Joy For Beginners (28 page)

“Want a seat?” he asked.

She walked up closer, looking at his face in the moonlight.

“Not to worry,” he said, pointing to the band on his ring finger.

She dropped down on the pad and he took the opened sleeping bag and draped it across their shoulders. They sat next to each other, looking out to the dark water in front of them.

“I don’t know what that was,” she said, embarrassment lingering in her words.

“They say the canyon holds everything that everyone has let out here,” Sam remarked. “It just hits some people more than others.” He was quiet for a while, the heat of their bodies warming the space under the sleeping bag.

“Madge told me,” he said, still looking at the water.

“I figured.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Cleared for takeoff, as Robin would say. Landing uncertain.”

“You’ve got a good daughter,” Sam commented. “I see how she watches you.”

“I got lucky with her.” Kate smiled a bit to herself.

“Where is her father?”

Kate listened for suggestion or judgment in his voice, and sensed none. “We got divorced when Robin was in middle school.”

She heard the intake of Sam’s breath. “It must’ve been rough, being on your own for all this,” he said quietly.

“I’ve got incredible friends,” Kate said. “It’s Robin I worry about.”

“She’ll be fine, you know.”

Kate pulled her knees toward her and felt the smooth surface of a rock under her right foot. She leaned forward and picked it up, feeling its weight in her hand, the cool air outside. She pulled her hand back into the warmth of the opened sleeping bag. How long had it been, Kate wondered, since she had sat next to a man like this, felt the heat coming off his arms and legs, mingling with her own? The simple, intimate comfort of sharing space.

“It’s funny,” she said after a while, her voice contemplative, “when Robin was little, she was so independent—she didn’t need anyone taking care of her, but it was all I wanted to do. I didn’t know how not to.” Kate shook her head. “It’s what broke up my marriage.”

“How so?”

“My husband said he didn’t want to be married to Robin’s mother anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Kate took a breath. “So, what do you do when you’re not here?”

“I teach English.”

“Really?” Kate looked over at him, surprised.

“Yeah. I was a river rat when I was younger. I gave it up for a while there when I got married—I had this idea of what grown-ups were supposed to be like—but I missed the river. Now I come every August and do a couple trips.”

“What does your wife think about that?”

“She was the one who called my old boss and told him I needed to come back.” Sam laughed.

Kate tried to imagine picking up a phone, making the call. “So, how many times have you been down the river?” she asked.

“About a hundred.”

“That’s why you can get us through a rapid like that.”

“You did pretty well yourself today.”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t know where that came from, either.”

“You will.” She could hear his smile in the dark.

KATE WALKED BACK ALONG the river, feeling the air riffling quietly along her skin. She felt shaken, hollow, but somehow completely, perfectly clean. She couldn’t remember the last time that had been true.

She wasn’t the first one to cry to the river, Sam had said. She looked out at the big water, thinking about all the anger and sadness and love it must hold. People would tell things to a river they wouldn’t tell their friends. At least the ones they thought were going to live.

She had been a river, she thought as she walked back along its bank, the one they all told things to. Caroline, Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley, Ava—it seemed that when they were around someone who might or might not be there the next year, they said things they wouldn’t otherwise, let out parts of themselves they might otherwise keep hidden. Kate wondered sometimes now if they remembered what they had said and who they had been during those times.

Daria, always so spiky, so angry. Bringing her that odd bread on the red plate. Taking Kate into her studio where she never let anyone go, sitting Kate at her wheel with the clay, starting the movement of the wheel and then leaving. Kate’s hands on the clay, like touching silence, all the voices of the doctors and nurses gone, the clay beneath her fingers molding to her touch, the lightest impression of her finger creating a ridge, the upward movement making the clay rise between her hands.

Hadley, showing her the big blue chair in her overgrown garden and telling Kate it was for her, whenever she needed a place to be by herself. Kate sitting in the chair in the sun, hearing Hadley playing next door with Sara’s twins, the longing in Hadley’s voice clear and strong. Sara, coming over to Hadley’s garden and sitting on the ground next to Kate, her hands playing with the vines as if she could find herself within the tangle of ivy.

Marion in the hospital waiting room with Kate, making up stories about the people who surrounded them, turning ordinary strangers into retired circus performers and safecrackers, collectors of bottle caps and chandeliers and lovers. Caroline at the cottage, finding the book on the bedside table, her eyes meeting Kate’s, the endless recognition within them. Ava, her phone calls like beach rocks held out in the palm of a hand with the understanding that they are never the ocean itself.

She had been a river, Kate thought, the thing that took them close to death, made them suddenly, courageously, honest.

Kate looked out at the water in front of her. I know you, she said. She walked back up to the tent, where she quietly pulled her sleeping bag outside and then lay down, looking up at the stars.

 

TWELVE DAYS on the river, and the world was made out of small things—the distant clatter of the pots at the cook table in the morning, the scent of brewing coffee, as Kate walked barefoot across the soft sand, a metal mug in her hand. A wet bandana, drenched in the freezing river, tied around her neck on a hot afternoon, the cold water sliding down the length of her spine. The sound of the last dry bag hitting the sand as they unloaded the boats for the day. The smell of portobello mushrooms grilling, a chocolate cake baking in a Dutch oven, the cool, tart taste of a margarita made with the last of the ice they carried. The sight of a bat, conducting the night air with its wings.

 

THE LAST FULL DAY of the trip. Kate lay on the rounded edge of Patty’s oar boat, feeling the sun on her face, her bare arms and legs. Soon it would become too strong, she knew that by now, but for the moment, with the water lazy underneath her and the cliffs changing like an endless slide show in front of her, she was perfectly content. She looked over at her daughter, lying on the other edge almost asleep.

“Hey, Robin,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Robin smiled, her eyes still closed.

“While we’re confessing,” Robin said after a moment, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

Kate raised her head and looked more closely at her daughter. Above them, on the metal cooler, Patty pretended to watch the water.

“It’s not a big thing,” Robin said, “it’s just that I didn’t want to tell you until I knew what I was thinking.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, I knew you and Caroline would get all excited, and I didn’t want that to happen if things weren’t going to work out. But I’ve been thinking a lot on this trip, and it seems right.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Brad.”

“Really?” Kate did her best to hold the eagerness out of her voice. Brad and Robin were a project that she and Caroline had first talked about when the two children were in preschool together, but had given up on long ago.

“Yeah, well—I mean, I hadn’t really seen him in years. But when his dad left his mom, he called. He wanted to know what it was like for me.”

Kate nodded. How grown-up her daughter sounded, how grown-up they had made her be.

“Anyway, we started talking, and then he came to visit me and . . .”

“And?”

“Mom, really. You don’t want details, do you?”

“No,” Kate lied. Up above her, Patty grinned.

 

WHEN THEY ROUNDED the next corner, they could see that two of the oar boats had pulled over next to a huge rock some thirty feet tall. Some of the younger men and women were already climbing up a path that led around the back of the rock. Kate saw Patty grimace slightly and pull into the eddy above the rock.

“What’s that?” Robin asked.

“It’s a jump-off rock,” Patty responded. “Last big chance of the trip.”

Watching Patty’s expression, Kate thought not for the first time about the responsibility the guides must feel to keep their passengers in the boats and out of the fifty-degree water, protected from the heat and sun, away from rattlesnakes and falling rocks. Their group had been fairly well-behaved, but they had passed a cadre of kayakers who had showed a blissful denial of mortality. Who would pick up their bodies? Kate had wondered when she saw them aiming, one after another, for a hole in Hance rapid.

“It looks like fun,” Robin said quickly, eyes alight. She jumped from the boat and joined the line heading up the path before Kate could say anything.

Patty relaxed, stretching her back, watching as the first young man took a running start and launched himself off the rock.

“You know,” she said reflectively, “I sure hope none of the girls have their periods.”

“Why?”

“Well, that’s a lot of force when you hit the water. I did it once wearing a tampon. Had to get the darn thing pulled out of me in the emergency room.”

Kate stared at her.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

Kate looked at the young women now on the top of the rock and felt a deep, maternal urge in direct conflict with a sudden embarrassment. She may have given up showers and she no longer thought twice about walking around camp in her pajamas, but she was still not ready to yell inquiries about feminine hygiene products at the top of her lungs. She saw Robin looking down at her and signaled for her to wait. Then she scrambled out of the boat and started running up the path.

 

NONE OF THE GIRLS was having her period, which was a blessing, Kate thought, as one of them had jumped, screaming, just as Kate reached the top of the rock.

“It’s pretty cool up here, isn’t it?” Robin asked.

Kate stepped to the edge of the rock and looked down toward the river.

On one of the hikes, the group had climbed up thousands of feet above the river. Kate had looked down to see their yellow and orange rafts, small as fallen leaves on the sand below. But somehow this was different, the height at the top of the rock feeling taller with the knowledge that it was only a resting place before a larger and more spectacular commitment to the water below. Some of the group who had raced up the trail so confidently now looked more subdued at the prospect before them.

“Are you going to jump?” one of the girls asked Kate. “That would be so cool. My mom would never do that.”

“Mom,” Robin said quickly. “Don’t do it for me. If you’re going to do it, do it for you.”

The tone of her daughter’s voice caught at Kate’s memory. It was funny how much Robin could sound like her father at times, Kate thought.

After Robin had been born, Rick had become increasingly irritated over what he called Kate’s refusal to be selfish. His leaving had changed many things, but not that—in fact, being a single parent seemed only to compound the issue. Even when the oncology doctor had given Kate the diagnosis, when her friends had urged her to claim selfishness as the only real silver lining of her illness, she had smiled and nodded and done nothing, so used to standing back that the prospect of stepping forward into a world of wants and desires seemed more exhausting than chemotherapy. It was Marion who had insisted that Kate not go by herself to her chemo appointments; it was Caroline who had literally kidnapped her for a sunny day floating across Green Lake in a rowboat.

Kate looked out at the canyon around her, at the walls that were starting to widen again, lazy and sun-filled, at the river flowing beneath her. Tonight was their last night. The last chance to stand around the prep table and try to convince Patty to put less red pepper flakes in the marinade, to smell the Dutch oven cakes that Troy turned out every evening with Martha Stewart pride. The last chance to open her eyes in the morning and watch the canyon walls wake up around her. Tomorrow they would pack up the dry bags one last time, load the rafts in the dark and float through the sunrise to the take-out spot.

It was funny how things kept coming around. On the night Rick had left for good, he asked her, frustration racing across his face, to tell him one thing she had done for herself, to tell him the last time she had ever done anything she wasn’t supposed to do. Now, standing at the top of the cliff, she thought, Well I didn’t die. And then, in a sudden moment of clarity, she realized how true that was, how utterly, blissfully, selfishly true.