“I’ll think about it, I promise,” he said. He moved his fingers over the bones on the back of her hand. “What’s on your mind tonight?”
“I’m thinking about the river,” Tessa said, and an embarrassingly melodramatic shiver shook its way down her spine.
“I felt that. Did something happen? You were at the river this afternoon, right?”
“Nothing happened today,” she said. “I told you that I nearly drowned when I was four but that I couldn’t remember it until I nearly drowned on a trek in Montana last May.” She held up her cast, dropped it down. “That’s when I did this. But when I fell in the river, I remembered the first near-drowning.”
“Trauma amnesia,” he said.
“Is that what it is?”
“It happens a lot to children who have some traumatic experience; it’s a protective thing.”
Tessa felt the familiar creeping regret and let go of a breath.
Quietly, he asked, “That wasn’t childhood, was it?”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
Tessa felt overwhelmed at the many layers of history. “Oh, it’s a long story,” she said, and waved it away.
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
“It’s not that, it’s just one of those convoluted things that folds over itself.”
“An origami story?” His eyes danced, and Tessa felt a breath of lightness move through the heaviness in her chest.
She nodded. “It’s hard to even figure out how to start it.”
“Pick a spot.”
Tessa considered the fact, sucked in a corner of her lip. “There are always tours that don’t go well. It’s part of the job. The weather is bad, or you have a group that isn’t as well trained as you’d hoped, or someone gets really sick or injured. I had a guy break his ankle at ten thousand feet on the Milford Track, and it was a challenge to get him out. In the end, it took helicopters. But the weather was good that time, and we were not far from a hut, so it worked out okay.” She shrugged. “Lots of things can go wrong. You do your best.”
“Right.”
“This tour was cursed from the get-go. Bad weather, a group that was so varied in fitness it was like a junior high school gym class, some people pushing ahead, others trailing behind. It was frustrating.”
He nodded. “I can imagine.”
“We had rain nearly every day—not all day, but gully-washers for an hour at a stretch—making the trails soggy, muddy, sloppy. Everyone got soaking wet and cranky. We were spending nights in hostels, very basic accommodations along the way, so they’d be okay, get pumped up, and be ready to start again the next day.
“So,” she reiterated, “not great weather or trail conditions. A mixed group of fitness levels. And I got the spider bite the first night. It kept getting worse and worse, ulcerating, but I honestly thought it was just the wet conditions making it harder to heal. Every night I cleaned it up, doctored it, kept it dry overnight, and it would be a little less painful in the morning.”
Vince said nothing. Listened.
“Thursday, we woke up to sunshine. It lifted everybody’s
spirits. We had a good breakfast and got moving. My foot was killing me by then, but that’s the job—you do what you have to do. I felt so damned lucky to do this every day, and, really, I wasn’t going to complain about a freaking sore foot, you know? There were people with devastating blisters and they were walking anyway. So would I.
“It was the most challenging day on this particular tour—ascents and descents of about two thousand feet and several miles at above eleven thousand feet, which makes it hard to breathe. The weather report was decent for a change, at least, and we were shedding clothes in the hot sun by ten a.m., when we had the first break. Everybody was doing okay, or maybe I only thought that because my own foot felt like it was on fire. I didn’t even want to take off my boot. It was one of those things. You learn to live with it.”
“Go, sister.”
“Toward lunchtime, there was a descent into a heavily treed valley, and the clouds moved in. Here we go again! Everyone just groaned and pulled out their ponchos and trudged along. I was trying to be upbeat—‘You can do it! We’re halfway through. You can look back on this and laugh one day.’”
“I’ve had a few bike rides like that.”
“The day got worse—heavier rain, and heavier, and then there was hail and it got slippery. We took shelter under a rock for a while, and nobody said a word. We just stood there and glared at the hail. I poured hot ginger tea out of a thermos and passed it around, we split a few cookies, and when the hail stopped, we headed out. There was muttering and complaining and I knew they felt miserable.
“Again, things I couldn’t do anything about, right? But if my foot hadn’t been in such pain, I might have been thinking more
clearly. I might have realized that there was a bad bit of trail ahead and at least called out some caution.”
She stopped, narrowing her eyes so that the lights across the square turned blurry. Through the fog of light, she peered into the past.
“Or not. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “What happened was that a pine tree, loosened by the rain, went down sideways. It was a steep part of the trail. Not dropping a thousand feet to a rocky death or anything like that—thank God—but a long, steep fall to the base of the ravine. The tree started rolling, and that set off a little avalanche of dirt, and the trail washed out from under us. We all went with it.”
“Whoa. Nasty.”
“Yeah, it was. The slope was modest, but you can imagine there was an avalanche of mud that came with that tree—”
“Oh, yeah.”
“There was a river at the bottom of the slope, and two of us went in. I managed to get out on the other side and pulled Lisa out, too, and there we were, stranded on the wrong side of the river from the rest of the group. Everyone was muddy and soaked and scared, and we had lost most of our supplies. I had broken my arm.” She lifted it to illustrate. “One guy had a pretty nasty broken leg, and there were some other injuries—cuts and bruises and things like that—but we were lucky: Nobody got killed.”
“How many of you?”
“Eight.”
He nodded.
“Lisa and I were on the right side of the river, so we headed out, walking, leaving a pretty capable guy in charge of the others. We had no cell phone reception, and the rain was horrific, and we were freezing cold—God, it was just horrible.”
“And your arm was broken. And you had an infected spider bite. You had to have been in shock by then.”
Tessa nodded. The darkness pressed in, the black hole. She took her hand away from Vince and put her palms over her eyes. “Ugh! Why am I telling you this story? It’s stupid. All you really need to know is that she died and it was my fault.”
Vince said nothing for a minute. He sipped his beer, and Tessa heard the echo of “she died” hanging in the air like a vile curse.
“What I know about search and rescue,” he said finally, “is that survivors need to tell their stories over and over until they get them into narratives they can manage.” He put his big hand on the place between her shoulder blades, gently rubbing in a circle. “You haven’t told this story much, right?”
“No. I don’t want to seem like I’m trying to get sympathy when I really was terribly irresponsible.”
“I won’t give you any sympathy, if you don’t want it. I’ll just listen.” His hand kept circling, circling, on her upper back, a deeply soothing motion. “Go back to walking down the river-bank, freezing cold.”
“Right.” She leaned elbows on her knees, letting the images come back. “Lisa was one of the girls I loved to see come on my trips. She was quite plump, maybe sixty or seventy pounds overweight, but working on becoming more fit. Sometimes it was pretty challenging for her, but she had a lot of moxie, she worked really hard and never, ever complained.” She paused, put a hand to her throat. “Only twenty-two or twenty-three, this adorable, shy blonde. We were walking through the rain, soaking wet, freezing, and she
never
whined.”
His hand stalled, moved again.
“I only lasted for maybe an hour, and I just couldn’t go any farther. We should have stayed put, tried to find someplace dry
to get warm. Since it was so cold and wet, they would be expecting us at the hostel, so they would have sent someone out to find us. It had probably been stupid to start walking in the first place. But by then I was so out of it that I made some very bad decisions.”
He nodded ruefully.
“I got panicky, thinking we were going to have to spend the night outside, and I—ugh. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to remember this part. I remember having a conversation with Lisa and she volunteered to keep walking until she got to the hostel. She helped me cover up with leaves and stuff, and …”
“Take your time.”
“It must have been a couple of hours, but I was hallucinating. I thought there was a mountain lion with me, keeping me company.” She gave a little shake of her head, rolled her eyes. “And I thought I was four and they had just hauled me out of the river—Los Ladrones River—and I was calling for someone.”
She paused and took a long swallow of wine. “The hostel did send out a rescue party, and they found the group who stayed put, predictably.”
Vince nodded.
“And they found me, though I seriously don’t remember that at all. By then I was in pretty bad shape. I didn’t really come back to myself for two or three days. They did surgery on my arm, cleaned out my foot, IV antibiotics and hydration, and I was fine.”
“Relatively speaking.”
She shrugged. “Lisa never made it to the hostel. They didn’t even find her body for three weeks. She drowned, somehow. Probably the bank gave way at some point. Not that it matters. She died.”
“How about the rest of your group?”
“They were okay. The one guy had a broken leg, but it was fine. Only Lisa—”
“Who was twenty-three and blond and plucky.”
The words brought tears to her eyes. “Right.”
Vince said nothing, and after long minutes she looked over at him. He sat calmly, looking out at the night. As if he felt her gaze, he said, “You made some bad decisions, especially as a trained tour leader, starting with the first choice to go out with a badly infected foot.”
His calm reiteration of the facts eased the darkness rather than added to it. “You should have stayed where you were once you went down the mountain, too, of course, but that’s a rough situation, and not one anybody would be able to manage well. But I get it. You feel responsible, and you are.”
Tessa blinked the tears back. Nodded. “I’m not sure how to live with it forever—that’s the trouble, you know?”
“Right. You’re not a monster, either, and I like it that you know that, too.” He took her hand. “How does this story fold back to the time when you were four?”
His voice, his touch, his matter-of-factness made it easier to simply tell the truth. It was too intimate, and she would regret it, but for months she’d been lugging around all these tangled memories and sorrows, and it was a huge relief to simply lay the facts all out on a table before a witness. “When I went under, I remembered the drowning from when I was four. Or six.” She frowned. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking that I wasn’t four. My memories are very mixed up, but I remember things that wouldn’t be from a four-year-old’s point of view.” The strange, building sense of worry rose into her throat. “I think my dad might have lied to me about my age.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Not yet. I’m a little worried about opening a Pandora’s box.” She took a breath. “I’m starting to think he might have been mixed up with whatever broke the commune apart.” She put both of her hands around his giant one. “Please, don’t tell anyone, okay? I mean, if there’s something he ran from, something that would get him in trouble, I would never forgive myself.”
“See, that’s what I like, how you protect him.” He brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “I promise, Tessa, I will not say a single word to anyone.”
“Thank you.”
“So, what do you remember?”
“When I woke up in Montana, the memory that surfaced was of being hauled out of the river as a little girl. I remembered falling off the cliffs and being in the water and my dad pulling me out. But a lot of other images just don’t make sense. I have a sense of other people with me.”
“But not who they are?”
“My mother, of course, because she was with me.” Tessa rubbed her forehead. “I’m starting to think she tried to kill me.”
“Wow.” He bristled slightly. “At least Carrie didn’t do that.” His hand moved on her back. “I’m so sorry.”
“And, come to that, why don’t I ever think about my mother? Ever? Why haven’t I, ever? It’s weird. Looking at your girls, at Natalie, I think—why don’t I remember?”
“But you said you were Jade’s age or younger, so …”
“Right. You said Jade doesn’t really remember, either.” She blew out a big breath of air. “Sorry. I do go on and on.” She stood up, uncomfortable with herself, the space. Something. She leaned on the railing.
Vince joined her. Overhead, the stars were a deep sparkle,
the night still and quiet. He put his arm around her. “Do you mind?”
“No, I like it.”
He tucked her close to him. “My wife killed herself,” he said, and she heard the words coming through his chest, against her ear. “I saw it coming for almost three years, from the time Jade was born, but she just kept slipping away and slipping away, and in the end she climbed into her car and drove up to the top of a mountain and drove herself right off.”
Tessa tried to pull back so she could look up at him, but he held her close to his side. “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”
“People saw her. And, as I said, it had been coming for a while.”
The tears that had risen over her own guilt now rose again for Natalie, with her blue-raspberry eyes and the hostile tilt to her head. “Poor Natalie. She must miss her terribly.”
“Oh, yeah.” He moved his hand on her arm, up and down. “I knew Carrie was depressed, and I didn’t do anything to make it really better. She went to a doctor and took some antidepres-sants, but she didn’t like the way they felt, and then—I don’t know. I didn’t stay on her. It was sort of embarrassing or something that she had this mental illness.” He growled to himself. “I just wanted her to get over it, pull herself together.”