There was nothing wrong with his voice, anyway. Then, suddenly, there was another voice.
“What the devil’s going on here?” A man’s voice, angry and demand- ing.
I turned, startled, and found myself looking down the barrel of the longest rifle I had ever seen. I heard a metallic click, and I froze, think- ing I was going to be shot for saving the boy’s life. I was going to die.
I tried to speak, but my voice was suddenly gone. I felt sick and dizzy. My vision blurred so badly I could not distinguish the gun or the face of the man behind it. I heard the woman speak sharply, but I was too far gone into sickness and panic to understand what she said.
Then the man, the woman, the boy, the gun all vanished.
I was kneeling in the living room of my own house again several feet from where I had fallen minutes before. I was back at home—wet and muddy, but intact. Across the room, Kevin stood frozen, staring at the spot where I had been. How long had he been there?
“Kevin?”
He spun around to face me. “What the hell … how did you get over there?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Dana, you …” He came over to me, touched me tentatively as though
THE RIVER 15
he wasn’t sure I was real. Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and held me tightly. “What happened?”
I reached up to loosen his grip, but he wouldn’t let go. He dropped to his knees beside me.
“Tell me!” he demanded.
“I would if I knew what to tell you. Stop hurting me.”
He let me go, finally, stared at me as though he’d just recognized me. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I lowered my head and closed my eyes for a moment. I was shaking with fear, with residual terror that took all the strength out of me. I folded forward, hugging myself, trying to be still. The threat was gone, but it was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering.
Kevin got up and went away for a moment. He came back with a large towel and wrapped it around my shoulders. It comforted me somehow, and I pulled it tighter. There was an ache in my back and shoulders where Rufus’s mother had pounded with her fists. She had hit harder than I’d realized, and Kevin hadn’t helped.
We sat there together on the floor, me wrapped in the towel and Kevin with his arm around me calming me just by being there. After a while, I stopped shaking.
“Tell me now,” said Kevin. “What?”
“Everything. What happened to you? How did you … how did you move like that?”
I sat mute, trying to gather my thoughts, seeing the rifle again leveled at my head. I had never in my life panicked that way—never felt so close to death.
“Dana.” He spoke softly. The sound of his voice seemed to put dis- tance between me and the memory. But still …
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “It’s all crazy.” “Tell me how you got wet,” he said. “Start with that.”
I nodded. “There was a river,” I said. “Woods with a river running through. And there was a boy drowning. I saved him. That’s how I got wet.” I hesitated, trying to think, to make sense. Not that what had hap- pened to me made sense, but at least I could tell it coherently.
I looked at Kevin, saw that he held his expression carefully neutral. He waited. More composed, I went back to the beginning, to the first dizzi- ness, and remembered it all for him—relived it all in detail. I even
16 KINDRED
recalled things that I hadn’t realized I’d noticed. The trees I’d been near, for instance, were pine trees, tall and straight with branches and needles mostly at the top. I had noticed that much somehow in the instant before I had seen Rufus. And I remembered something extra about Rufus’s mother. Her clothing. She had worn a long dark dress that covered her from neck to feet. A silly thing to be wearing on a muddy riverbank. And she had spoken with an accent—a southern accent. Then there was the unforgettable gun, long and deadly.
Kevin listened without interrupting. When I was finished, he took the edge of the towel and wiped a little of the mud from my leg. “This stuff had to come from somewhere,” he said.
“You don’t believe me?”
He stared at the mud for a moment, then faced me. “You know how long you were gone?”
“A few minutes. Not long.”
“A few seconds. There were no more than ten or fifteen seconds between the time you went and the time you called my name.”
“Oh, no …” I shook my head slowly. “All that couldn’t have happened in just seconds.”
He said nothing.
“But it was real! I was there!” I caught myself, took a deep breath, and slowed down. “All right. If you told me a story like this, I prob- ably wouldn’t believe it either, but like you said, this mud came from somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“Look, what did you see? What do you think happened?”
He frowned a little, shook his head. “You vanished.” He seemed to have to force the words out. “You were here until my hand was just a couple of inches from you. Then, suddenly, you were gone. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood there. Then you were back again and on the other side of the room.”
“Do you believe it yet?”
He shrugged. “It happened. I saw it. You vanished and you reappeared. Facts.”
“I reappeared wet, muddy, and scared to death.” “Yes.”
“And I know what I saw, and what I did—my facts. They’re no crazier than yours.”
THE RIVER 17
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m not sure it matters what we think.” “What do you mean?”
“Well … it happened once. What if it happens again?” “No. No, I don’t think …”
“You don’t know!” I was starting to shake again. “Whatever it was, I’ve had enough of it! It almost killed me!”
“Take it easy,” he said. “Whatever happens, it’s not going to do you any good to panic yourself again.”
I moved uncomfortably, looked around. “I feel like it could happen again—like it could happen anytime. I don’t feel secure here.”
“You’re just scaring yourself.”
“No!” I turned to glare at him, and he looked so worried I turned away again. I wondered bitterly whether he was worried about my vanishing again or worried about my sanity. I still didn’t think he believed my story. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I hope you are. Maybe I’m just like a vic- tim of robbery or rape or something—a victim who survives, but who doesn’t feel safe any more.” I shrugged. “I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe any more.”
He made his voice very gentle. “If it happens again, and if it’s real, the boy’s father will know he owes you thanks. He won’t hurt you.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what could happen.” I stood up unsteadily. “Hell, I don’t blame you for humoring me.” I paused to give him a chance to deny it, but he didn’t. “I’m beginning to feel as though I’m humoring myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it’s beginning to recede from me somehow. It’s becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got sec- ond hand.”
“Or like a … a dream?”
I looked down at him. “You mean a hallucination.” “All right.”
“No! I know what I’m doing. I can see. I’m pulling away from it because it scares me so. But it was real.”
“Let yourself pull away from it.” He got up and took the muddy towel from me. “That sounds like the best thing you can do, whether it was real or not. Let go of it.”
The Fire
1
I tried.
I showered, washed away the mud and the brackish water, put on clean clothes, combed my hair …
“That’s a lot better,” said Kevin when he saw me. But it wasn’t.
Rufus and his parents had still not quite settled back and become the “dream” Kevin wanted them to be. They stayed with me, shadowy and threatening. They made their own limbo and held me in it. I had been afraid that the dizziness might come back while I was in the shower, afraid that I would fall and crack my skull against the tile or that I would go back to that river, wherever it was, and find myself standing naked among strangers. Or would I appear somewhere else naked and totally vulnerable?
I washed very quickly.
Then I went back to the books in the living room, but
