by Nevada Barr
For a minute there was no sound but the dripping of Anna’s trousers into the lake.
“What next?” Anna asked finally.
“I’m thinking,” Jenny said. “Are you getting warm?”
“Are you kidding? I’m sweating.”
Jenny turned her head to look down the ever-narrowing slot. Night was drawing on, and, this far from the sky, it was already difficult to tell rock from water. A few yards from where they sat in thin air, the cliffs came so close together a person would have to turn sideways to squeeze in, the water beneath so pinched a slip could get one’s foot jammed in too tight to pull free. Debris, naked limbs, sharp, dry, and honed to needle points, would be stuck in places; various bits of desert skewered on branches, maybe a long-dead rabbit, rat nests of spiny plants, things washed down in flash floods.
For a few minutes Jenny considered trying to make it out that way. There was no way she could do it before dark. With luck, maybe she could scale the chimney by feel. It was a crevice. It wasn’t like she could wander off-trail. Without boots, helmet, or any other protective gear, she’d be skinned alive, but in four or five or six hours, she could be on the plateau. Maybe. She could light a fire. That would bring the rangers quicker than anything.
A memory of sitting with her sisters in a circle in their grandparents’ backyard, all five of them diligently rubbing two sticks together because their granddad said that was how men made fire before matches were invented, quenched the signal fire idea. None of the sisters’ sticks got warm, let alone burst into flame. By the time Jenny got help—if she didn’t die of exposure after crippling herself on spiny pointy things—Anna would be drowned.
“Damn,” Jenny said to no one in particular.
Anna broke into her thoughts. “The dead person you gave me? I might know who it is—was. The back of his—its—head looked familiar. Or maybe it’s the T-shirt. I don’t know, but it could be the guy who had his back to me and was undoing his pants. If he doesn’t sink we can check his back. He had a tattoo. A turtle, I think.”
“Do you think the other guy was one of the other attackers? The one who held Kay or the one who watched?”
“Could be.”
A beat passed.
“Do you figure there’s a third dead person floating around that we missed?” Anna asked.
“The joint seems full of corpses tonight,” Jenny said. “It’s a regular dead zone.”
“Do you think they got caught in here like us? Then drowned?” Anna asked.
That was exactly what Jenny thought, that they became too exhausted to maintain the muscle tension that was keeping her and Anna high and dry, they fell into the lake, became too hypothermic to stay afloat, and death flowed into their lungs.
“No,” Jenny lied. “They could have fallen, or maybe the third kid—the one you said had dishwater blond hair and acne—killed them and rolled the bodies over the rim of the slot.” Jenny thought it more likely the third bad guy had done to his pals precisely what somebody—maybe the third bad guy himself—did to her and Anna; pulled up the rope so they couldn’t get out, so Anna couldn’t identify him.
After a moment Anna said, “I see a star.”
Jenny tilted her head back and looked up. Night was upon them. The dark at the bottom of the earth was absolute, the water beneath them invisible ink in midnight. In comparison, the slender scrap of sky was translucent and rich with life. The star was the brightest Jenny had ever seen.
“There is no ‘what next,’ is there?” Anna’s voice was soft beside her.
“I actually did have a plan,” Jenny defended herself, though there was no accusation in Anna’s tone. “You really can chimney up out of here at the end of the slot. Unless the rope has been taken or rotted, you can climb out. I hadn’t realized how late it was,” Jenny finished. “I think we’d be worse off trying it in the dark than we are here.”
“You could make it without me,” Anna said.
“No I couldn’t,” Jenny said.
“It’s stupid to stay here. Go for help. I’ll wait. I waited for days in a jar, didn’t I? And there I only had one corpse to keep me company.”
“You had Buddy. Besides, I don’t think I could make it. Trying that slot in the dark without protective gear, I’d end up getting slashed or impaled or wedged and die screaming in pain,” Jenny said honestly.
Anna didn’t reply to that. Instead, she rested her hand on Jenny’s thigh. Jenny took it, entwined her fingers with Anna’s. There wasn’t a lascivious twitch in all of Jenny Gorman’s many cells. When it came to dying, she found she wanted a friend more than a lover. She turned her face in Anna’s direction but could see nothing. The darkness in the slot had become an absolute. Without visual verification, Jenny had the sense they were wedged not a few feet above water level but over a chasm ten thousand feet deep.
Soon they must fall. Anna’s grip communicated the fatigue in her body. Jenny’s own thigh muscles were beginning to tremble the way they did before they cramped or failed.
Anna gasped.
“Slipped,” she explained.
Jenny drew Anna’s arm around her neck. “Move your right leg over mine and put your foot between mine. Stay strong. I can take some of your weight. We’ll keep each other warm.”
“Warm” was a metaphor for “brave.” The night hadn’t cooled much below ninety degrees, and the effort of keeping herself from sliding into the cold water had sweat running between Jenny’s breasts and down her back, making the canyon wall even more slippery.
Anna’s foot nudged hers. “I’m afraid to take it off the wall,” she said. “I’ll take us both down.”
“I’ve got you,” Jenny assured her.
“Your legs are shaking.” Anna didn’t sound alarmed so much as sympathetic. During all of this—the cold, the dead, the pain, the whole mess Jenny had gotten them into—Anna had not complained. Not once. Self-pity was a pool into which Jenny dove deep on occasion. Wee little Ms. Pigeon seemed to have none.
“How come you’re so brave?” Jenny asked; death and the dark making intimate communication possible, even necessary.
“I’m not,” Anna said quietly, her voice deeper than one might expect from so slight a source. “I’m afraid of everything; waking up, going to sleep, living alone, living with someone new. I’m afraid of whoever put me in the jar and cut me. I’m afraid of disappointing my sister. I guess the only thing I’m not afraid of is dying.”
“What made you so afraid of living?” Jenny asked. Her right calf was trying to cramp. Pushing her heel hard into the rock face, she drew her toes back as far as she dared and felt the cramp pull out.
“I killed my husband,” Anna said.
The words stuck in the slot like the echo of a thunderclap. Jenny jerked and the back of her head rapped against the sandstone.
“Like what?” she managed after a moment. “You shot him or knifed him? Like that kind of killed him?”
“No. Zach was coming down Ninth Avenue. I was coming home from D’Agostino’s. He saw me and started across. A cab hit him. He died a couple hours later.”
“And you think you killed him?”
Anna didn’t answer. Jenny took silence as an affirmative.
“A cab killed him. You get no credit for that. Us poor mortals live under the ‘shit happens’ rule of nature. Life doesn’t make sense. Unearned guilt is hubris, a claim to powers you don’t have. I understand the temptation. It’s less scary than admitting shit happens, because if shit does just happen, it can happen again and tomorrow your sister or your dog gets run over by a cab.” Jenny wasn’t lecturing Anna but herself, for the guilt she’d carried; guilt that she had done something, been something that brought on the gang rape at the beer bash.
“Shit happens,” she repeated and closed her mouth.
For what seemed like an eternity Anna made no reply. Twice more the cramp twisted in Jenny’s calf. Twice more she pulled it out by stretching her toes. The soles of her feet and the small of her back we
re simultaneously numb and on fire. Her spine was a line of liquid agony from coccyx to skull. She could no longer tell where the quivering and twitching of her muscles left off and Anna’s began.
Finally her companion spoke.
“I did not kill Zach. He was hit by a cab.”
“There you go,” Jenny said.
“Thanks a heap,” Anna replied. “Now I am afraid to die.” With that she fell, and Jenny with her.
THIRTY-THREE
Anna expected to fall a long way. Forever. When she immediately struck the water it startled a squawk from her. Then she went under and there was no way to know up from down. Weight crashed onto her, plunging her deeper. Jenny. She must have dragged Jenny down when her feet slipped from the wall. Anna’s hip struck something solid, and she curled into a ball. She was afraid to try to swim. She might be swimming toward the bottom. A heel or an elbow struck her on the side of the head, not enough to stun, but enough to shock and hurt. Then a painful jerk and she realized she was being reeled in, like a fish on a line, her braid being the line.
“Breathe,” she heard Jenny command, and so she did.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “I didn’t know if I was still underwater or not.” She couldn’t see Jenny, or the walls, or the water. All that remained to let her know she was not blind, and was more or less right side up, was the single star allotted to this graveyard. Astronomy was not one of Anna’s strengths. Living in the city, working a night job, was not conducive to stargazing. Still, she knew stars moved across the sky at night and was surprised to see this one had yet to rotate from view. In her previous incarnation, Anna’s internal clock was trained to register time to the minute. How long the first act was, how many seconds for Juliet to change backstage, one minute of blackout, the length of time it took for the night-blind lead to fumble his way down the stairs. Reborn to die in a ditch, Anna’s internal clock insisted the star had come into view hours before and should have been halfway to setting by now.
“Anna! I asked if you were okay.” Jenny twitched the pigtail she held. Given the situation, to answer “daydreaming” didn’t seem a logical choice. That’s what Anna had been doing, and, being called back to reality, she realized why.
“This feels so good,” she said, then laughed at the relief and wonder in her voice. The water was heaven; it cooled her burning muscles, refreshed her parched skin, supported her weight. She felt as if she’d fallen from the gallows into loving arms.
“It does,” Jenny admitted.
Anna was grateful she didn’t say more. At this blissful moment she didn’t want to hear the rest of the story; how the cold would sap their body heat, extremities would cease to function, lethargy and disorientation would follow, and they would drown. For this moment, tragedy could wait, as it waited in the second act of Romeo and Juliet, when the lovers were so beautiful and young the audience chose to forget they die horribly in the end.
“Can you get up out of the water again? After we’ve rested a minute?”
Movement felt grand after holding Scylla and Charybdis at bay for however long it had been, but treading water was difficult. Muscles, quick to uncramp and feel blood flowing again, were just as quickly complaining of fatigue. “I can try,” Anna said.
“If you put your hands on my shoulders, I could help hold you up for a bit, give your arms a break.”
“No,” Anna said, then, feeling she’d been an ingrate, added, “Thanks all the same.” Water flowed into her mouth. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to know how deep one was in the soup? In the black-on-black universe it wasn’t only muscle failure that could pull one under. Anna swallowed so she wouldn’t choke. Not a time to consider how many parts per million of human waste this part of the lake contained.
“Do you still have the end of my braid?” she asked the darkness.
“I do.”
“Don’t let go of it, okay?”
“I will cling to it as long as there’s breath in my body,” Jenny said. “I wish you could see me crossing my heart. Let me know when you’re rested enough to try the wall routine again. We don’t want to get too cold or we will never make it.”
“Why don’t you go back up now? I’ll try in a minute.”
“No,” Jenny said. “Thanks all the same. Do you want to swim back toward the sandstone where we came in? It’s wider there, and you could see the sky. That’s where they’ll look for us.”
“Unless they’ve gone to the bottom, our dead guys are floating around there,” Anna said.
Anna felt Jenny tug her braid gently. “Pretty scary stuff,” Jenny said.
The bodies didn’t scare Anna. When had she become so comfortable with corpses? When Kay had turned out to be such good company? The dead required nothing from the living, and there was nothing the living could offer the dead. All in all, it was a relaxed and amiable relationship.
Jenny must have mistaken her silence for fear.
“It’s not far to the mouth of the big pool. Let’s at least go that far. It will be easier to tread water with a bit more room. I, for one, am tired of skinning my knuckles and knees every other stroke. When you’re ready to try to get out again, we’ll pop back in the slot.”
Anna felt her braid move, Jenny leading her like a puppy on a leash. That was good. Otherwise she would have had only a fifty-fifty chance of swimming in the right direction.
In seconds the unutterable blackout of the slot was relieved by a slender line of, not light, but a less complete darkness. There was sufficient sky to house more than one meager star, and the canyon’s rim showed a silver sheen of moonlight. Across the water, the rock face they had descended caught the faint light—enough that Anna could discern it from the water.
“Do you feel like we’re being watched?” she asked suddenly.
“We are,” Jenny replied. “Can you see him there, near the blockage but way on the left?”
One of the dead men floated barely above water, eyes open, the iridescence of the moon caught in the whites.
“That must be it,” Anna said. It was not what she’d meant. This was reminiscent of when she was in the jar, naked, and felt eyes crawling over her skin like phantom cockroaches.
“What should we do?” Anna asked. “Sorry,” she apologized. Putting the onus of their survival onto Jenny wasn’t fair. Anna had been doing it, not because she’d abdicated responsibility for herself, but because Jenny had superior knowledge. Jenny had gotten them out of the cold water for a while.
“Do you know what the water temperature is?” Anna asked to change the subject. The bliss of chill weightlessness was becoming cold misery.
“Forty, fifty degrees, maybe a little more,” Jenny said. “The surface of the main part of the lake can get up to eighty degrees this time of year, but only the first ten feet or so where the sun warms it. The deeper you go, the lower the temperature. Are you getting cold?”
The concern in her housemate’s voice was so sincere Anna said, “No. You?”
“No,” Jenny replied. Both were lying, both knew it, yet it helped marginally.
“How long does it take for the hypothermia to get serious in forty-fifty-degree water?” Anna asked. Not that it mattered. After so many years practicing the intricate timing of cues and effects required of a stage manager, Anna couldn’t break the habit.
Stage-managing my own demise. Too bad life didn’t have a better playwright, she thought. Sam Shepard, that’s who she would have chosen to write her final scene. The man knew how to keep the action moving, yet never at the cost of language or emotional content.
“I don’t know much about hypothermia,” Jenny said. “Lake Powell’s a heatstroke kind of park. Are you ready to try getting out of the water now?”
“I can’t.” Anna was ashamed of her weakness but knew she hadn’t the strength to spider up the wall and wedge herself again. Jenny might as well have asked her to smash the sandstone separating them from the boat and safety with one blow of her fist. “You go.”
“I don’t think I can either,” Jenny admitted, “and I’m not just dying to be nice here. Climb twice, with the cold … I’ve lost my strength of ten men.”
Talking was too much work, and they stopped. Anna tried to think of warm things, but thinking was too much work as well. Rumor would have it that dying people saw their lives flash before their eyes. Anna saw a hundred plays enacted in a single heartbeat. “I have a variation on the climbing thing,” she said as the last image faded. Her jaw ached with the effort it took to keep her teeth from chattering as she spoke. “Want to try it?”
“Got to try something,” Jenny said. Holding Anna’s pigtail, she followed as Anna swam the few strokes into the slot.
“Like you were before—wedged—feet on one side and back against the other, but in the water,” Anna instructed. Blind, she waited until Jenny grunted, “Okay.”
“You’re all wedged in? Not treading water? Just braced?”
“Ten-four.”
“Be ready. I’m going to crawl on you, if I can find you,” Anna said. She felt a tug on her braid and followed it until she ran into her housemate’s legs where they were braced across the narrow water channel. “Here I come,” Anna said. She fitted herself into Jenny’s arms, her back against her housemate’s breasts, and braced the soles of her feet against the stone between Jenny’s. Jenny wrapped her arms around Anna’s, and in turn Anna hugged Jenny’s arms to her chest, sharing as much body heat with one another as possible.
“Am I squashing you?” Anna asked.
“Not yet,” Jenny said. “This is an aquatic variation of getting naked with friends in a sleeping bag, isn’t it? Where did you learn it?”
“Terra Nova, a play about Scott and Amundsen’s race to the pole. There was no sleeping bag scene, but the crew got a lot of mileage out of the image.”
Out of the water Anna’s plan wouldn’t have worked. The pressure she would have to exert to stay in place would have been too painful for Jenny. With the buoyancy of the water helping, they were able to raise heads and shoulders above water level, exposing a few more square inches of skin to the kindness of the July night.
