Nevada Barr - The Rope

“That must be it,” Anna said. It was not what she’d meant. This was reminiscent of when she was in the jar, naked, and felt eyes crawling over her skin like phantom cockroaches.

“What should we do?” Anna asked. “Sorry,” she apologized. Putting the onus of their survival onto Jenny wasn’t fair. Anna had been doing it, not because she’d abdicated responsibility for herself, but because Jenny had superior knowledge. Jenny had gotten them out of the cold water for a while.

“Do you know what the water temperature is?” Anna asked to change the subject. The bliss of chill weightlessness was becoming cold misery.

“Forty, fifty degrees, maybe a little more,” Jenny said. “The surface of the main part of the lake can get up to eighty degrees this time of year, but only the first ten feet or so where the sun warms it. The deeper you go, the lower the temperature. Are you getting cold?”

The concern in her housemate’s voice was so sincere Anna said, “No. You?”

“No,” Jenny replied. Both were lying, both knew it, yet it helped marginally.

“How long does it take for the hypothermia to get serious in forty-fifty-degree water?” Anna asked. Not that it mattered. After so many years practicing the intricate timing of cues and effects required of a stage manager, Anna couldn’t break the habit.

Stage-managing my own demise. Too bad life didn’t have a better playwright, she thought. Sam Shepard, that’s who she would have chosen to write her final scene. The man knew how to keep the action moving, yet never at the cost of language or emotional content.

“I don’t know much about hypothermia,” Jenny said. “Lake Powell’s a heatstroke kind of park. Are you ready to try getting out of the water now?”

“I can’t.” Anna was ashamed of her weakness but knew she hadn’t the strength to spider up the wall and wedge herself again. Jenny might as well have asked her to smash the sandstone separating them from the boat and safety with one blow of her fist. “You go.”

“I don’t think I can either,” Jenny admitted, “and I’m not just dying to be nice here. Climb twice, with the cold … I’ve lost my strength of ten men.”

Talking was too much work, and they stopped. Anna tried to think of warm things, but thinking was too much work as well. Rumor would have it that dying people saw their lives flash before their eyes. Anna saw a hundred plays enacted in a single heartbeat. “I have a variation on the climbing thing,” she said as the last image faded. Her jaw ached with the effort it took to keep her teeth from chattering as she spoke. “Want to try it?”

“Got to try something,” Jenny said. Holding Anna’s pigtail, she followed as Anna swam the few strokes into the slot.

“Like you were before—wedged—feet on one side and back against the other, but in the water,” Anna instructed. Blind, she waited until Jenny grunted, “Okay.”

“You’re all wedged in? Not treading water? Just braced?”

“Ten-four.”

“Be ready. I’m going to crawl on you, if I can find you,” Anna said. She felt a tug on her braid and followed it until she ran into her housemate’s legs where they were braced across the narrow water channel. “Here I come,” Anna said. She fitted herself into Jenny’s arms, her back against her housemate’s breasts, and braced the soles of her feet against the stone between Jenny’s. Jenny wrapped her arms around Anna’s, and in turn Anna hugged Jenny’s arms to her chest, sharing as much body heat with one another as possible.

“Am I squashing you?” Anna asked.

“Not yet,” Jenny said. “This is an aquatic variation of getting naked with friends in a sleeping bag, isn’t it? Where did you learn it?”

“ Terra Nova, a play about Scott and Amundsen’s race to the pole. There was no sleeping bag scene, but the crew got a lot of mileage out of the image.”

Out of the water Anna’s plan wouldn’t have worked. The pressure she would have to exert to stay in place would have been too painful for Jenny. With the buoyancy of the water helping, they were able to raise heads and shoulders above water level, exposing a few more square inches of skin to the kindness of the July night.

“I definitely think it’s warmer,” Jenny said after a minute.

“Definitely,” Anna said. Marginally, she thought.

“Mmm,” Jenny murmured in her ear. For a time they didn’t speak. Braced as they were, sharing heat, partially supported by the water, they might last a while. Not forever, not till daylight. Not even until midnight, Anna guessed.

Since Zach died, and Anna’d given her mind to the Grim Reaper, she’d almost come to believe in his corporeal existence the way children believe Santa comes down the chimney, eats the cookies, puts the gifts under the tree, then leaves the way he came.

Trapped in the jar, she’d realized the Grim Reaper wasn’t the guy for her, unless the monster was planning a fate worse than death. Embraced in stone and Jenny’s arms, Anna knew there was no “worse than death.” There was only life and the cessation thereof. Zach had not left her, he had died. Anna was not abandoned, she was widowed. God was not punishing her or testing her; he, like Zach, was simply dead.

“We are probably going to die in the next few hours,” Anna said, to see what it was like to state a truth such as that.

“Probably,” Jenny said, her breath warm on Anna’s cheek.

“I can live with that,” Anna replied in all seriousness.

The cold leached the life from them. Anna lost feeling in her feet, then her hands. Jenny was losing strength as well. The arms that held Anna trembled. The two of them slipped a few inches deeper.

For bits of time, seconds, or perhaps years, Anna forgot where she was, why it was so cold, when she had been rendered sightless. She was glad not to be alone. A sharp pain in her ear shocked her back from a mind drift where she raced, soaring over a cloudless landscape.

“You bit me!” she said.

“You were going to sleep,” said a voice so close she wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t in her head.

“Jenny?”

“If we go to sleep, we won’t wake up,” Jenny said.

Anna remembered that from somewhere. A production she’d crewed in college, she thought.

“Savage Mountain,” she said. “K2, second highest in the world.”

A tiny whisper of a groan let her know Jenny thought she wasn’t making sense. Anna hadn’t the energy to assure her she was perfectly sane. Perfectly, perfectly sane. Perfectly perfect. Again the gentle wafting threatened to carry her away.

“Tell me a story,” Anna pleaded.

“What kind of a story?” asked the warm sweet breeze in her left ear.

“One with lots of explosions and sirens and slamming doors,” Anna replied. “I think I might be falling asleep sometimes.”

“Okay.” Jenny was silent long enough Anna had to fight the drift by biting her tongue and the insides of her cheeks. Digging her nails into her palms was an impossibility. Her hands were either curled into fists or clamped on Jenny’s. They wouldn’t open or close. Dark was so dark she didn’t know when her eyes closed, and she couldn’t lift her hands to find out.

“Once upon a time,” began the whisper in her head, “there was a beautiful princess named Adafaire. God, was she a princess! Right out of a fairy tale. Her hair was blond, honest blond, and straight and fine. The princess wore it long and knew how to toss her head so it shone. That hair was as expressive as a cat’s tail. Adafaire would twitch it, and disdain filled the air, toss it, and hearts pounded.

“The princess was rich as well as beautiful and lived with other princesses in the sorority house. Delta Gamma or Theta Tau, I can’t remember. Let’s call it Kappa Kappa Damn. Picture a place the likes of me would be allowed in only as the hired help.