Page 26 of Smoke Season

“Nothing more to discuss,” Claude grunted, already starting up the truck. It took a couple tries, but he got it going. “I’m staying at your place with the little one. Dusting off my stethoscope and holding down the fort. You’re retrieving the power bank and coming right back. That’s all there is to it.”

Sam searched his neighbor’s age-worn face, looking for uncertainty. Regret. Misgiving. Finding none, he nodded tightly, wondering anew at Claude’s sense of loyalty. His dedication to his neighbors. He felt a wash of gratitude, making it impossible to speak. He’d choke down all thehandkäsein Bavaria for a friend like Claude.

They parked the pickup to the side of Sam’s driveway, so he’d have plenty of room to pull out in his rig later. Back inside the house, they were met with an eerie quiet. Even the TV had been shut off. “Astor!” Sam called into the gloom. “Annie!”

“In here,” Astor called.

He left Claude to seal up the doorway as best he could with damp beach towels and went in search of her. He found her with her sister in the living room: Annie propped on the couch, Astor on her knees on the floor, holding her sister’s pulmonary-function machine to her face. “She said it was getting harder to breathe,” Astor said, “so I went and got her inhaler and her tube.”

Her sharp brown eyes sought her father’s and held.

Sam stared back, communicating a silent gratitude for the second time in as many minutes. Astor acknowledged this with a solemn little nod.

“That’s exactly right, young lady,” Claude said, stepping into the room behind him. “Good on ya.”

“Yes, thank you, Astor,” Sam echoed, even while mourning Astor’s innocence anew. Astor was a marvel. But she also deserved to be a kid. Not tethered to her emergency watch, burdened with listening closely for abnormalities in Annie’s labored breathing. Watching the little plastic ball in her pulmonary tube rise pitifully before falling again.

He came to an instant decision. “We forgot something important back at the Eddy. Come along to keep me company?”

She blinked, a question in her eyes, but Sam didn’t pause for her to ask it. “Your sister will be fine. Claude’s going to stay here and take care of her until we get back.”

Claude nodded his approval. Annie was already settled back into the confines of the couch, and so Sam grabbed the SUV keys and steered Astor toward the door before he could change his mind.

CHAPTER 14

True made her way back along the rocky shore to Emmett and Vivian, directing them onto a boulder overlooking the river. From there, they eyed their biggest challenge of the Outlaw, or at least the part of it they could see. The Quartz ran the length of a mile, the narrow canyon walls closing in to form a fast-water flume.

“I’ll be starting hard right, and then we’ll need to merge into the center flow,” True told them. It helped, she had learned, for clients to know what to expect ... even if they promptly forgot it all. “Once we’re in the canyon proper, the water will move hard and fast, and we’ll basically just be along for the ride—oars in the water, of course—until we reach the Wash.”

“What’s the Wash?” Emmett asked, wide-eyed.

True made a circular pattern in the air with one finger. “Have you ever seen gold panning?” When Emmett nodded, she continued. “Imagine you’re a fleck of gold being churned in a pan.” When he blanched, she smiled. “It’s like a funnel water slide ... super fun.”

“Super fun?” Vivian echoed skeptically, with a funny little quirk of one eyebrow, and True arranged her face into her most confident expression as she nodded enthusiastically. “And I bet even more fun in the smoke,” she said, with a wink to Emmett. “No one else can say they’ve donethat.”

To Vivian, she added in an undertone, “We got this.”

“Of course we do,” Vivian agreed, though for the first time, True detected a note of hesitation in her tone. Her eyes watered as she peered out onto the challenge that awaited them on the Outlaw, then wrapped Emmett’s Buff more securely around his face to filter out the worst of the smoke. Witnessing this gesture of care sent an answering pang through True, and it took her a moment to identify it as an echo of the maternal instinct displayed countless times by Mel. She wasn’t sure how this startlingly unfamiliar feeling had snuck up on her, but since it threatened to shake the foundation of True’s confidence in flinging the three of them down the flume of the canyon, she shut it down. Confidence was key when tackling Quartz. To get her head back on straight, True reminded herself that the Wus were among the most competent clients she’d guided.

Back in the oar raft, Quartz started out unassuming enough, though the din of the whitewater still out of sight promised otherwise. The canyon walls—lava rock stained in a white stripe at the high-water mark somewhere just over True’s head as she bent into her oars—funneled their raft toward the first of many obstacles: a triangle-shaped boulder that sat in stubborn resistance directly in the middle of the water flow. She pulled hard right, knees bent, perched forward on her bench seat in the center of the oar raft, missing the boulder by a few generous inches.

The water speed picked up on the other side, just as she’d warned the Wus it would, and though both clients kept paddling as promised, the smoke obscured their vision, their paddles hitting the sides of the rock walls with a hollow thump on more than one forward stroke. Each time, this contact sent a tremor of shock through the already fatigued muscles of True’s forearms and biceps as she made up the difference. She set her jaw in resolution—Wonderland Lodge is the goal—and dug into the whitewater again and again, shouting to the Wu family to keep paddling despite the challenges.Always, always keep paddling.

They’d reached the point of no return: the spot where the canyon turned into a full-fledged flume, where no matter what they did, no matter what strategy True implemented, they were one with the river,destined to rush downward on its back. The Outlaw’s spray stung their faces, each wave of whitewater cresting and crashing onto the raft, into Emmett’s lap, onto True’s chest, causing Vivian to sputter and cough as she white-knuckled the handholds at the stern. There was no eddying out now. No pausing to take stock, and certainly no going back. Though this feeling of inevitability was par for the course, it felt otherworldly today to True, disembodied as they were lost in the fog of the smoke, blind to each dip and rapid of the river. She’d never felt so disoriented on the Outlaw, and her gut tightened in more than just the customary rush of adrenaline. For the first time she felt actual fear, compounded by the knowledge that it was far too late now to heed the warning of her earlier slip in confidence.

“Here it comes!” she shouted, sensing the final crescendo of Quartz was upon them. Just ahead, though she couldn’t see it, True knew the Wash spiraled in an angry boil, dropping nearly seven feet in one fell swoop, waiting to deposit their raft into its vicious spiral. She dug deeper into the water than ever with her next stroke, even though her oar, too, hit rock as often as it hit water now. The canyon walls were so close now, True cried, “Duck!” several times as the raft spun and twisted and bumped its walls, bringing its passengers careening toward the jagged lava. Then they spun completely around, like riding an inner tube at a water park, just as True had promised, and she caught her breath and held it as her stomach dropped out from under her and they fell into the whitewater below.

She thought Emmett might have screamed; it was hard to be sure, with the reverberating slap of the raft onto the whitewater and the crash of the rapids. They spun two, three times in quick succession, giving True ample time to absorb the panicked faces of her clients as they clung to the raft ropes, toes digging into the toeholds. And then, almost as quickly as it had gripped them, the Wash spit them out, the raft shooting out the other side. They hit the last “train” of rapids, Emmett now riding the bow like a cowboy hanging onto a bronco as the inflatedtubes crashed down two, three, four times. And then they were out, the raft eddying out in a shallow pocket of suddenly calm water.

“Well?” True gasped with a breathless laugh, uncharacteristically giddy now that they were out of it in one piece. “How did you like it?”

She peered into Vivian’s and Emmett’s faces through the haze of the smoke. As with every client, wildfire or no, each wore an expression of awestruck wonder mixed with acute relief. “We did it!” Emmett finally shouted, lifting one hand in triumph. His oar nearly hit his mother in her face.

“We did,” Vivian agreed with a shaky laugh that echoed True’s, and unlike every other time, with every other client, True reached across the middle tube to give her arm a reassuring squeeze.

By the time Wonderland Lodge emerged through the trees on the north side of the river, True’s forearms screamed with every stroke, and the afternoon sun cast the smoky canyon into gloom instead of its usual harsh light. The adrenaline and worry from the adventure of the Wash had long burned off, and the Wus were quiet as they dipped their oars into the water obediently. True gave them the signal to let up and then turned the nose of the oar raft toward the small dock, navigating around the single aluminum Tracker boat the Martin family kept here, looking for a place to tie off.

“Stay put for now,” she told the Wus, stifling a groan as her thighs cramped when she rose from the bench seat to step off the raft onto the floating dock.

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