He ran his eyes down the man’s long body.
Both of his legs appeared to be attached at an incorrect angle. His right knee was swollen to two or three times a normal size. But there was no blood. Just a disconnected appearance to the leg below the knee. His left leg had something plunged into it. Some whitish, long object, like a white stick that looked as though it had been stabbed into the flesh halfway up his thigh. And on that leg there was blood. A lot of blood. But it was old, and dried, and even that blood seemed to have too little color. A faint, dusty reddish-brown.
Ethan crawled two steps closer, partly drawn to look, partly having to force himself to approach. He stifled a reflexive gag as he saw a flurry of tiny movement—a light swarming of ants—on the open leg wound around the impaled object.
He heard Sam call down to him.
“Hey. You okay down there? What d’you see?”
Ethan didn’t answer. He looked more closely at the long object shoved into the man’s leg. Part of him must have known by that time that the man was his father. But another part of him simply had not caught up with it. Had not allowed it to click into place.
It was a bone.
Ethan scrambled back a step at the shock of seeing such a thing. The guy didn’t have something sticking into his leg. He had something sticking out of it. It was his femur.
Ethan backed up a few more steps.
His eyes moved down the savagely, illogically bent leg. It hurt just to see a leg forced into such an unnatural angle.
At the bottom of the leg was Ethan’s first look at a blast of color. In fact, he was surprised the bright red hadn’t caught his eye sooner.
His father’s running shoes.
“Oh my God,” Ethan said quietly.
He scrambled back another few steps and climbed to his feet.
He looked up to see both Sam and Jone peering at him over the edge.
“You okay down there, Ethan?” Jone asked.
“Did you find anything?” Sam added. “What do you see?”
Ethan opened his mouth. Only the tiniest squeak slipped out.
“Did you say something?” Sam called down.
“Yeah,” Ethan said. But maybe not loudly enough.
“What did you find?”
“He’s here,” Ethan said. With a little better volume.
“Is he alive?” Jone asked.
“Oh. I don’t know. I didn’t think to check.”
Part of Ethan stood outside himself in that moment, critiquing the ridiculousness of the statement. And of the truth behind it. It was true. Inexplicably true. He hadn’t thought to check.
But it was shock. It was just that simple. Ethan was in full-on shock.
“I’ll go see,” he said.
He took two steps in toward the spot that held his father. Then he fell to his knees. And did not move.
“What’re you doing, hon?” Jone asked. “You okay?”
“I . . .”
“You need help down there?”
“I don’t want to know,” Ethan called back. “I’m afraid to find out.”
A long moment passed. Nobody called to him, asked any questions. Nobody gave him any advice. Because it was no longer that easy. Sure, anybody could call down and tell him to check the pulse at the wrist or the carotid artery. Or hold a hand in front of his father’s nose to check for breathing. That wasn’t hard. But to be this man’s son . . . to hang in that moment, where the father’s dead and alive possibilities existed almost simultaneously, and to have to snap that answer into place. Forever. Whichever way it fell, it was pretty damned permanent, and Ethan knew that all too well.
Which of them was about to advise Ethan how not to be too afraid to move?
“I’ll come down,” Jone said. “I’ll do it with you.”
“No,” Ethan called. And he held one hand up high—a stop sign for her. “No, if the answer is no, you don’t need to do that. I’ll find out.”
He swallowed hard.
At first he told his knees to crawl and they didn’t. Like Rebar refusing to turn onto the trail that led up the mountain, away from home. But a deeper, more solid part of Ethan knew this wouldn’t cut it. He didn’t have the luxury of breaking inside. Not now. He was on a narrow ledge in the middle of a wilderness, not really accessible from any direction. It was simply no place to get stuck.
“Dad,” he said. “I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m going to come in there and take hold of your wrist.”
Ethan crawled forward.
The hand he reached for seemed wholly unfamiliar. Ancient, paper-skinned, and gray. But Ethan saw something else he missed the first time around. His father’s watch. It was caked in dirt, the crystal shattered. It said eight ten, which meant it was broken. Stopped. But it was still the twin of the good, expensive watch he’d given Ethan for his sixteenth birthday. The one that was now gone. Run off into the night with a man and a knife.
See? Ethan thought, in a weirdly disconnected moment. You didn’t take good enough care of yours, either.
Ethan wrapped his hand around the bony wrist. As he did, he felt a jolt of fear and negative anticipation. Just the touch of his father’s skin would tell him a lot. It might be stiff and cold.
It was not stiff. The skin felt cooler than Ethan might have liked. But not cold.
He watched his father’s face—still not wholly recognizing it—for any reaction to being touched. There was none.
For what felt like long, torturous minutes—but was probably less than ten seconds—Ethan felt for a pulse. When he felt nothing, he tried to convince himself he was looking in the wrong place. On the fourth spot he tried, something. But it was something so small. So small it might have been nothing. It might only have been imagination. Wishful thinking. It might not have existed at all.
He held his fingers still, and concentrated all his will on feeling it again. But too much time went by. It couldn’t be that long between heartbeats. Could it?
And then there it was again. Something tiny.
Ethan was feeling a pulse that was so weak, so slow, that he could barely register it as having happened. Barely believe it was real.
But that meant he was feeling a pulse.
He leaped to his feet, hitting his head hard on the rock overhang.
He scrambled out into the sunlight.
“I think he’s alive!” he called up to Sam and Jone. His voice sounded excited and big. And as though it belonged to someone else entirely. Someone less shocked. “It’s just the tiniest pulse you can possibly imagine. But I felt it. I swear I felt it.”
“I’ll ride for help!” Sam called back, followed by a big whooping sound. Like something you’d hear in the roundup scene of a cowboy movie.
“Don’t go yet!” he heard Jone yell at Sam. “First we’re going to load me up with food and water. And I’m going down to wait with Ethan and his dad.”
In the time between her announcement and her arrival, Ethan sat down hard in the dirt, cross-legged, and stared at the barely familiar man under the rock overhang. And, for the first time, he allowed himself to believe, to know, to absorb, that they had found him. Against all odds, they had found him.
Even more amazingly, they had found him before it was too late.
“Know what I was just thinking?” Ethan asked her.
He watched Jone squeeze water onto yet another clean spare bandana, and brush the liquid over his father’s lips.
“Can’t imagine,” she said. “I figure you must be thinking a million things at once.”
“Kind of,” he said. “But mostly I’m thinking back on two mornings ago. When we rode up that trail. Right over his head. Maybe he wasn’t unconscious yet. Maybe he heard us calling for him. I’ll bet he was in better shape two mornings ago. Wish we’d found him then.”
“We didn’t know,” she said, without any further editorializing. Not even by way of her tone.
“I guess. It still feels weird to think of riding by right over his head.
We were barely two hours out.”
“Life is a funny thing. I think we need to get him out of this tight little spot. Because I need to tip his head forward. So I can get a little more moisture into his mouth without choking him.”
“They say you’re not supposed to move a person after an accident. He could have spine damage.”
“First of all, it’s pretty clear he landed on his feet.” She nodded down toward Noah’s shockingly damaged legs. The shock of those injuries had not worn off for Ethan. He simply had been trying not to look.
“Second, he’s so close to the line here, I think water trumps everything. I’d rather he end up in a wheelchair than what could happen if he goes a couple more hours without water. Survival would be priority one.”
“I guess that’s true,” Ethan said.
“Third, it’s clear he’s already moved himself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He couldn’t have fallen under that rock overhang. It’s a physical impossibility. You fall straight. There’s no such thing as a curveball fall. He must have pulled himself back under here.”
“That seems strange,” Ethan said. “You’d think he’d want to stay out where he could be seen. I wonder why he did that.”
Jone wrapped her strong arms under Noah’s armpits and gently slid his upper body out into the light. In full sunlight, Ethan did look at that face and recognize his father. But at the same time the changes to his condition seemed even more shocking. Even more impossible to accept. Even to comprehend.
It seemed unimaginable that a living person could look so entirely dead.
“I’ve just been wondering that myself,” Jone said. She sat down close to Noah and carefully lifted his head onto her lap. Then she soaked the bandana again, a little more liberally this time, and gently opened Noah’s mouth, swabbing it with moisture.
“Think that’ll be enough water?” Ethan asked.
“If I keep doing it until the medevac team gets here, it’ll be something. Not much, because I want to be careful not to choke him. But better than nothing.”
“Here’s what I hope,” Ethan said. “About why he dragged himself under there. I hope I get to ask him.”
“Yeah. That makes two of us, son. Could’ve been to get out of the sun. When it was hot, he might’ve done that to help himself stay hydrated. Or there could’ve been a waterfall coming down right on him. Or maybe the hail hurt like a son of a bitch when it hit those legs. Any of which make sense. But it’s hard to see prioritizing anything over rescue. I would think he’d at least try to get back out later. Maybe he thought he could, wanted to, but maybe he just couldn’t do it. I’m going over and over it in my head, but I just don’t know, Ethan. All I know is this: All this time we been riding out here I thought if we found him I’d be ticked as hell at Dave and the other rangers for not doing their job. But now that I see where he was hiding, I’ve got to say I truly get why they didn’t find him. What I want to know now is how in hell we did.”
“How long has it been?” Ethan asked Jone.
The sun felt baking, radiating heat through his shirt and under the bandana covering the back of his neck. But he didn’t ask because of his own discomfort. He asked because he was worried about his dad.
“’Bout thirty-five minutes,” she said.
“Oh. And you said it would take two hours for Sam to ride out?”
“We said it would take the team about that long to get home. You know. At a walk. I have a suspicion they’re going at a better clip than that. We’ll see how much time Sam can shave.”
“You want me to do that?”
Ethan indicated the work she was doing with the water bottle and the bandana. Swabbing tiny bits of moisture into Noah’s mouth without dripping, because he was in no shape to swallow. She also had taken to leaning over Noah to throw her shadow on him. Keep him out of the direct sun.
She didn’t answer right away.
So he added, “He’s my dad. After all.”
“No, I don’t want to have to move his head again. But you can sit over here by me so the rest of him is in the shade. We want more water going in and less sweating out.”
Ethan tried to pull to his feet, but he’d stiffened considerably in the thirty-five minutes of sitting on the rocky ground. He tried to stifle an expression of pain, but a puff of air and noise escaped.
He sat down carefully where the shade would help his father.
“Pretty stiff and sore, huh?”
“More than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I swear. I have never hurt this much. And you know what’s weird? I didn’t think about it until just now, but the whole time I was getting into that harness and going down the side on a rope and crawling around on my knees looking for him, I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even notice.”
“Adrenaline,” she said.
“Oh. That makes sense. Well, it’s wearing off now. And I—”
“Look at that,” Jone interjected. “Did you see that?”
“No. See what?”
“His mouth moved. Just the tiniest bit, but it wasn’t my imagination. I put that wet bandana in there, and he made this tiny move, like to suck the water out of it.”
“Is that good?”
“Everything is good at this point, son. Everything that living people do is something we like to see. I’d give him more, but I’m not sure if he’d swallow it. I don’t want to be getting water down into his lungs. Let me give him a tiny bit more and see.”
Jone soaked the bandana again and then squeezed it gently into Noah’s open mouth. Ethan watched his Adam’s apple, hoping to see it bob. At first, nothing. Then he saw it twitch.
“He swallowed!” Ethan shouted.
“Well, anyway, he tried. If he gets better at it, I’ll give him more.”
“And that’s good, right? Because only living people try.”
Ethan was wrestling with himself about whether he should ask her for the time again, when she seemed to read his mind.
“An hour fifteen,” she said.
“Oh,” Ethan said. “It feels like about a year.”
“We should be doing a better job helping the time go by.”
“How do we do that?”
“Well, we don’t exactly have cable TV or an Xbox up here,” Jone said. “But we can talk.”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “Tell me about last night.”
Her head jerked up and she eyed Ethan suspiciously.
“What about it?”
“I don’t know. Sam seemed so happy. I just wondered if you were, too.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Not much. Just that you two talked for hours.”
“Oh. Good,” she said, visibly letting her guard down. “For a minute there I thought you meant he was telling tales.”
Then more silence fell.
“Well, that didn’t help much time go by,” Ethan said.
“Tell me about you and your father. Why do you hate him?”
“I don’t know if I want to get into that right now,” Ethan said. “What if he can hear?”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” she said.
“They say people in comas can hear. When you read to them.”
“They say people in a coma like to be read to. I never heard anybody say they’re catching every word. But anyway, it’s up to you.” Then, after a brief pause, “You trying to tell me whatever he did to make you hate him is something he doesn’t even know about yet?”
“He was there. Just because we didn’t talk about it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.”
“But you haven’t told him right to his face how you felt about it.”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s time.”
That sat in the air for several long minutes before Ethan decided to speak. Or maybe he didn’t even decide. Maybe he just spoke.
“He cheated on my mom a lot,” he said, vaguely surprised that he was doing this thing. “I kind of knew . . . but at the same tim
e I didn’t know. I saw things. Like I saw him talking to younger women and getting their phone numbers and stuff. So then when I actually knew, I thought, Hey, you knew this already. But only after the fact. Looking back. I’m not sure if that makes sense.”
“It does,” she said quietly.
“I got that same weird feeling when I found him up here. You know. An hour and fifteen minutes ago, you said. Seems longer. The whole time he was missing I kept saying, ‘I know he’s up there.’ And the whole time we were up here looking I kept saying, ‘I know he’s up here.’ And I swear I meant it. With every cell in my body I meant it. Even though I said the opposite once, and maybe thought it more than once. But it’s like I knew, but then I second-guessed what I knew. But I still knew it. And then I bent down and stuck my head under that rock overhang. And he was up here. And I was totally shocked.
“Anyway. I’m getting off track. There was this girl. Jennifer, was her name.” Ethan could feel an inward wince as he spoke the dreaded J word. Like something pinching him with too much pressure. Like the name was a weapon with a sharp edge and a point. He had been careful not to say her name out loud since . . . well, just “since.” He preferred to leave the sentence at that. He even tried not to say that name in his head, but instead leave a blank space where it used to live. “She was his assistant. She was twenty-four. Way too old for me. Way too young for him. Although, I don’t know. Looking back, I think twenty-four fits with forty-one better than it fits with seventeen. Especially when the seventeen-year-old is the boy.”
Then Ethan felt his will to tell the story fade. So he let a silence fall.
“You loved her,” Jone said. It wasn’t a question.
“You’re good at this.”
“It comes through when you talk about her.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “That was part of the problem. I don’t have what you might call a poker face. So everybody knew. It was humiliating. And my dad took every opportunity to tease me about it. I mean, he never acknowledged it straight-out, but I could tell he thought it was funny.”
Another stall. This time Jone didn’t fill the gap.
“My mom and I were going on a trip to Peru, only there was this mix-up between e-tickets and paper tickets. We’d always used e-tickets, as long as we could remember. I think we both thought paper tickets were completely a thing of the past. But it was something about the fact that it was a Peruvian airline. Anyway, we missed the flight. Came home. Let ourselves into the apartment . . .”
Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Page 22
