That summer, they go to the river every morning. It’s a long walk but reasonable by bicycle. They are high in the mountains. The heat is not so bad. They only have the summer, and Olive is frantic with the scarcity of it all. In the fall, when their parents’ research is over, she will be back in the city and the air will be heavy and thick and she will not be able to bicycle with her helmet unclasped, over the stone bridge and through the valley and past the old men who carve animals out of cherry wood in their front lawn every morning. Each day, Olive wakes up breathless and early. Olive doesn’t want to waste a second.
There are no other children here—only them. Olive is not bored, but she is lonely. Rhea is smaller and slower. She is sometimes languid, which Olive resents but begrudgingly accepts as the necessary cost of her companionship. The summer floats by quickly, but every day is mostly the same and so too, the summer floats like it will never end. Once, Olive sees the face of a little boy in the window of the sculpture's house as she careens through the village on her way to the river. She stops abruptly then, abandoning her bicycle in the bushes and darting flailingly towards home on foot, shouting with an urgency to alert some authority that is surely not listening.
“KIDS MY AGE, KIDS MY AGE”
Olive leaves Rhea behind that morning, although Rhea catches up later. Left alone, Rhea moves slowly. Rhea picks her way through the village gardens and it is early afternoon by the time she wanders home. Her pockets are full of currents. No one was worried. The living room doors to the back lawn are left open and Olive sits barefoot at the kitchen table. Calls are made to identify the newcomer in the window. He is a grandchild, In town for just a day. Olive never meets him, although her gaze flickers across the window of the sculpture's house every morning from that point on as she passes. He never returns. That summer, it is just Olive and Rhea.
Olive tells Rhea that if it were the fall or the spring, they would not be able to swim in the river, because the fall and the spring is when they open the dams in Geneva, and by the time you see the tidal wave of water sweeping down the river banks, it is too late. If it was winter, Olive tells Rhea, you would not be able to swim either. In the winter, it is too cold. The anecdotes are not meant to scare her, Rhea thinks. Olive means more to chastise her with nagging reminders of gratitude. Or perhaps to bombard her with lack so that she will rejoice in the bounty with which she has somehow been befallen. She is so lucky to go to the river everyday. She is so lucky that she is here now in this time and this place and this world, and september does not feel too far away but she must remember that even if she were in this not so distant future, she would be swept like a pebble from the rocks where she sunbathes by a torrent of unpredictable currents. She is so lucky that it is june. If Rhea couldn’t tune out the reminders, she thinks she might find them tiresome, but she can, and so she doesn’t mind.
In the grotto by the river, the yearly fall and spring flooding has carved pools into the rocks. Shallow carve outs in the limestone that become something akin to fresh water tide pools when filled with rainwater and spillover from the rapids that surround them. When no one is watching, Rhea likes to slip away from the shore, and sink herself into the holes in the grotto. It’s not safe, she’s been told, even in summer, even in June, but then again, she is so small and the divets are so sturdy. Rhea likes to imagine that if this isn’t safe, then nothing is. She likes to imagine herself fearless. Olive likes to imagine herself euphoric.
Olive needs to be the luckiest girl in the world, Rhea thinks sometimes. Olive needs it to matter that she landed exactly at this river exactly in this village and exactly in June. Would the luckiest girl in the world be washed away by the rapids because a false bottom of a fresh water tidepool disintegrated under her feet and swept her into a network of underwater tunnels where she was never seen again? Rhea doesn’t think so. And Rhea is, she knows, luckier than Olive. It’s why Olive twists her words into something so self satisfactory all the time. It’s why, of course, Olive would be so annoying if Rhea wasn’t so good at just turning herself to stone. The luckiest girls in the world can just turn themselves to stone, she knows Olive knows this too, Rhea thinks. She has to. But Olive can’t turn herself to stone, and so she spins and talks and twirls and falls and Rhea closes her eyes and sinks into the little insides of the rocks in the sun, letting her hands reach out and run over the tops of the rapids rushing by, knowing with full certainty that the floor will not fall through.
