Page 124 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

The splashing was not a bird. It was a person. A flailing, fading person. There was no bright life vest keeping them afloat as they rose and fell in slivers illuminated by the thin light from the boat. Just strands of hair. A crescent of pale skin.

The headlamped person was yelling down, jiggling a thin line of cord attached to a floating bag tossed in the water. But the swimmer didn’t grab the rope. Didn’t even seem to know it was there. They were just a flutter of fingers, a billowing dark shirt.

Thor crashed past Mandy, grabbing a life vest from behind her.

“Come on!” he yelled.

His long hair streamed behind him as he leapt into the river. He swam hard, churning through dark water, grabbing for glimpses of the drowning person. Mandy hastily clipped the other PFD around her and started swimming out behind him.

The river was chaos, everything in motion: the body, the swirling water, the tiny light blinking erratically across the surface. Something brushed Mandy’s hip, and she screamed. She tried to kick it away. But it wasn’t a fish. It was too big. She scissored her legs around it, feeling its weight threaten to sink past her.

“Thor!” she yelled. “Under here!”

The guide flipped, reaching down as deep as his life jacket would allow.

“Got him!”

Thor popped up with an arm around the swimmer’s torso. Mandy reached down and grabbed for a hip, a foot, whatever she could find. Thor tugged the person onto their back, but still, Mandy couldn’t see a face. The head kept slipping below the black water.

They hauled up onto the beach, Thor sputtering, Mandy’s eyes streaming with silt. Even before she could make out the swimmer’s face, she knew.

It wasn’t a man.

It wasn’t a killer.

It was Liv.

They lifted her sister onto the first set of ledges, and Thor swept her mouth with his finger while Mandy hunted for a pulse. Nothing. Liv wasn’t coughing. She wasn’t breathing.

Thor started chest compressions. Mandy watched as if in a dream, a nightmare, though the thing that flashed in her brain was the first time she’d gotten her CPR certification, which Liv had insisted they do as teenagers, because Liv was already a million years old, even then. The mannequin they were assigned was so janky that its head kept popping off. Liv had her fingers laced together, her hands driving into the self-decapitating piece of plastic, and Mandy kept making jokes about how Liv was killing the patient and Liv kept scowling at her, and was she never going to see her sister glare at her like that again? Were they never going to perform their stupid duet, their push and pull, thrust and parry, hug and throttle, again?

Thor kept pumping. Mandy administered the rescue breaths, shoving air into her sister’s body, praying for it to come out again as carbon dioxide, as river water, as anything close to hope. She was vaguely aware of the supply boat coming to shore, other people crowding the ledges, her dad putting his hand on her back. But they were all just paper cutouts, shadows in the dark. The only thing she could feel, the only thing she could hope for, was Liv.

On the twenty-fourth breath, her sister’s eyes flashed open, just for a second, the whites around her pupils shining over the dirty water smearing her face.

They fluttered shut again.

Thor kept pumping. Mandy kept counting. Every time he got to thirty, she gave Liv two more breaths. Two more chances.

Six breaths later, one of Liv’s legs started to shudder. She groaned and twisted. Mandy looked to Thor, unsure what to do.

“Keep going,” he said.

Finally, on the thirty-sixth breath, Liv shot up to a seated position, coughing and puking river water everywhere. She looked wild, ragged and raw, streaked with mud and God knew what else. But she was alive.

“Ashhhh.”

The sound creaking from her sister’s mouth was more ragged exhalation than word. It was the sweetest thing Mandy had ever heard.

“Breathe, Liv. Just breathe. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

“Cashhhh,” Liv said. She shuddered and jerked in Mandy’s arms.

Then Liv retched again. “You know what the best cash business is?” she croaked.

“Shhh.”

But her sister wrenched around and grabbed Mandy’s wrist.