Holding Lies (29 page)

The water here had no options but to rush down the chute, bending left first, then dividing around a cabin-sized boulder, before rejoining and bending hard right and dropping over a lip into a gravy train of head-high waves.

He was here partly to scout the line, but mostly to find Annie a way around. He didn't want her in the boat, not with these gusts. As the boat rounded the boulder, it would be blasted with the full force of the wind, a wind powerful enough to shear the tops of the waves, as it was doing now, and blow them upstream. He'd have to keep his line and push forward at the precise moment if he was to make it off the wall. If he hit that wall, he'd never straighten in time for that last drop. This was too much risk for his daughter.

And yet, he couldn't find a way around the cliffs, not in a half hour of scaling up and down. He even hiked back upstream checking for a gap in the canyon rim. There was nothing that didn't require ropes and anchors.

“You were gone a long time,” she hollered when he returned. He could tell by the sound of her voice that she'd been concerned. If he was gone, how would she get out of here?

The world was huge and rolling and his mouth was bone-dry. He'd fucked up and broken his routine and run a section he shouldn't have run and here was his daughter hating him and in grave danger. “It's fine. I've run it before. It looks worse than it is.”

He thought of the ring out there somewhere, tumbling in the current. His daughter was safer when she was out there somewhere living her own life—the farther from him the better.

He turned his attention back to the rapid and tried to force out all the doubts, all the self-loathing, all the pain of her contempt. She was a client. He owned these oars. He knew this water. And he knew the secret, that every rapid is run the same, one move at a time: Straighten at the top, push, push, ship the oars through the first squeeze, push, push, push, quarter left, pull, pull, straighten, and ship—they would smack there against the rock and the wind would strike—push then quarter right and pull into position, push like hell and hope the boat makes it over the waves and around that wall and then line up for the drop. If they made it to there, he'd just have to stay straight and the gravy train would carry them through and into the pool. It would happen fast, but it would happen. He'd done it before, and he'd do it again.

Besides, this worry was a good thing, the body's natural caffeine; it was giving him the fast reactions and powerful strokes he would need to keep them in line and upright.

Double-check the floatation bags and bowline. The oar locks. The extra oar. The vests. He tightened his own, then reached a hand to Annie. “Here, pull that strap.” She did, and then he lifted the vest as he'd done when she was a child to be sure it wouldn't come over her head.

She was looking at him now, and he couldn't make heads or tails of her face. “What?”

“You're nervous.”

“So are you.”

“But you're the guide.”

He took his seat and stretched his shoulders and loosened his neck and spit in his hands and worked his grip on the oars. He was good at one thing in life, and this was it.

They were halfway to the lip when he called, “I'll get you out of here. Don't worry.”

She turned and hollered, “What?”

“Nothing, forget it.” There wasn't time now.

They were between gusts, thankfully, and the boat was keeping its line. More important than any single move, he reminded himself, was keeping the oars working in power position, at shoulder level and within reach. Form before stroke.

The current caught them and pulled them over the lip: like being released from a slingshot.

*

B
LACKNESS AND RINGING
and cold and bang bang bang. Who was there?

You're fucked now, Patrick O'Connell said. His voice riding a darkness spawned from the roar. You shouldn't have brought her here and you shouldn't have gone left around that boulder, and now you're fucked.

What happened?

Live by the sword … Really, though, it's your kid that I'm feeling for.

There she was, running through the grass toward him after he'd failed to come home the night before. Summer morning, the dew climbing the sunlight, an ethereal veil just out of reach. She did a cartwheel, and yelled, “See Daddy! See what Mommy taught me!” That's when he felt it.

O'Connell's voice: A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-four pounds. If you were forced to hold only the H
₂
O that exists in the column of atmosphere between your person and the limits of space, only that thin slice of airborne water, you'd be pressed into a wafer of flesh.

But this was far heavier than water. What he was holding was the weight of his failure, the weight of fractured succession: He hadn't cheated Rosemary as much as he'd cheated Riffle.

There's only one thing that matters in this world, Hank. You know that. And you knew it then too.

*

A
SANDALED FOOT
on fingers. Cold steel against skin. And bang bang bang.

He could feel it like a distant memory: the rush of wind in his face, the pillowy bounce of the boat riding curls of
white water
, the feeling of unstoppable momentum. He could feel it, but he couldn't place it. Or himself. And where the hell was O'Connell?

Gagging, and rising. A dark figure grunting. Punching the oar at something. His mouth tasted metallic and this boat was leaning and there was the river coming right at them, surging over the gunwale. He must have lost his footing (had he been kneeling?) because then he was on the bottom again, coughing at a lung load of water.

Trapped. Pinned against a rock. And Patrick O'Connell was doing his best.

Hank tried to say, “Faster,” but he heard nothing of the sort. He looked up to see Caroline dropping the oar into the lock and pushing hard on one stick. They were moving again, and he could tell they weren't straight to the current because the boat was wobbly, but there was the unmistakable freedom of the drift—and he heard a voice much like his say, “Straighten out!”

“How!”

How
to straighten a boat. How. It was so simple, and yet there were no words.

And then terrifying speed and the floor rising up and punching him in the face. They were slowing, slowing, slowing up a wave, and he knew they weren't straight by the pace of the climb and he knew they were in trouble. But then they were accelerating again and a wall
of water broke over the gunwale, so much that he was floating inside this boat which was floating on some river, and he turned to see the sunlight illuminating her.

Riffle was at the sticks. It was Riffle oaring this boat. She had come back to him.

*

A
FTER THE FUZZ
cleared, there was the nausea. “You've lost a lot of blood,” Annie said. She was poking at the tear above his ear. He could feel the pressure, but none of the pain.

“What happened?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. All of a sudden you were on your back and the oar was gone and we were broadsiding into the cliff. Everything was fine, and then it was like so fucked.”

“You got us out of there.”

She was looking at his wound, not his eyes. “You'll need stitches.”

He'd been knocked silly by oars before and he'd been razored open a time or ten too, and this would be fine. He just needed a few minutes here, in the sun, to shake out the remaining clutter.

“Was there someone else with us?” he asked. “I feel like there was someone else with us.”

“We need to get you to a doctor.”

“No doctors.” He could feel blood dripping from his elbow now, and he looked to see if he'd been cut there too, but he couldn't find a wound.

“It's coming from this laceration,” she said, pointing at his ear. “Listen. We need to get you to a doctor.”

*

“L
EFT HERE.”
H
E
pointed at the gravel driveway with the hand that wasn't holding a shirt to the wound. Annie was driving. She had loaded the boat too, only requiring the slightest guidance. Now, she
fumbled with the gears—grinding, roaring, a jolt—and they rushed up the steep hill. The nausea was still there. Not concussion nausea, he knew that well enough, this was different. It wasn't how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here nausea, it was the-stars-are-creeping-closer nausea. He hadn't eaten lunch, and now he'd lost a lot of blood.

Rita was coming out the door before the truck was even stopped. Slung over her shoulder was a blue case with yellow reflection strips on it. “Nice work, Hank.” She was smiling, which meant this couldn't be too bad. “Take my hand. Let's sit you right here. You dizzy?”

Annie had explained everything on the phone on the drive down. She'd brought that BlackBerry after all.

Rita was flashing a penlight across his eyes. “What day is it, Hank?”

He waved her off. “I'm fine, I'm fine. Really. It's just a cut.”

“Well then, tell me what day it is.”

He told her.

“Can you tell me the time of day?”

He had to think about it. But he could see the sun through the trees. “Around three.”

Rita pulled on a pair of purple gloves. “You're going to need sutures. Probably seven or eight of them.” She told Annie to grab a glass of water. “Cabinet above the sink.” After Annie had left, “So where did this happen?”

Rita had this way about her, this calm voice that was like aloe to a sunburn. It had been that voice, and the unflinching confidence behind it, that had attracted him so profoundly all those years before. And there, clearer than anything, was the look on young Bridge's face when he showed up that night to have it out over what had happened. “You were running a hard boat through the Falls? With Annie?”

“I've made mistakes, Rita.”

She was pulling back the suture's foil packaging. “I'd say.”

Somehow they'd gotten through it. Somehow, Rita and Bridge had worked it out, and Bridge forgave him. How had that happened? How had they gotten to where they were now?

“How do I fix this?” If anyone would know, she would.

“No, Hank, I do the suturing.”

There was a sharp pain, then another one. The needle and painkiller. “How did we fix what we did?”

Rita held a gauze pad to the wound, and leaned so that she could see his eyes. “You'll be okay, Hank.”

“No, I know. I mean. You know, between you and me and Bridge. How did we fix that? How did we get here?”

She went back to the laceration, and he could only see her shoulder, her silver hair riding the breeze. “I haven't thought about that in decades.”

Annie was coming through the door with that glass of water. “That's what I mean. I need to know.”

“Maybe we didn't fix it. Maybe we just moved on. Who knows? Maybe we decided we were too valuable to lose.”

*

A
FTERWARD
, A
NNIE INSISTED
on driving. “I'm not putting my life in the hands of a dizzy man.”

“I'm not dizzy anymore.” His head was pounding now though, and the gauze wrap was pulling hairs every time he turned to look at her. “Give me the keys.”

She was holding open the door for him, not saying any more. Like her mother, she knew the best way out of an argument was to stop talking.

They were already on River Road and halfway home when he said, “I'm sorry, Annie. I shouldn't have taken us there. It was a mistake. I shouldn't have put you in that position.”

She was quiet for a long minute, and he didn't know if she would ever talk to him again. Then she said, “There is something else I want to say.”

From the tone of her voice, he understood this was serious. “If I say it to you, I won't be able to pretend it didn't happen.”

“I'm here,” he said, turning to see the tears on her cheeks.

“I did it even after I saw what it did to Mom. Does that make me worse? It does, I know it. Some ethicist.”

He wiped her cheek with the back of his fingers. “What happened?”

“I cheated on Thad. I did it. I connected with someone and cheated because I knew it would sabotage everything.”

It was Danny she had cheated with; he knew as much without even asking, though it hardly mattered. “You're wrong,” he said. “You're not worse. But now you should tell Thad, and you should tell him why you did it.” He'd learned that much, if nothing else.

*

T
HEY SAID GOODBYE
where they'd said hello, under the rustling oaks in his driveway. It would be a hot day tomorrow; these breezes weren't wet coastal northwesters, but dry southerlies. He told her as much, said, “You're lucky to be leaving tonight.”

She was freshly showered and dressed again in long supple pants and fancy flip-flops and oversized sunglasses—she looked cut from a fashion magazine he would see in the checkout of the grocery store. “I always trusted you had your reasons for not calling or coming.” A tear slipped loose under those glasses. “I just hope it wasn't something I did.”

“No, not it at all.”

“For years when we spoke, I walked on eggshells, afraid to say the wrong thing and drive you farther away. Even when I got here, I was so nervous.” She laughed, though there was no humor. “I vomited in the airport.”

He took her in his arms because he trusted his arms. “This isn't a good answer,” he began a moment later. “It isn't an answer at all. But it's the truth. I put off calling you after you left here the last time because I regretted what happened between us. Then I regretted not calling you, which only made me put off calling you longer. It's no
excuse, but that is what happened. Regret, maybe, is the strongest current.”

And he thought then of his own father, escaped into his death, escaped from all Hank had to say to him, and all he was owed in return. A simple “I should have been the man you needed” would have gone so far. Just eight words might have set him free.