To travel from the island to the garage required but the merest flick of a thought.
He came to in his car, head throbbing with misted pain.
Turning off the ignition, he got out, threw open the garage doors, and staggered out into the shockingly cold winter's night.
He remembered belatedly that his hat and coat were in the back of the car.
No matter.
He crammed his lungs with fresh air and rubbed snow on his face.
Then he ran down the street to the apartment building next door.
Would he be in time? he wondered.
He could not have been in the garage more than ten minutes at the most, which meant that time on the River moved at an even faster pace than he had thought.
Hours, then, had already passed since he had left the island, and the raft could very well have gone over the falls.
Or had there really been a raft? A River? A girl with sun-bright hair?
Maybe the whole thing had been a dream—a dream that his unconscious had manufactured in order to snap him back to life.
The thought was unendurable, and he banished it from his mind.
Reaching the apartment building, he ran inside.
The lobby was deserted, and the elevator was in use.
He pounded up three flights of stairs and paused before her door.
It was locked.
"Jill!" he called, and broke it down.
She was lying on the living room sofa, her face waxen in the radiance of a nearby floor lamp.
She was wearing the yellow dress that he remembered so well, only now it was no longer torn. Nor were her slender slippers bedraggled.
Her hair, though, was just the way he remembered it—short, and trying to curl.
Her eyes were closed.
He turned off the gas in the fireless circulating heater that stood against the wall, and he threw open all of the windows.
He picked her up and carried her over to the largest one and let the sweet-life-giving air embrace her.
"Jill!" he whispered.
"Jill!"
Her eyelids quivered, opened.
Blue eyes filled with terror gazed up into his face.
Slowly, the terror faded away, and recognition took its place.
He knew then that there would be no more Rivers for either of them.