Thinking of You

by Rachel Kane

  Eventually it was the friction of my entire body scraping down the granite that stopped me. I froze, careful not to move a single inch, because if I did, I was going to plummet.

  They’re never going to find me. I’m going to slide off this outcrop and never stop falling. When Pop finds out I’m dead—

  Okay. Time to stop thinking like that. This is a problem, and problems have solutions. You just have to think clearly.

  Fuck, I’m going to die.

  That’s it. That’s all the desperation I would allow myself. There had to be a way to fix this.

  When the blood stopped rushing in my ears, I could hear Eli.

  “Jake? Holy shit, Jake, where are you?”

  I couldn’t speak. If I took a deep breath to shout, my ribs would press against the mountain, I would lose my grip and I would die.

  “Here,” I said in a quiet voice. My chest hardly moved at all. “I’m here.”

  “Jake?” His voice had come closer, and suddenly I could see his face above me. “Oh my god!” he cried.

  I need you not to panic. I need your help, and we both need to stay extremely calm for that.

  If only he could read my thoughts. I couldn’t risk one more word. My fingers, gripping tiny cracks in the rock, were beginning to quiver with the strain I was putting on them. I didn’t dare move my feet to try to get a better footing.

  Eli did a strange thing. I thought he was going to be like a tourist, overreacting, shouting, panicking. But instead he grew very still, staring down at me.

  He reminded me of a buck in the forest, ears twitching, absolutely silent and still as he scanned for predators.

  There was an intelligence in his eyes, but also something a little frightening. The intensity with which he was studying me, made me wonder if he was going to try to save me…or push me away. I sensed that I was no longer a man in trouble in his eyes. I was a math problem, something abstract, a matter of angles and forces.

  It worried me, that look.

  It worried me more when his face disappeared.

  Come back, Eli.

  Please don’t leave me here.

  I tried to imagine what he could be doing. I knew the thing he absolutely must not do, which was to climb down to get me. That would be the way to get both of us killed. We had no rope to throw down to me, no supplies at all. There was no way to get help. There was really nothing left at all, except to hang here for as long as I could, and then—

  Stop. Stop thinking that way.

  If I had to go down, I wasn’t going to go down panicking. My arms were starting to shiver now. It was one thing to do pull-ups on a bar, lifting myself over and over, feeling the stretch and pull of my back as I worked it out. Another thing entirely to have all that weight on my fingertips. Eventually my fingers would have to let go. Being pressed against the rock face would buy me a few precious extra seconds, but eventually I would accelerate. Then I would be in the air, one very last time.

  How strange, I thought, to have survived one crash, only to die in another, more personal one.

  I remembered another of the poems in my mother’s book on Coleridge. The lines came unbidden to my mind:

  A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

  A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

  Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

  In word, or sigh, or tear—

  Maybe that was how I had lived my life. Unimpassioned. No natural outlet. Keeping everything real, everything true, hidden away so no one could see it. Hoping it would go away, if I ignored it long enough. I thought again of that time with Marcia and the laptop, how quickly I had slammed it shut so she wouldn’t see the men on the screen. I’m sorry for lying to you, I thought. When you hear about how I died, I hope you’ll forgive me for that. I hope you’ll understand.

  My right hand slipped down an inch. Only an inch, but it was enough to change the balance of things. My whole body shifted. With my last ounce of strength, I steadied my hand. The crack my fingers found wasn’t any deeper than half an inch, but that half-inch would have to do for now. It wouldn’t last long, but if I could just have a few more seconds, just a couple more breaths—

  When the tree lunged at me I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. My first thought was landslide but that didn’t make sense. Why would this single pine tree, thin and supple with its youth, have lost its footing and come tumbling down so that its branches and needles brushed my hand.

  “Can you grab it?” shouted Eli, and the entire world snapped into focus.

  I saw him, back up above me, his arms wrapped around the thin trunk of the tree. I blinked as the needles jabbed at my face and eyes, sharp as tiny daggers.

  I had no breath to answer. No strength. But now I had a task before me, and very little time to think.

  It would have to be fast. I would have only a split second between the time I let go of the rock, before falling too far. A split second to grab the tree trunk and hope. Hope that I could grip it tightly enough with my weakened fingers. Hope that Eli had a good enough hold that he wouldn’t let go. Hope that he didn’t slip off the rock and join me in the air.

  There was no time for second-guessing. No time for a deep breath and a countdown. Leaving my right hand in the tiny crack in the rock, I quickly slid my left over and grabbed the tree. My contact with the rock broken, gravity tugged at me, trying to get me to let go. Now I brought my right hand over, and my shoulders strained and shook. I gasped with the pain of it, but had to ignore how I felt, had to ignore everything but the climb up, Eli pulling the tree, me getting my shoe soles flat on the rock, walking upward, pulling myself up the trunk, hand over hand.

  The moment I found level ground, we let go of the tree. It slid down the side of the mountain, disappearing behind me.

  I collapsed then into Eli’s arms, my entire upper body quivering with weakness from having to hold myself for that long.

  He held me tight, and I could feel his heart pounding in his chest. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

  I buried my face against his throat.

  My lips touched his skin.

  It wasn’t a kiss. I swear it wasn’t a kiss.

  10

  Eli

  We reached the airstrip without any further disasters. Also without any further conversation.

  There wasn’t anything to say, after saving him. Maybe he was embarrassed that he had fallen. Big guy like that, he’s used to saving other people, not being saved himself. I don’t know, guys confuse me. But I was feeling pretty proud of myself. It’s not often you survive a plane crash and help someone avoid falling to their death, all in the same day.

  Proud of myself…but also exhausted. Because that’s the other thing about disaster, it takes all your energy away. That baby tree had been hard to move. I’d had to bend it back and forth, back and forth, until it cracked and tore so that I could pull it up and use it to save Jake. Then, lifting him up… I mean, I try to stay in shape, but I’m not cut out for lifting guys off the sides of mountains. My arms sung in pain, and my head felt a little swimmy.

  Also, and I’m not positive about this, but I think Jake might have kissed me.

  It had been so fast, I couldn’t be sure, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask about it.

  Just one of those things. Heat of the moment. His lips cool, strangely cool, touching my throat over my pulse point. Nothing else. He had broken away from my arms. Shaken but casual, dusting himself off. He considered his fingers; his hands were all scraped up. He put one of his fingertips in his mouth, wincing at the pain.

  In a perfect world, I would have accepted his fingers into my own lips. I would have kissed each fingertip, tasted the warmth of injured skin.

  But I knew he didn’t want that. It was foolish to even think it. I’d saved the man’s life, but he’d saved mine too. We were even. That part of our lives, the intensity of it, was over. Now there was nothing left but marching onward to the
field, waiting for rescue.

  We finally found the trail, and it felt like an anticlimax. The trail led up to the field so easily we might as well have been walking on a highway.

  “So that’s it,” I said, looking over the long dirt strip.

  Jake sat on the ground, resting his arms on his knees. “That’s it. That’s where we would’ve landed.”

  Sure enough, there was no tower. A shack sat off to one side, but I didn’t see any radio antenna jutting out above it, no sign that the shack could help us get rescued.

  I stood a short distance from him. Not too close. Give him his room.

  I felt like saying something. And now we wait. A quip. Some way to mark the fact that we were here…and that we would be here for a while.

  Jake’s face stopped me. I don’t know whether it was exhaustion, or the thought of how close he had come to death, but I knew from his expression that he needed some space. Some silence.

  That was fine.

  I would visit the shack and look inside. Walking was easier here; this was the most level ground we’d been on in hours. Even though my upper thighs were tired, I wasn’t ready to sit down yet. My mind wouldn’t calm down.

  There were no tire-tracks on the strip itself. I guess it had been a while since anyone was up here. That made it feel even lonelier. I glanced back at Jake. He was lying on his back now, staring up at the sky. A stranger passing by would’ve thought he was just relaxing, his hands behind his head, counting clouds. I wondered what he was thinking.

  Maybe he was thinking about that kiss.

  Stop that. No he isn’t.

  But he might be. He might be thinking, here we are, lost in the woods, two hot guys with a lot of time on their hands—

  Okay, whatever Jake was thinking, I was pretty sure he wasn’t scripting some gay porn in his head. These kind of thoughts weren’t doing me any good either. I wasn’t going to beat myself up for thinking them, because damn he had felt good in my arms back there… But I had to be realistic. Straight guys are off-limits. And even if they weren’t, being trapped on a deserted mountain wasn’t the place to question that.

  The shack’s door was latched, but it wasn’t locked. I undid the latch. The hinges screeched, and a couple of birds in a nearby tree were scared off.

  “Hello, are there any serial killers home?” I asked, poking my head inside.

  It was dark, the windows fly-blown and dirty. In the murky gloom, I could see that one wall was devoted to square cubby-holes. Each one had a label on it. Most of the labels were curled, filthy and torn; some boxes were missing their labels entirely.

  One box, though, still had its label, reasonably well-preserved. The label said: GROOM.

  I reached out and touched it. Ron Groom. Uncle Ron.

  This would be where his shipments would arrive. I could picture Jake as a little boy, carefully putting reams of paper and typewriter ribbon into the box. Would Ron wait until he heard the plane leave, before coming to get his supplies? Or would he have been here at the strip, gladly welcoming his rare visitors to the mountain?

  I liked to think it was the latter. Ron had always been a gregarious man, as quick with his handshake as he’d been with his wit. His stories were full of people, crowded with them, the cities in his fiction ready to burst with humanity.

  How strange then, that he had come to the mountain to write his final book. To choose this lonely place at the end of a life so full.

  I felt, not for the first time, like I was never going to understand Ron. That he would always be a mystery to me, no matter how much I needed to understand him. No matter how much I felt like my entire life depending on grasping how he had been exiled from the family, for the same crime as me, the crime of being born a little bit different.

  “Can you take me to his cabin?” I asked Jake. I stood over him, looking down. He blinked and tried to focus on me.

  “We need to wait—”

  “For rescue, I know. But the cabin is pretty close, right? It’ll just be a minute. Can you show me which one was his?”

  Jake sat up and shook his head. “Look, we need to stay put. We’ve had enough fucking disasters for one day.”

  “Then just tell me which one was his, and I’ll go by myself.”

  “No. I don’t want you wandering off and getting bit by a rattlesnake or something.”

  Under normal circumstances, this might’ve caused a flicker of annoyance. These were not normal circumstances. I felt like I might start yelling at any second.

  I took a breath.

  “I understand. But I came a long damn way to visit my uncle’s cabin, I’ve gone through hell to get here, and now I’d like to see it. Will you tell me where it is, or do I just need to wander aimlessly through the woods?”

  I could tell Jake was on edge too. He stood up, his eyes lit with fire.

  “Twice now, twice,” he said, “we have nearly died. You get that, don’t you? If your foot had slipped while I was climbing up—”

  He grabbed my arm, and I twisted to get him to release his grip.

  “Jake, I get it. Trust me, I was there, I am not interested in any more life-threatening adventures. But damn it, I’m going to go look for the cabin. You can either tell me where it is or not, but you’re not going to stop me from doing what I came here for.”

  Back when I was little, this mama cat had taken up residence under our porch to have kittens. Amanda and I were delighted, and even though my folks kept telling us to leave the newborn kittens alone, we couldn’t help ourselves, taking them out, kissing them, cooing over them. Mama cat had been so stressed by that. The moment we set one of the kittens down, she would grab the kitten in her jaws, carrying the mewing little bundle back to bed with its brothers and sisters.

  That’s the vibe I was getting off Jake. He was exhausted, he was on the edge, and if I got too far away, he was going to pick me up and bring me back here where it was safe.

  The idea was not without its appeal, but I would be damned if anything would keep me from my purpose. I marched off. I hadn’t seen anything in the shack that would tell me where Ron’s cabin might be, but maybe I would look again. There were three paths behind the shack, and I was sure one of those would eventually lead me to the right place.

  I was almost to the shack when I heard him behind me. I tensed up, ready to fight if I had to. Instead, he caught up with me and kept walking, by my side. “It’s the trail on the left,” he said.

  “Surprised you came with me,” I said.

  “Somebody’s got to keep you safe. Here, grab one of these branches.” He picked a fallen, straight branch from the ground and handed it to me. “I’m not kidding about snakes.”

  I’m not sure what I expected to find. Maybe a log cabin like in the picture books, painted red like a barn, with a little green tin roof and a chimney. Happy puffs of smoke rising from the chimney. A rosy picture indeed.

  “That’s…it?” I said.

  Jake nodded. “That’s the cabin.”

  The sun and rain had not been kind to my uncle’s final home. The planks that made up its sides were warped, faded into a neutral gray except where moss climbed up its side. The roof was indeed tin, but a heavy branch had fallen on it at some point, tearing the metal.

  There were no windows. Just a single door.

  I approached the cabin. In its stillness, its lifelessness, it seemed to have become a feature of the landscape, just another thing to rot and feed the next generation of trees.

  His book will be ruined.

  That was okay. The physical book itself wasn’t important, the words inside were. As long as I could make out the words, I could transcribe them. I could picture his novel now, the paper fat with moisture, nibbled by mice, dotted with soil, but underneath it all, his words, his story, the answer to the mystery that plagued me.

  Or maybe he had been smart. Maybe each day after writing, he put the pages into a metal box. Now that would be like Uncle Ron. All the pages neatly stacked, the stack tappe
d together so not a single corner poked out. Locked in a box. It would probably be a black box, nice and formal, like something a banker would have. Ron liked that old-fashioned style.

  “You can go in,” said Jake, his voice pulling me from my reverie. “It’s not locked.”

  The doorknob was ancient and covered in rust. It felt rough against my hand as I turned it. The door had swollen from years of rain, it was stuck, and I put my shoulder against it to force it open.

  Then I was inside.

  The air was musty, with only the hole in the roof to allow ventilation. It made me want to sneeze.

  There was a little iron stove, a single pan sitting on it. In one corner—beneath the hole the branch had made--was a cot, empty of bedclothes, stained with years of water, practically rotted through.

  The only other furniture was a card table and a chair.

  There was no typewriter.

  There was no banker’s box.

  There was no book.

  11

  Jacob

  I have seen disappointment before. I know what it looks like, somewhere between annoyance and sadness, when someone realizes that whatever they’d expected, they weren’t going to get it.

  But I’d never seen a look like Eli’s before. Something closer to sorrow than disappointment, something like grief.

  “Where is it? Where’s his book?”

  He knelt by the table, looking underneath. He turned and looked under the rotted cloth of the cot in the corner.

  “I don’t think there’s anything in here,” I said.

  “But it’s got to be. That’s what he came here for, to write it. Where would he have put it?”

  He opened the pot-bellied stove and looked inside. Nothing in there but ancient ashes and spiderwebs.

  When someone is busy looking for something, there’s an instinct to help them, you just naturally start looking around too. I found myself doing that, even though there was clearly nothing here.