Nevada Barr - The Rope

“What made you so afraid of living?” Jenny asked. Her right calf was trying to cramp. Pushing her heel hard into the rock face, she drew her toes back as far as she dared and felt the cramp pull out.

“I killed my husband,” Anna said.

The words stuck in the slot like the echo of a thunderclap. Jenny jerked and the back of her head rapped against the sandstone.

“Like what?” she managed after a moment. “You shot him or knifed him? Like that kind of killed him?”

“No. Zach was coming down Ninth Avenue. I was coming home from D’Agostino’s. He saw me and started across. A cab hit him. He died a couple hours later.”

“And you think you killed him?”

Anna didn’t answer. Jenny took silence as an affirmative.

“A cab killed him. You get no credit for that. Us poor mortals live under the ‘shit happens’ rule of nature. Life doesn’t make sense. Unearned guilt is hubris, a claim to powers you don’t have. I understand the temptation. It’s less scary than admitting shit happens, because if shit does just happen, it can happen again and tomorrow your sister or your dog gets run over by a cab.” Jenny wasn’t lecturing Anna but herself, for the guilt she’d carried; guilt that she had done something, been something that brought on the gang rape at the beer bash.

“Shit happens,” she repeated and closed her mouth.

For what seemed like an eternity Anna made no reply. Twice more the cramp twisted in Jenny’s calf. Twice more she pulled it out by stretching her toes. The soles of her feet and the small of her back were simultaneously numb and on fire. Her spine was a line of liquid agony from coccyx to skull. She could no longer tell where the quivering and twitching of her muscles left off and Anna’s began.

Finally her companion spoke.

“I did not kill Zach. He was hit by a cab.”

“There you go,” Jenny said.

“Thanks a heap,” Anna replied. “Now I am afraid to die.” With that she fell, and Jenny with her.

Anna expected to fall a long way. Forever. When she immediately struck the water it startled a squawk from her. Then she went under and there was no way to know up from down. Weight crashed onto her, plunging her deeper. Jenny. She must have dragged Jenny down when her feet slipped from the wall. Anna’s hip struck something solid, and she curled into a ball. She was afraid to try to swim. She might be swimming toward the bottom. A heel or an elbow struck her on the side of the head, not enough to stun, but enough to shock and hurt. Then a painful jerk and she realized she was being reeled in, like a fish on a line, her braid being the line.

“Breathe,” she heard Jenny command, and so she did.

“Thanks,” she gasped. “I didn’t know if I was still underwater or not.” She couldn’t see Jenny, or the walls, or the water. All that remained to let her know she was not blind, and was more or less right side up, was the single star allotted to this graveyard. Astronomy was not one of Anna’s strengths. Living in the city, working a night job, was not conducive to stargazing. Still, she knew stars moved across the sky at night and was surprised to see this one had yet to rotate from view. In her previous incarnation, Anna’s internal clock was trained to register time to the minute. How long the first act was, how many seconds for Juliet to change backstage, one minute of blackout, the length of time it took for the night-blind lead to fumble his way down the stairs. Reborn to die in a ditch, Anna’s internal clock insisted the star had come into view hours before and should have been halfway to setting by now.

“Anna! I asked if you were okay.” Jenny twitched the pigtail she held. Given the situation, to answer “daydreaming” didn’t seem a logical choice. That’s what Anna had been doing, and, being called back to reality, she realized why.

“This feels so good,” she said, then laughed at the relief and wonder in her voice. The water was heaven; it cooled her burning muscles, refreshed her parched skin, supported her weight. She felt as if she’d fallen from the gallows into loving arms.

“It does,” Jenny admitted.

Anna was grateful she didn’t say more. At this blissful moment she didn’t want to hear the rest of the story; how the cold would sap their body heat, extremities would cease to function, lethargy and disorientation would follow, and they would drown. For this moment, tragedy could wait, as it waited in the second act of Romeo and Juliet, when the lovers were so beautiful and young the audience chose to forget they die horribly in the end.

“Can you get up out of the water again? After we’ve rested a minute?”

Movement felt grand after holding Scylla and Charybdis at bay for however long it had been, but treading water was difficult. Muscles, quick to uncramp and feel blood flowing again, were just as quickly complaining of fatigue. “I can try,” Anna said.

“If you put your hands on my shoulders, I could help hold you up for a bit, give your arms a break.”

“No,” Anna said, then, feeling she’d been an ingrate, added, “Thanks all the same.” Water flowed into her mouth. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to know how deep one was in the soup? In the black-on-black universe it wasn’t only muscle failure that could pull one under. Anna swallowed so she wouldn’t choke. Not a time to consider how many parts per million of human waste this part of the lake contained.

“Do you still have the end of my braid?” she asked the darkness.

“I do.”

“Don’t let go of it, okay?”

“I will cling to it as long as there’s breath in my body,” Jenny said. “I wish you could see me crossing my heart. Let me know when you’re rested enough to try the wall routine again. We don’t want to get too cold or we will never make it.”

“Why don’t you go back up now? I’ll try in a minute.”

“No,” Jenny said. “Thanks all the same. Do you want to swim back toward the sandstone where we came in? It’s wider there, and you could see the sky. That’s where they’ll look for us.”

“Unless they’ve gone to the bottom, our dead guys are floating around there,” Anna said.

Anna felt Jenny tug her braid gently. “Pretty scary stuff,” Jenny said.

The bodies didn’t scare Anna. When had she become so comfortable with corpses? When Kay had turned out to be such good company? The dead required nothing from the living, and there was nothing the living could offer the dead. All in all, it was a relaxed and amiable relationship.

Jenny must have mistaken her silence for fear.

“It’s not far to the mouth of the big pool. Let’s at least go that far. It will be easier to tread water with a bit more room. I, for one, am tired of skinning my knuckles and knees every other stroke. When you’re ready to try to get out again, we’ll pop back in the slot.”

Anna felt her braid move, Jenny leading her like a puppy on a leash. That was good. Otherwise she would have had only a fifty-fifty chance of swimming in the right direction.

In seconds the unutterable blackout of the slot was relieved by a slender line of, not light, but a less complete darkness. There was sufficient sky to house more than one meager star, and the canyon’s rim showed a silver sheen of moonlight. Across the water, the rock face they had descended caught the faint light—enough that Anna could discern it from the water.

“Do you feel like we’re being watched?” she asked suddenly.

“We are,” Jenny replied. “Can you see him there, near the blockage but way on the left?”

One of the dead men floated barely above water, eyes open, the iridescence of the moon caught in the whites.