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family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don’t breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism’s colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.
     
    The search and rescue squad and the sheriff arrived at the falls late that afternoon. Two of the squad members were brothers, one in his early twenties, the other thirty. They had a carpentry business, building patios and decks for lawyers and doctors from Greenville and Columbia who owned second homes in the mountains. The third man, the diver, was in his early forties and taught biology at the county high school. The sheriff looked at his watch and figured they had two hours at most before the gorge darkened. Even so the diver did not hurry to put on his wet suit and air tanks. He smoked a cigarette and between puffs talked to the sheriff about the high school’s baseball team. They had worked together before and knew death punched no time clock.
    When the diver was ready, a length of nylon rope was clasped tight under his arms. The older, stronger brother held the other end. The diver waded into the river, the rope trailing behind him like a leash. He dipped his mask in the water, put it on, and leaned forward. The three men onshore watched as the black fins propelled the diver into the hydraulic’s ceaseless blizzard of whitewater. The men on the bank sat on rocks and waited. With his free hand, the older brother pointed upstream to a bend where he’d caught a five-pound trout last fall. The sheriff asked what he’d used for bait but didn’t hear the answer because the mask bobbed up in the headwater’s foam.
    The brother tightened the slack and pulled but nothing gave until the others grabbed hold as well. They pulled the diver into the shallows and helped him onto shore. Between watery coughs he told them he’d found her in the undercut behind the hydraulic. She had been upright, her head and back and legs pressed against a rock slab. Only her hair moved, its long strands streaming upward. As the diver had drifted closer, he saw that her eyes were open. Their faces were inches apart when he slipped an arm around her waist. Then the hydraulic ripped free the mask and mouthpiece, grabbed the dive light, spiraling it toward the darkness.
    The diver told the men kneeling beside him that the girl’s blue eyes had life in them. He could feel her heart beating against his chest and hear her whispering. Before or after your mask was torn off, the sheriff asked. The diver did not know, but swore that he’d never enter the river again.
    The younger brother scoffed, while the older spoke of narcosis though the pool was no more than twenty feet deep. But the sheriff did not dismiss what the diver said. He too had seen strange and inexplicable things involving the