what you do when your ex drowns your dearest friend

you will f-bomb him into oblivion

You will see the message machine blinking and ignore it until after you’ve mailed the letter to her that you’d been forgetting to mail.

After the Post Office you will go for a quick ski, stop for a beer, flirt with the smokejumpers, swing by the market for tampons and ice cream because it’s your day off! a beautiful day! you are thirty-two and single! Living the life. All those things.

You’ll walk in your unlocked door because it’s that kind of a mountain town, hear the phone ring and your heart will pound: friend or flirtation, either way a good day and something worth running to answer.

You’ll leave the ice cream on the kitchen table and find it three days later.

You’ll answer and instantly recognize the tremoring drawl softly crackling from the other side of the country. Instantly feel the pang of what ripping a life to shreds feels like, when it comes to the people who composed that life that you never actually said goodbye to.

You’ll say Hello! and then somehow know, as the cheerful ! lilted upward at the end of the word, the way parents and old folks and more responsible people know, that you’ve reached the age that when the phone rings it’s not always something good. Now you’ll know this forever, and years downstream when the phone rings and your son is at a sleepover or on a class camping trip or away at college, you’ll know that hope might be the thing with feathers, but it perches on a ledge terrifyingly high and too far for you to reach it and save it.

You’ll take a breath and Tommy will talk and then you’ll ask him to repeat everything he said.

You will wonder why your old friends are still your ex’s friends.

You will wonder about the new girlfriend: did someone warn her?

You will be ashamed to be grateful that you didn’t go, even though he tried to guilt-trip you into rowing a boat for his new company. You looked at him like he was crazy and then over at his never-a-river guide girlfriend and said what you thought was the meanest thing you could say about her, So what’s she going to do, sweep the boathouse? In retrospect you could have done better.

You will forever feel guilty you weren’t there to stop him.

You won’t wonder why he chose to launch the trip, a two boat descent with three (or did Tommy say four?) safety kayakers, every single one a canyon crewmate and friend of yours, rafting down one of the world’s most dangerous rivers when (louder for the sane people at the back) IT WAS IN FLOOD STAGE, and the other river outfitter who’d been running expert-only whitewater trips for several years advised him he should not.

When you hear later how they had advised, then argued, then pleaded with him, you’ll know exactly how that worked for them.

About that expert-only qualifier. Sally drove her car down her driveway and back to pick up her mail; her driveway was fifty feet long. She organized a local boat church for her mountain town. She was an accountant, and funny. A devout avoider of housekeeping, including, the leftovers and dishes stacked on every iota of counter space, still there from the last time you stopped by her house weeks before. She was not a person who exercised, or watched her health. She was a reader of banned books, and she introduced your small southern university-attending self to the writing of her dear friend Lillian Smith, which is how you came to acquire a lifelong collection of letters and clippings including a first edition of Strange Fruit that you used for your senior English lit thesis.

You will wonder why your not-a-traveler or expert river rafter friend didn’t tell you she was flying from Georgia to South America to climb aboard a raft trip organized by your bi-polar ex-husband, even though you know the answer.

Because you’ll think back on just how charismatic. How smart, so very smart, standing on his raft to recite The Aeneid, Book Three, word for word. If it was a rainy day, lines from some old poet you’d never heard of but for some reason all the older men would know; something something battle?

Playing his bowed psaltery in Redwall cavern, with Canyon Wrens flitting closer like one of those Disney cartoons. His old money manners, the Brooks Brothers cashmere with the holes in the elbows. Cheerfully telling you he’d called the vet to ask how much it cost to have a cat put to sleep because you’d gotten a kitten without asking his permission.

You will think in the earliest of days How bad can he be? The grandparents with seats in the university president’s box who phone his mom their approval the minute you left, because you knew enough to wear a skirt and nice blouse and loafers and act appropriately, given the occasion; any and every occasion. This is your superpower, all the more so because river girl, you didn’t look the part. This family will teach you that appropriate means nothing; knowing how to act is not the same as who you are. You will learn that mental illness, when your family is richer than god, draws the well-heeled line between not embarrassing your family and committing unforgivable acts that can be written off with the same fine point pen.

Since you have seen drowning~~the Baptist church deacon who keeled from the heart attack just as your boat entered the rapid, the skinny kid with the inner tube, the woman headfirst and stuck in the rocks with one bare foot above the waves~~you won’t need to be told what Sally and the guy from New York looked like once the bodies were chased downstream through the worst part of the rapids, before being spit out onto rocks.

You might think ragdolls; sure. Just not the kind you’d ever want a child to see.

Since you know from that time when the ex almost drowned you, you won’t need to wonder what it felt like. It feels like betrayal; the kind with two hands squeezing your throat. You can’t do anything to fight back, except to think. Your last thoughts: Fuck him. So you kicked and clawed and when you realized the rock they’d always warned you about truly did have a crack where all the water in the world it seemed went sucking through, you had to choose: lifejacket on or lifejacket off? Not knowing (because no one had ever made it through that crack) if you’d fit. Fuck him. Lifejacket off.

You already knew how once the drowning was over they were still Sally and a guy named Bob, but not themselves ever again. You will, instead, imagine what it looked like when the oxcart hauled the two bodies up and out of the river canyon, and away. You’ll wonder: what did those farmers think, the bodies tied under wool blankets, the heaving steps of the animal hauling the cargo up the narrow road. You will wish that Lynn, one of whitewater’s most respected extreme boaters telling you he had to paddle for his life while trying to reach Sally, getting close enough to throw her his safety rope, hadn’t said that he saw her staring at the sky with her eyes open. Alive but never grabbed the rope.

You’ll wish the photographer, who your alive and undrowned ex-husband (with his alive and undrowned soon-to-be new wife) punched out cold at the airport in Santiago would have shaken it off and punched back.

You’ll wish you’d been there to scream and finally let go of your fear of fighting back.

When Tommy tells you the ex wants to talk to you say no. Everything that could be said or should be said is water under a bridge you left smoldering behind you. But you won’t. You will take his call, the life raft you were to him there again to buoy his broken mind and keep it afloat. You will hear him say one thing, and it’s not the thing he should say; not a thing you for one second believe he has it in himself to say anyway.

What you know is that he is a slowly leaking boat, and no patch job will fix it. No rowing for shore for all you’re worth can stop it from sinking to the cold, devoid of all light, bottom of who he is. What you know is that it’s not the dark he fears, but being alone with himself. When he says the one and only sentence you let him say before you hang up the lifeline between you, you understand what rising to the surface feels like, and that for him, his words I don’t want people to say bad things about me,

will be an anchor that motherfucker will haul with him for the rest of his life.