I sniffed. Among the other odors, the gasoline was almost buried, but not quite. “Good God, I’m glad you
caught that. I didn’t even notice.”
“Well, with all the other wonderful aromas-”
“Colleen!” Doc’s voice was tinged with alarm.
“Colleen!”
I took a step toward the tent.
Goldie stopped me. “He’s a doctor, Cal. What’re you going to do that he can’t?”
There was a stinging slap and Colleen gasped.
“Forgive me,” Doc said.
“S’okay.”
“Can you sit up?”
“Uh-huh.”
A quiet struggle ensued.
“Breathe,” he commanded her.
She breathed, audibly. “Better. I’m better. Whose socks’re those?”
“Do you really care? Just a little more to go. Whose dog tags do you wear?”
“Huh? Oh, those. Those’re Daddy’s. Mom gave ’em to me at the funeral … Men’s long johns?” She let out a choked laugh.
“Very fashionable.”
“I can feel my skin a little. Your hands are warm.”
“This is a relative thing, believe me.”
“Sweater’s way too big.”
“It’s Goldie’s. Put this on, then we’ll get us all onto dry land. We’ll build you a fire, make you some hot chocolate …”
“Heaven.”
I could hear her teeth chattering. Literally. I remembered that part of nearly freezing to death, too. My jaw hurt for days afterward.
“Can I sleep?” she asked.
“No!” Doc’s tone was sharp. He softened it and added, “But soon. I promise.”
He lifted her from the tent with great care. In the overlarge clothing, with her short damp hair sticking out from beneath a woolen cap, she looked like a little boy who’d raided his daddy’s closet. And she looked vulnerable. I’d never tell her either of those things.
“How is she?” I asked, and half held out my arms again. “She’s damn cold,” said Colleen, through her teeth. “An’ s’not nice to talk over a person.”
Doc offered me a thin smile. “I think she will be fine if we can get her out of here.” He gestured with his head at the vapor rising off the river. “Sooner is better.”
“Then let’s pack this up and get moving.” I dropped my arms and bent for the sodden clothing Doc had tossed outside the tent flap. It was already wearing a thin veneer of frost.
Goldie moved to dismantle the tent, while Magritte helped Doc reinstate Colleen in the sheltering driftwood, swaddled once more in a sleeping bag. Doc started to crouch next to her, but Colleen poked a hand out of the folds of quilting and caught his shoulder.
“Change your clothes,” she told him, and I realized that Doc’s jeans wore a sheath of ice from the thigh down. The hem of his anorak, likewise, was crusted with hoar, as were its sleeves where he had plunged them into the water.
“You must stay awake, Colleen.”
“Fine. Magritte can keep me awake. Change your clothes. I’ll be all right… I promise. Spacibo,” she added, in Russian. “Thank you.”
He nodded and rose stiffly.
“Viktor,” she said, turning him back around. She held his gaze for a long moment, then said, so softly I almost didn’t catch it, “I told you so.”
He said nothing, but when he turned back to face me, his eyes were glistening and haunted. I grasped his arm as he stumbled over the uneven ground.
“What did she mean?” I asked. “ ‘I told you so.’ What was that for?”
“We had spoken of choices.” He winced, and I tightened my grip on his arm. “Of how nearly impossible it is to make the correct ones. How difficult the past makes it to put yourself where you belong in the present.”
“Apparently, you belong here. If that’s what ‘I told you so’ meant, she was right.”
We had reached the horses. Doc halted at his mare’s side and laid his forehead against her steaming flank. “Cal, I begin to believe she is always right.”
We took over an hour to navigate the last stretch of the land bridge. It zigged and zagged, but presented us with no major obstacles. Colleen rode sidesaddle, still wrapped in the sleeping bag, across the pommel of Doc’s saddle. He kept up a running dialogue with her the whole way, making her focus, forcing her to speak. By the end of the journey his voice was a rasp, and she was cursing him for not letting her sleep.
We made camp as soon as we climbed beyond the river’s miasma, and laid a fire in the lee of a broken wall. There, Colleen and Doc went through the painful process of thawing out-stoically, silently.
Oddly enough, it made me realize how much of a kind they were. Very much, I thought, like father and daughter.
III
Animal, Who Are You?
… Suleiman-bin-Daoud was not proud. He very seldom showed off, and when he did he was sorry for it. Once he tried to feed all the animals in all the world in one day, but when the food was ready an Animal came out of the deep sea and ate it up in three mouthfuls. Suleiman-bin-Daoud was very surprised and said, “O Animal, who are you?” And the Animal said, “O King, live forever! I am the smallest of thirty thousand brothers, and our home is at the bottom of the sea. We heard that you were going to feed all the animals in all the world, and my brothers sent me to ask when dinner would be ready. ”
…and now the real story part of my story begins.
SEVENTEEN
COLLEEN
Life is strange. I knew that long before I pitched horse first into the new and improved Fox River; before my life was stretched out in the icy water between a submerged snag and Doc’s hands. They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like that. It’s true, but where I’d kind of expected a fast-forward movie, I got a slide show of random freeze frames.
Well, probably not random. These were all moments I suspect my subconscious wanted me to know were IMPORTANT. I’m pretty sure that’s what Goldman would’ve told me, anyway. And whereas I’d lived those moments from the inside, now I saw them from the outside, as if I were sitting in the audience, glancing at my watch and wondering how long this little documentary was going to last. At least I didn’t have time to get bored.
Slide one: I am smiling up at Dad, who has just helped me turn twelve years of hoarded allowances into a real, live, kicking, breathing horse.
Slide two: I am at a graveside service cringing under a twenty-one-gun salute while Mom clutches a triangle of red-white-and-blue to her breast but does not cry.
Slide three: I am helping a crumpled lawyer lead refugees out of an office building into a Manhattan blackout that might never end.
Slide four: I am watching Rory-or what’s left of him- scuttle across the street on which we live to lose himself under a manhole cover.
Slide five: I am having a quiet conversation with Doc in a moonlit wood that’s slipped sideways in space. Or maybe it’s a frozen plain that’s slipped sideways into winter.
Slide six: I am standing in a cold, damp barn in rural Illinois, half convinced that a kiss has just caused a freak ice storm. The world seems strangely upside down.
Slide seven: I am up to my neck in a frozen river, wondering if I’ve come to the last slide in the show. Doc is all that’s keeping my head above water, and the world has righted itself again, but not the way I expected.
Funny: in the moment that might be your last, you suddenly see everything clear as a bell.
Sometime after the slide show, I woke up late in the day from a very long sleep. I had no idea what day it was late in, but I was warm and dry. I was also bruised and stiff and my fingers and toes hurt, but all in all I felt pretty good for a person who’d almost been drowned, frozen, and eaten by a whatever.