But there was nothing to see. Complete darkness. Either the river had taken us around a bend that hid everything from our view, or Stoat and his flashlight and his van were gone.
I asked the darkness, “Justin?”
No answer.
“Justin!”
Nothing. And it was high time to get out of this flooding river. At any moment it might conk me with a floating log or smash me against a fallen tree. Which, with my luck, would have snakes on it.
“Justin!” I called, uselessly, before I kicked, managing to lie more or less on top of the water, and by swimming across the river current, I aimed, I hoped, toward shore. The opposite shore from the one we had left Stoat on.
I was just getting into the rhythm of a pretty good Australian crawl—stroke, up and over, stroke—when my extended hand touched something that felt like a big tree. But when I tried to grab on to it, it lashed like a giant whip, threw me aside as if I were made of cork, and took off.
“Sorry, alligator,” I said politely, treading water. Having never before in my life been in a situation like this, I found it impossible to predict my own reactions or even explain them. I reached out again, could not find the alligator, and promptly panicked because now it could be behind me, underneath me, anywhere.
“Justin!” Why not yell? Between the swoosh of the water and the gibbering of the frogs, he could be a few yards away from me and still not hear me.
No answer.
Anxiety kicked me from inside as if I were pregnant with worry. That boy might as well have been one of my sons. Getting myself drowned along with him would not help him. Once again I swam, trying hard not to thrash (were alligators, like sharks, attracted to thrashing?), and headed toward shore.
But where was my strength? I was only menopausal, dammit, not geriatric. I had been a lifeguard not so many years ago, which meant I had been a strong, fast swimmer. But I couldn’t seem to make any progress muscling myself out of this damn pushy water—
Conk. The river bashed my shoulder against something rough and hard that could have been an alligator but didn’t move and was therefore of the tree persuasion. Or so I surmised in the total darkness. The river immediately twisted me and tried to whirl me away from it, but I grabbed hold and managed to get a leg flung over the thing, which lay horizontal, partially above the waterline.
Definitely a tree, I found as I crawled onto it. A nice, round, fat, sturdy tree. Embracing it—I had always aligned myself with tree huggers, but never before had I actually thrown my arms around a trunk—I lay on my belly with the side of my face pressed against the bark and most of me at last out of the flooded river. Despite rain and darkness, I felt tension drain out of me; I lay limp, with no idea how exhausted I had been until strength began to return.
“Justin?” I called to the night.
No answer. I sighed, sat up, and began to inch toward shore. To make sure I hadn’t gotten turned around in the darkness, I stuck a foot down into the river. The direction of the current reassured me, and I went on, feeling my way along the tree trunk on all fours until something, I suppose the stub of a branch, poked my collarbone. I tried to circumnavigate the obstacle, slipped, and ended up back in the water. But this time, mothers be praised, it wasn’t wash-me-away water, only a quieter eddy in which I could stand on the bottom. In fact, the water reached not far above my waist.
But if I thought I was out of trouble, the notion was premature. Blundering toward what I hoped was shore, I collided with tree branches, stumbled, fell, dunked myself in water over my head, fumbled my way upright, sneezed, stumbled only two steps before I dunked myself again, got up, and did it all again, muttering a few new words I had learned from Stoat, before I finally reached dry land.
Well, not dry land, exactly. It was still raining. But I did find a stretch of something that was not flooding river.
I sat. I panted. I called for Justin. I intended to sit and call for Justin until daybreak, but my body had other ideas. At some point I toppled sideways and, curled in the wet sand, fell sound asleep.
• • •
I awoke to find myself basking in bright sunshine, feeling pleasantly warmed, grateful that the rain had stopped and even more grateful that it was no longer dark. Seldom had I so ardently appreciated simply being able to see.
The only immediate problem was that I had company. I was not the only life-form basking on that stretch of sand. When I opened my eyes, they stared straight at a brown thing that looked a bit too much like a snake. I had to blink and focus right in front of my nose to see—whoa. It really was the head of a reptile. At first I tried to convince myself it was a lizard or something, not a snake, but I remembered all too clearly reading about the poisonous snakes of Florida, that vipers had eyes like those of a cat, unlike the beady eyes of harmless snakes, and I remembered laughing because who the heck was ever going to get close enough to a snake to check out the pupils of its eyes?