The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [37]
It was late July, that point on the calendar where summer has gotten a little old, boring. After two days of heavy rains, the stream was wide and fast in places. Emboldened by our friendship with Chicken George, we had been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods each day, taking sack lunches prepared by Mrs. Robison or Mrs. Halloran. We found what appeared to be a broken concrete dam, most of it submerged in the rushing brown stream, but with a few jagged pieces above the waterline. Tim insisted on crossing there. Mickey scrambled behind him, sure-footed as ever in anything that wasn’t an athletic contest.
Go-Go went next, forever indifferent to the water, no matter how many times we had been told it was polluted and deadly, and his very indifference somehow kept him safe. Sean waited for Gwen to go. She clearly didn’t want to cross, but it was too late to argue against Tim’s plan, and she would have been shamed if she didn’t try. She lost her footing on her second or third step, and although she righted herself, the sleeve of her filmy, flimsy blouse caught on something in the water. If she had pulled back sharply, she would have been fine, but she didn’t want to tear the blouse. She reached down, determined to gently extract the material from whatever had snagged it—and that was when she fell into the water. The horrible, murky water, which we had been told countless times could kill us, the water whose merest contact required tetanus boosters.
She didn’t come up.
In water that brown, it would have been impossible to see blood, but Go-Go pointed, screaming in that way he had, so we couldn’t tell if he was happy or scared. “Blood! Blood!” Gwen bobbed to the surface, floated, like the Lily Maid of Astolat. Not that we knew the poem, but Gwen had read Anne of Green Gables, in which Anne has to be rescued after attempting to re-create the maiden’s fate. We knew a lot of stuff in that secondhand, watered-down way, through cartoons and books and television shows. Which, perhaps, is a way of saying we knew nothing.
Those of us who had crossed to the other bank froze, but Sean plunged into the water. Gwen’s body kept moving away from him, almost as if it were a game. Catch me if you can. The others ran down the bank, shouting contradictory instructions. “Shut up,” Sean shouted through gritted teeth. “Shut up.” He was wading, the water up to his waist, reaching for her, but she kept slipping from his grasp. Gwen might have eluded him forever, but a stick saved her this time, catching her skirt just long enough to give Sean time to catch up to her. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to shore, then began giving her mouth-to-mouth, which he had learned in swimming classes at the camp the Hallorans could no longer afford.
“She’ll be brain damaged,” Mickey said. “She was unconscious too long, she took in too much water.”
“Shut up,” Tim said.
Go-Go jumped up and down, chanting: “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air.” That’s how it worked in cartoons. We had all seen it ourselves on the old Captain Chesapeake show. In cartoons, the characters pushed on each other’s stomachs with great force and manipulated