Borderline Read Online Free PDF Page B

“medical leave,” the park was calling it. Anna wasn’t sure what she called it. Maybe the end of her career. More than not knowing what to call it, she didn’t know how she felt about it. Ambivalent was a good word.
    “I’m ambivalent,” she said to Paul.
    Paul Davidson was her husband of less than a year and most of that spent apart. “Ambivalent is a good word,” he said, echoing her thought. For a moment Anna just looked at him. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. White hair fell thick and straight across his broad forehead. There had been more blond in it when she first met him. Perhaps being married to her aged a man quickly. The white suited him and the hard bright sun of a Texas spring burnished it to a fine gloss. Paul was fifty-seven, eight years older than she. He wasn’t much taller, five-feet-eight in his socks, precisely the right height to hold and be held, to kiss and be kissed.
    “Are you ready to do this? It’s all adventury and parky,” he said softly. The rest of the rafting group was in the middle of preparations peppered with laughter and chat as they loaded the raft with gear. “We could still do something else. Go to Italy. Hike the Great Pyrenees. Spend a week getting wrapped in seaweed and glopped in mud at a fancy spa.”
    “It’s warm here and I’m not the boss,” Anna said.
    Paul kissed her gently. He was the best kisser of any man she had ever met. Most men thought they were good kissers, just like they all thought they were good drivers. Most were wrong on both counts.
    “Stop kissing! You’re setting a bad example for the children!” a girl shouted at them.
    Though Anna could have finessed a trip down the river with other rangers, she and Paul had chosen to go with a commercial outfit out of Terlingua. Anna had wanted nothing to do with the green and gray, and it was one of those rare occasions she didn’t want to be alone in the wilderness: she needed the distraction other people provided. This group of college kids—three girls and one boy, a boyfriend of somebody, Anna assumed—promised to be more distracting than bucolic. The girl who had shouted at them was a lanky nineteen-year-old who was so thin her bones were held together only by the spandex she wore. Her dark hair was slicked back into a ponytail that stuck through the back of her ball cap. Cyril something. Anna liked her. She had a wide smile full of big teeth, and eyes so black the pupils were nearly lost, giving her the perpetual look of a night-seeing cat.
    Paul released Anna but held her hand as they walked over the stones to the raft. This trip was a luxury outing. Camp chairs and sleeping pads, coolers full of food and beer, folding tables, a portable fire pit made from the bottom of a metal barrel, a grill for cooking steaks, pots, pans and tents had been stowed in the raft’s midsection. Life jackets had been provided but no one bothered to put them on. Not yet. The guide, Carmen, a small woman of muscle and attitude, told them they’d need them later but here, where the water was flat and amiable, they could use them as seat cushions.
    Carmen directing, the seven of them pushed the raft into the water of the Rio Grande River. They were putting in at Lajitas on the western border of the park and would float downriver through Santa Elena Canyon. In all her years in the Park Service, including time in northern Texas at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Anna had never visited Big Bend. She had always meant to.
    “What’s with all the black SUVs?” one of the three girls asked. Her name was Lori, Anna recalled. She was quietest of the group and looked to be the strongest, which wasn’t saying a great deal. These were urban children, raised on electronics and junk food. Their minds were sharp but their bodies could have used a lot more dodgeball and tree-climbing in their early years.
    “Mayor of Houston is in the park. She’s going to announce a run for governor.”
    “You’d think