THIRTY-FOUR
When Anna Pigeon had first slunk, catlike and all in black, from the shadows of Jenny’s duplex to sit as a shadow in the evenings, the long dusky red hair roped down her back in a sailor’s queue, Regis had thought she might prove a pleasant diversion, an entertainment to get him through the summer exiled in Dangling Rope with the ever-clinging Bethy. Bethy, who was too insecure to trust him alone for five days a week in their perfectly respectable house in Page.
Anna Pigeon had proven more than an entertainment; she had turned into a nightmare.
“God damn that woman!” Regis shouted as he pulled back on the throttles. The red speedboat sloshed around the final curve and waked the beach of the grotto where Jenny was camping. Two tents were pitched, one at either end of the grotto. The visitors were out on the lake, Regis knew that. Riding Jet Skis with the kiddies.
Anna and Jenny were bobbing around like icebergs in the slot canyon beyond the rock fall. If they were still bobbing and not yet drifting lifelessly toward the bottom. Adjusting the spotlight to the left of the boat’s windscreen, he idled past the grotto and into the narrowing crack. Jenny’s boat, its fat gray stern reminding him of his wife in sweatpants, was moored at the bottom of the rock fall. He cut the engines, shoved a six-cell battery in his belt, snatched up two personal flotation devices, and draped two coils of yellow nylon line over his shoulder.
Having thrown out a bumper, he jumped agilely from the bow of his boat to the Almar and rafted the red cigarette boat of the NPS patrol boat. In seconds he was climbing the rock fall. Seconds after that, he was on the top of the rock pile.
The flashlight yanked free of his belt, he played the beam over the water. Beneath the blockage, the rectangular pool was flat and black. From the far end, where the narrowest portion of the slot cut up in a blacker shadow toward the plateau, crescents of silver were fanning out, ripples catching the last of the moonlight. Movement.
Damn that woman, he thought again.
“Hey.” The voice was so close it made Regis twitch. Had he not spent years controlling his body and face, he would have jumped a foot in the air.
“You need help? We were behind you. There’s a gray boat. Is somebody in trouble?”
Rudely, Regis trained his flashlight beam into the face of the intruder. An Asian man, thirties maybe, tall and leanly muscled, had scaled the rocks behind him and was standing helpfully at his heels in wildly pink-and-turquoise print swim trunks.
A witness.
“I got a call someone may be in trouble here. There’s no time to explain.” He pulled the park radio from its holder on his belt, keyed the mike, and said Jim Levitt’s call number. When Jim’s voice crackled back, he said, “It’s Regis. I think Jenny and Anna are in trouble in the slot at the end of Panther. I’m going in. I got a visitor here —”
“Martin,” the young man said.
“Martin. I’m leaving the radio with him.” Regis shoved the radio and the flashlight into Martin’s hands. “See if you can locate bodies in the water,” he said sharply, uncoiling the rope. When he had a line looped over a rock that wasn’t going anywhere in the next fifteen thousand years, he kicked off his deck shoes and dove off the rock, the yellow line, held in his right hand, trailing after him.
When he surfaced the water was alive with reflections. The Asian guy methodically sweeping the waves with the flashlight. “Anna!” he yelled. “Can you hear me? Anna! Jenny! Answer me!”
THIRTY-FIVE
Jenny’s feet had cramped, the insteps curling in on themselves. When she’d tried to pull her toes back toward her knees, she’d lost her grip on the wall. It wasn’t like before, when they plunged; this time she and Anna, held together by muscles too cold to move, sank gently. Anna Pigeon and the warmth she shared floated away into a lightless universe.
In Jenny’s fist was the front of Anna’s shirt. When Anna had drawn her arms around her, Jenny took a fistful of cotton to fortify an embrace she knew was going to get more difficult to maintain as the minutes clicked by. It wasn’t strength or courage that kept her holding tightly to her friend but the inability to unclench her fingers.
Too confused to know which way was up, Jenny waited, unafraid, in limbo. The air she’d drawn in as they sank carried her back to the surface. Her lungs sucked in the oxygen greedily. Jenny was oddly indifferent, as if the bellows pumped in a body not her own.
She had thought Anna was completely submerged. She wasn’t. Her chest was rising and falling under Jenny’s knuckles. Had she been able, she would have wrapped the smaller woman in her arms. When she could no longer move her legs sufficiently to keep them afloat, she promised herself, that’s what she would do.
Wild and racing, lasers slashed the slot walls, cutting out ribbons of darkness that fell into the darker waters. Hypothermia was disorienting, Jenny knew that. Hallucinations hadn’t been mentioned. Not that it meant anything. Not that Jenny could hold on to the thought or care.
A deep, ragged voice jangled through the stillness. “Anna! Can you hear me? Anna! Jenny! Answer me!”
The shouting seemed part of the death Jenny and Anna were sharing. When it penetrated the area of her brain still operable, and she realized the cavalry had finally arrived, Jenny tried to call out. Her jaws would not open, not at all, not one millimeter.
A splash. The cavalry had dived in.
Hope generated enough strength that Jenny kicked, keeping them above water a few more seconds. A blow landed on her upturned face. Bone and muscles, paralyzed with cold, clanged a death knell and she sank like a stone, Anna’s shirt still caught in her fingers.
Her hair snagged on something; there was no pain, just pressure as she was dragged. Jenny’s face came clear of the water. Her head rested on something warm; above her were stars. Slow as a dream, she began drifting on her back. An arm was across her chest. A lifeguard had jumped into the pool. Rescue had come.
Though her mind did not remember the lifesaving moves, her body did. From a source not her own, strength flowed into her arm, enough so that she could draw Anna onto her breast. She hoped Anna’s nose and mouth were above water, and that there were not now three dead children in the deep end.
Stars slowed, then stopped. No. She had slowed, then stopped.
“Okay, Jenny, this is going to be a bit crude, but you’re about one angle from an ice cube. I’m putting a rope around you.”
A light shone down from above. A beam like from the star to the baby Jesus in his cradle. In its vague glow she watched a bright yellow rope in dark brown hands pass under her arms and across her back.
“I’m going to tie this off, okay? When it’s tied, I’ll take Anna. Don’t you worry. Hey, guy! Throw me down the PFD.”
“Martin.”
“Yeah, Martin. There’s two there by the rock. Throw one down.” Warm hands threaded the rope over her rib cage, pushing it between her and Anna. Jenny tried to take it and make it go around both of them, but the hand that wasn’t clenched in Anna’s shirtfront was of no more use than a club.
The lifeguard who was saving them kept on talking. The words were too quick to catch, but the tone was comforting. Then he began pulling at Anna, digging at Jenny’s fingers to free them from the shirt. Anna was being taken from her arms. Jenny fought in her mind, screamed in her mind. Her hands let go without her permission, her arms fell away, traitors.
“It’s okay, Jenny. Don’t fight me.” It was wrong to fight the lifeguard. Jenny used to know that. She watched him buckle Anna into an orange Mae West. Then the lifeguard went away and left them in the cold water. Anna bobbed gently out of the erratic circle of light. Jenny waited to slide under. The rope didn’t let it happen.
“Jim. Hallelujah,” burbled up from somewhere. “Tie off that second line and throw it to me.”
