Page 23 of A Summer to Save Us

I open my mouth in a silent scream. The engine roars at the same moment the car fishtails, and my eyes lose focus. Somehow, I notice River pulling the handbrake and steering against the momentum. The seatbelt squeezes the air out of my lungs as I grip the handle even tighter.

We spin like a top until we stop in the direction we were traveling. Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God!

Unable to think straight, my heart pounds in my ears.

For a moment, River stares over the steering wheel, as if he can’t believe what just happened, but then he immediately accelerates again.

No! Brake! My mind screams, but even if River could hear me, he wouldn’t stop.

Definitely not. I glance back. The black car is still behind us.

River has spotted him as well because he revs the engine, sending the Porsche flying down the next straightaway toward another invisible curve, still driving too fast. Out of nowhere, the back of a camper appears in front of us, as big and white as a wall.

“Dammit!” River jerks the wheel to the left and shoots past the side of the camper. At the last second, a tunnel opens in front of us, less than eight feet wide, and a red VW Bug approaching.

Stop! Please stop!

A tiny voice inside me reminds me that he’s probably on drugs and unable to control his reactions.

Everything is happening too quickly. The camper’s deep horn blares like bass in my ears. The VW Bug takes up my entire field of vision and automatically, I narrow my eyes, hold on tight, and hear the shrill squeal of brakes.

But there’s no crash . Oh God! When I open my eyes again, I see the VW Bug on the side of the road, and a millisecond later, River thunders into the tunnel. The engine’s roar echoes on all sides, and the smell of rubber fills the air.

He didn’t brake whatsoever!

He didn’t fucking brake! He’s suicidal!

Suddenly, he hits the steering wheel and shouts, “Fuck that fucking asshole!”

My heart is pounding hard in my chest. The tunnel is short, no more than sixty-five feet long. As if under anesthesia, I notice a few cars waiting at the other end of the tunnel.

River speeds by, glancing in the rearview mirror before accelerating again.

I continue to sit there in a daze, my hands shaking, still unable to get the words dying companions out of my head.

After a while, he lights a cigarette and gives me a searching look through narrowed eyes. At the moment, he seems like the angel of death to me—dark but captivatingly beautiful, someone you willingly follow anywhere, even to the final frontier. “That was close!”

I’m still shaking. I don’t know what he means. The thing with the curve and the tunnel, or the Camaro he wanted to outrun. I merely nod, paralyzed.

Who’s chasing us if not Chester? Why would anyone even be following us? I’m still clinging to the door handle. My blouse sticks to my back, drenched with sweat. That could have gone so wrong. A collision with the VW Bug would have folded us like an accordion. And probably not just us.

Don’t worry, Tucks . We’re dying companions , I hear River whisper in my head. Whatever that means. However, here with him, on this journey to freedom, I no longer want to die.

Later, when he slacklines barefoot in Spearfish Canyon, my knees are still weak. Trembling, I watch as he runs nimbly from one end to the other. He looks as if running is something sacred to him.

The place also feels sacred somehow. All around us, pale limestone cliffs rise, and the dark pine forests stand with enchanted streams and hundreds of sparkling waterfalls between them.

Apparently, River doesn’t seem afraid of being discovered here, even though he hid the Porsche along a forest path.

“Come up and take the strap out of the backpack!” he calls to me. “Then you can learn how to put it on!”

I look up at him. I want to know so many different things about him. Why is he being followed? I asked him about it earlier, but he didn’t reply to my message.

“Hey, come on!”

Too high , I try to convey with gestures as I point to the line, which is stretched six feet above the ground.

He grins. “I can’t believe it. Two days ago, you wanted to throw yourself off Old Sheriff, but this is too high for you?”

He’s right. It’s ridiculous. On the other hand, my body is still full of adrenaline. I feel like I have an overdose of it running through my system.

I hesitantly take the strap out of his backpack.

“By the way, the longest highline was almost a mile long,” River says from above.

“And the highest was between two hot air balloons in the sky. But these records constantly change, so whatever.” He talks faster than usual and tells me everything about setting up a highline, mentioning anchor points, fixed points, and a second safety line, while I examine the harness, which looks like a climbing harness.

I quickly slip into the leg loops and fasten it around my waist. Luckily, I don’t have any bruises there.

“You need a second Handana.” River climbs down toward me over a few overhanging branches.

I look for a second Handana in my backpack and put it on while River kneels in front of me and tightens my belt in a few places.

I feel his fingers brushing against my thighs and hold my breath because his proximity and his scent confuse me even more.

Everything about him confuses me, and I think of the saying in my Beautiful Words book, ‘There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth,’ from Nietzsche, who also said, ‘God is dead.’

Why does River want to save me? He must have some reason.

If there’s one thing I know about life, it’s that no one does anything without a reason—unless their impulse control fails; that’s from James.

So, River has a reason, and he had it even when he didn’t even know me. When I was still a strange girl to him.

“Hey, dreamer!” River pretends to playfully punch my upper arm but actually does it so gently it almost seems like a caress. “What are you thinking about?”

I’m completely confused. I can barely look at him without blushing because I keep imagining him kissing me.

“The safety line that attaches to the harness is called a leash,” I hear him say as if from afar.

“You always have to attach it to the harness with a double figure-eight knot, and it hangs on a ring that the line has been run through during setup.” He climbs up a few boulders and points to a thick silver steel ring to which a rope is attached.

I hadn’t noticed it before. “The leash holds you if you fall, but you also have to practice falling; otherwise, you can hurt yourself.” He’s standing on the line that, this time, hovers over a stream.

He peers down from above, and a myriad of dark, sparkling butterflies flutter through my senses as if I were already standing unsecured on a highline looking into the depths.

I nervously climb after River and stop on a wide branch next to the line.

“Stop!” River comes over and ties a knot in the leash, which he calls a “figure eight.”—a figure eight knot. The knot isn’t at the end of the rope; he threads the end through my strap and then uses it to create a second knot parallel to the first.

“Do you know how to tie a double-figure eight knot?”

I shake my head, so he picks everything up again and repeats each step until I can copy it.

“Now you can belay yourself,” he says with a satisfied nod, but my knees are shaking because the line seems much higher from up here.

River explains a thousand more things to me about falling.

Catching is the name given to catching the slackline when it slips.

He also says I need to use the first momentum after a fall to pull myself back up to the line; otherwise, I’ll bounce up and down like a yo-yo.

“You certainly don’t look like you have the strength to pull yourself up on your own. ” He looks at me, grinning.

Well, thanks a lot!

“Okay, run over it and see how the height feels to you. If you fall, the leash and the water will slow you down. Nothing can happen.”

I put both feet on the line, and my legs shake.

For a moment, while I’m still holding the branch above me, I look down.

The glittering surface of the water lies below like a reflective eye, with clouds passing under my feet.

My heart is racing. This is crazy. When I sat on my windowsill every day and thought about jumping, I wasn’t wearing a safety harness.

I stared into Willow River and considered throwing myself into the depths without a second thought. But now I’m scared.

“That’s not even a highline, Tucks,” River says, still standing next to me. “But a line in the air is different from one on the ground. From a purely psychological perspective, there’s a huge difference, even if the process is identical. Find a fixed point.”

I look at the tree shelter on the other side and start running.

“Yeah, good. Just don’t look down.” He leaps down in a few jumps, and I think he takes off his jeans and gets into the water. God, how am I supposed to slackline properly now when he’s standing down there half-naked?

I keep running, balancing myself like a plane encountering turbulence.

I feel the line under my feet and the damp air around me.

My blonde curls bounce. I can do it. Just one foot in front of the other.

It’s only me and the band, and I finally understand what River means when he says slacklining is freedom.

It is freedom because everything else fades away.

I’m not thinking about anything anymore—not Kensington, River’s pursuers, or even my muteness.

“You’re halfway there!” he calls from below, and I involuntarily look down at him.

He stands in waist-high water, directly below me, in only his black T-shirt and shorts.

I instantly lose control. My world tilts sideways so quickly I can’t maintain my balance.

I forget everything River told me about falling and feel only the hard jolt of the leash holding me.

A sharp pain shoots through my back as I dangle like a wet sack with my legs in the water.

At first, River seems shocked, but when I make a silly gesture, he bursts out laughing.

His laugh doesn’t sound like one of the beautiful songs he’s always humming—it's more like an air pump with the air being squeezed out, mixed with loud ahs and uhs. I fall in love immediately. With that laughter. With this moment when everything is so perfect, and I feel free. And even though I’m still dangling helplessly on the line, something stirs in my chest. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

An emotion I had forgotten how it felt—joy.

And because it’s so beautiful, I want to cry.

River helps me back up, and in retrospect, I know why he went in the water. “Tucks, no one runs a line like that on their second day and doesn’t fall!”

Bastard!

I stay on the line for three hours. I practice catching the line while falling.

Twice, I miss and fall; the third time, I manage to hold on to the line and pull myself up, but afterward, my left hand burns like fire despite the Handana.

Later, I practice falling normally, and by the end, I’m soaked, and every bone feels like it’s going to break the next time I fall—a bit like after a really bad school day at Kensington.

As we walk back through the valley surrounded by streams and waterfalls, River takes my hand without asking.

He looks at me intently. I act like this is normal even for me, but I tremble under his touch.

It tingles up my forearm and discharges into my heart as a series of delicate impulses.

It is so beautiful that I can hardly stand it.

“You’re shaking.” He grips my hand tighter as if he could calm me, and it actually works. We jump over stones side by side, wade through the stream, and balance together over mossy tree trunks lying in the stream.

Dying companions would probably be the words I would have written in my notebook today.

I still have so many questions, but somehow, they’ve lost a little of their urgency.

In fact, while slacklining, River appeared to be so normal and exuberant by the end that I can’t imagine something being wrong with him.

He was neither a fallen angel, the angel of death, nor Peter Pan. He was just River.

My clothes are slowly drying, and as we arrive hand in hand at the Porsche, I feel there is a canyon between me and my old life in Cottage Grove that no line in the world can connect.