“No one told me.” Carin pushes away to climb back onto her mattress.
“You would have hated it.”
“How do you know that?”
“There were balloon penises.”
Clouds appear behind the hills, a breeze picking them up and stretching them across the sky. Carin opens another bottle. Her empty rolls off the air mattress and drops into the channel. I fish it out and plunk it into the half-empty pack. “Slow down,” I say.
“You have a maid of honour?” Carin asks, dipping her head back into the water as though she doesn’t really care what my answer is. I wait until she surfaces before answering no. I was hoping Carin wouldn’t ask, but I knew she would. I know so many other women, responsible women, punctual women, women who wash their hair more than twice a week. There are certain expectations. Carin doesn’t say anything. She smirks and looks down the length of the channel. Her expression reminds me of her younger self, the one who would stick out her chin stubbornly or kick you in the shins if she felt she wasn’t getting fair treatment. “Am I gonna get to meet him one day,” she says, after some time.
“Anton?” The tube has spun around so I’m looking at Carin’s feet. She is lying on her stomach now with her legs splayed open.
“Don’t I need to give my approval?”
“You’ll meet him at the wedding.”
“Oh, sure.”
We float in silence past a dinghy full of kids. One of them must have lost something, because they’re all quiet, staring intently at the water.
“I guess I should be helping,” Carin says.
“With what?” I can’t stop a laugh.
“I don’t know, pluck petals off roses or something,” she says, finishing her cooler. “Do you need a flower girl?”
I laugh a little harder and Carin joins in.
“Just show up.”
“We’re getting to the gross part,” Carin says and I lift my feet out of the water as we pass the underwater pipe. Thin, feathery weeds choke up the channel. Carin shivers, still haunted by her childhood phobia of waterweeds. I catch one on my toe and kick it at her. We laugh some more and when I float by her, I grab her hand and rest my heels on her air mattress. It does feel good to be with her again. When we’re apart I always forget I miss her. And then when I’m with her I’m suddenly hit with these horrible pangs of yearning for her company, even though at that moment she is right there in front of me. Usually I have to leave soon after that because something she’s said makes me want to strangle her. She’s always known how to push my buttons.
Carin lifts one of my heels. “You have claws.”
With my feet on display, I suddenly realize they have gone untouched for months, calloused and rough, the toenails curling over fleshy tips. How can someone forget their own feet? I am careful, always, with hygiene; I use grooming to assess a person’s competency. Carin, with the armpits, tends to rate very low on that scale. Instinctively, I dip my toes back into the water and then feel stupid for being so obviously self-conscious. “Aren’t we getting off soon?” I say, quickly finishing the rest of my cooler.
Up ahead I can see the end point, the concrete stairs leading out of the water and the big blue-and-red school bus waiting to take all the drifters back to the town. Above the gas station a large banner reads Relvis and Hot Dogs and a man in a white sequined Elvis outfit sings “In the Ghetto” on a makeshift platform in the parking lot. Carin hops out of the water and pulls her air mattress up the concrete stairs and over to the gravel driveway. I hoist the inner tube onto my shoulder and while we wait in line to get on the bus we push the air out of the mattress. Carin is distracted by a large group of raucous men standing in front of us, drinking beer. They board the bus and pay their fare and we follow them on. I hand the bus driver our money, but he waves it away and with a gesture toward the drunk men, says, “They took care of you.” I roll my eyes, but Carin struts over to thank them, grinning widely.
The only seats left surround the group of drunkards. I take one in front of them and focus out the window as the bus pulls away. I suddenly feel completely out of place in my hometown, out of place on this bus next to my own sister. Everything feels wrong; my bare feet on the dirty floor, my head nearly touching the ceiling, the friction of my wet bathing suit on the vinyl seat. I miss the cool white walls of my eleventh-story condo. Watching Carin I see everything I’m not. She’s already made a friend, chatting up one of the better-looking guys in the group. He opens a beer and hands it to her and she slides in beside him. She tells a loud dirty joke and the back of the bus erupts in laughter, but when she looks over at me I find it hard to even smile.
CARIN AND I NEARLY died on the channel one year and to this day she still refuses to take responsibility. We used to float down weekly, Mom piling us into the pickup with our inner tubes tied down in the truck’s bed. It was a great way for her to get rid of us for a couple of hours, dumping us into the channel at the Okanagan end and picking us up later in the parking lot across from Skaha.
One afternoon, standing side by side on the banks, Carin wanted to tie our two inner tubes together with rope so we wouldn’t float apart. The channel was high and fast that year, water licking at the edges, pulling along rocks and clumps of grass, and Carin was scared. With my legs braced against the icy water and my inner tube bouncing around my waist in anticipation, I shouted at Carin to hurry up and get in. She was going through a phase where she never wanted to be more than arm’s reach from me. “She’ll grow out of it,” my mother kept repeating. “One day she won’t want to have anything to do with you.” When I started to lose feeling in my toes from the freezing water, I finally agreed to let Carin tie the tubes together, but I made her promise not to talk to me if she was going to be clinging for the entire ride.
The first bridge the channel passes under is bisected by a large concrete support wall, and even from a distance I could see the water breaking around the pillar, creating a foaming mouth that wrapped around either side of the cement wall. When we reached the bridge Carin went on one side and I went on the other, the rope holding in the middle, balancing our equal weights. I clung to the wet rubber tube, afraid to let go and be sucked underwater by the strong current, my legs battering helplessly against the concrete as water poured over my head. Part of the rope wrapped around my calf and I kicked wildly to stay afloat, fumbling with the twine that linked our tubes, but the knot was on Carin’s side. I screamed at her. “Carin, untie us! Carin, you dingbat!” It was hard to hear her over the roar of the water, but she kept calling my name and I could hear her sobbing. Every time I screamed at her, I swallowed a mouthful of water. “It’s your fault! Carin! Your fault!”
The man came from my side of the channel. I hadn’t noticed him sitting there in the dark angle of the bridge, watching me hang on for dear life. He was standing up the bank a ways, making swimming motions with his arms, but I ignored him. His scraggly hair reached down past his shoulders and he wore dirty jeans and an unbuttoned shirt that displayed a hairy, tattooed chest. He fit the description of men our mother warned us not to trust. I watched him walk up the bank a bit further, take off his shirt and his crummy boots, and wade into the water. He fought the current out to the middle of the channel and then floated placidly toward us like some sort of grizzled river nymph. He straddled the concrete wall and pulled a knife out of nowhere as the water swelled around him. With one quick flick of the blade he slit the rope and set us both free. I floated away so serenely that for a moment the whole thing seemed like a dream, but when Carin’s inner tube drifted toward me without her, my heart stopped. Still on my tube, I tried to paddle upstream to find her, but the current was too strong. Finally I spotted her coming out from under the bridge, flailing through the water. I kicked downstream where it was shallower to catch her tube, and then stood to watch her thrash messily until she was practically under my nose. Her eyes were puffy and red from crying. “You can touch, dummy.” Those were the only words I said to her for the rest of the ride. The incident was another point of proof toward everything I already knew — that Carin was my responsibility, that I would always be watching out for her and she would be hanging on tight, like that rope around my ankle.