I&#39ll Be There (25 page)

It didn’t take long for both of the branches to be sucked into the swirling current and then they were completely at nature’s mercy.

For Sam, with his throbbing shoulder, it was a double hell. Every move caused new stabs of pain, until after an hour of what could have been a ride on a bucking bronco with a chainsaw in his
ribs, something seemed to give way inside his body.

It was a kind of physical shock brought on by the cold water, the constant motion and the sounds of Riddle yelping. Once the river turned into a series of rapids, his little brother was like a
chained-up dog being beaten. He couldn’t escape, and he couldn’t keep quiet.

Now he was on a rollercoaster that was also a freezing waterwheel, and his answer was to growl and whimper and cry. So while Sam gritted his teeth, wincing with pain, certain that any moment
he’d black out and fall overboard, hoping that he’d drown as quickly and painlessly as possible, Riddle was gasping for air, putting up an audible fight.

And then, after three and a half hours of riding the river like a cork in a washing machine, the terrain changed, the waterway narrowed, and abruptly the current slowed.

It was a miracle. They’d never tipped over.

They’d travelled twelve miles. And they were at a much lower elevation. There were now smooth rock formations on either side of the waterway. Tall, rust-coloured walls of stone lined the
river, which had turned lazy and slow. The sun was out and it reflected off the flat surfaces and began to dry their soaked clothing.

Riddle stopped screaming. And Sam stopped thinking about dying.

And they both were moved by the intensity of the world around them. Overhead an eagle soared, checking them out as it circled.

Riddle finally said his first sentence that didn’t include the word
help
. ‘I peed my pants.’

An hour later, the stone canyon had again given way to a new terrain, and the river had again changed character. The current was picking up, and the rush of the water echoed,
making a new kind of roar. The horror show was returning.

Riddle shouted to Sam, ‘I’m done.’

Sam knew what he meant. He felt done, too. But he answered, ‘We’ll find someone . . .’

It made sense when he said it. But hearing the words wasn’t very comforting. Riddle said again simply, ‘I’m done.’

Sam turned his head slightly to get a better look at his brother, and then the flow changed and the kayak swung around for the thousandth time and Riddle was now in front and Sam was in back,
except that they were on an angle, not moving straight down the river.

But the roar was now getting louder. Sam wondered if the sound was in his head. But then Riddle said, ‘I hear cars.’

Sam tried to listen. Is that what it was? A highway? Could they have come that far? It was too much to even hope for.

Riddle was now completely still, intently listening.

Sam, despite the pain in his shoulder and his neck and his back and his legs, twisted at the waist to get a better take on the situation. It certainly seemed as if they were in a very remote
area.

But the highway sound was even louder now. Riddle was getting agitated. ‘Sam – I hear the cars! I hear them!’ Riddle twisted his body in all directions, and the kayak swayed
with him.

Sam shouted. ‘Riddle, stop that. Stop moving!’

Riddle tried to be still, but he was wide-eyed now. The highway was getting closer. Maybe they would go under an overpass. Maybe they could wave their arms. Wouldn’t people see them?
Wouldn’t people understand that they were in trouble?

Some of the sunscreen that they’d put on hours earlier was now melting off Riddle’s forehead and into his right eye. He wiped his eye and made it all worse. He suddenly felt intense
stinging.

Riddle leaned over into the water and cupped his hand and splashed his face. The kayak wobbled.

Sam didn’t understand. ‘Riddle, I said stop that!’

‘My eye hurts. Maybe from the sunscreen.’

Sam snapped at him. ‘Forget your damn eye!’

He shouldn’t have said it that way. He didn’t mean to say it that way.

They were caught up in the moment, in the kayak, both exhausted. Both hungry. Both not really able to pay attention to what was happening on the river, and both not able to do anything about it,
even if they had been paying attention. Their drama now involved shouting at each other not to rock the boat.

And only seven seconds later, the rush of the phantom highway revealed itself to be a waterfall, and the two boys and the kayak went straight over.

It was a thirty-one-foot drop, which was like going off the roof of a three-story building. They were on an angle when they slid right over the lip of the river, the bottom of
the kayak scraping suddenly on a large rock like a car not clearing a kerb.

They both screamed. Like crazed animals, was Sam’s thought as the sounds came out of their mouths.

But the river pulled, the rock held, and the kayak flipped. And then the two boys were suddenly airborne as they travelled with the red kayak and the icy water. They hit the river below right
with the main flow. The now-empty kayak knifed into the white water and then shot up as if fired from a cannon.

Both boys sank like stones, pounded from above by the black hammer of the wall of falling water. The weight on their bodies was enormous, when suddenly the twists and turns of the sucking snake
that was the current shifted direction. A new thrust of motion pushed them upward, and moments later they were both spat back to the surface.

The crimson kayak suffered a worse fate, slamming down on a sharp rock and splitting in two as if cleaved by a giant axe. The two pieces swirled in circles, and the front section promptly took
on water and sank. The back piece rode downstream in a spinning fury and disappeared.

The two boys, pushed to the surface as the aerated water churned against their bodies, found that it didn’t matter that they couldn’t swim. There was no swimming in this situation.
There was only the icy hand of fate.

And here it pulled them apart to follow their own destinies. The last thing Sam remembered Riddle saying was, ‘My eye hurts.’ And the last thing he remembered saying to Riddle was to
‘Forget your damn eye.’

He heard himself saying it now again as the black water filled his nose and pushed the air out of his lungs.

Forget your damn eye.

For, where he was now, only the blind could really see.

People die every day in rivers.

They die wearing life vests, after years and years of water experience. They die surrounded by boats and onlookers and first aid at their fingertips. They die when they have done everything
right in the big book of water safety.

And people live who have done everything wrong.

Sam and Riddle went in opposite directions, thrown to different sides of the river.

Riddle was on the right. His body, semi-conscious, bobbed along on the surface. Air pockets inflated his shirt at the shoulders and kept his torso from sinking. Smaller and more compact, he
moved at twice the speed of his lanky brother.

Sam was on the left, rolling like a piece of trash. The sticks and the tape that Riddle had put on to stabilise his shoulder were carried off his body like paper products.

The roiling water took the two boys swiftly away from the waterfall and swiftly away from each other. As they tumbled, pulled by the current like rag dolls, their body temperatures rapidly began
to fall. Their circulation responded by slowing and, within a matter of only seconds, simple movement was becoming no longer possible.

Everything inside was closing down.

Because it wasn’t that you didn’t want to swim. It wasn’t that you didn’t try to paddle. Your body no longer took any direction. It had been thrown in ice water, and all
that was communicated to nerve endings was pull in, pull back, exhibit full retreat.

And then Sam’s head hit something. Hard. An old tree along the shore had fallen during a flash flood when the water rose and the banks were swollen. The roots had given way and the tree
had gone down. A sinker.

The tree now lay partly on the shore and partly in the river. Sam’s hand opened, out of instinct, not with any sense of purpose, and it closed on one of the slimy branches. And suddenly,
out of nowhere, Sam had a way to make it onto the shore.

Minutes later, he lay on the rocks and mud of the riverbank, feeling a kind of relief that he’d never known. It had stopped, the agony of the motion, the spinning icy world that was
pulling him down into the blackness of forever.

And he made a vow to himself that if he survived, he’d never get in a boat again. For the rest of his life.

Just the idea made him feel better. And then his mind, his ability to form conscious thought, turned off.

Done.

He shut his eyes and gave in to the now blinding light and the emptiness of all that was behind him.

I’m done.

He now heard Riddle’s voice echo. He answered back, ‘I’m done, too.’

Riddle, puffed up with air that had lodged into the shoulders of his shirt, was moving feet-first, riding downstream on his back like a stubby, bobbing pencil. He continued
that way, his body frozen from both trauma and fear and an inability to get a decent breath.

And then he hit an eddy that abruptly spun him in circles. His jeans twisted around his body, tangling with his legs, cutting off the blood in his ever-stiffening limbs.

The only movement Riddle could make was to use the thumb on his left hand to pop open the top of his old jeans. They were immediately stripped off his legs with his shoes. But the jeans and
shoes pulling away did something else. It spun Riddle on an extreme angle, heading for the riverbank and, miraculously, seconds later he found himself grabbing at the sandy shoreline, pulling
himself up out of the icy water.

Two minutes later, one hundred and twenty more seconds, and Riddle would have been dead. His pulse had slowed. His body temperature had been falling fast, and he was slipping below the surface.
He was two minutes from being done. But he was taken out before he was cooked. Or, in this case, before he was frozen.

In just his underwear and his shirt and socks, he moved up onto the rocks and put his head between his knees, throwing up what felt like buckets of brown river water.

The world was spinning.

After what seemed like an eternity, he lifted his head and stared at the river.

Where is Sam?

My Sam.

Sam.

Where is my brother?

He watched every curl of the water for Sam to emerge, popping up out of the frothy sauce that flowed in front of him.

But Sam did not appear.

Riddle waited and waited, shivering as his teeth clattered and his legs shook. It was clear. Sam was gone. Riddle thought about throwing himself back in and joining his brother in the black cold
that was the liquid executioner, but he couldn’t.

It wasn’t that dying made him afraid, but the instinct for survival was strong.

And Riddle had it.

Emily remembered Sam saying that he’d taught himself to swim in Mexico.

So even when they explained to her that no one would survive in cold water like what was in the Manti-La Sal National Forest, she would not believe them. He’d left in April and in a week
it would be June, and the latest news from the sheriff’s department in Utah was meant to be some kind of closure.

At least that’s what they were all telling her.

But she didn’t want closure. She didn’t believe in closure. She didn’t accept closure.

The authorities had recovered personal possessions from the truck and from the Liberty Motel room, and Emily wanted something that had belonged to Sam and to Riddle, but she wasn’t a
relative, so it was not seen as a reasonable request.

Detective Sanderson had contacted the sheriff’s office in Cedar City, which was a back-channel way to see if they could do anything.

Clarence had been moved from a state hospital to a clinic and then to a physical rehab facility, where he was to learn to use his artificial leg before going to prison to await his trial. He had
been asked, through his attorney, Howie P. McKinnon, if Emily could have one of Riddle’s phone books and Sam’s red shirt.

Clarence had answered no.

Or more accurately, ‘Hell no.’

And then Clarence told the authorities that he wanted his kids’ possessions thrown away. Instead they were all sealed for use as possible evidence in the upcoming trial against him.

While he was in physical rehab, most of the details of Clarence Border and his two sons, Sam and Rudolph Border, were documented and Clarence was now being investigated for crimes all over the
United States. As Detective Sanderson saw it, it was highly doubtful, when all was said and done, that Clarence Border would ever in his lifetime see the world outside of prison.

Detective Sanderson sent an email to Tim Bell with the information that the two boys’ mother, Shelly Thayer Border, had died many years ago after being struck by a car.

Tim Bell read the email over the phone to his wife, and Debbie Bell went outside and sat in the garden that night until long after it was dark. She put her head down on the picnic table and,
certain that no one could see her, allowed herself to cry, not just for the two boys but for the first woman who had lost them.

People at Churchill High School had all heard some account of what had happened.

Emily Bell had been seeing a guy whose father was a total criminal and had taken him hostage, and the kid had died in Utah trying to escape.

That was the headline, but all kinds of things had been added to and subtracted from the story.

Bobby Ellis figured into the narrative because he had information that had led to the arrest of the fugitive father.

That’s why Emily and Bobby were so close now.

And that’s why Emily Bell didn’t hang out now with her friends and kept to herself.

The girls on the soccer team had seen the guy, so they considered themselves more knowledgeable about the whole thing, even if that meant making up details.