pair of channel-lock pliers, decided they weren’t the right size, then dropped them—okay, threw them—back into the metal tray. The resulting clang was just loud enough to be satisfying.
Later, when she was asked how much time passed between the time the work crew scattered and the moment when she heard Joe call her name, she couldn’t hazard a guess. For Faye, mechanical work involved disassembling the offending objects and scattering them around her, willy-nilly. Then she sat cross-legged among the far-flung pieces, like the survivor of an explosion, until a solution to her problem magically appeared. She was deep into the rumination portion of the process when she heard Joe.
His voice was muffled, indistinct. Still, she was deep-down certain she heard him call her name. And she sensed a looming darkness in the sound, as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun.
Where was he? The sound seemed to come from the levee, but if six-and-a-half-foot-tall Joe were standing on it, then she’d have been able to see him. She hurried that direction anyway, breaking into a run when she couldn’t shut out her deepest fear.
What would life be like if something happened to Joe?
Faye’s earliest memory was of an old photo of her father in her mother’s hands, and the sound of her mother’s voice as talked about what it would be like when Daddy came home from the war. When the bad news came, her mother had locked that photo away and refused to look at it again or show it to Faye, for the rest of her life.
It was Faye’s now, and she kept it on her bedside table. She never wanted to live through that kind of loss again.
What could have caused Joe to call out to her in that dreadful voice, then fall silent? She almost stumbled at the thought. There were so many terrible possibilities. Climbing the levee, she prayed to find Joe safe on the other side.
There was no Joe. There was nothing but the river.
Seen up-close, the Mississippi River was unfathomably broad. Its muddy blue-brown water rushed past her, swollen by spring rains. Whole trees spun slowly in invisible eddies.
She was startled to see that the water lapped just a few steps from where she stood. Faye was accustomed to seeing large rivers at a distance, from the span of a high bridge, while she was safe in the comfortable confines of a car. It was disconcerting to realize that she could just walk down there to the most notoriously treacherous river on the continent and wade right in, boots and all.
Where was Joe? The only thing in her field of vision that was moving was the rushing water.
Logs and clumps of trash floated past. After a long moment, two of those fast-moving objects caught her eye. They were both downriver from where she stood, past the park’s dock, and getting further away by the instant. She had been staring at them for five seconds, maybe ten, before she realized that they didn’t belong where they were.
They were gasping faces. One of them was Joe’s.
His long, powerful arms were cutting into the roiling water as he swam toward the other face—Nina’s—but Nina wasn’t reaching out to Joe for help. She just hung motionless in the water, passively letting the insistent current carry her out to the Gulf of Mexico.
In horror, Faye watched as Nina sank beneath the water, then, buoyed by an eddy, bobbed back to the surface, perhaps for the last time. She was sinking again when Joe grabbed her and Faye’s heart rose with Nina, until she realized the truth. Even Joe couldn’t fight that current.
Nobody human could swim against the Mississippi, dragging dead weight. Certainly, nobody could do it long enough to regain the park’s dock, which is where Joe must have jumped in to help Nina. And what about Nina? Did she slip? Or did she jump?
That seemed like a silly question. Nina’s career and schoolwork seemed to be going well. She was clearly crazy about Charles, and he’d walked back into her life. Why would Nina jump?
Faye looked downriver, hoping to see something Joe could grab while she rushed to fish them both out. No luck. The next dock was way too far downriver. There was no sandbar, no curve in the bank to catch them.
Faye’s first impulse was to just jump in and help. She owned an island, for God’s s
ake. She was a strong swimmer.
No. If Joe couldn’t fight the mighty Mississippi, then neither could she. She had to do something to help him. But what? There was no boat tethered to the dock where she stood, and Joe and Nina were way too far to reach with a pole, even if she had such a thing.
One of Faye’s grandmother’s old sayings popped into her head.
“Tools are the thing that separates man from the beasts.”
Nice try, Grandma, Faye thought, but my toolbox would take me straight to the bottom, yet all the time she was being disrespectful to her dead grandmother, she was looking around. There was a wooden sign advertising an upcoming park event near the end of the dock. She yanked it out of the ground.
It was about half as tall as Faye, and almost as wide as it was tall. It wasn’t much of a boat, but it would have to do.
Faye sat down and yanked her boots off her feet. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she held the sign tight against her stomach and ran, launching herself as far in Joe’s direction as she could muster. Like it or not, she was going on a riverboat ride.
Faye didn’t weigh much, so her makeshift boat dipped underwater when she landed, but quickly surfaced. It held her up, until a slight shift of her weight toward the front sent it submarining, and she swallowed her first gulp of river water for the day. Why did she think it wouldn’t be her last? She leaned back and her craft righted itself. Fully realizing that the action was insane, she started to paddle away from the dock and safety, and toward Joe.
***
If his mouth hadn’t been full of muddy water, Joe would have cursed. What was that woman thinking? His woman. What was his woman thinking when she jumped in the Mississippi River?
She certainly couldn’t be thinking that she’d be able to swim out here and save him. Because he had been in the process of accepting the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to save himself.
He certainly wasn’t going to be able to save Nina. He’d clamped an arm around her waist—an arm he really wished he could use to help himself swim—but she just slumped in the water like a woman who was dead already. He knew she wasn’t, because he could feel her shallow breaths against his ribs. So there was no way he was letting her go. Unfortunately, this meant that they were probably both going to die.
Then, just as he was working to accept that unpleasant fact, his woman—his Faye—had launched herself into a river swollen by spring floods.
Now he was going to have to suck it up and fight back against death. This river wasn’t going to let him go easily, and it probably wasn’t going to let him go at all, but he couldn’t just quit. Not if it meant that Faye was going to die with him.
***
He saw her. Faye could see that Joe saw her.
She saw him give a few strong scissor kicks that brought him slightly nearer to Faye and her stupid little boat. The fact that his kicks were proving effective encouraged her to try something different—something besides just hanging on for dear life. She eased herself back, hanging her legs into the water behind her. Mirroring Joe’s form, she kicked with all she had.
Shifting her body so far back caused an interesting effect when she hit a good-sized eddy. Faye and her improvised boat spun slowly around their combined center of gravity until she found herself floating down the Mississippi backwards. She thought that no good could possibly come of this.
Then she remembered that her legs were remarkably long for a short woman, and they were now pointed in Joe’s direction. It was an odd way to extend her reach, but Faye would take what she could get.
Shaking water out of her eyes, Faye scooched as far off the back of the sign as she dared and found that her legs were just long enough. Joe grabbed her right big toe so hard that she nearly lost her grip on the sign that she hoped would keep them all afloat. She held on, though she feared she might lose that toe.
Joe started climbing her leg and torso hand-over-hand. Under other circumstances, this might have been fun, but not today. When he reached her waist, he grabbed hard, straining to maneuver Nina’s limp body onto the sign.
Faye had lived her entire adult life on the Gulf of Mexico, but she’d never once had so much water driven deep into her sinus cavities. She could hardly breathe. She could hardly see, The out-of-control shaking of her arm muscles signaled imminent failure. Still, Nina and Joe were slightly safer. And she wasn’t dead yet.
A dock was looming, but it was too short. On their current course, they were going to float right past it. Joe was already kicking hard, trying to move their pitiful craft cross-current. It was working, but Faye didn’t have to do calculus in her head to see that their progress was too slow and their speed downriver was too swift. They were going to miss the dock.
Nina was draped across Faye’s sign, unmoving. If Faye’s mouth hadn’t been underwater, she’d have been shouting, Wake up! Breathe! Do something!
Nina did none of those things except continue taking breaths that were so shallow that Faye didn’t see how they could help Nina at all.
Faye found herself thinking about Joe’s hand-over-hand trick. Without warning him, she let go of the sign and grabbed him around the waist with both hands. Joe knew her so well that he could tell what she wanted him to do, simply by the way she shifted her body in the water. He extended his legs as far as they would go, while still steadying Nina’s unconscious form, then he relaxed and let her maneuver herself into position.
She’d just had time to grasp his feet with both hands and stretch her whole body out into the water, before her own feet struck a metal piling holding up the dock that just might save them. The pain was an electric thing, but she was able to hook a foot under that piling, willing it to hold them all. The current pulled inexorably, and her foot was screaming at her, but she clung to Joe. Now what?
Joe was pulling Nina closer to his chest, sliding her off the wooden sign that had served them so well. Faye swallowed hard. This was either going to work…or it wasn’t. He eased Nina into the water and let the sign go.
Relieved of Nina’s weight, the sign jumped to the surface and headed quickly downstream. Joe jerked his legs and Faye knew he wanted her to let go. It wasn’t easy, but she forced herself.
With Nina under one arm, Joe battled the last few feet toward the dock. With her foot still hooked around the piling, Faye grabbed Joe and drew him to her until he, too, had a grasp of something solid. A few lungs full of air helped Faye’s feelings considerably.
This was the moment when Faye realized that she had a cell phone in her pocket, and that it had been there the whole time. Damn.
Calling 911 wouldn’t have prevented the need for Faye to launch her rescue voyage. Nina and Joe would certainly have drowned by the time help arrived. But if she’d called first, they would be topping the levee’s crest right this minute, like the cavalry in an old B-movie.
Ah, well. It wasn’t that far to the shore. Too bad she and Joe had to get there while dragging an unconscious woman.
It worried Faye that Nina had never opened her eyes. She was still breathing. But she wasn’t doing much else.
***
Joe battled his way toward shore, dragging two women with him, and he wasn’t sure he had what it took to get to dry land. Not any more. Not since he’d gambled that his muscles could take on inexorable, unyielding Mother Nature.
Nina hung limply in one arm, so she was no help.
Faye was conscious. Oh, Faye was more than conscious. She was struggling in his other arm, squawking at him to put her down, blubbering like a baby, and pretending like she wasn’t crying at all. She was a big girl, and they don’t cry. Except she really wasn’t a big girl. She was five feet tall.
He couldn’t put her down. The water came up to his chin, so he could slog slowly toward shore, fighting the current all the way, but Faye couldn’t do that. If she tried to touch bottom, the water would close over her head. He wasn’t sure she had enough strength left to swim. Joe thought he could get the three of them closer
to shore, close enough that they could maybe walk the rest of the way. He had that much power left in his muscles, and no more, but it would sure help matters if Faye would quit struggling and let him carry her.
Somehow, he doubted that she was capable of such a thing.
***
Soon enough, Faye found herself lying face-down at the water’s edge, Joe and Nina beside her. Their legs still dangled in the river, all six of them.
If Faye opened one eye, she could see a crushed red-white-and-blue beer can. If she opened the other eye, she could see something unidentifiable and plastic that she hoped wasn’t medical waste. She would have been content to lie there for hours surrounded by the garbage of a continent, but getting Nina out of the river wasn’t the same thing as getting her out of the woods.
Faye managed to raise herself to all-fours and crawl to the levee, tottering to her feet at its top. Pointing herself in the general direction of the visitor’s center, she began to walk. She knew what she looked like—muddy, half-drowned, near-collapse. There was no chance that anyone who saw her coming would fail to dial 911.
She took one long look over her shoulder before she descended the far side of the levee and lost sight of Joe and Nina. Joe was pushing at the ground with both hands, trying to raise himself to a sitting position. Nina wasn’t doing anything.
Catching Joe’s eye, she found that she had only one thing to say to him.
“Christmas. At home. At Joyeuse.”
Faye had always wanted a Christmas wedding.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Faye didn’t like the intensity of the paramedics’ efforts to revive Nina. She crouched on the ground beside Joe and gave the medical team a sidewise glance now and then. It seemed somehow indecent to intrude into a scene where a human being’s life hung in the balance.
“Did she jump?”
Joe’s gaze was directed inward. If he’d heard her question, he gave no sign.
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