I’m completely confused. I can barely look at him without blushing because I keep imagining him kissing me.
“The safety line that attaches to the harness is called a leash,” I hear him say as if from afar. “You always have to attach it to the harness with a double figure-eight knot, and it hangs on a ring that the line has been run through during setup.” He climbs up a few boulders and points to a thick silver steel ring to which a rope is attached. I hadn’t noticed it before. “The leash holds you if you fall, but you also have to practice falling; otherwise, you can hurt yourself.” He’s standing on the line that, this time, hovers over a stream. He peers down from above, and a myriad of dark, sparkling butterflies flutter through my senses as if I were already standing unsecured on a highline looking into the depths.
I nervously climb after River and stop on a wide branch next to the line.
“Stop!” River comes over and ties a knot in the leash, which he calls a “figure eight.”—a figure eight knot. The knot isn’t at the end of the rope; he threads the end through my strap and then uses it to create a second knot parallel to the first.
“Do you know how to tie a double-figure eight knot?”
I shake my head, so he picks everything up again and repeats each step until I can copy it.
“Now you can belay yourself,” he says with a satisfied nod, but my knees are shaking because the line seems much higher from up here.
River explains a thousand more things to me about falling. Catching is the name given to catching the slackline when it slips. He also says I need to use the first momentum after a fall to pull myself back up to the line; otherwise, I’ll bounce up and down like a yo-yo. “You certainly don’t look like you have the strength to pull yourself up on your own.” He looks at me, grinning.
Well, thanks a lot!
“Okay, run over it and see how the height feels to you. If you fall, the leash and the water will slow you down. Nothing can happen.”
I put both feet on the line, and my legs shake. For a moment, while I’m still holding the branch above me, I look down. The glittering surface of the water lies below like a reflective eye, with clouds passing under my feet. My heart is racing. This is crazy. When I sat on my windowsill every day and thought about jumping, I wasn’t wearing a safety harness. I stared into Willow River and considered throwing myself into the depths without a second thought. But now I’m scared.
“That’s not even a highline, Tucks,” River says, still standing next to me. “But a line in the air is different from one on theground. From a purely psychological perspective, there’s a huge difference, even if the process is identical. Find a fixed point.”
I look at the tree shelter on the other side and start running.
“Yeah, good. Just don’t look down.” He leaps down in a few jumps, and I think he takes off his jeans and gets into the water. God, how am I supposed to slackline properly now when he’s standing down there half-naked?
I keep running, balancing myself like a plane encountering turbulence. I feel the line under my feet and the damp air around me. My blonde curls bounce. I can do it. Just one foot in front of the other. It’s only me and the band, and I finally understand what River means when he says slacklining is freedom. It is freedom because everything else fades away. I’m not thinking about anything anymore—not Kensington, River’s pursuers, or even my muteness.
“You’re halfway there!” he calls from below, and I involuntarily look down at him. He stands in waist-high water, directly below me, in only his black T-shirt and shorts. I instantly lose control. My world tilts sideways so quickly I can’t maintain my balance. I forget everything River told me about falling and feel only the hard jolt of the leash holding me. A sharp pain shoots through my back as I dangle like a wet sack with my legs in the water.
At first, River seems shocked, but when I make a silly gesture, he bursts out laughing. His laugh doesn’t sound like one of the beautiful songs he’s always humming—it's more like an air pump with the air being squeezed out, mixed with loud ahs and uhs. I fall in love immediately. With that laughter. With this moment when everything is so perfect, and I feel free. And even though I’m still dangling helplessly on the line, something stirs in my chest. Something I haven’t felt in a long time. An emotion I had forgotten how it felt—joy.
And because it’s so beautiful, I want to cry.
River helps me back up, and in retrospect, I know why he went in the water. “Tucks, no one runs a line like that on their second day and doesn’t fall!”
Bastard!
I stay on the line for three hours. I practice catching the line while falling. Twice, I miss and fall; the third time, I manage to hold on to the line and pull myself up, but afterward, my left hand burns like fire despite the Handana. Later, I practice falling normally, and by the end, I’m soaked, and every bone feels like it’s going to break the next time I fall—a bit like after a really bad school day at Kensington.
As we walk back through the valley surrounded by streams and waterfalls, River takes my hand without asking. He looks at me intently. I act like this is normal even for me, but I tremble under his touch. It tingles up my forearm and discharges into my heart as a series of delicate impulses. It is so beautiful that I can hardly stand it.
“You’re shaking.” He grips my hand tighter as if he could calm me, and it actually works. We jump over stones side by side, wade through the stream, and balance together over mossy tree trunks lying in the stream.
Dying companionswould probably be the words I would have written in my notebook today. I still have so many questions, but somehow, they’ve lost a little of their urgency. In fact, while slacklining, River appeared to be so normal and exuberant by the end that I can’t imagine something being wrong with him. He was neither a fallen angel, the angel of death, nor Peter Pan. He was just River.
My clothes are slowly drying, and as we arrive hand in hand at the Porsche, I feel there is a canyon between me and my old life in Cottage Grove that no line in the world can connect.
Chapter 9
We drive several more miles and set up the tent somewhere on the prairie. There’s a campground nearby with restrooms. For the first time in a long time, I pay close attention to my appearance. I use the curling iron—which is more of a straightener—to freshen up the curls, but I can’t do it as elegantly as Mariah. They are not even spirals, just large and small waves, sometimes turned to the right and sometimes to the left.
River doesn’t say anything about it, but I catch him looking at me every now and then when he thinks I won’t notice.
I still feel like I’m in another world, a parallel universe with different rules. I don’t turn on the phone because it will destroy the dream I’m sleepwalking through. It’s like a dream because I know so little about River. That night, the third with River, I slept well and dreamlessly. I wake up once and don’t see River next to me, so I open the dewy flap and peer cautiously into the night. The moon casts its light like a wedding dress train over rocks and prairie grass. River sits on his leather jacket, leaning against a rock with gigantic headphones on. Muffled music seeps through—he must have turned it up to full volume—and he stares up at the sky, lost in thought. He seems far away. Millionsand millions of stars flicker above us, a sea of lights, but the most impressive thing is the full moon. It appears huge in the empty landscape, just like you see in pictures of Africa’s savannah, as if it were about to sink into the earth.
I’ve only ever been an industrial romanticist, along with James and sometimes Arizona, but this vast landscape somewhere in Wyoming awakens forgotten things and dreams I locked away long ago. I feel a longing within me that I’m unfamiliar with. Until now, that longing always seemed too big for me, too dangerous, too futile.
