“Good job.” She heard Madge’s voice behind her. “Just relax.”
And as Madge spoke, the rattlesnake uncurled itself and moved farther down the trail to where, Kate saw with a start, another rattlesnake, smaller and lighter in color, emerged from the bushes. The two snakes circled each other.
“Hold still,” Madge said, her voice reverent.
“What?”
“Wait; you’ll see.”
The snakes moved toward each other, bodies sliding over and under, rising up, extravagantly high, a flowing contrast of white bellies and dark backs, climbing each other in a constantly moving helix, their heads weaving apart, then together. At some point, gravity and balance would pull them back to the ground, where they would start again. As Kate watched their movements, unending, sinuous, she felt a tug in her belly, a feeling of slowly moving gears.
“Incredible,” she said in a hushed voice.
“The river must want you to be here,” Madge said, “to show you that.”
SOMEWHERE AROUND the sixth day, time had discarded standard forms of measurement. It hung effortlessly in the air at night, stretched as they waited at the top of a rapid, snapping tight like a rubber band as they shot through the heaving water. It expanded huge and golden as they hiked up slot canyons, cooked dinner, played Frisbee in a giant arching cavern that could easily have sheltered twenty groups their size. As paddlers on the river, they got up while it was barely light, went to bed with the sun without ever checking watches, which few of them still wore, anyway.
At the confluence of the Little Colorado River, the big river had changed from green to brown, becoming thick and gritty, an amphibious creature, half dirt, half water, so solid at times Kate almost thought it might walk up out of its banks. At night the sky was filled with so many stars it seemed as if the darkness was peeking through a wash of light. In this world, hair was something you wet down to keep you cool, fingernails were tools, not adornment.
When they reached Phantom Ranch, a halfway point where some trips picked up and dropped off passengers who either hiked in or out the ten-mile trail to the top of the rim, they were startled by even the rustic signs of habitation there, at the sharp edges of civilization still clinging to those who had hiked in that morning. That night at camp, the guides told them that they were about to enter the gorge, where the walls narrowed even further.
“OKAY,” DECLARED SAM, “we’re coming to a big one now.” He steered the paddle boat into an eddy where it bobbed, out of the current, restless but stationary. Kate listened; she could hear the rapid up ahead, growling and crashing, a level of noise unlike any she had heard before in the trip, and her stomach wrapped around itself and tightened up toward her lungs, making her breath short and shallow.
She remembered the doctor at the hospital, the one whose brown eyes were kind above his mask, asking her, “Kate, are you remembering to breathe these days?” As if you could forget. Except of course you did, perhaps even on purpose, as if in the back of your mind you suspected that you had only been allotted so many breaths in your life, a number designated on the day you were born, precious inhalations and exhalations that you had given up so unthinkingly throughout your life, walking to the post office, kissing a boy you should never have dated in the first place. Breath you held on to now because each one out felt like one less left.
“Breath is life in, Kate,” the doctor had said, as if he knew. “Not life out.”
Sitting in the eddy, feeling the river licking the sides of the paddle boat, Kate took a deep inhalation, swelling her lungs, feeling the air flow into her arms, her stomach, pushing down against the tightness. Her hands gripped the paddle and she looked back at Sam.
“Now, Hermit has lots of ups and downs,” Sam was explaining, “but it’s a fun one. Just do what I tell you when I tell you and don’t forget to brace a foot against the side of the boat; it’ll help hold you in. We won’t tip over, but if we do there are oar boats ahead and behind us to pick you up.
“Lead paddlers”—Sam nodded at Kate and Arnie—“you’re setting the pace. The other paddlers go only as fast as you do, so when I say, you two dig with those paddles as if there’s treasure in China, okay?” He smiled the Sam smile, the one that would make even the businesswoman who still steadfastly applied mascara every morning pack up her own tent and carry it down to the boats.
Kate nodded. How had she ended up in the paddle boat, in this seat, today? She honestly couldn’t remember. It had been such a blur, getting on the life jackets, Sam cinching them tight. They’d been joking about Mammy and Scarlett and corsets, and he handed her a paddle and she stepped into the only place left in the boat, too nervous to notice the significance of her position. Rule of life, Kate noted with irony, always know your seat in the boat before you set out.
“Everybody ready?” Sam asked, and Kate realized there was no option to say no. With rock walls rising high above their heads and a river flowing at a rate of tens of thousands of cubic feet per second, there was only one way you could go, and only one way to do it—after Phantom Ranch, hiking out was no longer a possibility, the only exit by emergency helicopter or the take-out point a week downriver. For Kate, after living in the cancer world where it seemed there was always another experimental medicine, another course of treatment, where the promise of success was carefully protected behind an ever-changing wall of percentages and statistics, the reality of the river was stark.
“Let’s get in line then,” Sam said. “Easy paddling for now.”
Kate saw the rapid before the other paddlers, its angry brown water pitching and roiling, white spray exploding up in all directions. Kate watched as Patty’s oar boat met and crashed through the first wave, disappearing under the river and shuddering up like a horse pulling itself out of the thick mud-water. Thousands of pounds of water. Kate had never thought of water as weight before, but she did now, as she watched it churning upon itself, clawing at the sides of the canyon it had created.
This water eats rocks, Kate thought, in a moment of clarity. I am in a rubber boat.
“Our turn,” Sam directed, and the paddle boat moved steadily forward, and then down the smooth tongue of water into the rapid. Kate looked at the first wave coming at her, their speed suddenly fast, saw its arc, how it would rise, was rising, above her head, and she reached down and stuck her paddle in the river. The boat moved forward, but not enough; they wouldn’t quite clear the crest. The top of it blasted over her, drenching her arms and face.
She shook her head to clear the water from her eyes. When she opened them she saw another wave. Her arms flailed, running the paddle across the top of the water that moved toward her, the wave too close, too fast.
“Paddle hard!” Sam yelled from the back of the boat.
She took a quick look at Arnie, who was paddling rapidly, steadily next to her. She aimed her paddle at the water, trying to keep pace with him. The wave smashed into them, sideswiping her with a wall of freezing water. Their boat wasn’t flipping, but she knew she was doing nothing to help them stay upright.
Panicked, she shoved her foot farther into the gap between the rim of the boat and the base and felt it catch in one of the straps for her water bottle. She yanked at her foot; it didn’t move. She’d never get out if they tipped, she realized with a flash of shock.
“Dig!”
Sam yelled. Kate looked up and saw the next wave, higher than the last, and fear poured through her. Her foot was a block of weight, trapped in the straps. She saw the water rearing up to claim her boat, suck it under the wave, ready to throw her out and chew her up against the rocks. She raised her paddle high and felt pain spark across the scars on her chest.
“You son of a
bitch
,” she spat out, the water snatching the words from her mouth even as she said them.
She hefted higher, reaching above her shoulders for height and force, and plunged the blade in, pulling it toward her against the resistance of the cold, greedy water. Again, higher, harder, up, down, in, pull, feeling every muscle, shoulders and arms reaching up, slamming down—fear and hate and anger coursing through and out of her body until she thought that the rage of the water must be made from her.
“That’s it!” Sam yelled as they vaulted over the top. The next wave roared into view in front of them, huge.
“Dig now!”
She could sense Arnie next to her, matching her pace, upping it. She could feel the other paddlers behind her, all of them together pushing their ridiculous seedpod of a boat through this hurricane of a river. Seeing the next wave rising, impossibly, twenty feet tall, she launched her weight forward, almost out of the boat, letting her tangled foot anchor her, raising her paddle high up into the wave coming at her, digging in, again and again, climbing the wall of water like a ladder, feeling the paddlers straining behind her, taking the boat up, up, up until they were past the crest and plummeting down the other side.
They rocketed their way over the next three waves, each of them easier, until suddenly it was over and they coasted into a current that traveled quietly downstream, a few ripples on its surface, like the hiccups of a child at the end of a tantrum.
“Yes!”
Sam cheered, and their team held paddles in the air over their heads in a victory salute. Kate reached up, breathing hard, feeling the strength of her arms, the power of her legs and lungs.
“You were great,” Arnie said to Kate, his eyes sweeping over her appreciatively. Kate smiled and bent over to work at the strap around her foot. Arnie watched her, curious, and then saw what she was doing.
“Oh, man . . .” he said, and shook his head, eyes large.
“Well, at least it would’ve been easy to find the body,” Kate remarked. She and Arnie looked at each other and started laughing, big, huge gasps filled with air and no easier to control.
Robin’s oar boat pulled up next to them and started bailing water. Kate thought what a lumbering beast it seemed next to their sweet, trustworthy little paddle boat. How beautiful her daughter looked, her hair and life jacket dripping water, her eyes alight.
“Wow, Mom,” Robin called over, “you were something else out there.”
Kate shot Arnie a warning look; he returned it with a gaze of innocence. “Didn’t know she had it in her, did you?” he called back to Robin.
KATE SLIPPED OUT of her sleeping bag and slid down to the bottom of the tent, unzipping the flaps quietly so as not to wake Robin. It was still warm outside and the moon was almost full, illuminating the sand and scrub brush around her. She had to pee, of course. She could walk to the groover—a name whose origin she still didn’t understand—or she could go relieve herself at the water’s edge. The latter was closer, and there was less chance of stepping on a sleeping rattlesnake on the trail. Kate slipped her feet into her flip-flops and made her way cautiously to the shore.
She crouched with her toes at the edge of the water, feeling the air move across her exposed skin. She could hear the rapids upriver, and the ones that waited for her tomorrow. But here in an eddy the water lapped with friendly insistence against the sand. Kate relaxed, feeling the liquid leaving her body and entering the river, then looked up to see a sky overwhelmed with stars, their light covering the vast darkness like sugar spilled across a counter.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. She pulled up her shorts and sat back on the sand, staring up, breathing in the river air, the sound of the rapids moving through her body. Her shoulders, which she thought would be aching after the exertion of the day, relaxed.
And then, like an unexpected punch in the stomach, she was crying. Sobbing, her hand covering her mouth in a desperate attempt to muffle the sound, her breath heaving in and out of her lungs as if she was going under for the third time. She rocked forward, head reaching toward her crossed legs, then back. She couldn’t stop. The river was loud, but she felt the need to get away so no one would hear.
She stood up, still gasping, and walked upriver away from the tents, her vision blurred. She reached a spot where a huge rock, twice her height, rose out of the water and she huddled beside it, her body beaten by sobs that wouldn’t stop, even as a part of her mind, the rational part, looked for a reason and found none. Still she sobbed, and for the first time in her life she was unable to control it. All those months of chemo, chemicals ripping through her body, hundreds of hours crunched over a toilet, shaking in bed, feeling people prick and scan and cut her body, sweeping up her hair, her life, from the floor, and she had always been able to stop crying, but not now. She gave up and leaned into the sobs, feeling them wash over her, pulling up breath from the bottom of her stomach.
She wasn’t sure how long it was until the sobs finally slowed. She washed her face in the river water, hands shaking, and watched its dark surface moving in front of her like a great secret. After a while, she realized she was cold, and she stood.
“You okay?”
The words came out of the night behind her. Kate recognized Sam’s voice.
“Oh, hell,” she said under her breath. She turned around, hands gripping her upper arms. She could just make out Sam’s form under a sleeping bag laid out about twenty feet above the river line. “I thought the guides were sleeping at the other end.”
“I like the privacy.” His voice held a smiling irony. He sat up. “Don’t worry; you aren’t the first person who’s cried to the river. Are you cold?”
She nodded, and made a movement to return downstream.
“Maybe you should give yourself a few minutes before you go back,” Sam said. “I don’t think you’re ready yet.”
“How do you know?”
“Like I said.” He stood up, turned his inflatable pad parallel to the river and sat back down on one end of it.