I’d been writing at the table in the cabin for what felt like hours when I began to hear a noise. It was an uneven knocking. I laid the pen down on the table, and the noise stopped.
I lifted my pen to keep writing, and heard the knocking again. Maybe one of the ropes tying the tarp down over the pile of firewood had come loose and was blowing against the cabin wall? Mostly, I was trying to convince myself that it wasn’t anything alive. I was afraid. If I opened the door again, what would happen to me? Was there some kind of monster of darkness that would suck me into the river?
Of course, I thought, the rapping might be Grandpa trying to get back in. The idea cheered me. If he were here, I wouldn’t be lonely or scared. But still, I didn’t know. Sometimes in video games, if you open a locked door, you walk right through. Other times, you fall off a cliff. Was the knocking just a test?
I stood. I waited. I listened. I waited some more, then took six steps across the room and put my hand on the knob. Again, I heard the noise. It was too solid to be anything but an intentional knock—someone was definitely out there. I started to twist the knob, then stopped. I prepared myself. I was hoping that if I opened the door, I’d find Grandpa. But, maybe, instead, the cabin walls would dissolve, leaving me alone in the river, without Grandpa to protect me, without a tunnel to lead me back into the world where I belonged. My heart was beating so quickly I felt I could hear the rushing of the blood through its valves. Finally, I closed my eyes and flung open the door.
There was nothing but the cold dark force pushing against me.
Then I heard a slapping sound and saw four fingers wrapped around the door frame. The fingers looked red from the cold and they were straining to hold on to the edge of the door. I jumped back. There was something familiar about the fingers.
I had an idea. I stood with my back against the wall next to the door and moved sideways toward the fingers. The force of the blackness was coming through the door, but when I came from the side, I was able to touch the ends of the red, freezing fingers with my own. As soon as I touched them, I felt the cold push of the river fade. The air began to feel warm and light, like it might inside a helium balloon. I felt myself beginning to lift off the ground. I smelled lemon pie—hot, sweet, and delicious. I looked down to check—I was definitely floating. I tried to put my feet on the floor, but I couldn’t do it.
I began to float out the door, and I grasped the red, chapped hand even harder. I was feeling gentle and happy and full of light, but still, I knew there was danger. Whose hand was I holding? Where was I going?
As soon as I was out the door, I could see. The hand belonged to Gus. His body was plastered against the wall of the cabin, like he was inside one of those g-force spinning cylinder rides at an amusement park where people’s hair sticks up, and some people can climb the wall, and eventually the floor drops out, and someone pukes and the puke goes flying onto the person next to them, and it is the grossest thing you’ve ever seen.
“Michael,” Gus said. It was hard to understand him because the air was pushing his cheeks back toward his ears. It looked like he was baring his teeth. How come I wasn’t feeling it? “Look!” he shouted, and gestured by moving his eyes away from me. The space inside the river was shaped very strangely—Gus’s body looked like stretched-out Silly Putty. His other hand and even his face seemed very far away.
I followed his gaze to see who was holding his other hand. She looked as small as if she were standing on the other side of a football field, but I could still see who it was—Julia. She was floating out in the space beyond the porch, her toes pointed into a perfect second position, her eyes closed, her ponytail sticking straight up in the air as if she’d just stuck a knife into a toaster.
Beyond Julia, even smaller, was Trip. And beyond Trip was Ewan—a tiny Ewan. They were holding hands, making a chain. A chain of people. My friends. Against the impenetrable dark of the river, they looked like they were glowing yellow and pink.
“You guys are inside the river!” I shouted to Gus, half triumphant that they’d come to rescue me, half terrified that they were all stuck now in the same place I was.
“You have to come home now!” Gus shouted. “You have to hurry. Ewan said just to tell you to climb onto me.”
“What are you even doing here? How did you get into the river?”
“Shut up, Michael,” said Gus. “Start climbing.”
But I was scared, and Gus did not look like he was safe. I knew what the cold felt like. I didn’t want to go. “I’m not as strong as you guys,” I said.
“Michael,” Gus said, “don’t you see? You have to try.”
“It’s warm where I am right now.” I took a deep breath. “The air smells good all of a sudden. This is so comfortable. You go back. I’ll stay here.”
“You’re not feeling comfortable!” Gus shouted. “You’re feeling life. You’re breathing in my life. And Julia’s and Trip’s and Ewan’s. Ewan said to tell you how this is working. That you are stuck in the river right now and you don’t have enough life force left to get out of it on your own. If you feel good right now, it’s because you’re sucking off the life force of all of us making this chain. Do you feel like the air is sweet? That’s how your grandpa felt when he was with you.”
“Oh my God,” I said. He was right. Lemon. He’d said lemon pie.
“Michael, don’t you see?” Gus went on. “You’re drowning. You’re dying. And if you don’t come right away, you’re going to take the rest of us with you.”
“I told you, I can’t!” I shouted, but I looked at him as I said it, and he looked back at me, hard, and held my gaze. I remembered sitting at the top of the jungle gym at the elementary school with him, jumping off farther than I thought I could go. I remembered running down the stairs of our building, pretending we were in a fire. I remembered the time we went to East Hampton with his dad and he let us ride to the Dairy Queen in the trunk of his Saab—it was so dark we couldn’t see our own knees, and we held hands, like we were doing now.
And in that moment of feeling Gus’s strength, I borrowed some of it, and I let go of his hand. A cold rush swept the warm floaty air away, but there was a split second when I had the chance to move. I kind of hurled myself at Gus’s body, grabbing him. As the cold rushed in I felt its full impact and I knew I could no sooner have moved through it as I could have lifted a car. My body was being squeezed by the air around me.
“Climb across me,” Gus said. “Climb right down the chain.”
“I can’t,” I said again, but I started to move. Working my way across him was slow, and it reminded me of rock climbing. You find a place to put your hand, and then another place to put your foot. Each time I shifted, I felt like I was lifting a heavy stone. It took a lot of concentration, and it was exhausting. I didn’t think I could make it to the end of Gus’s body, much less down the rest of the chain.
I closed my eyes to rest, and without warning, I found myself inside Gus’s mind, totally oblivious to what was happening with my body. It was a new kind of slipping. I saw Gus’s mom, or at least her knees, from under a table. I was Gus, crawling and rolling on the floor under a table, with shoes everywhere. There were brown oxfords, and strappy, jeweled sandals, bare toes. The grown-ups were laughing loudly, and I could hear the clinking of forks on plates. I was remembering how I was laughing with them, almost like someone was tickling me. Colors inside this memory appeared brighter and the edges of things crisper and more tightly drawn. Happy! No wonder Gus is so good at everything he does.
Reinvigorated, I pulled myself all the way across Gus’s body and was getting ready to cross over to Julia when I slipped inside Gus’s mind again. This time, it didn’t feel so happy. I was looking into a mirror and seeing an older Gus looking back at me. He had grown jowly around the jawline, and he had a full growth of beard, but his eyes were the same. Or rather, they were Gus’s same black eyes, but they were sad. The bright light from earlier was gone. There were shadows in the mirror, and his eyelids were half lowered like he was trying not to fall asleep.
“What’s wrong?” I said, without even thinking, and as I spoke, the vision changed. He caught his reflection in the mirror and I knew that part of what he was seeing there was me. And I wondered for the first time—I’d always thought that Gus had everything he needed, but maybe he needed me also?
And then I felt Julia’s skinny-minny wrist between my ankles and I couldn’t believe she would be strong enough to support me.
“Michael!” she shouted. I looked up at her face. She was crying, the tears traveling back toward her hairline like raindrops on the windshield of a moving car. “Michael, come on. You have to keep climbing.”
“Are you okay?” I said, but she just shook her head.
I climbed along her body just as I had Gus’s. The muscles in my arms and legs were starting to burn, and when I stopped, I found myself slipping into Julia’s mind, just as I’d done with Gus. When Julia was little, she had a mirror in the car, in front of her seat, and she would talk to herself in it. I was her now, talking to the mirror, pretending I was a fancy lady who worked in a jewelry store, drawing my pretend long, painted fingernails across a pretend glass counter, saying, “Here are the diamonds. Here are the rubies.” I opened my eyes ready to keep going, as energized by the idea of those imaginary diamonds and rubies as Julia had been as a kid.
It wasn’t long before I was exhausted again, and again I slipped into her mind. This time, I was Julia standing at the back of Selden’s auditorium. The seats were filled for assembly and I scanned through group after group, looking for a place to sit, a friend, or someone who might become a friend. Each empty seat was all wrong. And then Julia was inside the dance studio, a room where everything was either painted white or covered in mirrors, and she was spinning, her eyes fixed on her face in the mirror as she spun, and the light on the mirror was splitting into thousands of shards reflected off thousands of shiny, angled surfaces, and it hurt, but she had to keep making the pirouettes—there was a number she was counting, and her body was trained to follow her mind. I felt like something was going to crack, maybe one of my bones, and I wondered how Julia could keep spinning, could keep going with the light breaking apart inside her eyes.
And then I opened my eyes and looked up at the real Julia, and I understood that there were things I knew about her that she did not. I slept thirty feet from Julia every single night. We shared a bathroom, for Pete’s sake. And yet, I hadn’t bothered to pay attention. Julia was just as freaked out finding a seat in assembly as I was. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t perfect. She was a mess. She was like me.
I wanted to say something to her, the kind of thing you say if you’re worried this may be the last thing you ever say. “You’re the one who is beautiful,” I said, and Julia nodded. I think she was doing everything she could to hold on and couldn’t really take in what I was trying to say. I kept looking at her, though, and finally she nodded again, and I moved on.
Holding on to Trip I felt an instant rush of strength. With Gus, I’d felt the power of his happiness. With Julia, I’d felt energized by her quest for perfection. With Trip, I felt strong, traveling with the kind of athletic grace that belonged only to him.
But even so, climbing was hard work, and I had to rest. I slipped right inside his head, where I was standing in an open field, and there was a ball coming toward me. I caught it and threw it back to a man who looked like an older version of Trip. Was that Trip’s dad? He was throwing the ball hard. “ ’Atta boy,” he’d say when I caught it. “Get ’em,” and “Yeah.” With each catch, I heard myself grunting, but I never let a single ball drop.
And this is the surprising part: I was terrified of the ball. I was terrified of my dad. He was throwing the ball too hard on purpose. He wanted me to drop it.
“It’s too hard!” I shouted. “I want to stop.”
“No quitting,” he said. “You want to be a man, right?” I didn’t want to be a man. I wanted the balls to stop. So I threw them back so hard that my dad would be the one who couldn’t catch them. But I couldn’t win. The ball kept coming back at me.
I opened my eyes and was looking up at Trip’s face. He’d made me feel powerful and strong right up until the moment when I’d slipped inside his head. Then I felt weak, angry, and scared. I didn’t like being Trip.
I was afraid to close my eyes again, but I had to. This time, I saw something from Trip’s future. Trip was saying, “Shh, it’s okay.” He—or I—was holding a woman’s hand. I knew that I was calming her down, that I had the strength to control her feelings with my voice. Her hand was bloody. It was sticking out of the window of a car. The car was dented—no, it was crushed, and half flipped over, such that the side window was facing the sky, and I was holding the strange woman’s hand as an ambulance siren sounded from far away. “You’re going to be okay,” I was saying. “Shh, now. I’m not going to leave you here.” And I sounded like a girl, I was making my voice so high and soft. I asked the woman for her name. “Annie,” I said, after she’d told me. “Annie, you should see the desert out here. It’s like nothing else. When you get out of this car, I’m going to show you these purple mountains. You’ll see what I mean.”
While I was inside this memory, I didn’t know where Trip was, or who this person in the car was, but I knew that the energy Trip was passing on to me as I climbed across him was also flowing into Annie. Trip was generous—I understood that now—and he was giving something from inside himself to a stranger.
And then my eyes were open and I started to slide down his arm, really fast, as if he were pushing me away.
“You go, dude,” Trip said. He did have the power to make me feel calm, just like he’d done with the woman in the crashed car. “You’re all good. Keep it up.”
As soon as I latched on to Ewan, I immediately went into his mind, and I felt a shock so painful I nearly let go. What was happening inside Ewan wasn’t a vision or a memory. It was right now. I was running along that gray curve of road that he draws over and over in art class, the same road I saw when I was sitting next to him in assembly. I was alone, under the low sky.
“Ewan,” I said, forcing my eyes open and looking up at his stringy hair and long eyelashes. He was screwing up his face, and I could feel his arm muscles tightening. “Move along,” he said. “I can’t stand this.”
And then something happened on the road. I ran to the edge, looked over, and saw the red car. It was turned upside down at the bottom of a gully—it must have just crashed, because there was smoke coming from the smashed-up engine, and I heard a hissing sound of steam.
Was this the same car that Trip had found? Did Trip rush down the side of the mountain and hold someone’s hand inside the car? Trip had said it was the desert, and this was not a desert. It was not the same car. But I remembered what Grandpa said about what memories he traveled to in the river—there were connections between them.
The car I was seeing in Ewan’s head was much more badly smashed than the one in Trip’s. I knew no one could have survived. And yet, while I looked down from above, a man in a red jacket was standing next to it. He looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. When he saw me, he started to run up the cliff, scrambling on the rocks, and I scrambled down, and then we were standing together, and the man was holding me, and I was sobbing, and I was saying, “Is this real?” and he was saying, “It’s as real as it needs to be,” and I was saying, “Why are we here?” and he said, “To say good-bye.”
But then he was sobbing too, and I was the one holding him, and he was saying, “I’m not ready to go.”
“I’m not ready to have you go,” I said.
“Ewan!” I shouted, opening my eyes, forcing myself out of his head, or at least trying to. “Keep going, Michael,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Just go!” he shouted. And I knew how strong he had to be to tell me to move, because by now I’d recognized the man in the red jacket from Ewan’s earth science report. He was Ewan’s dad, and Ewan was telling me to push past him. He was saying good-bye.
And so I closed my eyes and squeezed Ewan as hard as I could, a big bear hug like the one Grandpa had meant to give me when we were swimming in the water. Good-bye, I thought. And inside Ewan’s mind I saw his dad feeling the strength of my hug to Ewan. I saw both of them taking deep breaths, and then his dad let go. “You go on,” he said. “Do not stay here with me.” And then Ewan said to him, “You are inside me. You are the best parts of me,” and his dad said, “I’ll be watching over you,” and I released my hug. I was hardly able to breathe through my sobs. I felt like Ewan was my best friend, like he was precious to me, like it was going to be my job now to take care of him and make sure he was okay.
“Michael,” he muttered, and I knew how much strength he must be using to speak. “Go,” he said. “Go on.” And so I did.
As I traveled down Ewan’s arm, I tried to lift my head to see who was waiting for me on Ewan’s other side, but a current of air knocked it back down. I didn’t see until I was actually crossing over. It was my dad.
As soon as I touched his wrist, I knew I would be okay. I understood, just for a second, how much my dad loves me. He loves me as much as Ewan and his dad loved each other. He loves me with the strength of Trip’s grace. His love has the power of Julia’s beauty. He loves me with all of Gus’s brilliance, and his hope.
For one second, in the first moment of touching him, I felt like I had when I was little and my dad was holding me and I was resting my head on his shoulder. I had never made this connection before, but it was the same feeling I had had sitting on Grandpa’s lap in the cabin, when we were watching him die, when he was whispering the list of everyone he loved, and I’d felt there was no difference between the hot breath coming from his body and the breath I held inside my own.
But as I moved across my father, I felt the force of his energy rushing me. The feeling was like my body was being stretched. My stomach clenched with the effort, and I felt my jaw tightening. I couldn’t see any memories—my dad was not letting me in. But I had to rest, so I closed my eyes and must have gone back into my own mind. I was seeing my memories of Grandpa. Grandpa writing at his lonely table in the cabin. Grandpa watching Grandma at their school when Grandpa wasn’t brave enough to say hello or even smile. Grandpa on that open field before the battle, closing his mind to thoughts that could make him go soft.
Dad tried to pull me past these memories, but I pulled the other way. It felt almost as if Grandpa was the one pulling back while my dad pushed me forward. I felt tiny against their force. We were all three of us locked together.
“Michael,” my dad said.
“Grandpa,” I said back.
But as I held on to my dad, his pulling turned into a pulse. A giant, throbbing pulse that was highly invigorating. It gave me the energy to keep going. There was absolutely no way to see inside him, past the pulsing light of his demands. But at least I knew now what his number one demand was, and it was really simple. He wanted me to live. The pulse inside him wasn’t in his mind. It was in his chest. It was his heart. It was sending out a signal that was jump-starting mine. With each wave of electric reaction, I felt a cascade of sparks inside my body.
“Michael, hold on,” my father was muttering over and over. “Two seconds more. Hold on. Hold on.” I remembered what Grandpa had said in the cabin. “I love you more than I love my life.” And I felt that in my father’s strength, even as I felt his grip weakening and my legs beginning to float behind me into the cold, rushing void.
Then, with no warning, I landed hard on the wooden cabin floor. I could see my own body—I was next to it. I was lying on the floor, and sitting around me in a circle were my dad, Ewan, Gus, Trip, and Julia. They all had their eyes closed.
“I’m here!” I called, but they didn’t move. “I’m back!” Had they heard? Without knowing how, I knew what to do, I felt myself drawn toward my own body, looking down into it, seeing that it was really me. For the last time, I had the feeling of slipping. Except this time, instead of slipping into the cold river of the dead, I was slipping into the warmest, safest bed that I’d ever known.
“Wake up,” I said into the circle as soon as I was in my body once more. No one moved. Ewan was squeezing his eyes shut, trembling, his freckles dark against his pale skin. Gus’s face was set in perfect stillness, the utterly blank look he sometimes gets when he is playing sports. Trip was sneering. Julia’s face was contorted in her perfect fake smile. Dad’s head was bowed, and he looked a way I had never seen him before. I can only describe it as wasted. His cheeks were hollowed, his hair starting to curl. Had he lost weight? I couldn’t believe a person could change like that in just a few—hours? Minutes? How long had I been gone?
Ewan was the first to open his eyes. He closed them again as if he hadn’t even seen me, and gave a shake to his hands, which sent a ripple through everyone else in the group. One at a time they opened their eyes and dropped hands.
“Michael,” Dad said, looking at me to see that I was awake. “Oh, Michael. Thank God.”
Trip raised a fist in a gesture of triumph. “Yeah!” he shouted, and looked around the room, desperate for someone to high-five.
Julia’s eyes popped open like someone had pushed her from behind. Tears started to stream down Ewan’s pinched little face.
Gus opened his eyes just a crack, then collapsed forward onto his forearms, his face touching the floor. “Get him a blanket,” Ewan said, though he looked like he himself might go into shock, and Julia took off her coat and passed it over, though her teeth were chattering too.
“What happened?” I said, but they were all just staring at me, as if they couldn’t believe I was there.