The clouds are impossibly dark. Like animated movie clouds, they are too black, moving too fast.
“They’re angry,” I say.
Tim snorts. “Clouds. Angry.” He doesn’t look at me. A year after the kiss, his anger still feels like a storm just beneath the surface.
The red kayak is packed with camp gear. Em, thirteen, and Luke, eight, sit inside, life jackets zipped, paddles at the ready. Yesterday, when Tim and I had hiked with our heavy packs to this beach, the kids chose to kayak, as they always do—paddling takes one-third of the time it takes to hike—the wind behind them. Hugging the shore to their second favorite camp spot on Pine Lake, a lake Tim had discovered when they were little, which he used to bring them to when I needed quiet time. Though the thumbnail of granite beach where we spent the night was tucked back from the lake and missed the full force of the wind, the clouds gnashed above us all night as Tim set up camp, boiled Top Ramen, joked with Em and Luke. The three of them tied a tarp between three trees in case the clouds opened, as they were threatening to do. Then Em and Luke strung worms on hooks and cast lines into the water, poles propped between rocks, settling down on a flat boulder, shoulders touching, to watch for the dip in the tip that meant they’d caught a pink stipple trout. Their muscle memory for setting up lines to hang the towels to dry, for finding which ziplock bag the seasoning is in, the Buck knife at the bottom of the ice chest to cut the salami, wrapping sandy wedges of cheese in a dirt-smudged quesadilla, squirts of mustard, meant they didn’t need me here. This is the place where they had gone motherless on summer weekends and found they could thrive.
Now Em shifts herself in the kayak seat. The lake almost spills in around its sides. After only one night, we still have too many drinks and too much food left over.
“It’s too full,” I say.
Tim’s lips tighten. “It’s fine,” he says. He pulls the bungee cord tight. Then, to Em and Luke: “Ready?”
I know we need to redistribute the gear. Tim and I need to take more in our packs and lighten the kayak. He is expecting too much of them. I am the outsider here, I tell myself. I have no authority; this is their world, not mine. But the truth is, I’ve been battling Tim’s anger for a year now, and I’m tired.
Tim gives the kayak a shove. Using his momentum, Em and Luke row smoothly out of the cove, chattering with each other, Tim and I forgotten for now.
The plan is the reverse of the day before. Tim and I are to hike out to the truck while Em and Luke paddle along the shoreline to the dam three miles away. There we will pull the kayak out of the lake and load the pickup for home. But as Tim and I climb onto a boulder to watch the kids’ progress, we see instantly that the seven-mile-long lake outside our protected cove has, without our knowing it during the night, become a black maelstrom. This is the day hundreds of lightning strikes start hundreds of fires across California. But we don’t know that yet. Nor will I find out, not until I make it to the ranger station and the boat launch an hour from now, that there are craft advisories on Pine Lake. That no ranger has a boat big enough to safely take it out and look for our children.
The waves crash against the kayak that has already been picked up and taken by the wind. Though they’ve only gone twenty yards, neither Em nor Luke can hear me screaming for them to come back. Tim and I watch as, rowing hard, they are blown in the opposite direction, away from the dam side of the lake, across the black churning water, a vast angry sea now, toward the rougher, beachless shoreline miles away. Even in the distance, I can see how low they are in the water. So low that it looks, from my vantage point, like the lake is higher than the sides of the kayak. In moments they are a speck amid the vast sea-lake of black stormy whitecaps. And then they simply vanish, blown out of the range of my straining vision.
“Oh my God!” I scream. We still have an hour hike to get to the car. An hour. What will they be going through in that hour? Are they already in the lake? In the thin, sixty-degree, ocean-deep black lake water? I calculate in my head: even after we reach the truck, the boat launch and ranger station is another fifteen-minute drive. We push through the pine trees, running shoes sinking into the mossy bog, mosquitoes swarming in clouds above the soggy footing. Yesterday it had taken us two hours to hike to the cove. Now we’re covering the return in more than double our previous speed. But it isn’t fast enough. I feel like I’m in quicksand.
The forest opens onto a long, rocky dirt path that leads to the foot of a great slab of stone, mountain-size, bare and white like the moon. My running shoes grip the rock; my thighs and lungs and calves burn. Over boulders, through a long tangle of swamp, as fast as we can. But careful, too. Nothing can happen to us. We are the only people on the planet who know our kids are in a kayak in the middle of Pine Lake.
I climb onto another bald upward slope of granite and push forward. The heavy pack I’m wearing pulls me backward. I need to stop and breathe, my back aches, I am soaked with sweat, my lungs burn, desperate for oxygen in the altitude. Now comes the worst part: we have to leave the lake, lose sight of it completely in this stretch. I push on, feel Tim following, my breathing a rhythm I match my steps to. The white of the moonlike granite, the silence except for the sounds of my body. Finally the truck comes into view, parked up another long slope, three stories of granite still to go. Don’t think about how long this is taking. But I feel hope, too. Miniature fireworks explode in my chest.
“I’ll hike to the point,” Tim says as he turns his back for me to dig in the pocket of his pack for the keys. “I can look for them there. Pick me up at the point,” he adds.
I drive ninety miles an hour along the narrow mountain road. Does anything look familiar? That boulder, that big pine tree. Did I miss the turn? I don’t know my way here. I haven’t spent all those weekends they have, learning boulders and trees, landmarks to know which turns to take. Tim should be in the car with me. I should have forced him. What good is hiking to the point if Em and Luke aren’t there? Now it’s all come down to me.
I keep driving faster than is safe on the narrow, endless road. Boulders and trees come at me and speed past in a blur like the cartoon backgrounds of my childhood. If I make a wrong turn and end up in the labyrinthine roads of the Sierra Wilderness, I will never find my way out. I could find myself driving in these wilderness back roads for days, weeks. The old panic, my father leaning over me, his rage boiling, the type on the page unreadable to me, the letters meaningless. If Em had x amount of pine trees and boulders and Luke wanted y, how many pine trees and boulders would they both need? Panic that felt like shame. My brain shutting down. The belief that I couldn’t do it in the clutch. The reason I had always relied on my mother and then Tim to be my compass.
A fork in the road ahead. Everything literally looks the same; there is nothing to distinguish going right from going left. The turn is coming fast now, but I want speed. Speed means the difference between living or dying in an icy lake. Panic is screaming in my head, but I’m not listening. Instead I can feel a lukewarm pit, like a solid calm seed sitting in the middle of my sternum. When I focus on that pit, I notice, I feel calm, too. I take a left and step on the gas, holding on to the steering wheel with both hands. Another fork. Another left. Is it left, left, right, or left, right, left? Another fork, I turn left again. The road veers around the largest boulder I have passed yet and then ahead, through the trees, I see it. The parking lot and, beyond that, the trailer that serves as the ranger station up here in the middle of nowhere. I turn in, come to a stop. Climb out of the truck, knock on the door of the RV. No answer. Everything is going much too slowly again. Where is the ranger? An older woman, coat pulled to her ears, comes around from the other side of the RV. She looks at me expectantly.
“My kids are in a kayak in the lake. They were blown to the other side. We don’t know where they are.”
The woman pulls a crackling radio out of the pocket of her coat. She talks into it: “Two kids are lost on the lake.”
Minutes later the ranger pulls up in a golf cart. He radios the headquarters. The ranger on the radio says in a crackling voice that there is no boat big enough to take out safely to look for Em and Luke. The boat is being used in Sacramento.
“No boat?” I look at her blankly.
At the dock, at that moment, a fisherman is pulling his boat in with his son, to get out of the storm. The ranger drives the golf cart over. I see the fisherman look over at me. The ranger drives back.
“He’ll take you.”
I lock the truck. Walk over, climb onto the boat.
“I’ve seen a lot in my years on this lake,” the fisherman tells me. “I have seen kayaks sink.”
We speed across the lake, the fisherman and his son, a year or so younger than Luke. Jumping the waves, soaked with spray, we reach the spot where I last saw them over an hour ago now. There is nothing. Only empty black water. We head over to the opposite shore, where it had looked like they were blown. Waves crash against trees growing out of the water along the unforgiving shoreline.
We see a few people in tents and call to them, “Have you seen a red kayak? Two children?”
No. Sorry.
We move on. Up and down the lake. I see a red kayak on the beach of another island. Of course, there they are. Safe and sound. But a bald man and a woman with a baseball cap sit beside the kayak, waiting for the storm to abate. We ask more campers along the shore. No one has seen them. We pick Tim up from the point. He looks eagerly into the boat as we approach. I can tell by his smile that he thinks I have found them. Then he realizes. Poker-faced, he climbs in beside me, shakes hands with the fisherman, as if we do this every day, lose our children, climb into boats with strangers who have offered to find them. He looks at me, then says so only I can hear:
“I’m supposed to be the person protecting them.”
My mother grew up with the threat of the mighty Mississippi over her shoulder. She came out of her childhood needing to believe she could control the uncontrollable. At times Tim seemed to encompass both my mother’s need for control and a low burn of anger, reminiscent of my father. But what if anger and control were always and only an attempt to avoid what couldn’t be faced? Our own helplessness?
We head to the most remote fjord on the lake. We will start there, work our way back. We follow the shoreline, looking into the woods for a kayak, for Em and Luke sitting beside it in the dirt. But at point after point there is nothing but pine trees, granite boulders. Rocks and pinecones strewn in the empty dirt. The fisherman has stopped chatting with us. We are all silent now as we motor along the shoreline. The fisherman is hugging close, following the fingers of inlets. I realize by how slow he is driving, the way he is scanning between the washed-up logs, that he is looking for debris now, for what would be floating if a kayak had sunk.
We have doubled back twice. We are running out of wilderness.
I can no longer call out, “Have you seen my children?” to people as we pass. The words choke in my throat, mix with sobs.
The fisherman calls for me: “Have you seen two children in a red kayak?”
No. Sorry. No. We’ll keep our eyes open, though.
Finally there is no place else to look that makes sense. It has been two hours in this boat. Three since we last saw them. Wouldn’t the kayak have washed up to a shore? All that was in it. Umbrellas. Ice chest. Chairs. Towels. (Frisbees.) Why hasn’t anything floated up? I think of the kayak filling with water, sinking into the cold black depths of this lake. Em and Luke, exhausted from fighting the waves, sinking down with it.
We are heading back. I don’t know how to face arriving at that boat launch without them. How to turn away from this lake and toward a future without my children.
Then Tim says, “We’ve driven by, but can we check it one more time?”
The dam.
It’s impossible that they have made it without anyone seeing them. Without somehow crossing our path. But the fisherman and Tim seem glad for one more stop before the finality of the boat launch.
We turn toward the dam.
From a distance, my heart leaps—something red! As we get closer, I realize it is a bumper, one of four, strung along the dam to protect boats. We continue numbly. No one talking.
And then I see it. A slightly longer, thinner red pill–shaped object.
Could it be? We get closer. It’s definitely something.
I start to sob. No sound, just sobbing soundlessly. The dam is in full sight and yes, the pill-shaped object is a kayak now. Two children stand beside it. Closer still and we can see Em’s long honey-colored hair, Luke’s bowl cut, his yellow life jacket. We pull up and the fisherman kills the engine. He leaps from the boat. In his eagerness, he catches his foot on a tie just off the bow and falls hard onto his hands and knees in the cold lake. He stands. His pants and shirt are dark, soaked with lake water. He strides over, knee-deep in the lake, and pulls Luke, though they have never met, hard against his chest.
Tim steps forward and unbuckles first Em’s life vest, then Luke’s.
“How did you get across the lake?” Tim’s voice is tight with held-in emotion, his lips white and trembling.
“We rowed,” Em says. “At first we were blown, but then we pointed into the wind. Just like you always say to do.”
They found their way. Left to their own devices, they knew what to do and did it.
I say nothing; I just sit on my cushion on my seat in this fisherman’s boat. Head bowed, my face in my hands.