spat into the water where it was caught in a tiny whirlpool and swirled out of sight. The coughing stopped and she breathed. The wheeze was softer, less pronounced.
That dead animal…Not Joe. She knew it wasn’t Joe. But still she wanted to find a way back upstream, just to check. Just to be absolutely sure. But it wasn’t possible. No way. There had been no sign of Joe anywhere.
Her head demanded attention, its throbbing increasing in volume and intensity. She cradled her skull in both icy hands. The pain seemed to swell like a wave washing over her.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m not gonna make it. Not alone.” A single salty tear slid down her nose. For the first time since she was a little girl, Nell cried. Covering her sobs in the embrace of her own arms.
Caught in the shadows, in the narrow lee of rock, she thought about prayer.
She hadn’t been to church since her father died. The car crash had killed both him and the wife of a church elder, with whom he had been having an affair. She had been twelve. And she had blamed God. Even though she realized that her father made his own choices and his own mistakes, and that God had nothing to do with either her father’s infidelity or his death, she still blamed God. Because she knew that God, if he wanted to, if he really loved her, could have made her father love her mother. He could have kept her father alive. He could have. And he didn’t.
And she hadn’t prayed since.
But perched on a rock, in a trickle of water, near where Pine Creek entered the South Fork of the Cumberland, after facing her own death twice in as many heartbeats, with the worst of the rapids—the Narrows and the Hole—yet to come and her husband missing, Nell thought about prayer. She raised her head and looked up. The canyon walls were closing in, a narrow channel of foamy water and sandstone in browns and yellows, and gray-coal-stained river boulders. There was a patch of blue and glaring sunlight visible in the westward-facing cleft of boulders. She wiped her face, the chapped skin burning. Pale, thin blood dribbled from her fingers. This cold, the blood flow should have been constricted by the temperatures. But with a fever, her body was acting weird. She clenched her fists. Out of options, Nell talked to God.
“Get me out of this, okay?” Her voice was rough, pitched lower with sickness. Her words grated along her throat painfully. She massaged it with one hand and kept talking. “Get me out of this, help me find Joe, and…and we’ll talk about us later. Okay? Just…don’t let me die. And don’t let Joe—” She stopped, the words strangled in her throat. Unable to finish the sentence. The thought.
Instead, she popped the skirt and finished the water in the third bottle, tucking the empty into the hull of the boat. That left her twenty ounces of water. She resecured the skirt and pushed off the rock, downstream, into the still pool. The roaring of the rapids ahead was louder than anything she had heard before today. In front of her, the river disappeared, crooking around and behind a massive boulder. In an instant she was back in the maelstrom. Heading toward the Narrows and Jakes Hole, watching for Joe. For any sign of Joe. Anywhere.
Canyon walls rose above the tree line around her, boulders blocked both water and her way. Water spirits, cruelly playful, knocked against the boat, tipping and redirecting and spinning it, trying to capsize her, tricking her with foamy, hidden dangers. Her boat was underwater as often as it rode atop it. She braced and stroked and pulled with the current, reading it, working with the flow to power her small boat. She swept past a flat-topped boulder capped with a series of altars. Guides often found places on rivers to leave stacks of the rounded, pancake-shaped rocks, each successively smaller rock balanced on the larger one beneath. It was half play, half superstition. Nell tipped her paddle at the formations in salute.
She whipped around a strainer that appeared out of nowhere. An image of the strainer that had trapped her flashed before her again, then vanished. But it left behind a hard ball of fear and desperation in her chest. She took the next series of wave trains too tight, too stiff, and was pulled out of position, making an ungainly inflexible run.
Just before the Narrows, she pivoted the boat into a tiny patch of still water river-right, between two boulders that didn’t appear to be undercut, with no current that could pull her under. In the cleft they formed, she sat. Her breath heaved. Nausea stirred. Dehydration was raising its ugly head, but it was to soon too break open the last bottle of water. Way too soon.
Coming up was the meanest, most gnarly piece of MacGyver water on the run. A long, squirrelly, hairy-hard, impossible crapid to the max. She had taken it before, several times, but it was a dangerous stretch. The last time she ran it, one of the men in her party got dumped. He had to swim the hole and came out with a broken arm, dislocated shoulder and compound fracture of his right leg. Getting him to help had taken the entire five-man crew the rest of the day. It had been a hairy, scary afternoon. Randy, an old paddling buddy, hadn’t been on the water since. And now she was running the hole alone. She searched around, up the canyon walls, between the rocks upstream and down. No Joe. But if he’d been tossed and made it to the shore-side of a boulder, he would be out of sight. He could be ten feet away and she would never know.
Nell popped the skirt and drank water, knowing that she had now taken in eighty ounces of water and hadn’t yet needed to answer the call of nature. She dropped the bottle back in the boat and resealed the skirt. Checked her palms. The flesh was white and bloodless now, nails slightly blue gray with cold. A callus was torn and should be bleeding, should be hurting, but her hands were too cold to bleed and her adrenaline was pumping. She’d bleed and hurt later, when Joe was safe. When Joe was safe…
Chest muscles tight, she peeled into the current. The roar of water increased as the canyon walls climbed. Three and four hundred feet, they soared above her. After a glimpse around for her husband, Nell paddled hard, choosing a position midcenter of the Narrows. With a series of quick strokes, she helped the water take her.
The boat disappeared and reappeared under the water, bouncing over it. Spray slapped her in the face. She maneuvered the tiny craft through the growling snarl of water. Jakes Hole was just below her. The current to the inside of the turn swept under and vanished, taking with it anything it could grab. Water on the outside of the turn curled up, ripping against the rock face of the boulders and the base of the canyon. At the bottom of the turn, the water curled continuously, like an ocean wave breaking without ceasing, a trap for the unwary. The river plunged down and down, a powerful churn of white water.
Nell took the turn in perfect position, her body guiding the boat with ease, as if the water spirits had decided to lend a hand. She swept with the current, taking the crest high. Around the turn, and down, she paddled with all the energy and might she had, letting the water carry her downstream, building momentum. She took a hard drop. Into another hole.
The kayak seemed to stop. Water sucked at the boat, pulling it back.
Leaning forward hard, Nell paddled, her whole body working to breach Jakes Hole.
She fought, reaching the curl and pillow of water that marked the lower boundary of the hole. Water shot at her face. Suction dragged her back and down. Her arms felt on fire. Weighted. Her wet sleeves dragged at her. And she broke through.
The small boat rose up and over and out in a sudden swoosh of movement and texture, the water beating at the hull. If she’d had breath, she would have whooped with success. Ahead were IIs and IIIs. Easy-peasy by comparison to the hole. She was laughing softly under her breath, but the movement of air in her throat was raw and aching. After he finished beating her butt for boating alone, Joe would be so impressed. She thrashed down the soft, panicked “what if…” that threatened to rise.
A quarter mile later, Nell spotted a patch
