Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  Toward Flattop Mountain, the terrain changed as they broached 10,000 feet in elevation. Disintegrating logs, crumbling from years of rain, lined the sides of the trail. The taller trees of sub-alpine became alpine tundra’s bushes and twisted shrubs. Thick glades of trees gave way to sparse and grassy open areas littered with fractured boulders. Packed snow on the sides of the trail that were random piles at lower elevations became patches covering dozens of square feet.

  Reagan’s glutes burned as the terrain became ever-steeper. Keeping a wary distance from the humans, elk grazed on the nearby slopes. A marmot chirped at Reagan as she strode past it. Its presence meant they were close to treeline.

  When she and Dad had broached treeline two years ago, he flicked pebbles at marmots for fun. The bushy-tailed, obese squirrel-like creatures barked their high-pitched chirps in return. At first, she was appalled, then after the fourth or fifth marmot went scurrying, little involuntary giggles escaped her lips. He always had the ability to take something inappropriate and make it fun.

  Dad. Empty casket. Note in her pocket that she couldn’t get any alone time to read. Dalton saying strange things and then pretending he’d said nothing. The key. Aching to see Spoon. Her mind swirled with so many things, she couldn’t concentrate on any one of them for more than a few seconds.

  Reagan turned back to examine the zig-zag of the valley deepening below them as they climbed, and oddly enough, Charlie was right behind her but Dalton wasn’t. She waited until Charlie hiked past her line of sight so she could see beyond him, and then she knew why. Wisps of smoke were rising from Dalton’s mouth as he climbed, three switchbacks down, about five hundred feet below.

  “You wouldn’t have trouble with your breathing if you’d put that thing out,” she called to him, thinking he was holding a cigarette.

  “Fuck that. You’ve got it backward. This right here is my Gatorade,” he yelled, holding up what she could now see was a thick joint.

  She pursed her lips, not in the mood to have yet another confrontation on the trail. But they would discuss it later, for sure. Then, Reagan gasped at the sight of the green and gray outfit of a park ranger as the woman rounded a switchback ahead. She was only a few hundred feet above and could probably see exactly what Dalton was doing from that short distance.

  Reagan’s heart bounced into her throat. If Dalton were caught smoking pot, they could all share the blame for it. Trip over.

  She tried to whip around to shout at Dalton, but the quick movement and weight of her pack knocked her off balance, and she tumbled into the grass next to the trail. The makeshift rope hipbelt dug into her side. With the wind knocked out of her, she had to gasp to catch her breath.

  The park ranger raced around the trail turns to reach her. “Oh, dear, are you okay?”

  Reagan looked up at the woman hovering over her. The standard-issue Stetson hat shrouded the woman’s face in shadow.

  “I’m fine,” Reagan said. “Just turned around too fast. Thank you for stopping, though.”

  Charlie stopped hiking, and Reagan caught sight of Dalton approaching the nearest bend in the trail, now joint-free.

  “What seems to be the trouble here, officer?” Dalton said, laughing. “I’m not sure if this young lady knows how to hike. She may need to be airlifted out of here.”

  The park ranger leaned closer to Reagan and revealed her face. She was older, with kind gray eyes to complement her silver hair. “These guys with you?”

  Reagan nodded and accepted a hand up. “Thank you.”

  “You going over Flattop?” the ranger asked.

  Reagan adjusted her shoulder straps. “Yes, we’re staying at July camp tonight.”

  “Better get a move on. Weather says storms this afternoon. I’ll come check on you at July later to make sure you got in safe.”

  “I appreciate it,” Reagan said.

  The ranger tipped her hat and continued down the trail. Reagan waited for her to leave earshot range, and then waved for Charlie to take the lead. Charlie’s lips parted as if he had something to say, but he shut them and lumbered toward the crest of the mountain.

  Reagan seethed at Dalton, red flaring her senses. How could he be so selfish? How could he behave so dangerously, so foolishly, so like a clueless stoner? Submitting to his insistence to come along on this trip began to seem more and more like a terrible idea. Healing, family time… how stupid and idealistic she’d been.

  “Listen to me,” she said, getting close enough to his face that she could smell the pungent aftertaste of pot on his breath. “Don’t do that again. I don’t know how she didn’t smell it in the air just now, but I’m not kidding when I say all this immature crap ends now. I would tell you that whatever you do in your tent is fine like last night, but you heard her say she’s going to come check on us later.”

  He smirked, pulling his face into the same sarcastic expression he’d worn since he was thirteen years old. “I don’t see what the big deal—”

  “Don’t. Do. That. Again.”

  Without waiting for him to respond, she dug her poles into the dirt and pressed onward.

  They crested Flattop at a little after midday as the clouds were gathering and darkening. Billowing and cottony masses of gray mixed in with charcoal patches streaking across the blue. Despite appearances, the worst rain often came from the lighter ones. The air smelled of rain. She kept waiting for the skies to open up and start pouring.

  Flattop was not exactly flat, instead a broad circular shelf with no trees and clear views of most of the surrounding peaks and valleys. A field of green sprinkled with thousands of gray bumps from the rocks half-submerged in the grass. They were roughly in the center of the park, and at the geographical edge of their loop, although the return would take longer due to the side trip to Nokoni and Nanita.

  Crossing Flattop and finding the trail to descend the other side would take only a half hour, but during that half hour, they would be without any kind of shelter. Not good to be the tallest thing on a mountain during a lightning storm.

  The rain started as they’d hiked halfway across Flattop. At first, a few wet spots appeared on the trail in front of her, then splats connected with her hair, face, and shoulders. The drops were large and heavy, some big enough to cause a reflexive head-jerk. Larger rain was coming. There were no other hikers on the mesa, which was not unusual. The day hikers wouldn’t come this deep into the park.

  “Let’s move it, guys. We’re almost there.”

  “The blister on my pinky toe isn’t going to be happy with me,” Charlie said.

  The first bolt of lightning struck the ground in the distance, briefly illuminating an area to the side of Flattop. She counted one thousand one, one thous-

  A crack of thunder reverberated across the park. Not even two miles away. Her cousins’ packs jostled as they seemed to have finally decided to take the situation seriously and add some haste to their movements.

  Reagan quickened her own pace as hair started to slip from her ponytail and fall in chunks around her shoulders, and she wondered if she had wrapped her phone in a baggie or left it sitting inside her pack. Couldn’t remember. It would probably not get wet unless the rain kept on for hours, but she’d check as soon as they were below treeline.

  Meds.

  The thought hit her like a slap across the jaw. With the chaos over the animal-chewed packs, she’d forgotten to take the lithium and Risperdal she took every morning. She hadn’t taken them last night either, now that she thought about it. She was too upset about finding the strange key and the seemingly unanswerable question of what lock it might fit.

  She tried to picture the pills in her pack, but she couldn’t think of where they might be. In the first aid kit? In the same tiny dry-bag where she’d stored the car keys?

  The realization that she likely hadn’t packed her meds at all began to creep over her. Not good.

  Lightning cracked the ground again, and less than a second later, thunder rolled across the surface of Fl
attop Mountain. That strike had been on the surface of Flattop itself. The rain was steadily growing louder and heavier, falling in sheets that turned the world blurry.

  She’d taken the meds yesterday morning when she woke, before she’d packed her gear into the car. She did some quick math: if she couldn’t take the pills again until Friday evening, it might be okay. Three days without her lithium sounded iffy, but she’d been stable for long enough that she figured she could handle it. Maybe. Her track record with skipping meds hadn’t been the greatest, but her last episode had been a long time ago.

  After the hospital and coming home to rest at Dad’s house, the doctors had tried several combinations to find something that worked. And even when they found a cocktail of meds that stabilized her moods without making her constantly nauseous, or dizzy, or killing her sex drive, she still didn’t like taking them. The psychiatrist switched her from lithium to Depakote, but that only made things worse. The carousel of medication-switching had begun.

  Usually, she would try to think of the craziness from her last manic episode or the ruthless self-judgment she’d endured during the depression, and that was enough motivation to take the pills to feel stable, if not a little flat. Meeting Spoon had helped. She wanted to be healthy for him.

  Three days without meds. She could do this.

  Just as the thought occurred to her, a bolt of lightning struck a hundred feet away.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1:30 pm

  Reagan waved her arms through the dense sheets of rain to get her cousins’ attention. When Dalton and Charlie looked at her, with streams of rain cascading from their foreheads, she realized this kind of downpour and lightning had become deadly. She hadn’t thought about anything besides her missing meds for several seconds.

  “Hunker down,” she yelled, and demonstrated by crouching with her elbows resting on her knees.

  They both dropped to a crouch. “Shouldn’t we keep going, though?” Dalton said, his voice muffled under the splattering of rain on rock. “We’re almost at the part where it goes down again and meets the trees. Let’s run for it.”

  All the survival blogs said you were supposed to hunker in a lightning storm. Make yourself low, and if lightning struck, it might pass through without harming you. But how long were they supposed to stay like this? What if the storm didn’t pass?

  She didn’t spend too much time debating and instead leaped to her feet. “Okay. Let’s move.”

  They jogged, and the rope hipbelt yanked at her flesh as it slipped underneath her shirt and rubbed against bare skin. Her shirt, pants, socks, and boots were thoroughly soaked. Her feet sloshed in the boots as she jogged, and the pack bounced around on her back, nearly toppling her with every step.

  Priority one was getting below treeline. Priority two had to be dry clothes. Wet clothes could kill.

  A bolt struck a few hundred feet to the right.

  A thousand feet ahead, two rocks on either side of the trail indicated where the descent began. She focused all her energy on that marker, throwing the left pole as right foot landed, then the right pole as left foot landed. As they ran, the lightning and thunder still flashed and bellowed behind them, but each step took them further away from the worst of it. The rain still fell in sheets and blurred the world into a dark mess, but the danger seemed to be behind them.

  At least, that’s what she hoped. Like a herd of moose, the storm could move at any time.

  She closed the distance to the edge of the shelf, hoping her cousins were behind since she couldn’t hear them and didn’t want to risk another fall by turning around. When she reached the rocks signaling the beginning of the downward trail, she stopped and eased around to face them. Her cousins were only a few seconds behind her.

  Charlie’s eyes bulged, his chest heaved, and his face twisted into a grimace. Dalton just looked angry.

  Down the trail. A hundred feet this way, sharp turn, a hundred feet that way. Repeat. The ground was already becoming slippery with patches of mud and slick rocks. She wished she had boots with good tread, but too late for that now. At each sharp angle of the switchback, she leaned both poles on the outer edge of the bend, in case the extra weight she carried tried to yank her over the edge of the trail. She wouldn’t fall far, but a twisted ankle or bruised knee might strand them.

  Sounds of rain and thunder drove her onward.

  Within ten minutes, they had reached the trees, and Reagan let out a massive sigh. Her shoulders were so tense that an ache had spread to her neck and the pulse of a headache was forming at the back of her head. The rain still fell, but now they seemed safe.

  They all sought shelter under a giant tree, huddled together.

  “Whoo!” Dalton said. “Nobody told me that backpacking was like a motherfucking Bourne Identity movie, racing against the clock and all that shit. That was exciting as hell.”

  Reagan put a hand on Charlie’s arm. “You okay?”

  He was wheezing, his face red. He struggled to retrieve an inhaler from his pocket. “Just let me… catch… my breath.”

  “I’m fine, by the way,” Dalton said. “Thanks for asking. I’m just soaked.” He lowered his eyes to Reagan’s shirt. “Nice nips, cuz.”

  She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her chest, then looked down and saw something like a Fort Lauderdale wet t-shirt contest down there. The sports bra wasn’t much help when soaked.

  She jabbed the tip of her hiking pole into Dalton’s stomach. “I’m your cousin, you pervert,” she said, but she laughed a little anyway. Maybe from embarrassment, or maybe the release of tension, but it felt good to hear that sound coming from her mouth. Had she laughed at all since getting the news about Dad? She couldn’t remember.

  They all turned at once to break cover of the tree, and Charlie took only one step before he stepped onto a rock and slipped.

  The events passed in slow-motion: as he fell, his foot hit the ground and twisted one way as his body bent another way. A mewling grunt came from his lips as his body hit the ground.

  Reagan gasped, then dropped to her knees and lunged for him. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Charlie, are you hurt?”

  “My ankle,” he said, groaning.

  “That’s great,” Dalton said. “Just great.”

  “It’s okay, Charlie. You’re going to be fine,” Reagan said. “Can you stand?”

  Charlie’s eyes darted around. Then he nodded and she put her neck under his arm to help him up. Reagan glared at Dalton and he rolled his eyes as he took Charlie’s other arm. Together, they lifted Charlie from the ground.

  “Don’t try to put any weight on it,” she said.

  “I’m fine, really,” Charlie said, but his face tensed and his breaths were labored.

  They helped Charlie for a few minutes along the muddy trail, then he insisted on trying it on his own. He seemed to be able to walk, but each time he placed that foot on the ground, he winced and let out a little squeak. He moved like an elderly person, gingerly and unsure.

  If they were going to hike at that speed, she could forget about the timetable. Then guilt nagged at her for thinking ill of him when it wasn’t his fault. At least Charlie was being cooperative, unlike Dalton, who did nothing but complain and cause problems. Charlie wasn’t the villain here.

  The camp was supposed to be a mile down the trail, where it flattened out and the steep switchbacks blended into grassy foothills. When they turned off at the backcountry marker after a half hour of slogging through the muck, everyone was cold and tired and grumpy. They barely spoke for twenty minutes and set up camp in silence. The rain had stopped, but the ground was slushy and covered in pine cones and needles from the trees. Boulders and razor-sharp shrub branches occupied the surrounding area.

  The campsite had less tree coverage than the previous night, which would mean less chance of a tree falling, but also less shelter from wind or rain. The area was hilly and not flat enough to find level ground for the tents. Sleeping on an angle meant h
er sleeping bag would slip off the mattress pads all night long, making her have to continually readjust and scoot up.

  They debated trying to remove the mushy pine mess versus setting up their tents on top of it, and came to a consensus that a clear campsite wasn’t worth the effort to move all the junk out of the way. The ground wouldn’t be comfortable, but everyone wanted to get the camp set up sooner rather than later. They put the tents near two logs that lay opposite each other. No stumps nearby big enough for sitting, but the logs would do.

  As soon as she’d erected the tent, Reagan brought her pack inside it. She hated to bring something so wet and messy inside a clean tent, but she didn’t want her cousins to see her hunting for her meds. They knew she was bipolar, but doing that in front of them would feel weird. None of their business.

  She dumped out everything in the pack. Explored every pocket and dry bag. The three pill bottles were not inside any of the possible hiding spots.

  Straining her brain, she tried to reconstruct the events of the morning she left… packing, Spoon’s story about the beach crabs, kissing him goodbye, driving away. No memory of packing the meds. Could she truly go three full days without medication?

  Empty pack. Empty casket.

  Her heart started racing. Stay calm and breathe, focus on the task at hand, whatever it may be. She could do this.

  After everyone had exchanged dry clothes for sopping wet ones, they gathered on the logs to reassess.

  “Your ankle okay?” Reagan asked Charlie.

  He raised that leg and rotated it. Agony on his face. “I don’t know. But thank you for helping me down the mountain. I know I’m not the… you know, lightest guy.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “That was one of the scariest experiences of my life,” Charlie said. “You know what I’m saying? I was just holding on and praying like crazy to get through it.”

  “It’s been a challenging couple of days,” Reagan said, casting a glance at Dalton.