Empty Mile Read Online Free PDF

these glowing islands the forest was cool and shadowed and the grass was cold against our legs.
    A couple of hundred yards back from the lake we found a swale of grass in a cone of sunlight. We stopped at its center and the noise of our dash died suddenly around us. We stood panting, face to face, smiling. Light and dark. A heartbeat of stillness. Out there, out in the splashing, picnicking world, there were reasons to hesitate, to question what we were doing, but in this wooded sanctuary there was only us and what we wanted from each other. I felt the sun sizzling in my cells and my eyes, even in the strands of my hair.
    The grass we lay on slid against our bodies as though it had been polished. It bruised and tore beneath us as we moved, leaving a pale wash of green on knees and elbows and shoulders. The moment was not lingered over, it was stolen time and could not be wasted on the languors that arpeggiate love. It was everything at once, as much as we could cram into a handful of minutes. Afterwards, as we lay beside each other, the scent of the grass we had broken rose about us.
    Who knows what plans we might have made then? What resolutions to join our lives, what fretting there might have been about the hurt we would inflict on Gareth? But these turmoils were not to be, not that day. Sounds from the lake carried to where we were. They were baffled by the trees but if you listened you could guess at their meaning—the willowy scale of laughter, the short barking of a complaining child, the calling of a mother, two or three notes, over and over, like an instrument being tuned …
    We had not heard these sounds, of course, as we strained at each other. But now, as our bodies quieted, they began to fall upon us. And as they fell they changed, from a collection of commonplaces to a harsh blatting that lanced the warm cocoon Marla and I had drawn about ourselves. For a moment I lay listening, trying to decode their meaning. And then I was pulling on my shorts and running, running, running …
    Because the sounds I could hear were panic and danger and alarm. And I knew what was causing them.
    Out of the forest. Into the sun. Our towels and bags were still at the edge of the lake. Stan’s book too. But as much as I willed the image, as much as I screamed for it to be so, he was not there reading it. A few yards further on a group of people were crowding over something.
    I ran through them, shouldering bodies out of the way, and stopped abruptly. A man was kneeling, driving his locked arms rapidly up and down. The jeans and shirt he wore were soaking wet and beneath his pumping hands the body of my brother was dreadfully pale and dreadfully still. His chest flexed and one of his feet rocked back and forth through a short arc but it was plain to me that he was not alive. I dropped to my knees opposite the man. I felt a sudden desperate need to explain that I was the one here to whom this terrible event was most terrible, to confess to the ring of faces peering down at me my part in this tragedy.
    “He’s my brother,” was the only thing I could force past my lips.
    The man grabbed my hands, putting them where his had been, locking my elbows, showing me how to do it.
    “When I stop blowing, pump.”
    For several seconds the back of his head hid Stan’s face. I felt the narrow chest rise and fall but there was no elasticity to it, no willful drawing in or pushing out of air. His flesh, too, was dense beneath my palms, as though muscle and tissue had become somehow compacted.
    I was moaning. I could hear the sound, but I couldn’t stop it.
    “Pump! Pump!”
    I hammered down on Stan’s chest.
    People in the crowd started to bead together what they had seen into small strings of explanation.
    “He was out by himself. I saw him go in—he looked okay.”
    “We thought he was playing. We couldn’t tell he was in trouble.”
    “Jared saw him go under.”
    “Yeah, he was way out, but I knew something was wrong.”
    The man