This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Joy tested the blade’s edge, nodded approvingly, and put the knife with the rest of the equipment on the hood.

  “Nice compass,” she said, admiring it before setting it aside. “Mmm, Swiss chocolate. Better not let Fish see that. He has a passion for the stuff. Raisins,” she muttered, moving aside a plastic packet with her index finger. “Bleh.”

  “Still hate raisins, huh?”

  “With a passion.”

  “But they make great—”

  “—emergency food,” she finished. “I still don’t like ’em. No matter how you pack, smash, drown or otherwise abuse raisins, their taste and texture doesn’t change. Bleh!”

  He laughed softly.

  “Peanuts,” she said, going through his food. “Soon to be peanut butter, compliments of Gotcha. Tablets to purify water. First aid kit.” Her eyes widened as she opened the small kit. It was like a miniaturized surgery, everything in place from sutures to disinfectant. Reverently she closed the tiny case. “What a beauty.”

  “Worth every penny I paid,” he agreed.

  The canteen was all it had to be: tough, waterproof, and small enough not to be in the way more than half the time. He also had a compact survival kit that was a miracle of modern advances in materials that would keep a human being warm and relatively comfortable under conditions that were neither.

  “Space blanket, extra wicking socks, shoelaces, change of clothes, paper clips, and safety pins.” She looked up suddenly, almost smiling. “Useful little devils, aren’t they?” Before he could answer she was concentrating on the equipment again. “Ensolite pads for knees, elbows, and seat, more batteries, peppermint hard candies.” This time she did smile. “Oh, boy, you’re in trouble. Better hide these.”

  “Why? Fish has a thing for them, too?” Gabe asked, amused.

  “Nope. I do. After a few hours down there, peppermint is like having sunshine dissolve on your tongue. Problem is, I like them when I’m on top, too. Can’t keep them around.” She gave everything on the Jeep’s hood a final, quick look. “That’s it for the personal gear. On to the climbing equipment.”

  While he refilled his backpack, she opened his rope sack and began pulling things out. She was satisfied with everything until she came to his climbing rope. It was designed for mountains, not caves. It was nearly half an inch thick and had never been used.

  “Damn,” she muttered. “We should have washed this last night. It would have been much easier to handle. Then there’s the stretch factor.” She frowned and mentally went through alternative routes down to Lost River Cave’s second level. She shook her head. “Won’t work. This rope is great for belaying the leader on a mountain, but it’s too stretchy for caving. If anything goes wrong on the long route, we’d have to use one of the others. We’ve got one vertical descent of nearly a hundred and fifty feet—if you fell using this rope, it would stretch so much before it stopped you that it would be like having no rope at all. You’d end up ten feet wide and an inch thick at the bottom of Surprise.”

  “Surprise?”

  “That’s our name for the slot. It has what looked like a floor fifty feet down. It wasn’t. It was a very thin cave formation that had closed the slot partway down.” Joy smiled crookedly, remembering. “Good thing Fish was belaying me. I didn’t even have time to call out a warning before the floor gave way, but he didn’t let me slip more than six inches.”

  Gabe could all too easily picture Joy standing on a fragile sheet of rock more than one hundred feet above the true bottom of the slot—and then going through, falling, her life dependent on her rope and the skill of the person belaying her.

  Even though he knew that she was a careful, experienced caver, the image of her falling left a queasy hollowness in Gabe’s gut. He’d learned that no matter how carefully life or an expedition was planned and executed, things went wrong. What looked like a floor was really a fragile ceiling, and what looked like solid mountain was really a lethal rockslide waiting to be triggered.

  And ropes, even the best, contained flaws that couldn’t be discovered short of the final test, when a human life dangled over a bottomless void.

  “Anyway,” she said, “there’s too much stretch in this rope for the longer descents. We’ll use my backup rope for you.”

  “May I see your rope.”

  There was no question in Gabe’s voice. He would inspect the rope very carefully before he trusted his life to it.

  “Sure.” Yet even as Joy agreed, she sensed the unyielding steel beneath the polite request. “If you’re that concerned about my judgment, maybe you’d feel better if—”

  “It’s nothing personal,” he cut in. “I check my own ropes. Always.”

  She searched his face but found only the contrast between his dark, thickly curling lashes and the luminous green depths of his eyes. “It’s in the gray bag.”

  With that she went back to sorting through Gabe’s rope sack. She found another rope, this one thinner, an emergency rope. There was the usual assortment of backup equipment such as webbing loops and spare carabiners.

  Then her groping fingers found a piece of rope that was less than a foot long. When she pulled it out, she saw that both ends had been neatly cut, as though it had once been part of a longer rope. But the segment itself was useless. The outer surface of the nylon rope was badly abraded, almost furry looking. In one place the structure of the rope itself had been frayed until all but a quarter inch of the inner core had been worn through.

  She stared at the ruined rope, wondering why he bothered to carry it with him.

  “It reminds me of how narrow the margin between survival and death can be,” he said, watching her, “and how important a good rope is. That was new, top of the line, and I used it only once. In Peru. If the rope had been cheap or worn, I’d be dead.”

  Joy looked at the frail strands that were all that had held together the rope and Gabe’s life.

  “This?” she said in a raw voice. Then, “How far?”

  “Did I fall?”

  Her mouth was too dry to speak, so she nodded.

  He shrugged. “Not far. Under twenty feet, for sure, or the force of the rope stopping me would have broken my back. Even so, I fell far enough to bounce like a yo-yo on an elastic string. Far enough for the chest harness to break and part of the Swiss seat to give way and leave me dangling by one leg and a chicken loop. But the piton held during all the time the rockslide broke like a stone wave over the cliff we’d been climbing. My rope held, too. It tore hell out of my hip and leg, but I survived.”

  She closed her eyes and drew an unsteady breath as she imagined Gabe dangling helplessly on a rope while a rock slide ripped through piece after piece of his safety equipment. The strain on his leg must have been terrible.

  “No wonder they thought you might never walk again,” she said, her voice ragged. “It’s a miracle you survived at all.”

  His eyes narrowed as he saw the depth of her reaction to the knowledge of his past danger and injury. She hated him, but the thought of him hanging at the end of a fraying rope, battered by falling rocks, brought her no pleasure.

  She looked up at him, her eyes as clear as spring rain, searching. “Does your leg still bother you?”

  “Not nearly as much as the questions.”

  “The questions?”

  “Why me? Why did I live? Why did other men die? Why—” He made a curt gesture with his hand. “Questions without answers.”

  “Ah, those questions,” she said ruefully. “The ones we all ask on the way to growing up.”

  At that moment Gabe knew Joy had cried out those same questions after her parents had died in a helicopter crash.

  He should have been there with her. He hadn’t been.

  It was something he would regret for the rest of his life.

  “The questions were a little late coming to me,” he said. “I’m thirty.”

  “Some people never ask those questions at all, no matter how long they live.”

&nbs
p; “And the answers? When do they come?”

  She sensed the urgency beneath his controlled exterior. Whatever was driving him came from deep inside, all the way to his soul.

  It was exactly that intensity which had drawn her to Gabe from the first instant they met. She’d known instinctively, certainly, that he was a man who would demand a response as intense as his own.

  She’d never met another person like him. No one else had had his combination of wide-ranging curiosity and sensual involvement with life. No one else had shared her eagerness and consuming wonder in the world around her as he did. No one else had been able to release the primal response of her body and mind as he had.

  But the questions Gabe was asking concerned emotions rather than earth sciences. That was new.

  “There’s a world full of answers,” she said. “The trick is to find one that satisfies you.”

  “Have you?”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes . . . not. Some nights are longer than others.”

  That, Gabe thought, is the understatement of the century.

  Twelve

  “WE’D BETTER GET GOING,” JOY SAID TO GABE. “I WANT TO have plenty of time for you to get used to being in a cave again before we try exploring any new leads.”

  Without a word he reassembled the contents of his rope bag and climbed into his thermal underwear. The same clothes he’d used for mountain climbing would serve for caving. Right now the underwear was hot enough to pull sweat out of him, which the efficient cloth promptly drew away from his skin.

  The sun was like a torch.

  He pulled on his pants quickly, left his thermal shirt unbuttoned, and stuffed his climbing gloves in a pocket. He put on the battery pack and helmet. The caving coveralls he’d bought seven years ago were still tight enough not to get in the way and loose enough not to be uncomfortable. He put the pads in the seat and knee pockets and elbows and pulled on the coveralls, leaving them unzipped. The wire leads from battery pack to helmet stayed beneath the coveralls, where nothing could snag on rocks. Socks, jungle boots, and leather-palmed gloves completed his outfit.

  He tested both lamps, even though he would probably use only one at a time. They worked. He was ready to go. More than ready. He was getting hotter by the instant.

  “All set?” Joy asked.

  “God, yes. Anything to get out of the sun.”

  Laughing, she led the way into a brush-choked ravine and down a steep descent to the mouth of the cave. The entrance was concealed by brush. No one could see it until they forced their way past the dry, prickly barrier.

  At the mouth of the cave there was a doubled loop of rope with a carabiner attached. The anchor loop was slung around a huge boulder. A rope attached to the loop trailed down like a thin, bright tongue into the cave’s beckoning darkness. Cool air stirred caressingly, whispering of the moist cave hidden beyond the reach of the scorching desert sun.

  Joy dressed quickly. The last thing she put on was a specialized harness, called a Swiss seat. At the moment she wore it reversed. That way the seat became an ideal restraint for anchoring a belay. Automatically she checked that the rigging around the boulder hadn’t frayed or tangled since its last use. Only when she was confident of the anchor did she snap herself to it.

  “I’ll belay you into the cave,” she said to Gabe. “After you get through the short trench cut into the guano floor—”

  “Guano?” he interrupted quickly. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Like most of the caves around here, this was a fertilizer mine back in the nineteenth century.” She yanked on the rope. It didn’t budge. “They went broke real quick. The guano was so old that it had about as many nutrients as gravel. The bats have long since gone to other roosts. Mom and Dad probably didn’t mention it to you because they didn’t want to pinpoint the entrance too closely. We didn’t have a steel locking grate for the entrance back then.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She grinned. “Gotcha comes later. After the trench, it’s nearly two hundred feet of a real steep pitch over loose rubble and fresh flowstone. Before you start down, holler to make sure no one’s on the way up. Ready?”

  He visualized her instructions and his own memories and nodded his head. He went to the black opening, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “Yo!”

  He waited a long ten count. No answer came up out of the darkness. No one was below.

  Joy carefully pulled up the rope that was trailing down into the cave. As she wound the line into a neat coil, she examined it for fresh cuts or abrasions.

  Gabe stood right beside her, checking the rope for himself.

  She wasn’t insulted or irritated. After seeing the horrifying piece of rope he carried in his pack, she wouldn’t have objected if he’d insisted on going over every inch of every rope with a six-power magnifying glass.

  In fact, she wanted to do it herself.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  He finished examining the last bit of rope, nodded, and pulled on his gloves. “Ready when you are.”

  “When you get to the bottom of the rubble slope, you’ll see a path laid out between two strips of orange tape. Off to your right there’s a big block of breakdown. Ceiling rubble. Wait behind it while I descend.”

  He nodded.

  Joy put on her own gloves and sat down facing the mouth of the cave with her legs partially extended. The newly coiled rope was at her left. One end of the rope went around her lower back, and from there to Gabe.

  Gabe put on his Swiss seat and attached himself to the rope so that he would be able to climb freely unless he slipped. Then the rope would spring taut under Joy’s hands, preventing him from falling. She herself would be anchored against the pull of his weight by her own attachment to the massive boulder.

  Although he could see plainly that she was in position to belay him, he went through the necessary ritual of voice signals—necessary because he wouldn’t always be able to see her. That was when communication would be critical.

  “Belay on?” he asked clearly.

  “On belay.”

  “Ready to climb.”

  He waited, poised on the brink of the cave, his helmet lamp looking very pale in the blaze of desert light.

  “Climb,” she responded.

  “Climbing.”

  With that he began his descent into Lost River Cave, his life quite literally held in her hands. He didn’t hesitate, a fact that astounded him when he realized it. Despite all that had happened, despite the violent emotion he’d seen lurking at times within Joy’s gray eyes, he knew at some deep level that she wouldn’t deliberately harm him.

  It was one of the few certainties that remained to him after the accident in Peru, yet he hadn’t even discovered it until this instant.

  As he walked backward down the slanting trench, the cone of the one light he was using picked out the deep layer of ancient bat guano. Tiny, needlelike shadows poked out of the reddish deposit. They were the bones of bats that hadn’t lived for thousands of years. He looked at the fragile remains wonderingly before moving on.

  The last of yesterday’s stiffness left his hip as he came to the end of the guano mining trench and entered the steep, slippery part of the descent. Here sunlight thinned into the “twilight zone” of the cave. He worked his way deeper into the darkness with every backward step. The reassuring tension of the rope moved with him, neither too tight nor too loose. He had an impulse to call up praise of Joy’s belaying skill through the deepening well of velvet darkness folding around him.

  He kept silent. When a climber was on belay, only a few words were used. You’re doing a great job! weren’t among them.

  Coolly, caressingly, Lost River Cave’s seamless night condensed around Gabe. That was when memories spun up out of the well of darkness like ghostly ropes attaching him to anchor points in the past.

  The first time he came down to the cave alone with Joy, they turned out their lights and stood hand in hand, adrift in the limitless, magi
c night of Lost River Cave. With sight gone, every other sense leaped into razor focus. The subtle lemon-and-rose scent of her perfume. The warmth of her breath washing over his lips. The heat and peppermint taste of her tongue. The exquisite textures of her mouth revealed to him in a kiss that had no end.

  The memory sliced through Gabe even as his body moved more deeply into Lost River Cave. His breath came in hard and fast, then settled into its usual steady rhythm as his muscles responded to the demands of the descent. Soon he was at the end of the steep pitch, looking up toward the small, brilliant spot where the mysterious cave world ended and the New Mexican desert began. He removed the rope and stepped back.

  “Off belay,” he called.

  Joy’s response carried easily down to him on the damp air. “Belay off.”

  He fastened his shirt and zipped up the coveralls against the coolness of the cave. Air stirred past him, a damp breeze that promised a large cave lying in endless darkness, waiting to be discovered. Nearby the rope shifted and slithered, responding to movements beyond the reach of his cone of light.

  He looked around quickly, spotted the block of breakdown Joy had mentioned, and walked behind it. There he would be protected from any rubble she might accidentally kick loose during her descent.

  Up on the surface Joy finished connecting the rope to the boulder again. She reversed her seat harness and positioned the climbing rope so that she could in effect belay herself down the steep pitch. After a final check, she stepped off backward into Lost River Cave’s cool, welcoming darkness.

  “Coming down,” she called.

  “Yo!” he answered.

  Moving with the easy rhythms of an expert technical climber, she fed rope across her body, using the friction of rope against her clothes to slow and control her descent.

  Gabe could have climbed down into the cave the same way, but if he’d fallen—or if she fell now—the shock of landing against a static anchor like the boulder would be enough to break bones, even if the fall was only a few feet. With a belayer in place, the shock of hitting the end of the rope was softened by the unavoidable slipping of rope through the belayer’s hands. The slippage was only a few inches, but it was the difference between an abrupt, brutal stop and a more gentle end to the fall.