To this day, I can’t be at the river bottom and not think of how we became bound by love and loss there. The particular smell—the decay of wet things, fish and moss, that heady pine-and-honey stink of cottonwood resin, the river disappearing and remaking itself in the current—it’s the stuff of memory. I am soaked in it. She summoned me. I was at once powerless and powerful. “C’mon, sleepy! Let’s jump in.”
