“Can you get up out of the water again? After we’ve rested a minute?”
Movement felt grand after holding Scylla and Charybdis at bay for however long it had been, but treading water was difficult. Muscles, quick to uncramp and feel blood flowing again, were just as quickly complaining of fatigue. “I can try,” Anna said.
“If you put your hands on my shoulders, I could help hold you up for a bit, give your arms a break.”
“No,” Anna said, then, feeling she’d been an ingrate, added, “Thanks all the same.” Water flowed into her mouth. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to know how deep one was in the soup? In the black-on- black universe it wasn’t only muscle failure that could pull one under. Anna swallowed so she wouldn’t choke. Not a time to consider how many parts per million of human waste this part of the lake contained.
“Do you still have the end of my braid?” she asked the darkness.
“I do.”
“Don’t let go of it, okay?”
“I will cling to it as long as there’s breath in my body,” Jenny said. “I wish you could see me crossing my heart. Let me know when you’re rested enough to try the wall routine again. We don’t want to get too cold or we will never make it.”
“Why don’t you go back up now? I’ll try in a minute.”
“No,” Jenny said. “Thanks all the same. Do you want to swim back toward the sandstone where we came in? It’s wider there, and you could see the sky. That’s where they’ll look for us.”
“Unless they’ve gone to the bottom, our dead guys are floating around there,” Anna said.
Anna felt Jenny tug her braid gently. “Pretty scary stuff,” Jenny said.
The bodies didn’t scare Anna. When had she become so comfortable with corpses? When Kay had turned out to be such good company? The dead required nothing from the living, and there was nothing the living could offer the dead. All in all, it was a relaxed and amiable relationship.
Jenny must have mistaken her silence for fear.
“It’s not far to the mouth of the big pool. Let’s at least go that far. It will be easier to tread water with a bit more room. I, for one, am tired of skinning my knuckles and knees every other stroke. When you’re ready to try to get out again, we’ll pop back in the slot.”
Anna felt her braid move, Jenny leading her like a puppy on a leash. That was good. Otherwise she would have had only a fifty-fifty chance of swimming in the right direction.
In seconds the unutterable blackout of the slot was relieved by a slender line of, not light, but a less complete darkness. There was sufficient sky to house more than one meager star, and the canyon’s rim showed a silver sheen of moonlight. Across the water, the rock face they had descended caught the faint light—enough that Anna could discern it from the water.
“Do you feel like we’re being watched?” she asked suddenly.
“We are,” Jenny replied. “Can you see him there, near the blockage but way on the left?”
One of the dead men floated barely above water, eyes open, the iridescence of the moon caught in the whites.
“That must be it,” Anna said. It was not what she’d meant. This was reminiscent of when she was in the jar, naked, and felt eyes crawling over her skin like phantom cockroaches.
“What should we do?” Anna asked. “Sorry,” she apologized. Putting the onus of their survival onto Jenny wasn’t fair. Anna had been doing it, not because she’d abdicated responsibility for herself, but because Jenny had superior knowledge. Jenny had gotten them out of the cold water for a while.
“Do you know what the water temperature is?” Anna asked to change the subject. The bliss of chill weightlessness was becoming cold misery.
“Forty, fifty degrees, maybe a little more,” Jenny said. “The surface of the main part of the lake can get up to eighty degrees this time of year, but only the first ten feet or so where the sun warms it. The deeper you go, the lower the temperature. Are you getting cold?”
The concern in her housemate’s voice was so sincere Anna said, “No. You?”
“No,” Jenny replied. Both were lying, both knew it, yet it helped marginally.
“How long does it take for the hypothermia to get serious in forty-fifty-degree water?” Anna asked. Not that it mattered. After so many years practicing the intricate timing of cues and effects required of a stage manager, Anna couldn’t break the habit.
Stage-managing my own demise. Too bad life didn’t have a better playwright, she thought. Sam Shepard, that’s who she would have chosen to write her final scene. The man knew how to keep the action moving, yet never at the cost of language or emotional content.
“I don’t know much about hypothermia,” Jenny said. “Lake Powell’s a heatstroke kind of park. Are you ready to try getting out of the water now?”
“I can’t.” Anna was ashamed of her weakness but knew she hadn’t the strength to spider up the wall and wedge herself again. Jenny might as well have asked her to smash the sandstone separating them from the boat and safety with one blow of her fist. “You go.”
“I don’t think I can either,” Jenny admitted, “and I’m not just dying to be nice here. Climb twice, with the cold … I’ve lost my strength of ten men.”
Talking was too much work, and they stopped. Anna tried to think of warm things, but thinking was too much work as well. Rumor would have it that dying people saw their lives flash before their eyes. Anna saw a hundred plays enacted in a single heartbeat. “I have a variation on the climbing thing,” she said as the last image faded. Her jaw ached with the effort it took to keep her teeth from chattering as she spoke. “Want to try it?”
“Got to try something,” Jenny said. Holding Anna’s pigtail, she followed as Anna swam the few strokes into the slot.
“Like you were before—wedged—feet on one side and back against the other, but in the water,” Anna instructed. Blind, she waited until Jenny grunted, “Okay.”
“You’re all wedged in? Not treading water? Just braced?”
“Ten-four.”
“Be ready. I’m going to crawl on you, if I can find you,” Anna said. She felt a tug on her braid and followed it until she ran into her housemate’s legs where they were braced across the narrow water channel. “Here I come,” Anna said. She fitted herself into Jenny’s arms, her back against her housemate’s breasts, and braced the soles of her feet against the stone between Jenny’s. Jenny wrapped her arms around Anna’s, and in turn Anna hugged Jenny’s arms to her chest, sharing as much body heat with one another as possible.
“Am I squashing you?” Anna asked.
“Not yet,” Jenny said. “This is an aquatic variation of getting naked with friends in a sleeping bag, isn’t it? Where did you learn it?”
“
Out of the water Anna’s plan wouldn’t have worked. The pressure she would have to exert to stay in place would have been too painful for Jenny. With the buoyancy of the water helping, they were able to raise heads and shoulders above water level, exposing a few more square inches of skin to the kindness of the July night.
“I definitely think it’s warmer,” Jenny said after a minute.
“Definitely,” Anna said.
“Mmm,” Jenny murmured in her ear. For a time they didn’t speak. Braced as they were, sharing heat, partially supported by the water, they might last a while. Not forever, not till daylight. Not even until midnight, Anna guessed.
Since Zach died, and Anna’d given her mind to the Grim Reaper, she’d almost come to believe in his corporeal existence the way children believe Santa comes down the chimney, eats the cookies, puts the gifts under the tree, then leaves the way he came.
Trapped in the jar, she’d realized the Grim Reaper wasn’t the guy for her, unless the monster was planning a fate worse than death. Embraced in stone and Jenny’s arms, Anna knew there was no “worse than death.” There was only life and the cessation thereof. Zach had not left her, he had died. Anna was not abandoned, she was widowed. God was not punishing her or testing her; he, like Zach, was simply dead.
