“Don’t—” she said, and he reached out and she slipped and thrashed and turned from him and held on, and he came at her again.
“Stop that,” he said, but she said nothing more—would not speak to him, would not scream. He reached again and she dodged again, splashing, and held on. He would only come so close, would only risk so much. She kept moving to the left and to the right. Like a child going around a tree to keep from being tagged.
He was breathing hard, grunting with his efforts. He came closer still and reached again and she turned away and with her back to him she felt his hand land on her shoulder and felt the strength of his grip. And though she was not facing him she knew from the pressure of his hand, the orientation of his fingers, where he was, and she turned once more in her hole and flung the cast backwards through the air and it landed hard, solidly, as if striking a rock. The impact shook her to her skull and he made no sound and his hand slipped from her shoulder and did not return.
She turned to face him. He was lying facedown on the ice, his mouth open, one bug eye open and staring at her. Something dark ran down his jaw and she saw it was coming from his ear. His breaths puffed snow crystals along the ice.
Instinctively she grabbed at him. As you would grab at a rope, or the branch of a tree. She took hold of his arm, his shoulder, and suddenly he was awake again, and he was moving—rolling once, slowly, like a body turning over in bed, away from her, and her deadened fingers could not hold on. He lay flat on his back on the ice now, his face to the sky. His bug eyes shut. Cold, thin smoke drifting from his open mouth. No part of him within reach.
She watched him. Watched for the smoke to stop seeping from his mouth.
She looked back toward the road—no lights, no movement; the pines and the shadows of the pines, and the dim shapes of the two cars beyond—and when she looked back he was staring at her. Or seemed to be. He’d turned his head and his eyes were open. Bulbous and glassy and empty.
She looked away again, downriver, at the wide plate of ice and the bend that went around the woods and continued out of view. She’d stopped shaking, she noticed. Her teeth had stopped chattering. No longer cold because she was no longer there—arms dead, chest dead. No feeling whatsoever below the ice, not even the sensation of the current pulling at her legs. Nothing now but the dead weight of sleep, of dreaming, of sinking into water that was no longer cold but warm—bathwater warm, and you could see everything under the water, every bubble and every rippling eel of color where the moonlight came through the ice and lit up the underworld, the shape of your own fingers where they slid along the underside of the ice, and there’s the slippery and wavering moon following along with you, gliding along on the other side like a bright eye that wants only to keep you in its sight, wants only to light your way as you go, and the journey will be long but you are not alone—the girls of the river are here as they were before, girls of pale arms and long yellow hair… and Caroline is with them too, her hand finding your good hand and gripping, her cheek so smooth against yours, her voice so warm and grass-soft in your ear, Oh, Audrey, here we go again—what is wrong with us? and it’s a voice to fill your heart, to make you want to laugh and cry—Oh, Caroline, Caroline! God I’ve missed you!
Drifting with Caroline and the others in the warm river under the ice, the moon following overhead, and there is no urgency to breathe, no panic about breathing, just the steady current and the feeling of her hand in yours, her body alongside yours, the two of you bumping downstream under the ice.
It’s so beautiful, Caroline, isn’t it?
It is, Audrey. But hush now, hush, she says in her Georgia voice, it won’t be long.
On and on under the ice, in the strange light, your fingertips slipping along the underside of the ice and the girls coming and going like the curious creatures they are, the moon following, and it’s two minutes or it’s two hours or it’s ten years… ten years and ten thousand years all the same thing to the world and only one creature in all its history ever keeping track, ever thinking of such a thing as time—ever desiring it or fearing it or losing it, and that was why you’d come home in the first place, because you were running out of time and that was why he’d gone down there looking for that boy, and there’d been even less time than both of you knew. And time had just ended, just stopped cold with no warning for Caroline and her family, for Holly Burke and her parents too…
But that’s not how it is, Audrey, that’s not how things really are once you’re outside of time—or inside of it, as you are when you’re in the river, when you’re in that current and you are drifting. That’s not time, because there is no beginning and no ending and you are just in the current and the current is forever and you are not alone, you are never alone in the current and the current itself is… is what?
Is love.
Is love. All right. But you have to be in it, inside the current, to ever know that. And once you’re in it you can’t tell those who are not, who you’ve left behind, that it’s all right, that it’s not what they thought it was. And that’s the worst thing: that you can never tell them what it’s really like. That it all flows on, under everything, even the ice… And that’s why you can’t stay, Audrey: so you can tell them.
But I want to stay.
No, you don’t. You’re too strong.
You’re the strong one, Caroline… You are.
Tell that to the deputy!
Did you see?
I saw everything. You fought so beautifully, Audrey. Don’t stop now.
But I’m so tired…
Almost there, Audrey.
Caroline—
Hang on, now. Hang on, Audrey. See it? Here it comes…
PART V
57
THE SHERIFF SAT in the cruiser for a long while, the engine off, watching the building from a distance. He kept thinking something would come over the radio, or his phone, that would require him to pull away from the curb and get back to town. But no one radioed, no one called.
Almost six thirty now and lights were coming on in the windows. He didn’t have to watch hers, as he’d already been up there once and she wasn’t home, but he watched anyway.
He would wait fifteen more minutes and then he’d go.
He waited fifteen minutes and said, “All right, five minutes more,” and two minutes after that a small red hatchback pulled up before the building and parked. A woman stepped out of the car hitching a tote bag to her shoulder, then stood by as a small child—a girl—hopped down to the curb. The woman opened the hatchback and collected a plastic bag of groceries, then took the girl by the hand and the two of them went up the walkway toward the building.
He waited until he saw light in the second-floor windows and then he got out of the cruiser and walked up to the building and pushed through the unlocked entrance. He climbed the stairs for the second time, and for the second time rapped his knuckles on her door. There was a long moment, a long silence, the sheriff watching the lens of the peephole, before the deadbolt clacked and the door swung open and she stood in the opening, still in her coat.
She was older, a little heavier, but otherwise did not look much different than she’d looked ten years ago when she’d been Danny Young’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend. She looked like a tired young mother at the end of a long workday. The little girl stared up at him from behind her mother’s legs and the resemblance was strong. Like seeing the same person at two different ages.