HER FRIENDS TOOK JESSICA FROM THE RIVER AND LAID her out on the bank. Two ran for help toward the bridge, where several picknickers had seen the accident and were coming to meet them, delayed because they had to make their way over and around the river’s rocks and boulders.
One of the two who stayed with Jessica, the Taylor boy, knelt over her and tried to revive her, but he didn’t really know how. Soon he rose and stood, looking up, then down the river as though he were waiting for a taxi. Time passed. Minutes. Maybe five minutes.
One of the men from the bridge said he knew CPR. He went to work on Jessica while the others watched. More minutes. At last the man left off and sat on the bank beside Jessica. He lowered his head to his knees, breathing hard, sobbing.
Someone at the bridge must have had a phone, for shortly more people began to arrive. The first official was Trooper Amy Madison of the Vermont State Police. She left her cruiser at the bridge and came up the river toward the group around Jessica. The stony, uneven riverbed didn’t slow Trooper Madison. She ran over the ground like a deer, leaping from rock to rock. When she reached Jessica, she flung herself down and began immediately to perform vigorous resuscitation, but presently she too stopped. She shook her head.
“Nothing,” said Trooper Madison. “She’s gone.”
By chance, Jessica had gone into the river near the spot where she and her friends had pitched their tent earlier. Trooper Madison directed that Jessica be placed in the tent. She and two of the others picked Jessica up and carried her to the tent. They bent and took her in. In the distance, approaching quickly, sounded the siren of an ambulance. Hearing it, seeing Jessica carried into the tent, the Truman girl, who had been with Jessica in the party, began to scream.
• • •
Jessica Kennedy: a famous kid, if regular kids can be famous. Well-known, well-loved. Jessica didn’t have a boyfriend, but there wasn’t a male in the valley over ten and under ninety who would not have plighted her his troth, if he could. Jessica would have been eighteen in the fall, was about to start her senior year at the district high school. She had thought about trying for college on an athletic scholarship. Jessica was a basketball player, light and not especially tall, but quick, stronger than she looked, and a leader. She also ran girls’ cross-country.
With the confidence that comes from sport and successful competition, Jessica had also a daredevil streak, she had the kind of physical recklessness that is thought by some to belong, at her age, only to boys, but by no means does. As much as the boldest boy, Jessica would try anything. She had a flair for trouble—not real trouble, not bad trouble, but the kind of high-spirited trouble that good kids get into. Call it mischief.
It was Jessica who figured out that you could develop considerable speed going down the big ski jump in Brattleboro on your bottom if you sat on a plastic trash bag. When you got to the jump-off, you could bail out—or not.
It was Jessica who borrowed the line-man’s pole-climbing spikes from the electric company’s truck while the workers were at lunch and used them to climb to the top of one of the enormous old pine trees in the village. When the fellows came out of the café, there was Jessica, 125 feet in the air.
“Wow,” said Jessica. “I can see Mount Snow.”
When they demanded she come down immediately, she did. When they threatened to tell her father of her exploit, Jessica said, “Sure. What’s he going to do, tell me I can’t climb any trees for a month? Okay. I won’t. I promise.”
Who more likely than Jessica, then, to sign on to a whitewater paddle with four friends in a seam-sprung old canoe meant for two, with no life-preservers, no helmets, and no knowledge of or experience in surviving (let alone navigating) an enraged river in spate following three days of heavy rain? Jessica’s contribution to the expedition’s success was to observe that the canoe was pretty full and so to volunteer to be towed behind in an inner tube. The canoe went through a big, scary chute, with the others hanging on tight. Past it, they saw the people at the bridge waving and gesturing. They looked back. There was the tow rope. There was the tube, what was left of it. No Jessica.
Now she lay on the riverbank, unbreathing, near-naked, gray or blue in color, bruised, dripping, cold, and very still. A cruel, an unbearable business. Soon would have to begin the search for comfort, for strength, a search perfectly vain, reduced at best to reliance on ancient solace, the bleak assurance that the good die young and the young die good, spared as they are the disappointments, disabilities, and dissolutions that inevitably afflict those of us who live on. True, perhaps, but not a truth that has ever brought much relief to survivors in pain, or that could have done so in the valley at the death of Jessica Kennedy.
Except that Jessica didn’t die. Not exactly.
• • •
Eli had happened to be at the clinic when the call came in for a drowning at the bridge. He rode on the ambulance. At the river bank, he found Taft just arrived and standing with the others.
“What are you doing here?” Eli asked him.
“Where is she?” asked Taft.
“I don’t know. She must be in the tent.”
“Let’s go, then,” said Taft.
There was no time. Eight or ten people had gathered around the tent on the riverbank. The younger ones held one another. Some wept. Others stood dumb and helpless. Trooper Madison stood at the tent’s entrance. She was trying to take a call on her radio, but she wasn’t receiving well. “Say again?” she said. She listened.
Taft and Eli approached.
“Whoa,” said Trooper Madison. “Are you her family?”
“No,” said Eli. “We’re here to help her.”
“She’s past helping,” said the trooper. “We’re waiting on the medical examiner. Please stand aside.”
Trooper Madison’s radio squawked again. She listened, but again she evidently couldn’t understand the transmission. She left the tent and went down the bank toward the river, hoping for a better signal. When she did that, Taft stooped and went quickly into the tent. Eli followed him.
Inside the tent, Eli regarded the poor girl lying at their feet. She had lost the top of her bathing suit in the river, and, slender as she was and lying stretched on her back as she did, her small breasts lay like inverted saucers on her chest, juvenile, undefended. Eli looked away. He stepped to one side so Taft could approach the unmoving girl.
The Taylor boy was with Jessica, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth, not touching her. He wouldn’t leave her side. Taft looked for some moments at the girl. He got down on one knee beside her and delicately cleared a strand of wet hair from her face. He picked up her left hand and held it in both his, chafing it gently. Jessica lay quite still. Taft put her hand back at her side. He looked up at Eli, at the Taylor boy.
“You’d better go, now,” Taft told the boy.
Let him stay, whispered Dangerfield. He had come into the tent after the rest and stood in the shadow in a corner. He wore a Navy frogman’s rubber wetsuit, the glass face mask pushed up on his forehead, the broad rubber flippers on his feet slapping the ground as he walked.
From where he stood near the entrance of the tent, Eli watched as Taft laid his hand on the girl’s forehead. “What’s her name?” Taft asked the Taylor boy.
“Jessie,” said the boy. “Jessica.”
“Jessica?” Taft addressed the girl. “Jessica?”
Nothing.
“She’s gone,” said the boy. “She’s dead.”
She’s not dead, muttered Dangerfield.
“She looks dead,” said Taft.
“She is dead,” cried the Taylor boy.
Want to bet? whispered Dangerfield. Kiss her.
“Oh, come on,” said Taft.
“What?” asked the Taylor boy.
Go ahead.
Taft bent and kissed Jessica’s forehead. He waited. Nothing.
Not there, murmured Dangerfield. Dial it up a click, Chief. Go for PG-13.
Taft bent to the girl again. “What are you doing?” Eli asked him. Taft kissed the girl lightly on the lips. He drew back.
Uno mas, said Dangerfield.
“What?” asked Taft.
One more time, Chief. Three’s the charm.
Taft gave Jessica a third kiss. Eli started to speak again, but in that moment, Jessica stirred. She opened her eyes. She took a shallow breath. She sneezed. “Wow,” said Jessica.
You lose.
“I didn’t bet,” said Taft.
Damnation, hissed Dangerfield.
Jessica blinked. She looked up at them. “Wow,” she said again.
“Oh, my God,” said the Taylor boy. “Jess?” he cried, “Jess? Oh, thank God. Thank the Lord. Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”
Get that kid out of here, ordered Dangerfield. Jesus had nothing to do with this.
• • •
Later, on the bridge, Taft and Dangerfield watched the departure of the car in which Jessica Kennedy, wrapped in several warm towels and surrounded by her jubilant friends, was being driven safely home. The ambulance had left. Eli had gone with it. The incident was over. Nearby, Trooper Madison was on the radio in her cruiser, calling in her report. Taft watched her intently.
“Did you see her?” he asked Dangerfield.
Who?
“Her,” Taft nodded toward the trooper. “Isn’t she something?”
You mean the skinny statie? Yeah, I saw her. She’s the same one that hassled me the first day I got up here. Ball-breaker.
Taft hadn’t taken his eyes off Trooper Madison. “She’s beautiful,” he said.
Dangerfield eyed him narrowly. She’s a cop, Chief, he said. Are you telling me you’ve got the hots for a cop? Don’t be stupid. Listen, if you want that kind of action, I can put you together with people who’ll make her look like a mud puddle. Just specify color and size.
“No,” said Taft. “You don’t understand.”
Oh, said Dangerfield. Oh, okay. Cops, is it? You say cops are your fancy? Cops in themselves? A little rough stuff? I wouldn’t have thought that of you, Chief, but it’s not a problem. Not at all. What’s your pleasure? NYPD? Alabama Trooper? Texas Ranger? Gestapo? Name it.
But Taft seemed not to hear him. He continued to gaze at Trooper Madison. “Her,” he said. “Only her.”
Well, okay, Chief. Your call. The customer is always right. We live to serve. Do you want me to fix it for you?
“Can you?”
What do you think, Chief?
“But, how?” Taft pressed him. “She doesn’t know me, not at all. She doesn’t know I exist.”
She will, said Dangerfield. Don’t worry. You want her, you got her. Fact is, this one won’t be a heavy lift. Helen of Troy, she ain’t.