Reckless

by Ruth Wind

  There—a tumble of boulders shaped like a snail, one big one forming its back, another small one for the head. Without giving herself any time to think, she strode toward it and ducked into the trees just behind, letting the flashlight lead through the inky darkness. Behind her, the EMT followed closely.

  Ramona paused and took a breath. It wasn’t as hard as she might have imagined it would be, not with Jake waiting—maybe dying, if she couldn’t get to him. She deliberately called up memories she had tamped down on hard for many years. Remembered the boys in their red and blue and yellow jackets sitting on this very rock. They had caught her, and one dragged her behind the snail, but in the snow they had slid nearly forty feet before landing in front of a cave on a plateau. He had called his friends and they tumbled and slid down the hill behind them, laughing as if it was just any happy day in the mountains.

  Her throat tightened, and deliberately she moved forward, holding out the flashlight to make sure she didn’t tumble. The land was dry and covered with scrubby grass in the summer, and it wasn’t terribly steep. She looked over her shoulder at the EMT. “You okay?”

  “No problem. Wish I’d known this way an hour ago.”

  She gained the plateau and spied the cave. Lights from the supermarket parking lot at the foot of the mountain cast a faint, cold light over it. It should have horrified her. It should have made her skin crawl.

  But she felt nothing but an urgent need to get to Jake. “I came down this way,” she said aloud, and followed a flat, wide expanse of stone edging a sharp drop to nothingness one side. The EMT cursed. On the other side of the plateau, she paused to wait for him. “That was the hardest part.”

  “Good.”

  The rest of the way was over flat rock. In some places, trees and scrub oak had rooted in pockets of soil, but it was, in general, a simple downward climb.

  And finally, finally, there was Jake, lying exactly as he had been when she saw him from above. The plateau spread out to form a wide table, maybe thirty or forty feet wide, then narrowed again and grew steeper, but Ramona thought it was possible they could get him down.

  Shivering in relief, she rushed toward him and knelt. “Jake, we’re here,” she said, touching him gently.

  At first, he didn’t respond, and Ramona’s heart plummeted. She felt for a pulse on his neck, and his eyes opened. “Not dead.” His uninjured arm groped for hers and gripped it.

  “Good,” she said. His pupils were uneven. The damned concussion. She spoke to the EMT in quick, medical language, hoping Jake would miss most of it. Brain swelling was an urgent concern. He’d reopened the cut on his head, but miraculously, there was only a goose egg over one eye and no other cuts she could find.

  But his breathing was labored, and when she asked him, he said it hurt. His chest and his side. Ramona looked at the EMT. Broken or bruised ribs—and heaven only knew what else. They had to get him out—and quickly.

  Ramona stayed with him, holding his hand and talking quietly, while the EMT made his way back up the hill. She had given him directions to find the place from the bottom, and although the minutes seemed to take hours, the rescuers finally made it, with a hammock stretcher to carry Jake out on.

  He could barely speak, but he wouldn’t let go of Ramona’s hand as they carried him-down. Because she was a doctor, they let her fly with him to Denver, and he clutched her hard all the way there. Only when he was taken into surgery did she finally convince him to let her go, and even then, it was a fight. He kept trying to talk and she kept putting her hand over his mouth. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, smiling.

  “Mr. E,” he said fuzzily.

  Ramona swallowed with difficulty. “I’ll take care of him.”

  Ramona tried to put on a cheerful face for Jake’s family when they drove into Denver hours later, but she understood how grave his injuries were. She tried to phrase it gently, feeling they had to be prepared. In the waiting room, Louise, Lance, Tyler, Tamara and Jake’s friend, Robert, sat down and looked at her.

  Ramona took Louise’s hand. “He fell almost three hundred feet. It’s a miracle, and I’m not overstating this, that he lived at all. He must have bounced on the side, and it slowed him down.

  “We were lucky he had Robert with him, and that he reacted so quickly. We were lucky to find a way to get him out of there before morning came....” She paused. “We were lucky. He was lucky.”

  “What’s the but, Ramona?” Tyler asked, his face grim. He’d pulled his hair back into a ponytail, but he still looked haggard. His pain was obvious.

  She took a breath. “He’s injured pretty seriously. He hit his head again, and he had a concussion last week. It’s impossible to know the extent of internal injuries, but there were some.”

  Robert spoke for the first time. His voice was low and hoarse, and she hated the haunted look in his eyes. “So he might die.”

  Louise spoke before Ramona had a chance to frame a reply. “He will not,” she said fiercely, and stood up. “I reckon I prayed him through worse than this. I’m going to the chapel.”

  And suddenly, Ramona remembered her prayer earlier—or last night. Whatever. Angels with their strong, swift wings.

  With a dizziness born of exhaustion, she, too, stood up. “Excuse me. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  She followed Louise to the chapel and sat down beside her. Louise didn’t cease her silent prayer, but she reached out and took Ramona’s hand. Fighting hot tears of grief, Ramona bowed her head.

  Jake knew he was alive because everything hurt. His head. His neck. His stomach and chest. His legs and backside and even his mouth. He surfaced slowly, aware of the sound of voices somewhere close by, and a faint breath of air moving on his chin.

  Slowly, with great effort, he opened his eyes. A white ceiling was all he saw, and it must be night because there was a dim, greenish glow like that cast from a fluorescent tube tinting the white paint. Experimentally, very slowly, he moved his head. It felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds, but he could move it. A very good thing.

  Someone was asleep on the other bed in the room. He peered hard at the figure, trying to clear his vision, hoping it was Ramona. It wasn’t. He made out the salt-and-pepper curls of his mother’s hair, and that was okay, too. He wouldn’t bother her just yet.

  The memory of the fall came back to him, just a quick, blurred impression of falling and falling, the ground rushing up at him. It made him feel dizzy, and he pushed the memory away. Time enough.

  He didn’t remember landing. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he could feel his toes and attempted to wiggle them. They moved. With pain, it was true, but they moved. He tried the same with his fingers. The right ones moved fine, but he couldn’t seem to locate his left ones. He shifted his head a bit to try to see them. An enormous cast covered his arm from fingers to shoulder. No wonder he couldn’t move them just yet.

  A fierce, wild feeling rushed through him. He was alive.

  “Jake?”

  He jerked his head to the side, not sure if he was imagining that soft, warm voice or not. The sudden movement sent a zinging pain through not only his head, but all the way down his neck. He grunted.

  “Easy.” Her hands were on his shoulder, small and warm.

  By concentrating very hard, Jake brought Ramona into focus, though there was a nimbus of light surrounding her, as if she were some otherworldly creature. Maybe she was.

  He reached for the hand he could feel on his shoulder, found it and closed it tightly in his own. “Hi,” he managed. The effort hurt his throat.

  “Hi. Do you want some water?”

  He nearly shook his head, but remembered how it had hurt to turn it. “No. Throat’s too sore.”

  “I bet.” She smiled, and there was a motion at the edge of his vision, then her hand settled very lightly on his cheek. “You had surgery.”

  “Anything missing?” It hurt to talk, but he had to know.

  This time she chuckled. “Nothing you can’t live witho
ut. They took your spleen. Fixed some torn places inside.”

  Her hand moved, smoothing his hair gently back from his forehead. It was the best thing he’d ever felt. Ever. He tightened his fingers around hers, wishing he had the wit to lift it and kiss it. But he couldn’t. Or didn’t. Or something.

  “You were so lucky, Jake.”

  A remembered sensation of falling, falling, falling made him dizzy for a minute. “Yeah,” he rasped. “What—” The words stuck in his dry throat, and Ramona turned away then back, putting an ice cube against his mouth.

  “This will help.”

  It was cold and slippery against his tongue and Jake was torn over whether this or her hand were the best sensations ever. “What else?” he said.

  “What else did you do to yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Broke three ribs and your arm in two places. Multiple bruises and contusions. Bruised some internal organs, but none seriously.” She took a breath. “Your back should have been shattered, the way you landed, but it wasn’t.”

  He had the sense she struggled a little to keep her voice even, and he tried to bring her face more clearly into focus. It was too hard. “Thank you,” he sighed, and closed his eyes again.

  Ramona stood there for a long time, her hand clasped in Jake’s. Looking at him. Touching him. He was battered almost beyond recognition—his face violently discolored from bruises and scrapes. His mouth was swollen and held three stitches—and she didn’t think he was going to be happy to learn he’d knocked out two bottom front teeth. His ribs were taped, his arm in a cast, his legs and torso covered with bruises inflicted on the torturous way down. On his back, a wide red bruise from shoulder to hip showed the impact of his landing.

  When he really woke up, he was going to hurt. A lot. She doubted he’d be able to move without help for several days at least.

  But he would live. Ramona gently pushed her fingers through the thick, dark weight of his hair, smoothing it away from his wounded and beautiful face. He was warm and breathing and alive. For almost twenty-four straight hours, Ramona had not let herself think, first just to get through the rescue and the surrealistic night. Later, she had not wanted to consider all the things that could go wrong, or recall similar case histories with unfortunate endings. She had practically held her breath, waiting for Jake to awaken and recognize something, someone.

  And now he had. It was nothing short of a miracle. In a sudden release of tension, Ramona felt her strength give way. She sank into the chair she had stationed at his side, bent her head to the bed beside him and wept In gratitude and relief and a recognition that her life was forever changed.

  If she had never been raped, if she had never gone cross-country skiing that day, if—as she had wished a million times—that day had never happened, she would never have known the back way down the mountain. She would not have known any way to get Jake off that ledge until morning.

  And if they had waited till morning, Jake would have probably died from internal bleeding. He’d been close to succumbing to his injuries by the time they got to the hospital.

  She pressed her forehead to his fingers, lax now as he slept, and let the strange, unsettling knowledge of that wash over her again and again, unable to do anything but marvel at it. Too much had happened, and she was exhausted, and she just couldn’t think about any of it. Not yet.

  A hand fell on her shoulder and smoothed over her back. “Ramona, let me take you hope,” Tyler said, and she noticed absently that he was using her first name instead of the formal title he’d always insisted upon. “He’s going to be okay now. You need some rest.”

  Shakily, Ramona lifted her head and wiped her face, too tired to even care that she was totally falling apart and revealing everything. He handed her a box of tissues and she accepted it gratefully. “I’m sorry,” she said in a breathy voice, still struggling to pull herself together. “I think I’m just overwhelmed.”

  “He’s needed someone to love him like you do. For such a long time.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  A shadow crossed his pale gray eyes, and Ramona remembered another hospital room and a long vigil, one that had not ended so well. “I understand.”

  “I guess you probably do.”

  He fixed his gaze on Jake’s sleeping face. “I still miss her. Every day.” Ramona put her hand on Tyler’s arm, but said nothing. For another moment, he seemed lost in memory, then he roused himself. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a sloppy fast-food breakfast on the way out.”

  “Is it morning?” Ramona looked out the window. A faint hint of dawn pushed at the horizon. “I guess it is.”

  She slept a solid, dreamless twelve hours. When she awakened, a soft summer evening had crept into the mountains. Ramona carried a cup of hot, sweet coffee out to the porch and sat on the steps, gazing without thought at the long fingers of buttery light slanting through the feathery branches of pine. Dust motes swirled and danced on the strands of light. Starlings stuttered and sparrows sang from hidden boughs, and through the gilded bars a blue jay flew, calling out his warning.

  It made Ramona think of Jake, sitting on her porch that morning in a towel, teasing her.

  With a sense of unreality, she realized it had been just over a month since Lance’s wedding, since the day Jake had turned everything in her life upside down with his charm and his vulnerable blue eyes and his pain and his kisses.

  A kaleidoscopic whirl of images rose in her mind, all of them of Jake. Jake with that devilish grin when he teased her and his sultriness when he taught her to dance. Jake’s eyes burning with that fierce blue pain, or dancing with delight. Jake’s mouth smiling, frowning, moving toward her, pressing against her lips.

  She thought of him holding her so fiercely through the night while he slept, and of his still, pale face as he lay on the ledge in the mountains.

  With a small cry, she buried her face in her hands. Next to her, Manuelito groaned softly and pushed his head into her lap. She hugged him, feeling her heart squeeze painfully, as if a fist were crushing it slowly and steadily. Clutching thick handfuls of fur, she tried to breathe deeply, to tamp the fierce sorrow.

  She loved Jake, loved him in all his rugged beauty and when he was wounded and low. She loved the dashing slant of his cheekbones and the way he held Mr. E so close and the pleasure he took in sailing and cooking and dancing and music. Loved him for a hundred things, a thousand, some nameable, some not.

  But she couldn’t be with him. The way he’d called for her when he fell down the mountain, and the way he’d clutched her hand at the hospital told her that he thought he needed her. He might even think he loved her.

  And maybe he did. That almost made it worse. She rubbed Manuelito’s back idly, watching tiny hairs fly into a bar of sunlight to dance with specks of floating dust. She thought of the way Jake had made love to her, reverently, as if it were a holy act, this joining of their bodies. He had been so serious, so intense.

  No, she hadn’t imagined the purity, the rightness of that joining.

  She sipped her coffee. Even if he loved her, and she loved him back, she could not commit herself to that relationship. Not until he had found a way to make peace with his demons. She could not bear to pick up the pieces like this, over and over again. She couldn’t bear to see his face battered, see his body broken.

  It would be a life lived on the brink of disaster. And Ramona had spent too many years building a solid, stable peace to let his roaring, unpredictable pain make a shambles of it.

  She’d let the lion over the wall surrounding her quiet garden. She’d befriended the dangerous beast and tried to take the thorn from his paw. She’d made a place for him to sleep in the sun and he’d scorned it.

  So be it. He belonged in the wild, and she belonged in her garden. As she sat in the calm, peaceful world she had made for herself, her grief-stricken heart shredded into bits, but her resolve was strong. She could take almost anything, but she could not bear to sit b
ack and watch Jake kill himself. She couldn’t bear to be on the other end of the line when that last, sober call was made.

  No.

  Chapter 19

  At Ramona’s recommendation, they moved Jake to the VA home. He was glad to be there as he began to mend. He wished Harry was there with him, so they could sit side by side in the sun-room in their wheelchairs, but that grief had been blunted a little by the letter Harry had left him.

  Jake had carried the letter with him to the mountain. It had been in his pocket when he fell, and there were small tears and smears on the envelope now, but Jake read it every day.

  It was a very simple letter, written by a man who had learned not to take simple things for granted. In a thick scrawl that Jake could barely read, Harry had written:

  Jake,

  Please don’t get all choked up about this. I’m going home to Jean. I tried to stick around awhile for you, but I reckon you’re in good hands with Ramona, and I’m just tired.

  I’ve always thought of you like a son, and I’m going to leave you with a father’s advice. You’re too hard on yourself, and you need to ease up. For me, I wish you’d go to the groups, but I’m not making it a deathbed request. You’ll do what you know is right, just like you always have.

  Good luck to you, son. Harry.

  Jake had read it in the hospital, as soon as he could hold it, and he’d understood that Harry had taken the place of his own father. He wished he’d understood that sooner.

  He missed the old vet deeply, but he realized that he could let him go. The truth was, Jake felt extraordinarily blessed. As if there must be a purpose for which he’d been spared, if only he could figure out what it was. For a couple of weeks, he lived in a kind of exalted state. Everything in the world seemed newly made. A morning sky could move him nearly to tears. Raindrops and flowers and apple pie were wonders never to be equaled.