“That’s better.” My feet were braced and I could lean back against the webwork. “That’s not an easy climb for a grown-up,” I told her. There were times when I liked being five-foot-eleven, but this wasn’t one of them.
“How did you know my name?” she asked.
“Your sister came to see me yesterday,” I said. “She’s very worried about you.”
“Ainsley is here?” Ellie glanced up and toward the road, from where Vignale and I had both come. I couldn’t tell if she was hopeful or unhappy at the prospect.
“Uh, no. But she’s in town,” I said.
Ellie looked down again, toward the water. “She wants me to go back to Thief River Falls.”
“We both just want to know what’s bothering you,” I said. When she didn’t speak, I tried again. “Why’d you leave home, Ellie?”
She said nothing.
“Was it the kids at school?” I said, floating the broadest, gentlest question possible, so she could pick up on it or not, as she wanted.
“I can’t go back there,” she said quietly. “They’re all talking about me and Justin Teague. He told everyone, the shithead.”
Somehow I liked Ellie just a little more because she’d used that word. Besides, it sounded like it might be warranted.
“Was he telling lies about you?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No, it was all true. I did sleep with him. I had to.”
“Because you liked him and were afraid of losing him?”
“No,” she said flatly.
I’d thought this was what you were supposed to do with jumpers, talk to them about their problems until they felt better and agreed to come in. That didn’t seem to be happening here. Ellie Bernhardt didn’t appear to be feeling any better.
When I was her age, I was still new to Minnesota, separated from what remained of my family, feeling I would never belong anywhere. It wouldn’t help to tell Ellie any of that. When-I-was-your-age stories invariably fail to pierce the walls and barriers and defense systems of troubled kids who think all adults are, if not the enemy, at least useless civilians.
“Look,” I said, “there seem to be things in your life that need straightening out, but I don’t think the underside of a bridge is the place to do it. So why don’t you come with me, okay?”
She sniffed loudly. “I slept with him because I didn’t like him. And I wanted to change things.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Ainsley doesn’t, either,” she said quietly. “I… I like girls.”
“Oh,” I said. This just in from left field. “That’s all right.”
Angry tears stood in Ellie’s eyes as she stared me down. “All right for who?” she demanded. “For you? Some cop in Minneapolis?”
As if her rage had freed her, Ellie jumped.
And I did, too.
If it had been January, the river at its most frigid, my decision might have been different. Or maybe I would’ve stayed where I was if I’d done everything right, instead of making Ellie talk about her problems and getting her upset enough to jump.
Or maybe I was lying to myself when I called it a decision. I don’t really remember thinking anything. When I let go, that is. In between the time when I realized I had really let go of the framework and the time I hit the water, I thought of several things in very quick succession. The kid on the bank with his ridiculous pretend fishing pole. My brother, holding my head under the water in a trough when I was five.
Last of all, I thought of Shiloh.
I learned something that day that I’d only thought I’d known: the river you stick your feet in on a summer’s day, with a little shiver at its coldness even in June, is not the same river God throws at your body when you fall from even a moderate height. I felt almost as if I’d hit a sidewalk; the impact was so jarring I bit my tongue, drawing blood.
Most of the first moments after I jumped passed too quickly for me to remember much of them. My lungs were burning when I finally broke the surface again, and almost immediately I was breathing like a racehorse. The environment was so different from the tame, cool, chlorinated waters of the lap pool in which I’d been taught to swim that I was reduced to struggling in the current like someone who’d never learned at all. It was pure coincidence, I think, that I bumped Ellie and got hold of her.
She’d either knocked herself out hitting the water wrong or had gone motionless from shock. Either way, she wasn’t struggling, which was a blessing. I got an arm around her and rolled onto my back, breathing raggedly.
Anxiety stabbed me when I noticed how rapidly the railroad bridge was disappearing, and how quickly we’d been carried to the center of the river. The current kept pulling at my scissoring legs, particularly my flooded boots, which felt as heavy as cinder blocks.
I kicked for the shore, and paddled weakly with my free arm. I did that for a minute or two. And then I realized something: I wasn’t going to be able to save Ellie. I wasn’t a strong-enough swimmer.
I could keep us both above the surface, if I kicked hard enough. But that was all. And how long could I do that? After a certain point, Ellie might be dead, because I wasn’t at all sure I was keeping her face above the surface enough to keep her from inhaling water, filling her lungs.
And if I remembered my geography right, before too much time we’d be at the spillway, the lock and dam near the Stone Arch Bridge. That was, by far, the greatest hazard in the area. I’d heard that someone had gone through it once and survived. The word I’d heard in connection with that incident was fluke.
I could let go of Ellie and swim for the bank in my serviceable crawl stroke, and live. Or I could stay with her and drown.
I don’t think I really weighed that choice much. Rather, my cold arms wouldn’t let go of Ellie’s frame. We went under, briefly. I swallowed water, came up coughing, and saw in the sky above me that the sun had gone behind another cloud. The cloud was dark gray and wet-looking, but its torn edges were turned a fiery gold from the sun behind it.
God, that’s beautiful.
And then something on the periphery of my vision distracted me. It was a boat. A towboat, actually, but one without a barge before it.
It was all luck for Ellie and me that day: luck that the towboat was stalled in the water where its crew had time to notice us, that its powerful engine wasn’t going, kicking up a current that would have made a rescue impossible.
The crew had seen us. They were yelling at us, but my ears were too full of water to hear anything, turning them into the cast of a silent movie, animated, gesturing. One of them was throwing something.
It was a line, with an empty, sealed two-liter soda bottle tied to it to keep the far end from sinking. I kicked up great splashes on the surface as I headed for it, and with great relief got my free hand on the floating bottle.
Something strange had happened to my flesh in the water. Usually, when the weather is frigid and even warm winter clothes aren’t enough, the fingertips and toes go numb first, followed by the whole of the hands and feet. But when they pulled me out, I could still feel my fingers, but the skin of my upper arms and chest had lost sensation, so that I barely felt the edge of the deck as many hands pulled me ungracefully onto it. It was then I realized I’d shrugged off my jacket; at least, I wasn’t wearing it anymore.
Ellie was already lying on her back next to me, eyes closed. The skin of her face was so white from the cold water that the freckles I had seen as fading now stood out in stark relief. I sat up.
“Is she-”
“She’s breathing,” the oldest of the crew told me. As if to prove it, the semiconscious Ellie turned to her side and vomited up some river water.
“Jesus,” a young Hispanic deckhand said, watching.
“Are you all right, miss?” the old one asked me. His doubtful eyes were a piercing blue, although the rest of him was grizzled and faded. He looked Scandinavian, like a Minnesotan of old, but I heard Texas in his voice.