Kelly drowns

Kelly’s drowning is the fatal outcome of the Toyota’s plunge into Indian Creek, and the novel makes that ending both physically specific and narratively unstable. As water closes over the wreck, Kelly fights to breathe and escape; the account then returns to her death more than once, interrupting it with a vision of rescue and images of life she longs to keep. Her consciousness can still imagine release, but the ending confirms that she dies trapped in the car.

Circumstances of the Drowning

Before the crash, Kelly and The Senator leave the party with little time to reach the ferry. He takes a turn onto Old Ferry Road, an unmaintained, rutted route that should have been closed; a new paved Ferry Road had made the old one obsolete. The road is not marked, and the turn is an understandable mistake at dusk. The narration also notes that the accident’s speed was later estimated at about forty-five miles per hour from skid marks and vehicle damage, and speculates that the Toyota might otherwise have struck a narrow bridge railing with a similar result.

The car skids on a sandy rut, breaks through the guardrail, and plunges into water. The passenger door buckles, leaving Kelly trapped as black, foaming water rises over the hood and roof. The stream is Indian Creek: in places eleven feet deep, about twenty feet wide, and running toward a tidal pool and the Atlantic near Brockden’s Landing. Those measurements give the apparently obscure marsh a lethal geography. Kelly is caught not in open water but in a confined space of twisted metal, with the damaged door between her and the surface.

The Body Fighting to Survive

The drowning is experienced as a sequence of bodily emergencies rather than as a single instant. Kelly struggles for breath, tries to preserve the air in her mouth, and loses the ability to name what she senses. Water rises around her; she shivers in it, and its smell—sewage, gasoline, and oil, mixed with her own urine—makes the wreck’s enclosure inescapably physical. Fear and oxygen loss narrow her awareness, while the car itself both confines her and supplies the steering wheel she later grips as a possible means of survival.

Even in that enclosure, Kelly bargains. She offers to have one or both legs amputated if that is what rescue requires and promises not to sue. The thought of her father, Artie Kelleher, as someone the family calls litigious becomes part of her desperate reasoning: she imagines explaining what happened and taking the blame herself. Her mind reaches for practical terms and familiar relationships even as the water strips away words and orientation. This is not a calm acceptance of death but an effort to turn an impossible predicament into a transaction with rescue.

The same will to live appears in her remembered morning at the beach. While jogging among the dunes, she had watched sandpipers in the surf and felt her desire to keep living surge. In the car, that attachment persists as bargaining, movement, and the attempt to interpret any available sign as a route back to air. The contrast is stark: the beach offered open sky and birds, while the wreck gives her black water, a narrowing pocket of space, and only fragmentary clues.

An Imagined Rescue and the Repeated Ending

At one point Kelly sees The Senator diving toward the car, his fingers spread against the cracked windshield. In her perception, he finds her, wrenches open the passenger door, grasps her wrists, and hauls her upward. She then slips free of his hands and swims by herself, her legs seemingly restored, using the Australian crawl she learned at school. The moon above the water becomes proof, in her mind, that she is alive; she also sees her parents waiting in the grasses, aged and grief-stricken. The sequence gives her an imagined passage from confinement to the night air, but it does not establish that she has been saved.

The narration immediately presses against that reprieve. Kelly’s vision culminates in the image of herself as a little girl in white anklet socks, running to be lifted, even as the black water fills her lungs and she dies. The child’s joyful expectation and the adult’s fatal submersion occupy the same ending. Rather than presenting rescue as a reversal of the outcome, the passage makes the wish for rescue part of the dying experience itself.

The death is stated again in a brief, blunt sentence, then followed by the apparent last effort to lift her torso and head. Kelly grips what she recognizes only as a device that might save her and tries to rise toward a dwindling air bubble. The sequence refuses a simple, continuous account of what she can perceive: imagined escape, bodily effort, and the declaration of death recur against one another. That recurrence makes the reader feel the difference between Kelly’s conviction that she may yet survive and the narrative’s confirmation that she does not.

The Senator, the Aftermath, and the Meaning of the Ending

The account gives the reader a view of the aftermath that Kelly cannot possess. The Senator escapes the submerged car and reaches shore, vomiting filthy water; he later limps away through the marsh with one shoe on and one off. In panic, he reaches a roadside telephone booth and calls Ray Annick. He tells Ray that there has been an accident and that the girl is dead, then immediately fears manslaughter charges and claims that Kelly was drunk, became emotional, and grabbed the wheel. The claim is his distressed account, not an independently established explanation of the crash. His flight and call expose the gulf between his survival and Kelly’s entrapment, as well as how quickly he turns from the accident to his legal and political danger.

The novel also places the fatal outcome beside Kelly’s understanding of the man beside her. During the crash, she understands that he kicked her in blind panic to escape, and she makes herself believe that he did not know what he was doing. That interpretation coexists with the practical fact of her confinement and his escape; it does not open the passenger door or bring her to the surface. Likewise, her remembered attraction and anxiety on the beach—where she senses the man’s desire and fears that having made him want her will make refusal difficult—form part of the emotional context before the drive, not an explanation that transfers responsibility for the crash to her.

The drowning’s significance lies partly in this unequal ending. Kelly’s attention remains with air, movement, touch, and the possibility of living; The Senator’s aftermath turns toward exposure, prosecution, and political ruin. Yet the novel does not reduce her last consciousness to a single moral judgment or a final, lucid statement. Its recurring death sentence interrupts visions of the moon, rescue, and childhood, making survival persist as an experience and a desire even where the outcome is irreversible.