the ravine again, he would misremember the exact spot where the light
had disappeared and would send the rescuers to the wrong point along the
riverbank. The dim black-and-white world below offered few prominent
landmarks.
"Come on, hurry up," he muttered.
The wind-which stung his face, made his eyes water, and pasted snow in
his mustache-was keening so loudly that it masked the approaching sirens
of the emergency vehicles until they rounded the bend uphill, enlivening
the night with their headlights and red flashers. Bill rose, waved his
arms to draw their attention, but he still did not look away from the
river.
Behind him, they pulled to the side of the road. Because one of their
sirens wound down to silence faster than the other, he knew there were
two vehicles, probably an ambulance and a police cruiser.
They would smell the whiskey on his breath. No, maybe not in all that
wind and cold. He felt that he deserved to die for what he'd don-but if
he wasn't going to die, then he didn't think he deserved to lose his
job.
These were hard times. A recession. Good jobs weren't easy to find.
Reflections of the revolving emergency beacons lent a stroboscopic
quality to the night. Real life had become a choppy and technically
inept piece of stop-motion animation, with the scarlet snow like a spray
of blood falling haltingly from the wounded sky.
5
Sooner than Lindsey could have hoped, the surging river shoved her and
Hatch against a formation of water-smoothed rocks that rose like a
series of worn teeth in the middle of its course, wedging them into a
gap s-sufficiently narrow to prevent them from being swept farther
downstream.
Water foamed and gurgled around them, but with the rocks behind her, she
was able to stop struggling against the deadly undertow.
She felt limp, every muscle soft and unresponsive. She could barely
manage to keep Hatch's head from tipping forward into the water, though
doing so should have been a simple task now that she no longer needed to
fight the river.
Though she was incapable of letting go of him, keeping his head above
water was a pointless task: he had drowned. She could not kid herself
that he was still alive. And minute by minute he was less likely to be
revived with artificial respiration. But she would not give up. Would
not. She was astonished by her fierce refusal to relinquish hope,
though just before the accident she had thought she was devoid of hope
forever.
The chill of the water had thoroughly penetrated Lindsey, numbing mind
as well as flesh. When she tried to concentrate on forming a plan that
would get her from the middle of the river to the shore, she could not
bring her thoughts into focus. She felt drugged. She knew that
drowsiness was a companion of hypothermia, that dozing off would invite
deeper unconsciousness and ultimately death. She was determined to keep
awake and alert at all costs-but suddenly she realized that she had
closed her eyes, giving in to the temptation of sleep.
Fear twisted through her. Renewed strength coiled in her muscles.
Blinking feverishly, eyelashes frosted with snow that no longer melted
from her body heat, she peered around Hatch and along the line of
water-polished boulders. The safety of the bank was only fifteen feet
away.
If the rocks were close to one another, she might be able to tow Hatch
to shore without being sucked through a gap and carried downnver.
Her vision had adapted sufficiently to the gloom, however, for her to
see that centuries of patient currents had carved a five-foot-wide hole
in the middle of the granite span against which she was wedged. It was
halfway between her and the river's edge. Dimly glistening under a
lacework shawl of ice, the ebony water quickened as it was funneled
toward the gap; no doubt it exploded out the other side with tremendous
force.
Lindsey knew she was too weak to propel herself across that powerful
eruption. She and Hatch would be swept through the breach and, at last,
to certain death.
Just when surrender to an endless sleep began, again, to look more
appealing than continued pointless struggle against nature's hostile
power, she saw strange lights at the top of the ravine, a couple of
hundred yards upriver. She was so disoriented and her mind so
anesthetized by the cold that for a while the pulsing crimson glow
seemed eerie, mysterious, supernatural, as if she were staring upward at
the wondrous radiance of a hovering, divine presence.
Gradually she realized that she was seeing the throb of police or
ambulance beacons on the highway far above, and then she spotted the
flashlit cuers had descended the ravine wall. They were maybe a hundred
yards upriver, where the car had sunk.
She called to them. Her shout issued as a whisper. She tried again,
with greater success, but they must not have heard her above the keening
wind, for the flashlights continued to sweep back and forth over the
same section of riverbank and turbulent water.
Suddenly she realized that Hatch was slipping out of her grasp again.
His face was underwater.
With the abruptness of a switch being thrown, Lindsey's terror became
anger again. She was angry with the truck driver for being caught in
the mountains during a snowstorm, angry with herself for being so weak,
angry with Hatch for reasons she could not define, angry with the cold
and insistent river, and enraged at God for the violence and injustice
of His universe.
Lindsey found greater strength in anger than in terror. She flexed her
half-frozen hands, got a better grip on Hatch, pulled his head out of
the water again, and let out a cry for help that was louder than the
banshee voice of the wind. Upstream, the flashlight beams, as one,
swung searchingly in her direction.
6
The stranded couple looked dead already. Targeted by the flashlights,
their faces floated on the dark water, as white as
apparitions-translucent, unreal, lost.
Lee Reedman, a San Bernardino County Deputy Sheriff with emergency
rescue training, waded into the water to haul them ashore, bracing
himself against a rampart of boulders that extended out to midstream.
He was on a half-inch, hawser-laid nylon line with a breaking strength
of four thousand pounds, secured to the trunk of a sturdy pine and
belayed by two other deputies.
He had taken off his parka but not his uniform or boots. In those
fierce currents, swimming was impossible anyway, so he did not have to
worry about being hampered by clothes. And even sodden garments would
protect him from the worst bite of the frigid water, reducing the rate
at which body heat was sucked out of him.
Within a minute of entering the river, however, when he was only halfway
toward the stranded couple, Lee felt as if a refrigerant had been
injected into his bloodstream. He couldn't believe that he would have
been any colder had he dived naked into those
icy currents.
He would have preferred to wait for the Winter Rescue Team that was on
its way, men who had experience pulling skiers out of avalanches and
retrieving careless skaters who had fallen through thin ice. They would
have insulated wetsuits and all the necessary gear. But the situation
was too desperate to delay; the people in the river would not last until
the specialists arrived.
He came to a five-foot-wide gap in the rocks, where the river gushed
through as if being drawn forward by a huge suction pump. He was
knocked off his feet, but the men on the bank kept the line taut, paying
it out precisely at the rate he was moving, so he was not swept into the
breach. He flailed forward through the surging river, swallowing a
mouthful of water so bitterly cold that it made his teeth ache, but he
got a on the rock at the far side of the gap and pulled himself across.
A minute later, gasping for breath and shivering violently, Lee reached
the couple. The man was unconscious, but the woman was alert. Their
faces bobbled in and out of the overlapping flashlight beams directed
from shore, and they both looked in terrible shape. The woman's flesh
seemed to have both shriveled and blanched of all color, so the natural
phosphorescence of bone shone like a light within, revealing the skull
beneath her skin. Her lips were as white as her teeth; other than her
sodden black hair, only her eyes were dark, as sunken as the eyes of a
corpse and bleak with the pain of dying. Under the circumstances he
could not guess her age within fifteen years and could not tell if she
was ugly or attractive, but he could see, at once, that she was at the
limit of her resources, holding on to life by willpower alone.
"Take my husband first," she said, pushing the unconscious man into
Lee's arms. Her shrill voice cracked repeatedly. "He's got a head
injury, needs help, hurry up, go on, go on, damn you!"
Her anger didn't offend Lee. He knew it was not directed against him,
really, and that it gave her the strength to endure.
"Hold on, and we'll all go together." He raised his voice above the roar
of the wind and the racing river. "Don't fight it, don't try to grab on
to the rocks or keep your feet on the bottom. They'll have an easier
time reeling us in if we let the water buoy us."
She seemed to understand.
Lee glanced back toward shore. A light focused on his face, and he
shouted, "Ready! Now!"
The team on the riverbank began to reel him in, with the unconscious man
and the exhausted woman in tow.
7
After Lindsey was hauled out of the water, she drifted in and out of
consciousness. For a while life seemed to be a videotape being
fast-forwarded from one randomly chosen scene to another, with
gray-white static in between.
As she lay gasping on the ground at the river's edge, a young paramedic
with a snow-caked beard knelt at her side and directed a penlight at her
eyes, checking her pupils for uneven dilation. He said, "Can you hear
me?"
"Of course. Where's Hatch?"
"Do you know your name?"
"Where's my husband? He needs ... CPR."
"We're taking care of him. Now, do you know your name?"
"Lindsey."
"Good. Are you cold?"
That seemed like a stupid question, but then she realized she was no
longer freezing. In fact, a mildly unpleasant heat had arisen in her
extremities. It was not the sharp, painful heat of flames. Instead,
she fe feet and hands had been dipped in a caustic fluid that was
gradually dissolving her skin and leaving raw nerve ends exposed. She
knew, without having to be told, that her inability to feel the bitter
night air was an indication of physical deterioration.
fast forward...
She was being moved on a stretcher. They were heading along the
riverbank. With her head toward the front of the litter, she could look
back at the man who was carrying the rear of it. The snow-covered
ground reflected the flashlight beams, but that soft eerie glow was only
bright enough to reveal the basic contours of the stranger's face and
add a disquieting glimmer to his iron-hard eyes.
As color less as a charcoal drawing, strangely silent, full of dreamlike
motion and mystery, that place and moment had the quality of a
nightmare. She felt her heartbeat accelerate as she squinted back and
up at the almost faceless man. The illogic of a dream shaped her fear,
and suddenly she was certain that she was dead and that the shadowy men
carrying her stretcher were not men at all but carrion-bearers
delivering her to the boat that would convey her across the Styx to the
land of the dead and damned.
Lashed to the stretcher now, tilted almost into a standing position, she
was being pulled along the snow-covered slope of the ravine wall by
unseen men reeling in a pair of ropes from above. Two other men
accompanied her, one on each side of the stretcher, struggling up
through the knee-deep drifts, guiding her and making sure she didn't
flip over.
She was ascending into the red glow of the emergency beacons. As that
crimson radiance completely surrounded her, she began to hear the urgent
voices of the rescuers above and the crackle of police-band radios. When
she could smell the pungent exhaust fumes of their vehicles, she knew
that she was going to survive.
Just seconds from a clean getaway, she thought.
Though in the grip of a delirium born of exhaustion, confused and
fuzzy-minded, Lindsey was alert enough to be unnerved by that thought
and the subconscious longing it represented. Just seconds from a clean
getaway? The only thing she had been seconds away from was death. Was
she still so depressed from the loss of Jimmy that, even after five
years, her own death was an acceptable release from the burden of her
grief?
Then why didn't I surrender to the river? she wondered. Why not just
let go?
Hatch, of course. Hatch had needed her. She'd been ready to step out
of this world in hope of setting foot into a better one. But she had
not been able to make that decision for Hatch, and to surrender her own
life under those circumstances would have meant forfeiting his as well.
With a clatter and a jolt, the stretcher was pulled over the brink of
the ravine and lowered flat onto the shoulder of the mountain highway
beside an ambulance. Red snow swirled into her face.
A paramedic with a weather-beaten face and beautiful blue eyes leaned
over her. "You're going to be all right."
"I didn't want to die," she said.
She was not really speaking to the man. She was arguing with herself,
trying to deny that her despair over the loss of her son had become such
a chronic emotional infection that she had been secretly longing to join
him in death. Her self-image did not include the word "suicidal," and
she was shocked and repulsed to discover, under extreme stress, that
such an impulse might be a part of her.
Just seconds from a clean geta
way .
She said, "Did I want to die?"
"You aren't going to die," the paramedic assured her as he and another
man untied the ropes from the handles of the litter, preparatory to
loading her into the ambulance. "The worst is over now. The worst is
over."
Half a dozen police and emergency vehicles were parked across two lanes
of the mountain highway. Uphill and downhill traffic shared the third
lane, regulated by uniformed deputies. Lindsey was aware of people
gawking at her from a Jeep Wagoneer, but they vanished beyond shatters
of snow and heavy plumes of crystallized exhaust fumes.
The ambulance van could accommodate two patients. They loaded Lindsey
onto a wheeled gurney that was fixed to the left wall by two spring
clamps to prevent it from rolling while the vehicle was in motion.
They put Hatch on another identical gurney along the right wall.
Two paramedics crowded into the rear of the ambulance and pulled the
wide door shut behind them. As they moved, their white, insulated nylon
pants and jackets produced continuous frictional sounds, a series of
soft whistles that seemed to be electronically amplified in those close
quarters.
With a short burst of its sireD, the ambulance started to move. The
paramedics swayed easily with the rocking motion. Experience had made
them sure footed.
Side by side in the narrow aisle between the gurneys, both men turned to