The Spawning Grounds (25 page)

THE BOY PRESSED
into the wind and sheets of rain as he made his way downhill from the benchland, reaching and then passing the reserve houses. He walked slowly, but with clear intent, towards the remains of the burned bridge. Alex and Hannah raced towards him down the mountain road, cold rain cascading down the back of their necks. Furious winds pushed and pulled the trees, bending them nearly in half. Thunder boomed, and lightning flashed and flashed again, striking the hillside above, the fields on the other side of the river, the lightning rod on Stew's barn. Lightning hit a dead pine on the opposite shore, setting it alight despite the heavy rain. Hannah's hair, T-shirt and jeans were soaked through, and the shoulder of the road was giving way under her feet. Rainwater ran in streams down the reserve road towards the river, up to her ankles in places.

“Brandon! Stop!” Hannah cried. Then, to Alex, she said, “We're not going to reach him in time.” Brandon was
already stumbling onto the burned deck of the bridge. He lost his footing and fell, lying there as if stunned before righting himself. Beyond the bridge, Hannah saw Jesse drive into the yard and park the truck by the gate. He and Gina jumped out, holding their coats over their heads.

The eagle Hannah had seen perched on the cliff circled low overhead, watching them all, she thought. The bird landed on the railing and appeared to wait for Brandon there, eyeing him as he approached. As soon as Brandon reached him, the bird flew off. Brandon held the railing where the bird had perched and looked down into the rushing water. Rain pounded the blackened wood of the bridge all around him. The scorched deck hung suspended, and dangerous, over the rapids, the metal ribs of the supports beneath exposed. As Alex and Hannah ran onto the bridge, the deck bounced and swayed. Hannah wasn't sure the remaining deck would hold.

Brandon climbed the railing of the bridge and stood looking down into the water. Hannah saw Jesse and Gina racing towards the river shore through the field.

Alex held both hands out. “Wait,” he called to Brandon. “Just wait. You don't have to do this. We can find another way to get you home.”

Brandon turned to face him, slipping on the railing's slick surface. Hannah thought he would fall, but then Brandon righted himself, leaning into the thunderous wind to look down at them. “There's no other way,” he said.

Above them the eagle cried. Brandon turned his face upward and closed his eyes as the rain cascaded over his face.
Then he spread his arms and stepped back into the water. The river swallowed him.

“Brandon!” Hannah cried. Her brother resurfaced a few yards downriver at the pool. He thrashed in the water, gulping for air, his body reacting on instinct. Then he sank again, pulled under by the rolling currents of the swollen river.

Hannah kicked off her boots and as she did so, Alex grabbed her arm. “You can't. For god's sake, Hannah, you'll drown.”

She shook him off and jumped too.

Hannah floundered, gulping cold water instead of air as the river carried her downstream. Jesse and Gina ran down the river path on one side, Alex on the other. She saw Brandon beneath her, his clothes tangled within the branches of the many fallen trees. Hannah kicked against the current with the desperation of a salmon. Her hands found a branch, then another jutting from the trees trapped in rock, damming the narrows, and she pulled herself along this underwater forest until she reached her brother. She took hold of his shirt and turned him in an attempt to release him from the clutch that entangled him. As she did so, bubbles escaped his open mouth and with them a presence, a trailing shape in the water that swirled away from him like a cloud of breath on a cold night.

The energy, the mystery, circled around them as if holding them both safe, then it dispersed into the water. Freed now, Brandon drifted upward. Hannah wrapped her arms around him and allowed herself to be pulled downriver by the current to Dead Man's Bend, where she knew
they would be tossed onto shore. Perhaps she could still save them both if she could make it to the surface to take in breath.

A darkness lay between the rocks, and within that dark there was a deeper black. The current pulled Hannah down towards it and the dark took shape. A hand. An arm. A leg. A boy. A toddler.
Samuel
. The child's body hung in the water, the foot caught between logs submerged beneath the rush at the narrows. The current shifted the boy's hair from his face and he looked up, directly at her. His dark brown eyes held hers. Then he was gone.

Hannah realized she must be drowning, her mind conjuring visions as it suffocated. Yet she was aware of the flow of the rapids above, the river stones below. The cold. The
cold
. Hannah felt her body turn in the water, pushed upward and carried along by eddies.
I'm dying
, she thought.
I'm already dead
. Above her the choppy water was a broken mirror, each shard reflecting her image back to her: a thousand, a hundred thousand selves. Hannah was each of these incarnations, and yet she was separate from them also. She was both a series of individuals caught, static, within time, and a continuum. Hannah chose a moment and rose up, her soul expanding, to become that reflection, to become the rough, troubled water, the electric air and the grieving, weeping sky.

On the far shore, at Dead Man's Bend, Brandon lay on a bed of glistening river-rounded stone as Gina kneeled beside him and attempted to bring him back to life. Jesse stood behind them both, hugging himself, a look of panic and sorrow on his face. All around them raindrops, thick as fingertips, were suspended in the air, caught in the instant of their fall. Hanging directly above, like a chandelier, a lightning bolt was frozen in place. Thick, black-blue and green clouds draped low, heavy in electrical charge and moisture. Only the eagle, in flight, was in motion, circling and circling, crying
eye-EYE!

Hannah watched the eagle spiral down, then looked back to Dead Man's Bend. There was Stew, standing behind Jesse, with his hand on his son's shoulder. He nodded at Hannah and pointed upriver to the shore on the Robertson side, by the spawning grounds.

Hannah
. It was her mother's voice, reverberating as if in a chamber.

Hannah
.

“Mom?”

Hannah searched the shore, but all she saw at first was shadow, a hazy dark figure. She blinked and squinted and the figure became the silhouette of a woman. Then the woman took on colour, dimension, and became her mother. Elaine was bent over the sandy rocks on shore, searching through them, dressed in the sloppy sweatpants and T-shirt she had worn day in and day out in her final weeks, the clothes she had drowned in.

Hannah took a step forward, realized she was walking on water and faltered. She looked down to find a child's body, her own from childhood. These ten-year-old hands, these small, clumsy feet slapping the surface of the water as if in play.

She took another step, then another, and, gaining confidence, she strode to shore. When she reached her mother, Elaine didn't acknowledge her. “It's got to be here,” she said to herself.

Hannah looked down at the sand where Elaine turned over stones. “What are you looking for?”

Her mother mumbled to herself, as if Hannah was another figment of her imagination.

“Mom, it's me.” Hannah touched her shoulder and her mother shrugged as if dispelling a horsefly.

“It's got to be here,” Elaine said.

“I missed you,” Hannah told her. “I've missed you so much.”

Elaine lifted another stone, oblivious to Hannah's presence.

“There are so many things I want to tell you,” Hannah said. “So many things I want to ask.”

“Ask,” Elaine whispered, echoing her.

“Yes!” Hannah stepped in front of her mother, but Elaine looked through her. She bent and turned another stone.

“You used to play with Brandon and me. Do you remember? You used to chase us through the laundry hanging on the line. You sprayed us with the hose when you watered the garden. Then you didn't play with us anymore.”

Hannah took her mother's hand to stop her searching and Elaine looked down at their joined fingers.

“I thought it was me. I thought Brandon and I were too much for you. Grandpa told us that. He told us to go play outside, to leave you alone.”

Elaine half-turned to her.

“But it wasn't me, was it? Your leaving had nothing to do with me.”

Elaine's attention focused downriver, and Hannah turned to Stew, to Jesse and Gina with Bran's body at Dead Man's Bend. On the opposite shore, on the reserve side, she saw herself, a young woman, her body lying half out of the water, floodwaters rising to her waist. Alex was there in the mud with her, dragging Hannah's body away from the river. He had jumped into the water for Hannah. He had risked his life to save her. All around her the suspended raindrops were so thick they appeared to be a transparent curtain, a waterfall, obscuring the view.

“I wanted to save you,” Hannah told her mother. “I wanted to fix you, make you better, bring you home, but I couldn't.” I
couldn't
, she thought, realizing the truth of what she was telling herself. She couldn't bring her mother home then, any more than she could bring Brandon home now. It was his journey to make. She had her own.

Hannah saw the flash of gold at her mother's feet and reached down to pluck it from the wet sand and gravel. A ring, a gold wedding band. She offered it to her mother. “Is this it? Is this what you're looking for?”

Elaine looked at Hannah as if seeing her there for the first time. The confusion lifted from her face. “The ring,” she said. “We found it here.”

“You found it here.” The ring had been slipped over a bullet and had been fixed there by grit and time. This was the same ring—Hannah recognized the jeweller's marks—though it no longer held the bullet.

Elaine took the ring from her and slipped it on her finger. She looked directly at Hannah. “I've been looking for this for so long.” She held out her hand to admire the ring and turned it on her finger. “Now I can go.”

Elaine stepped onto the river and then headed downstream, walking on the surface of the water.

“Mom, wait!”

Hannah tried to follow, but the river swallowed her and pulled her down, even as her mother walked on. “Mom!” She struggled to keep her head above water. “Mom! Wait!” Her mother reached Dead Man's Bend, where Stew waited for her. They both looked back once before rounding the bend. Then they were gone. The eagle circled and cried,
eye-EYE!
and time moved on. The storm broke overhead. The raindrops, suspended the moment before, fell in a torrent. Hannah sank below the surface of river water.

“Hannah.” A man's voice, familiar, shouting to make himself heard over the thunder of rain and river water. His voice was desperate. “Hannah, come back to me.”

Hannah panicked, struggling towards the surface of consciousness as she would from a nightmare. She felt pressure on her chest, then again, and again, and then a kiss, lips
on her mouth. No, he was breathing his own air into her. He was forcing life back into her. It hurt. Surfacing, she coughed up river water and woke into herself, into an aching chest, into stinging lungs, into biting cold.

Alex removed his hands from Hannah's chest and turned her on her side, to drain the fluid from her lungs. “Jesus, Hannah,” he said. “I thought I lost you.”

He lay beside her, spooning her as she coughed the water from her lungs, both half in, half out of the water. Rain pelted down on them, as the floodwaters rose. The air felt liquid, as if she was still submerged.

“Can you understand me?” he asked. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. An asshole.”

She felt him laugh a little against her. “Do you know who you are?”

“An idiot.”

“Good. You're okay then.” He rubbed a cheek into her wet hair. “Hannah, I thought you were gone.” He squeezed her and spoke into her ear, his breath the only warmth against her body. “I don't want to lose you again.”