Thursday, 11:58 a.m.
I threw the syringe. The barrel cracked on the gravel behind me and I did not turn round. The lead rope went out of my other hand, and the mare screamed, and I was running.
Gravel went out from under my boots in sheets, and I ran on it with my arms out and my weight thrown back, and my right boot came off somewhere on the way and I let it go.
The truck did not plunge. That was the thing I hadn't expected. It moved off the ramp with a heavy shrug, and the front end went into the lake to the base of the windshield and stopped, tilting, and the bed came up behind it with the tailgate to the sky and the rear wheels dripping. It floated. Six thousand pounds of Silverado sat on the gray water, nose-down, the hood under and the windshield half under, and it began to slide out from the ramp on the push it had taken from the hill, toward the place where the green of the shallows turned black.
I hit the water at a run.
The cold took my chest in both fists and wrung the air out of it, and then the gasp came, a whooping wrench that had nothing behind it, and the lake was in my mouth, brown-green and tasting of iron and old leaves. I kicked off the left boot underwater. I put my face down and swam.
I got my head up and my breath back in short sobbing pulls, and the truck was ten yards off and going.
I got a hand on the mirror. It was slick and swung under my weight and I let it take me along the side, and then I had the door handle.
Aubrey had said the passenger door wasn't locked. It wasn't. It opened against the lake, an inch, then a foot, water over the sill and working up the panel, and I got my shoulder into the gap and my knee onto the seat and over. He was behind the wheel with his head against the glass. The door swung shut behind me on its own weight, the truck rocked, and the cab went very quiet.
* Green light.
It came up through the windshield from below, because the front of the cab was already under, and it came from the dash too, where a dozen small amber lights still glowed underwater, the oil, the belt, the check engine, all of them shining up through the wet like something at the bottom of a pond. Water stood in the footwells to my calves. It was rising while I looked at it. A cherry air freshener, the one he claims not to smell, had come off its mirror and floated at the ceiling with its string trailing, and his reading glasses, the ones he swears he doesn't need, had lifted off the dash and drifted against the windshield, folded, as neat as he'd left them.
He sat with his head back against the glass. Someone had buckled his belt across his chest. The green light lay across his face.
"Cal."
Nothing. I got two fingers under his jaw. There was a pulse there, slow, full, a long way down, and I could have wept, and did not have the air.
The window. Not the door. Kitchen tap, three in the morning. I said it aloud to the cab. The door was what my whole body wanted, and it wouldn't open until the cab was full, and by then neither of us would want it.
I went for the crank.
It was on his door beside his knee, the old kind, the kind he's never replaced, and someone had wound the glass all the way up. I got my palm on the knob and turned, and it went round twice, gritty, and the glass dropped an inch and the lake looked in over the top of it. Then it stopped dead. I threw my weight on it. Nothing.
Water was at his waist. It was at mine.
"All right," I said. "All right. Belt first."
I pushed the red button on the buckle with my thumb, hard, and felt it go in and stay in. It did not release. I dug at it with two fingers, and with a nail, and with a knuckle. My hands had stopped reporting. I could watch them working at the buckle and could not have said where they were, and I couldn't feel what was wrong with it. It might have been sand, or the angle, or nothing but the cold in my fingers. I got both hands on the strap and yanked, and the truck wallowed nose-down under us and the water came up over his belt and over his chest.
His hoof knife.
It was in the door pocket, down where the water had already gone. I reached across him and put my arm in to the shoulder, and my fingers went through mud and a hoof pick and a tangle of baling twine and closed on a wooden handle worn to a curve by twenty years of his hand.
A hoof knife is a hook. It's made to pare, not to cut. I put the hook under the belt at his collarbone and pulled it toward me, and it caught and skipped, and I set it again and sawed, short fast strokes against the grain, with the cold coming up my arm and my lungs starting to burn. The webbing parted strand by strand, and then all at once.
His chest came off the seat with the water.
Now there was a hand's width of air. A pocket at the roof by the cracked windshield, with the cherry in it. I put my mouth to it and took what there was, flat and cold and tasting of rubber and old coffee, and held his face up into the rest.
Then the water came over the glass.
I found the crank by feel.
It turned.
Not easily. It went round a quarter and jammed, then another, as the cab filled and the pressure fell away from the glass. Each little give ran up my arm. Then the knob spun free in my hand and the glass dropped into the door, all but an inch of it standing in its channel, and where the window had been was a square of brown-lit water and, far above it, a coin of gray that was the sky.
I had his collar. I pushed. His head went through the square first, and his shoulders bent to it, and I put my whole body behind him and drove, and he went, an arm, the wide back, his hips catching on the door and coming free with a shove of my knee. The truck lurched. The last of the air went up past my face in a silver sheet.
I went after him.
The glass that stood in the channel was an edge, thin as the lip of a bowl and chipped where the window had broken out of its frame, and I put my face to it, going through, and it opened me. Something hot went across my mouth in the cold. I tasted metal. I did not stop for it. My shoulders went through and my hips caught, and I kicked out of that truck like a foal being born, all at once, in a rush, and rose.
* I came up into the noise of it.
The lake was full of sound: a roar of bubbles where the truck was going down, a slap of water on planks, and above them a horse screaming, over and over, a great terrible braying, and a boom like a fist on a door where a mare was throwing her weight against a trailer. He rose beside me, a pale shape, and I got an arm across his chest. His face was up, on my shoulder, with the lake running out of his mouth. I kicked, and my right leg cramped, hard, hip to heel, and I kicked again with the other.
The truck went behind me. I didn't watch it. A long sigh came up out of the water, an old house settling, and the lake closed over it and left the surface turning in slow rings.
I got him onto his back, my arm across his chest and my hand hooked in his armpit, and swam on mine. It was thirty feet to the ramp. I don't remember it. I remember the sky, gray, moving, and the wet weight of him on my arm, and my own breath sawing in my ears, and the bottom coming up under my heel at last, gravel, slippery and cold, and I stood.
Chest-deep. I held his head against my collarbone and turned his face out of the water.
I couldn't take him up. I tried. I got my arms under him and heaved and my legs went out on the wet gravel, and I went down on one knee and the lake closed over both of us and I came up choking. He weighed what a man weighs, and I was forty-one and had been in the water for four minutes, and the ramp went up to the sky at an angle no one could climb with a body.
Get help. There was no help. There was a dock, and a bench on it, and a yellow rope.
The chock lay under the water a yard from my leg, a tarred wedge in a scatter of gravel, and the rope ran from it in a long yellow line out of the water, along the edge of the ramp, and onto the planks of the dock. Its end through the wedge was a knot the size of a fist, swollen with wet. I got my nails into it and worked it back through the hole, and the wedge fell away, and I had the end.
I dragged his shoulders up onto the gravel and pinned his sleeve with my knee, and with both hands I tied the rope under his arms, badly, the rabbit and the hole and the tree, my father's rhyme, and the knot came. A bowline. The only knot my father ever trusted, a loop that holds and doesn't slip. I put it round his chest below the shoulders, and I hauled it down hard, and I got my mouth to his ear.
"Come on. Come on, Cal."
I looked up the ramp.
The mare stood where I had left her, at the top by the trailer, with her back to the wheel well and the whites of her eyes showing all round. Her lead trailed on the gravel. When the truck went under she had gone straight back until the trailer stopped her, and she stood with her legs braced and her head thrown up, shaking, staring at the lake she wouldn't go near.
"Pilot!" I shouted. "Pilot! Come!"
She flattened her ears. She did not come.
I shouted it again. My voice cracked in the middle, a stranger's voice, and it went up the ramp and hit the trailer and came back, and the mare threw her head and backed a step. It was no use. I was a woman in a lake making a noise, and she had been frightened for four minutes, and she did not know me for anything she'd want to follow.
The rope lay slack along the planks.
Its other end was in a man's fist.
He had been standing at the shore end of the dock all this while, his good white shirt spotted dark with lake spray, the rest of the rope in loose coils at his feet, and I don't know how long he'd been there. He was looking at me. The cap lay on the boards.
Then he began to walk.
He came up past me on the edge of the ramp, a yard from my shoulder, and did not look at me. He didn't hurry. He couldn't. He went up with the slack paying out through his hand, one step and then another, an old man in a cardigan going uphill with the other hand pressed to his side. I stood in the lake and watched him and did not say a word. I didn't have one.
He reached the top. He went to the mare.
She dropped her head to him. The great heavy skull swung down out of the air, and she put her nose in his shirt and blew.
"There," Aubrey said. His voice carried down the slope, cracked and gentle. "There, now. That's a fright, isn't it. That's a terrible fright."
He took the rope and passed it round her chest, under her throat, in front of the points of her shoulders, and brought the end back and made it fast with a hitch I didn't see him tie. A breast collar. He'd hung one on a peg in his barn. He'd oiled it until the brass shone.
He turned her head up the lane, away from the water, and put his hand flat on her neck.
"Walk on, girl," he said.
The mare leaned.
The rope came up off the gravel and went tight as a bar. The loop bit under Callum's arms and the whole weight of him lifted against my chest and slid. The mare took a step, and then another, ponderous as a barge, her dinner-plate feet planted in the gravel and her great quarters bunching, and my husband came up out of the lake on his back.
I went with him. I walked up that ramp bent double with both hands under his head, out of the shallows and onto the wet stone, with his heels making two shallow furrows in the gravel and the lake pouring out of his clothes.
"Whoa," Aubrey said, and the mare stopped.
There was no sound but the water running back down the ramp to the lake. Callum lay on the gravel where the mare had brought him, with his face turned up to the sky, and his eyes half open, and the water still trickling from the corner of his mouth.
He wasn't breathing.