All I saw of the half-drowned swimmer was a glimpse of grey and black wetsuit, a face turned towards me with eyes staring wide, mouth gaping open and a slick of dark-blond hair plastered to his forehead.
A crowd closed in with mixed motives, I realized. Some hoped the kid would make it, even praying aloud. Others with phone cameras at the ready just wanted an image to post on Facebook. Still in charge, Ziegler piled in and roughly shoved the rubber-neckers aside.
‘Cancel the event,’ we heard Amos instruct the girl in the pink shirt. Back in control of his facial muscles, he turned to her. ‘Aurelie, call your brother. Tell him to contact the traffic marshals, send them home.’
‘Papa, are you sure?’ She spoke with a foreign accent – maybe French, maybe Italian. ‘Shouldn’t we wait until—’
‘Call Jean-Luc,’ Amos insisted. He looked at the swimmers wading out of the water, spotted number 102 in his life jacket, still breathing hard and standing hands on hips slightly apart from the action. ‘Tell Jarrold to go to his cabin,’ he ordered the girl, who this time didn’t resist.
She went and spoke quietly to 102. He turned and walked barefoot up the hill without glancing back, his long fair hair dripping on to his shoulders. No one said thanks for trying to save a kid from drowning.
They ignored Holly too, who by this time was sitting with Aaron, huddled in the shade of the nearest trees. Nobody expressed any gratitude for raising the alarm and diving down to the rescue. Maybe that would come later, we told ourselves.
In any case, no one was doing much talking while the paramedic worked. The CPR kit was out, she was kneeling over the patient, intent on airway management, attaching a resuscitation bag to the mask strapped around his face.
‘Is he going to make it?’ Grace whispered to Jude, who shook his head in a don’t-know way.
We stared in silence and watched the medic finally give up on clearing the airways. She shook her head, removed the mask and stood up. Game over. The kid lay on his back, eyes staring, his lips turning blue.
‘How long was he under the water in total?’ Orlando asked.
Holly was still in a state of shock. She didn’t answer.
‘What exactly happened – did anyone see?’ Jude added.
We’d driven up to Holly’s house next to mine on Becker Hill, persuaded her to change out of her triathlon gear into bright-blue sweats, made her drink a lot of water and sat with her until we were sure she was OK. We all had that shock-induced empty feeling in the pits of our stomachs and numbness in our brains.
‘This is bad news for the New Dawn people,’ Aaron sighed.
‘It’s bad news, period,’ I said. A sunny day had turned to tragedy and it had happened at Turner Lake – my favourite spot in the whole world. And my nightmare visions had started over.
‘I’m starting to wish I’d stayed in Europe,’ I whispered to Orlando.
‘It’s OK,’ he reassured me. ‘I can see what happening to you but I promise we’ll get through this – you and me together.’
‘You don’t know how it feels, deep down,’ I groaned. ‘This time it’s like I’m drowning, gasping for air. I come out of it and I can hardly breathe!’
‘It’s cool, I’m here,’ was all he could say as he held me tight.
The paramedic had given up on Conner Steben and covered his face. Antony Amos had watched her pack away her kit then had walked slowly up to the cabins with Ziegler and the girl who’d called him papa.
I thought how lonely Conner’s last journey – the drive to the hospital morgue – must have been.
I saw his face under the water, tilted up towards the light. The picture in my head was as real as the room I was sitting in now, shockingly vivid but with a weird underwater silence – a white face tilted upwards, eyes open but unseeing, fair hair billowing forward across his brow. I saw him sink without a fight to the bottom of the lake, just letting himself drift down. I hoped it was peaceful, that there were no monsters, no two-headed serpents writhing in the muddy bed, rising to meet him.
‘How are you doing?’ Orlando asked me as he squeezed my hand.
‘I’m good,’ I murmured, though my body language told him different. I was hunched on Holly’s sofa, arms crossed, shivering.
‘Holly, did you actually see him go under?’ Jude was the curious one who pushed her to speak.
She nodded then frowned and shook her head. She too was shivering.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pressurize you,’ Jude mumbled after an elbow nudge from Grace.
‘No, it’s cool. I need to vent,’ Holly said in a shaky voice. ‘The worst thing is, I thought I caught sight of him – the first time I dived down.’ She paused for a long time and we waited uneasily. ‘Yeah, I did see him. But I couldn’t reach him. I had to come up for air.’
‘Was he conscious?’
Maybe Jude should take up a career as a forensic scientist.
Again Holly shook her head. ‘I guess not. He wasn’t trying to save himself. He was just kind of drifting down, going with the underwater currents. Anyway, when I dived down a second time, he’d disappeared.’
‘And by that time Jarrold – number 102 – had been hauled into the boat and you were the only one left trying to save him until the rescue people joined in.’
‘I kept on searching as long as my lungs would hold out,’ Holly said. Her eyelids flickered at the painful memory and she began to cry. ‘I said to myself, he must be here somewhere: he can’t just vanish.’
‘But the currents …’ Jude pointed out. ‘And the lake must be forty metres deep at that point.’
‘I saw him and I couldn’t save him,’ Holly whispered, turning her face towards Aaron and burying it against his chest. This was the one fact she couldn’t get her head around.
‘You did everything you could,’ he told her gently then steered her away from the guilt that was tearing her apart. ‘It was crazy out there – too many people. Something bad was bound to happen.’
‘That’s right. That’s exactly what you said before the race started,’ Jude remembered. ‘It was up to the organizers to stagger the start.’
‘I guess there’ll be an investigation.’ Orlando tried to think ahead. ‘An autopsy, a pathologist’s report, that kind of stuff.’
Oh, didn’t we have enough of this on Black Rock – of kids dying in weird circumstances, of parents having to be informed?
The battle between good and bad angels hadn’t only been about Grace. Jude had been dragged in too. Plus me, of course. I relived Zoran’s party and the time the love thief had tried to snatch me away from Orlando – spectacular Daniel in his sun god costume, dancing me to the edge of darkness.
Then a boy called Oliver had walked out of Black Eagle Lodge and fallen into a sink hole – a burning underground chamber, the gateway to hell. The Forest Service rescue team had found him and carried his body off the mountain. That was the reason I’d fled to Europe, to escape the memory of these things.
‘I’ll take you home,’ Orlando offered, seeing how I was reacting. He raised me from the sofa and led me towards the door.
‘You all want to know what happened to Conner before he went down?’ Holly asked, her voice suddenly loud and clear. She had stood up, as if she had wanted to make an announcement. ‘I was there. I can tell you.’
‘So were twenty or thirty other guys,’ Aaron reminded her, wanting to spare her the responsibility and Conner. ‘I could have reached out and touched him.’ The glazed look in her eyes told us she was back there in the surge of bodies through cold, clear water, rocking in the wake of other swimmers, cutting through the waves.
‘Connor got kicked in the head,’ she announced. ‘Wham! Right between the eyes. One kick was all it took. He went under, dropped to the bottom like a stone.’
‘Shit happens,’ Orlando told me after he got me back home.
The day was still sunny and there was light streaming into the house as we sat on the porch overlooking the mountains. A wind rustled
through the trees and shook golden leaves from their branches. The sky was a deep, impossible blue.
‘I know it does. I’m good, thanks.’
‘There’s nothing weird. A pure accident, that’s all.’ Orlando knew I was still wrestling my demons and he was trying to help.
‘Thanks.’ I managed to smile at him.
He spoke with total conviction. ‘This has no connection with what happened with Zoran on Black Rock.’
‘I know.’ I sighed, I closed my eyes, fought the vision of Zoran Brancusi strutting his rock-star stuff to a pounding drumbeat, melting, shape shifting into a black-winged demon, rising with me into the night.
‘You fought him, you won.’ Orlando refused to let me go there. He held my hand and fought to draw me back into the light. ‘It’s over.’
‘It’s never over,’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, another kid has died. Conner Steben. We knew nothing about him, but somewhere there must be parents who would have to be told.
Frustrated, Orlando left me for a while and walked in amongst the aspens at the bottom of the garden, hands in pockets, staring at the ground. One of the doves from the pair I saw yesterday rose from a branch with a whistling flurry of feathers. Only one? What had happened to its mate, I wondered.
I watched it fly. It struck me as sad and lonely, and I cast my mind back to the family tragedy that had taken place here on this plot on Becker Hill. Before my dad had built our house, there had been a forest fire, a burnout. Three people had died – a husband, wife and baby girl. Deep in my psyche I was connected to those people, especially to Maia, the mourning mother. She’d been my good angel, my support during the worst times on Black Rock.
‘What was it like in Europe?’ Orlando asked me from the aspen stand.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How exactly was it better for you?’
‘Not so many nightmares,’ I told him. ‘No psychic episodes, so I didn’t live my life in constant fear that my dark angel would come back.’
‘It was good for us both to get away from Bitterroot,’ he agreed. ‘Plus, I was focused on my course. There was nothing in Dallas to remind me either.’
‘But did it feel real?’ I’d made a trip of a lifetime, been to all the major galleries, studied film, met cool new people. Lucky, lucky. But there was a barrier there, like I was trapped inside a bubble, not making contact.
Orlando walked back towards me, stopped with one foot on the porch, leaned in and gazed at me intently. ‘Yeah, Tania, it did. Real and important. I’m totally into what I’m studying. There’s a History of Theatre Costume module – that’s my favourite.’
I nodded, glad that he had a key into the future, a door to open which I still didn’t know how to find. Maybe with him – with Orlando – I could. ‘OK,’ I decided. ‘You’re right. We’re through with all that stuff.’
He smiled with relief and took me inside the house. Goodbye, post-traumatic stress and paranoia. Hello, real world.
Did it seem inappropriate to make love with Orlando with all that was going on around us – Mom in hospital and the dead kid in the lake? The thought flitted through my head, stayed about five seconds and left.
Then I was in the moment, in his arms, feeling the smooth warmth of his skin and sighing, kissing, telling him how much I’d missed this. After two whole months so strange, so familiar.
I love the way Orlando scoops me off the floor and lets me wrap myself around him. I love the effect of being so close to his face that his grey eyes and dark lashes blur. We lie on the bed and I eat up every bit of him. He gives himself totally. It was like our first moonlit time all over again. And afterwards the afternoon sun slanted across the bed and we talked.
‘Are you OK now?’ he asked, stroking my face with the pad of his thumb, smoothing it across the arch of my eyebrow.
I let my eyes close then half open for the blurred-vision effect I love. ‘Yeah, when I’m here with you, I’m good.’
‘I’m scared for you,’ he admitted. ‘All the time. I just want to know you’re OK.’
‘I’m good,’ I insisted. The sunlight was dappled and warm, I was where I most wanted to be. ‘And I’ll be better still when we get the results from Mom’s scan.’
‘I love you,’ he told me for the tenth, maybe eleventh time. ‘And listen, you’re not the only one with extra-sensory perception. It’s my turn – I have a gut feeling.’
‘About what?’
He smiled a brave smile, which I tried to mirror. ‘Your mom is going to get through this. Everything will work out fine.’
I lay back and closed my eyes, let Orlando’s comforting words flow through me. At that moment in time I would have believed black was white – anything so long as it was him who told me.
‘“Mourning dove – Zenaida macroura.”’ Dad read from his Native Birds of America book, which weighed a ton. He had opened it and spread it out on the kitchen table to identify the new visitor to our aspens – the lone, greyish-brown dove with the black wings markings and the soft pink belly. There was still no sign of her mate – missing, presumed dead.
‘Mom has to stay for more tests,’ Dad had told Orlando and me when he arrived home alone from the hospital.
‘More tests?’ We were wrong: we hadn’t expected this. Mom should have been with us, she should be here, sinking down on the sofa and asking for a glass of red wine, saying ‘Thank God that’s over!’ They should have given her pills to cure her headaches.
‘Yeah. Doctor is very thorough. Blood tests, more scans.’
‘Do they know what’s wrong? Can I call her?’
‘Not yet. Call tomorrow. She sleeps now.’ Dad had kept it short as always but he’d sounded calm, not as abrupt as the bare, Romanian-accented words look on the page. Calm and strong – as always, come to think of it. ‘She’s fine, Tania. Doctor is good. Knows what he’s doing. Mom says no problem.’
And he’d got beer from the fridge, sat on the porch a while then spotted the lone dove. He’d taken down his most recent doorstop volume, sitting on the shelf alongside the political histories and literary biographies to identify the visitor. ‘“Also known as the rain dove, up to six broods per year, two squabs per brood.”’
‘Let me see the picture,’ I insisted. Yeah, I recognized the flash of white on the wings, the dark eyes, the reddish legs and feet.
‘“A popular game bird,”’ Dad read on. ‘“Up to seventy million are shot annually for sport.”’
‘Ouch!’ I said, then, ‘Ugh!’ I don’t like guns. I especially don’t like shooting for fun.
‘“It has a plaintive coo-woo-oo-oo-oo call, which changes to roo-oo under threat. The wings may make a strange, low whistle at take-off and landing.”’
‘Yeah, I heard it.’ I put my hand on his shoulder, leaned over and read with him. Stuff about a flight speed of up to fifty-five miles per hour, a preferred habitat of grassland and lightly wooded area, not thick forest. A diet of corn, millet and sunflower seeds. And finally, ‘“The mourning dove is monogamous and partners for life.”’
Dad finished reading a few seconds after me, closed the book and took out another beer. ‘Maybe white-winged dove, Zenaida asiatica,’ he said, thoughtfully staring out of the window towards the aspens. ‘Maybe inca dove – Columbina inca. Maybe not mourning dove after all.’
Holly dropped by next morning with questions about my mom and news about poor Conner Steben.
It was when I was getting ready to drive into Denver with Dad and Orlando. I’d already spoken to Mom and she was expecting a visit at ten thirty so I didn’t have much time.
‘Your mom will be good.’ Holly echoed my boyfriend’s optimism. ‘People like her don’t get sick, remember.’
A reminder – Mom is a multi-tasker. She runs a home and family alongside a job that jets her across the world to find and rent commercial properties for an international energy company. She does it without stopping to draw breath so I took Holly’s point.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Cool.’
‘Sure?’
‘Totally.’ She was like a sleek yellow Labrador, running out of the river, shaking herself dry. Not a drop of yesterday’s trauma seemed to have stayed with her. ‘Aaron made some phone calls. He found out Conner Steben has been at New Dawn since May. His time was almost up.’
‘God, that makes it worse,’ I groaned.
She agreed. ‘The courts gave him a six-month sentence for stealing Dexedrine tablets from his local pharmacy – a first offence. Amos’s rehab community was his best option. They say he did real well there.’
‘Worse and worse.’
‘I know.’ Holly sat down at the kitchen table as if we had all the time in the world and Dad and Orlando weren’t hovering in the driveway ready to leave.
‘These halfway-house situations don’t usually work that well but you have to hand it to Anthony Amos and the guys who work with him.’
‘Tough love,’ I reminded her. ‘They set the kids big challenges, they don’t take no for an answer. All that wilderness therapy.’
Between us we pieced together what little we knew about New Dawn – facts we’d picked up second or third hand from the Internet and by word of mouth.
‘The juvies form a team and they hike up the mountain,’ Holly said.
‘What do they do up there? I mean, exactly.’
‘They explore. That’s why they call the kids Explorers. The leaders make them live like native people did before white men came and civilized the hell out of the place.’
‘They have to learn how to make a fire, find food, all that stuff?’
‘Yeah, and more. There’s a spiritual content too.’ Holly obviously knew way more about it than I did. ‘They have a motto: “From heart at war to heart at peace.”’
I said I liked the sound of this idea. ‘If only it was that easy,’ I sighed. I bet Holly didn’t have recurring nightmares and visions the way I did. I made a private bet my non-psychic buddy would outrun, outswim, outcycle any dark angel that came winging her way.