“I want to wring that boy’s neck too.”
“Mom. You told me you’d be able to handle it.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t get mad, though,” said Susan. “It infuriates me. Not just what the boy did to you. Didn’t anyone look in on you? You were passed out! You could have choked on your own vomit! What’s with these kids?”
Amy shrugged. She’d been the subject of whispery speculation for about a month—until Thanksgiving, actually, when someone else did something dumb and provided new gossip for the high school tabloids.
Now she lay against her hospital pillow, watching her mother pace. She wanted desperately to comfort her mother right now. I’m alive, she wanted to say. I survived. But she knew her mother’s heart was broken, and nothing she could say would help. And she hated herself, for getting drunk that night and doing this to her mother.
“Mom. Stop. I’m all right.”
Susan took a deep breath and sat down beside Amy and searched her eyes.
“It isn’t easy, hearing this,” she said. “But you’re right. I promised you I wouldn’t flip out. I feel like I’m going to flip out, but I won’t. I just need to vent a little. But I’ll deal with this. You’ll deal with this. It’s not going to wreck your life. You’re not going to punish yourself forever. We’re going to figure out the best solution, and it might not be clear for a couple of days, or even weeks, but we’re going to get through this. Remember what JT said? You lose your confidence, you lose everything. My goodness.” She sighed. “What if we had never come down the river? What if this had happened back in Mequon? I don’t know if I would have been able to get through all this and come out whole. Maybe I would have. But I don’t know.” She took Amy’s face between her hands and shook her own head in a way that meant yes.
“We’ll figure it out,” she said again.
“Okay” said Amy.
And even Amy thought that particular word, “okay,” sounded different, when spoken for once without anger or sarcasm.
DAYS TWELVE AND THIRTEEN
River Miles 179–225
Below Lava to Diamond Creek
50
Days Twelve and Thirteen
Miles 179–225
Everyone had a theory about the dog. Evelyn was sure he was dead. She recalled Lava Falls, and how much water there was. Automatically she computed numerous factors in her head—volume, body weight, time, and temperature—and knew there was simply no way the dog could have survived.
Jill thought he was dead too. Not by any calculation of the odds, but because of her ingrained belief—despite this river trip—in her own personal Murphy’s Law: if something could possibly come along to make her boys forever happy, it wouldn’t. She began to regret not letting the boys get a dog earlier—perhaps if they already had a dog, they wouldn’t have grown so attached to Blender. She wondered how much grieving time she should allow before suggesting they visit the animal shelter in Salt Lake City.
Mark, on the other hand, was convinced the dog had survived, that it was only a matter of time before he caught up with them.
“That dog has nine lives,” he declared, right in front of the boys, which made Jill wince for all its false hope. At the same time, she envied his optimism.
Please, just don’t let us find a body, she thought.
Ruth, who had buried a yardful of pets, was more philosophical. Perhaps because she had seen so many animals come and go; perhaps because she knew it was, after all, just a dog, and at the moment other things—childbirth and degenerative illnesses, to name a few—seemed more compelling. And Lloyd had already forgotten completely about the dog; he couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. “Dogs aren’t even allowed down here,” he kept reminding people, implying that fourteen people had hallucinated Blender’s existence.
For his part, Mitchell was racked with guilt, and he retreated into morose silence. He kept revisiting the run through Lava. Just when had he let go of the dog? Was it in the V-wave or below? He sat in the hot sun in the back of JT’s boat and stared at his hands, trying to understand how they had released their grip. And why hadn’t he clamped his thighs around the dog more tightly? Why didn’t they think of tying him to one of the lines, for that matter? There were a thousand decisions that Mitchell, in anguished hindsight, would have made differently.
By the end of their last full day, there