Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Another five feet and she knew she was not going to make it.

  FOURTEEN

  As children Anna and her sister, Molly, had often “chimneyed up” door frames, their small hands and feet leaving dirty prints all the way up. It wasn’t a skill Anna had been called upon to use all that much in her adult life: once in Texas and once in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. The idiosyncratic activity called on muscles seldom called upon. Or so Anna told herself. The possibility that it was age and the more sedentary life of a district ranger, that perhaps the leaping tall buildings in a single bound had been left behind in her salad days, didn’t appeal to her at the moment. Caught as she was, hands and feet crabbed out to the walls of the stones in crushed cruciform, there was little she could do if her strength gave out but fall. She’d been lucky she’d done herself no more damage than a few bruises and scrapes when she dropped the last few yards into Carmen’s sarcophagus. Now she was a good fifteen or twenty feet from the bottom of the cut. Enough to break a leg or back or neck.

  Trying to ease the tension in her muscles while keeping the tension against the rock, she debated whether to try to climb again, try to wedge herself into a position where she could ease and rest for a moment, or holler for help.

  “Paul!” she shouted after an exceedingly short deliberation. “I’m stuck.”

  “Wedged?” he called back.

  Getting wedged was funny in the comics. In caves or climbing it wasn’t. People wedged between the proverbial rock and hard place often died there.

  “No,” she reassured him quickly. “I ran out of steam. I don’t think I’ve got the strength to get myself out.”

  “How far up are you?”

  “Too far.”

  “How far down are you?”

  She knew he was thinking of their paltry lifeline of bra and belts.

  “Too far.”

  “Hang on,” he said, then began talking rapidly in tones too low for Anna to catch the drift of the conversation.

  She thought about trying to throw the sat phone out so they would be able to make a call—if they could get high enough to get a signal without getting their heads blown off—but knew if she moved a hand from the wall to her pocket she’d likely as not lose her tenuous position and join Carmen in more than just physical proximity. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If she could get at it, she couldn’t throw it; if she could throw it, it would slide back down into the crack.

  The palms of her hands were growing numb where they were splayed against the shale and the quadriceps muscle in her left thigh shuddered from quivering to cramping. Looking up, she noticed a narrow band of gray light, no more than six feet above her head, vaguely crescent-shaped. Rather like a sinister half smile on an evil mouth viewed from the vantage point of the glottis. Don’t swallow, Anna prayed to the Rock God.

  “Paul?” She tried not to sound too desperate. Paul would be doing everything he could, even if it included stripping everybody naked and twisting rope from their clothes. A good plan, but not timely. By the time the rope was done Anna would also be done.

  “Hang on,” Paul said again. “A minute, no more. You hang on.” He wasn’t trying not to sound desperate. “We’re coming.”

  The pit yawned.

  Anna did not wish to die today. She had one more son of a bitch to kill before she went gently into anybody’s good night. Perhaps Dr. James was right and she did have a calling. Certainly the bastard who shot Carmen and Lori had forfeited his right to a long and happy life.

  By force of will she kept the cramp from metastasizing into the rest of the thigh and the calf. “I’ll be here,” she called back, and was startled to hear the fierceness in her voice.

  “You better be. Okay. Ready, Steve?”

  Anna’s right foot slipped an inch and she ground her teeth trying to find the lock for the bones to hold when the muscles gave out, wedge herself in the Devil’s throat like a sharp stick.

  Scraping came from above and pebbles rained down on her.

  The silhouette of two birds cut the dying gray of her truncated sky; one of them dropped a snake from its beak. The shift of realities was over in the same instant it hit the back of her eyes. Black birds were hands and the snake was the line.

  “Heads up,” Steve called, and Cyril’s bra hit her in the face. After the initial insult, Anna was not displeased. Her teeth were the only bits of her free to do any serious grabbing. The makeshift line was none too long. Anna bit at the fabric till she caught it between her teeth then kept chomping. When she let go, she didn’t want the spandex to tear where her teeth perforated the cloth.

  “Got it?” Steve called down.

  “Unmph,” Anna managed, and clamped hard on the wad of bra in her mouth. Choosing what must be done quickly, she snatched her right hand off the rock wall and grabbed for the line. The palm had gone numb and the fingers pawed weakly at the belt above Cyril’s sports bra.

  Anna’s feet were slipping. She grabbed at the line with her left hand and was able to close her fingers around the belt, but there was no strength in her grip. She jammed it back against the wall. With a mind-wrenching scrape both feet began to slide. Anna was hanging on by her teeth. The skin of her teeth, she thought absurdly. Through her mind zipped a fragment of material from high school science class: the jaw muscles are the strongest muscles in the body. Anna hoped the lecture hadn’t been referring to titmice or voles.

  A lucky moment or a kindly god silhouetted the strap of the bra against the last of the daylight and Anna threaded her hand through it and twisted it until it was tight as a tourniquet. Left on long enough and she’d lose the hand. If she lost her grip the hand wouldn’t matter, so Anna didn’t dwell on it.

  “Whoa!” she heard huffed from over her head.

  “Don’t do anything,” came Paul’s voice. “Let me do it. You’re just rope.”

  “Rope,” Steve said, and Anna’s mind flew inexplicably to the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name starring Jimmy Stewart.

  The bra was pulling tight, stretching as the line drew upward. Anna had managed to stop slipping down by shoving her heel into the wall and almost sitting on it to keep it in place. She wished she could have gotten her hand caught in a belt. As the spandex expanded and grew thinner and thinner, it wasn’t looking quite as stalwart as it had when she and Paul first attached it to the rest of their rope.

  Finally it could stretch no farther. Still holding the end in her teeth, she snatched her left hand from the wall and grabbed with what strength remained in the fingers. Without this third point of contact her feet slipped suddenly and completely free of the walls and Anna fell a foot or so but the line held. Then, with painful slowness, it began inching upward. Anna closed her eyes so the infinitesimal progress wouldn’t seem so hopeless but, without that dim reality of the darkened stone creeping past, the pit beneath and within her was overwhelming, spinning her brain inside her skull till she was afraid she would pass out.

  “Hang on,” she heard Paul say once more, and the line, with her dangling on it like a landed fish, jerked her upward a foot, then another, and she watched her knuckles lift into the twilight above her.

  “Hurrah!” she heard Cyril and Chrissie shout and knew they had seen her emerging fists. “Hurrah,” she murmured against the spandex that was nearly choking her.

  The line pulled her wrists to the edge of the boulder and couldn’t move them. The line of her body, nearly perpendicular to the slide that heralded the entrance to the crack, acted as a doorstop. The line sawing against the stone was only serving to cut through the spandex and peel the skin from her hands.

  “Can you help us, Anna?” Paul’s voice sounded so close it gave her heart. It didn’t give her strength. Scrabbling with her feet on the slate she tried to find purchase, enough so she could boost arms over the lip of rock. Either she lacked the power to push hard enough or the ascent and descent had sanded off what little tread her river shoes had.

  “Mmnh, mmnh,” she sai
d through her self-imposed gag.

  “Stay right there,” Paul said. Scraping and pebbles rattled down the slope above her. Then the light winked out and skinny arms reached down. Steve Kessler’s face was inches above her, his head and shoulders over the edge of the fall.

  “Don’t worry,” Steve told her. “Paul said he saw this done once in a cartoon.”

  Steve’s thin arms wrapped around her rib cage and he laced together his long-fingered hands—a poet’s hands or a surgeon’s, Anna thought—till the knuckles locked and she was pulled tightly to him, her face buried in his shoulder and his in hers.

  “Okay,” his voice came muffled from the region of her armpit. “You’re supposed to climb me.”

  It took a moment but Anna saw Paul’s plan. “Ready?” she heard her husband shout and the tension on the line tightened. With her unfettered left hand Anna grabbed a handful of one of Steve’s elbows and began pulling herself up. She had to be stomping and clawing him with every move, but he did no more than grunt occasionally when the pain got too bad. Then she was above the edge of the rock. With Paul holding tightly to his ankles, Steve’s long body was laid out on the slope from head to heel for her to scramble up like a ladder.

  She wasted no time. She climbed up his body like a rat up a palm tree and kept right on going till she had climbed nearly into her husband’s lap. It had been her intent to help Paul reel in her bony and marvelous savior but she found she could barely lift her arms and her legs were cramping so badly she could hardly keep from screaming.

  Steve was pulled up to cheers from his sister. Anna was glad the only light left was that of a rising half-moon so Cyril and Chrissie above and a few yards away couldn’t see the cuts and scrapes with which she’d marked him on her exodus. Both of his elbows were bleeding freely from abrading against the sandstone, and his shorts were torn from pocket to hem, exposing cobalt blue briefs.

  “Thank you,” Anna said sincerely.

  “A pound of flesh is nothing,” Steve replied.

  “Can I use the phone?” Chrissie asked.

  FIFTEEN

  The phone didn’t work. The last swallows of water were consumed. The six of them sat in the dark with their backs against the stone. No one spoke, each lost in their own thoughts. Warmth from Paul’s shoulder permeated the tired muscles in Anna’s right arm. In her left she held the tiny scrap of life she’d cut from the drowned woman’s womb. Helena no longer whimpered. She didn’t move. Anna knew she lived only by the thready pulse in the miniature wrist she held gently between thumb and forefinger.

  Adults were said to be able to live three days without water and considerably longer without food. Newborns were not that sturdy.

  “I wonder if Easter made it,” Cyril said into the darkness.

  “She’s tough and resourceful,” Steve said. “She probably body-surfed out and is halfway to Rio Grande Village by now.”

  “That or back up on a ledge for the next boat to rescue,” Anna added. It was easier to speculate on the welfare of a cow than to think about the trail of bodies left behind. That vein of conversation mined out, they fell silent again.

  “I guess we may as well make ourselves as comfortable as possible,” Paul said after a few minutes. “We’ll climb out in the morning and holler for help.”

  “Why can’t we climb out now?” Chrissie demanded. “I am not going to sleep on some rock just because everybody got shot.”

  It reassured Anna to hear the heartlessness in the girl’s voice. Lori’s death had hit Chrissie hard and she’d used anger to keep going. Now she was using selfishness. Both were transparent. If any of the kids imploded and had to go into therapy over this, Anna’s money was on Chrissie.

  “Boulder hopping in the dark will get you a room next to Carmen’s,” Cyril said, saving Anna the trouble.

  “A night on a rock with a murderer looking for us wasn’t in the trip itinerary,” Steve said. “Do you think we’ll be charged extra?”

  “Right, like by then we won’t already be dead,” Chrissie said.

  “First light,” Paul promised.

  No one moved. Getting comfortable was a chore too great for any of them to tackle for a while.

  “Helena won’t live till first light,” Anna said quietly. The sorrow in her voice annoyed her. By default, she and Paul had become surrogate parents to the twins and Chrissie. One didn’t burden the children with one’s own emotions, not when they already had enough misery to deal with.

  Death and Anna were old acquaintances. She didn’t hate the grim reaper the way most did, nor did she fear him inordinately. Everybody died; it was simply a matter of timing. What she hated was cruelty and wasted lives. Though a lot of people wasted their days watching mindless television or endlessly carping about their lot in life while ignoring sunsets and breezes and strange, wonderful bugs, that was their business. On some level, they were living. Death snatched away the opportunity to bungle life as one saw fit. In the death of a baby the reaper stole too many years of possibilities.

  Anna did feel this way, but babies died all the time. Their tens of thousands of little lives were thrown in the pit inside her along with the rapes and murders and religious wars and genocides her species was so fond of. In other circumstances, she would have weighted the lives of the three young people, strong and established among the living, with mothers who were not being flushed from canyons in the desert, fathers who, she presumed, loved them, over the life of a newborn. The good of the many.

  This time was different. Helena was different.

  The thought rang hollow in the caverns of Anna’s mind and she knew it wasn’t true. Helena was too new to show any differences to an indifferent world. She was still in the larval stage, more or less; her personality, if not unformed, was as yet unexpressed by word or deed or gesture. The realization that it was she who was different dawned on Anna. Maybe because she had delivered this baby under such traumatic circumstances, maybe because of the way the dying mother had said, “My baby . . .” and looked to Anna to save the little tyke. Whatever the reason, Anna had a fierce need to keep Helena out of the reaper’s hands and in her own.

  “I’m taking Helena out tonight,” Anna said quietly.

  Paul said nothing for a moment or two. He was as interested in keeping her alive as Anna was in keeping the baby alive. A climb toward a shooter through a dark rockslide was dangerous and difficult. Doing the same with an infant tied to one’s chest nudged it toward the foolhardy.

  Paul didn’t argue. He knew the baby would not last too much longer without proper food, water and care. “Why don’t I take the sat phone and climb out?” he said reasonably. “You stay here and take care of Helena.” He didn’t add “and the kids” out of respect for the three teenagers’ feelings.

  “I’m guessing it’s going to take half an hour or more to climb up,” Anna said. “I don’t know how fast the rangers will be able to get to us. I want Helena as close to the EMTs as we can get her.”

  Steve sacrificed his T-shirt—his sister had little to offer, her bra already gone to make rope—and Anna fashioned a serviceable sling by creative threading of her arms and head through the various apertures. A misshapen moon appeared from behind the mountains to the east and cast enough light through the superclear air that the boulder field shone in black and silver. The light wasn’t sufficient to provide anything like depth to the landscape. A shallow scrape an inch deep showed as inky as a crack to the center of the world.

  As Anna tucked the limp infant into the soft hammock, she said, “Ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Paul replied.

  “You guys keep talking,” Anna said to the twins and Chrissie. “If our shooter is still around, I want him to think we are all here and going nowhere till daylight.”

  “Not a problem,” Cyril promised.

  “I shall tell them how wonderful I am and how lucky they are to know me,” Steve added. “That should take most of the night.”

  Paul leading, he and A
nna and Helena crept into the first black crack wide enough to allow it and angling uphill. Faint light from the moon gave them a hint of an ever-changing horizon. Anna’s great fear was not that she would break a leg or get shot or fall backward into a pit between a couple of house-sized boulders. She didn’t worry about Helena getting shot either. A bullet that killed the baby would kill Anna as well.

  Anna’s fear was of falling forward, crushing the baby strapped across her chest and living to tell about it. Living to remember it as she was sucked down into the internal hell she had been unable to escape in the months since Isle Royale. Deaths she had nothing to do with—such as the death of Helena’s mother—were sad or tragic or a relief, but she could live with them. Deaths she failed to prevent—Carmen and Lori—were harder but doable. Deaths she caused were the ones that stuck like burrs in the mind.

  The death of this baby was unthinkable. Fear slowed her down, made her cautious, footing was tested, and handholds tested twice, grips made sure and hard. Fear was getting them safely up the incline. Had they not gotten within shouting distance of the rim before darkness poured ink over the passages and routes, and had they not spent the bulk of the day studying the slide in all its deadly magnificence, she doubted they would have managed it. As it was, the journey of less than fifty yards as the swallow flies took them an hour and seven minutes. Anna timed it, not because it mattered but because it was a way she could give herself the illusion of being in charge of events.

  A couple gigantic rocks short of the rim, they stopped and tucked themselves deep in shadow, as close together as they could get without squashing Helena between them. Paul pulled Carmen’s sat phone from his pocket and opened it. “Searching for signal” popped up as it had in the canyon, as it had where Carmen had died. Anna held her breath as the graphic finished its scanning movement. Connection. They’d made it. Paul pushed 911. Anna breathed again.

  He pressed the phone to his ear.

  Pebbles skittered down from the boulder they had tucked themselves beneath.