Clear to Lift

by Anne A. Wilson

  He brings his hand to my face, wiping the spill.

  “This is pathetic,” I say, looking at my trembling hands.

  “I’m sure if you could control it, you would. So don’t beat yourself up. Especially not with what you’ve been through today.”

  He positions the cup at my mouth for another try, and even though we miss a little, I get most of it down. Like manna from heaven, it melts in my throat, warming me from the inside out.

  Releasing his grip, Will reaches for the thermos to refill the cup, and I bring my hands to my throbbing head. As the shaking that started so violently begins to ebb—the sugar elixir working its magic—I scan my surroundings, trying to figure out where I am.

  Granite walls behind me, to the sides, and above. I sit in a rounded alcove, sand and rocks covering the floor. The space is large enough that Will would have room to lie across the width of it, and if he stood upright … well, I think he’d have just enough clearance. In front of me, a tunnel in the rock, about fifteen feet in length and four feet across. The opening at the far end is a blur of white as snow blows sideways across it.

  To my right, an archway in the stone, leading to another tunnel, which terminates in a rounded cavern, like an anteroom to the main chamber. Will has propped his skis and a pair of snowshoes there, along with his backpack. Above his equipment, he’s placed a battery-powered lantern on a tiny ledge jutting from the rock itself.

  Moving my focus back to the tunnel, I see that a fire burns in a ring of stones about five feet in front of me, the concentrated flames heating our tiny space, providing adequate light, as well.

  A foreign, hollow keening rises and falls in sporadic intervals, but then, a familiar sound. A yip and a bark. Mojo nuzzles into my chest, rapping his tail against the dirt.

  “Hey, you,” I say. “Where did you come from?”

  “Wait just a minute there, big guy,” Will says, shooing Mojo away. “You’ll get your turn.”

  Having refilled the cup, he hands it to me, steam escaping the top, and I wrap my now-steadier fingers around it, guiding the flow myself. I take several lengthy swallows while he looks on, attentive, watchful.

  The tunnel starts to spin a bit. Overcome by a rush of dizziness, I set down my drink. I bring my hands to my head again, squeezing my temples, trying to shake away the cobwebs.

  Will places a steady hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I just … Where are we?”

  “A mine tunnel.”

  “A mine…?”

  “We’re at the bottom of Basin Couloir. This is an old mine tunnel we use for bivouacking.”

  As if suddenly realizing his nearness, he pulls his hand from my back and scooches away, clearing his throat. “Uh, yeah. So it’s a good thing this place is here.”

  He jumps to an almost-stand—he has to duck just slightly, so his head won’t hit the rock above—and moves under the archway. Bending over, he gathers wood from a pile, and returns to add a few pieces at a time to the ample fire. Mojo sits at attention, watching the proceedings.

  I take further stock of my situation. I wear my base-layer shirt and leggings, topped with an extra-large, extra-puffy down jacket. I wiggle my toes, although I can’t see them, tucked as they are in a plush, down-filled sleeping bag. It’s the first time I’ve felt my feet in hours. Next to me, my boots lie discarded on the sandy floor, wet socks and gloves strewn next to them. My flight suit also lies on the floor in a crumpled heap, covering my leather jacket, and next to them are my fleece sweater and jacket shell.

  Will’s gaze follows to where I’ve been looking. “I had to get the wet stuff off in a hurry.”

  I reach up to my head, now cognizant of the wool hat there, and I pull it off to look.

  “That’s mine,” he says. “When I found you, you didn’t have a hat.”

  “Oh.” I know I had a hat at one point.…

  Then I remember. “I lost it … when I was hiking down the couloir. There was a storm.… I was stuck in the snow.”

  “Yeah. I found you about fifty yards above here.” Next to Will, Mojo relaxes his position, dropping to his stomach, but his head remains up, alert. “Actually, Mojo found you. You’d fallen asleep next to a boulder.”

  I replace the hat, tugging it well over my ears. “What time is it?”

  He glances at his watch. “Five in the afternoon.”

  The mental math takes longer than it usually would, but I finally figure it out. “Two hours … The last time I looked at my watch, it was three p.m.”

  “You were lucky. Really lucky.” He points to my fingers. “No frostbite.”

  I look down at my hands, pink, warm, and a bit swollen, turning them back and forth. “How did you find me?”

  “They radioed that you’d begun climbing down the couloir, so we started at the bottom and worked our way up.”

  My head moves back and forth in disbelief. “How did you do it? I couldn’t see anything. I was completely disoriented.”

  “Well, this area is my home turf, if you will. I used to live in Bishop before moving to June Lake. And then, when we got close, Mojo ran directly to you.”

  I hug the sleeping bag a little tighter around me. Between the bag and my jacket—his jacket—I’m swaddled in a veritable cocoon of insulating, fluffy down.

  “How are you feeling now?” he asks, depositing the last of the wood in the fire.

  “Much better. Thank you.” I pull the collar of his down jacket higher up my neck, so it moves over my nose and mouth, feeling, smelling, sensing … him.

  What a difference in his demeanor since our last tense words on Donner Summit. His guard is down, unmitigated concern overriding everything else.

  I watch as he pokes at the fire with a long stick, remaining crouched on the opposite side. “With that drink I made you, the sugar goes right to the bloodstream.”

  “I feel it,” I say, my mouth warming into a contented smile.

  My eyes drift to his backpack, noting the luggage tag attached. Luggage tag …

  “Wait,” I say, the fog lifting further. “How are you here? I thought…”

  “I was on my way to the airport when I heard them talking about you on the scanner.”

  “You were on the way to the airport.… Hold on, did you miss your flight?”

  He nods.

  “You missed your flight.…”

  He watches me closely, and though my body fights to stay upright from exhaustion, my muscles sore from all the shivering, I can’t seem to look away from him. And I remember this same worried face so close to mine when I regained consciousness.

  “May I ask you something?” I say.

  “Shoot.”

  “When I was waking up just now … I don’t know, maybe I was a bit delirious, but it felt like you were … well, like you were breathing into me.” I lower my head, realizing how ridiculous the notion sounds when spoken out loud, but that’s what it felt like.

  “I was.”

  I look up. “You were?”

  “There are different names for it—rebreathing, inhalation rewarming. It’s a technique used for warming a victim of hypothermia.”

  “Oh,” I say, heartened by the thought of Will’s breath, his energy, channeled directly into me. “Have you ever had to do that before?”

  “No,” he says, a small laugh escaping. “You’re the first.”

  “Well, just in case you’re interested in feedback, it worked quite well.”

  He smiles, our eyes lingering. And this is several times now in a very short span of time that we’ve stopped like this.

  Many seconds later, he shakes himself out of it, rising again, this time busying himself with hanging my wet clothes. Rewinding, I imagine what it must have been like for him carrying me all that way through the snow, finding the mine tunnel, laying me on the floor—someone who was frozen and unconscious—and then struggling to get my clothes off, stuffing me in a sleeping bag, boiling water, and finally, having to coax me to wake up.
/>
  But now that the urgency has eased, he goes about organizing—first my clothes, hanging them to dry, then adjusting his equipment, all to make more room.

  Mojo seems to sense this. Tension dissipating. Emergency over. He pads across to me, stepping over the sleeping bag, circling around, and settles his warm furry self right up next to me.

  I bend down, encircling him with my arms. “Thank you for finding me,” I whisper into his ear.

  “Are you hungry?” Will asks. “I brought some ready-to-eat meals. And they’ll be hot, which you need.” He opens his pack, pulling out four vacuum-sealed bags. “You have your choice of beef Stroganoff, lasagna, chicken with mashed potatoes, or chicken teriyaki with rice.”

  “They all sound good to me, but how about the Stroganoff?”

  “All right, comin’ up.” He turns his attention to a portable propane ministove that he’s placed near the “antechamber.” He adjusts the flame, setting a pot of water to boil.

  “Come here, boy,” Will says to Mojo. He opens a pouch of something meaty, and Mojo leaves me—with haste—to dive in. Yeah, I guess he would be pretty hungry, poor guy.

  “I thought Mojo was Jack’s dog,” I say. “But he seems to respond just as well to you as to Jack.”

  “That’s because he’s well trained. A quality search dog can work with anyone.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s important for them to be able to respond to any handler. Like if their owner gets injured, the dog can be taken by someone else.”

  “I see.”

  “Jack had him at the airport today when I arrived, so we decided he should come with me.”

  Our heads snap up at the same time. A howl of wind, a siren wail, screams across the tunnel entrance, standing my hair on end. I pull my knees further into my chest, burrowing into the warmth of the sleeping bag.

  “This storm’s a mean one,” he says, laughing lightly. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

  “I’m just wondering where this storm was in our weather brief. I don’t recall anything forecasted that was even remotely close to this.”

  “Welcome to the high mountains,” he says, ripping the tab across the beef Stroganoff packet. He pulls on the zip-seal closure, spreading the pouch open wide, and places it next to him, removing the now-boiling pot of water and pouring it directly into the beef Stroganoff pouch.

  “Here,” he says. He places the bag next to me and hands me a heavy-duty plastic spoon. “You have to let it sit for about three minutes and then it’ll be ready to eat.”

  “Does this really taste like beef Stroganoff?”

  “Not exactly. But when you’re cold and hungry and stuck high on a mountain, it usually tastes pretty darn good, regardless.”

  “Like the doughnut.”

  “Like the doughnut,” he says, nodding his grinned approval. “You’re catching on.”

  23

  Will’s fire, in its ring of stones, burns undisturbed. The wind howls outside, and yet the gusts are unable to penetrate this protected space.

  “I wish I’d caught on sooner with this storm,” I say. “I didn’t realize how quickly things could change. I’ve read about mountain weather. Studied it. But the experience of it is something altogether different.”

  “Yeah, mountain weather’s a whole different animal.” He rips the top from the teriyaki chicken pouch, then opens the top zippered pocket on his backpack to retrieve a second spoon.

  “Truthfully,” I say, looking at the floor, “I’m embarrassed. Like really embarrassed for getting myself into this situation. I normally don’t … I mean, I normally handle things.”

  “What? You have no reason to be embarrassed. You did the best you could given the circumstances.”

  “But—”

  “It happens to the best of us, Alison. No one’s immune.”

  “I guess.…”

  “Besides, you can’t hog the hero attention all the time.”

  He pulls the pot of boiling water off the stove and pours it into his dinner pouch. “Yours is probably ready,” he says.

  “That’s okay, I’ll wait for you.”

  “You almost died of hypothermia, and you’re worried about manners? Incredible,” he mumbles.

  I adjust my position within the layers of my sleeping bag, sitting cross-legged, and lean my arms on my thighs, clasping my hands together. Myriad thoughts cross my mind, meandering here, curving there, until I have a jarring one.

  “What is it?” Will says.

  Am I that transparent? Indeed, I was thinking about a troubling problem, a difficult one on so many levels.

  “I’m fine. I, uh … I just remembered something.”

  “And that is…?”

  “Rich.”

  His face falls.

  “He was supposed to fly in today.”

  “I thought he was supposed to come on Saturday,” Will says, busying himself with his dinner pack. He opens it, stirring the contents.

  “He had to postpone … again.”

  Will’s ears perk up. “Why?”

  “He needed to close some deal. Very important.” I open my own dinner pouch and stir, putting my nose in the path of the escaping steam. Actually smells delicious. “Millions of dollars. ‘I can’t not be there.’ That’s what he said.”

  “But he’s here now?”

  “Yes, or I think he should be. I was supposed to pick him up this afternoon. He has no idea where I am.”

  Will blows on his first spoonful of rice to cool it. “I can radio the guys. Have them contact him. I called in earlier to say I’d found you, but that was it.”

  “Could you, please?”

  He lowers his spoon without tasting, I supply him with Rich’s phone number, and he makes the radio call. He strives to keep a neutral tone, an expressionless face, but he’s having difficulty.

  “Copy,” Will says. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. We can get her out in the morning.”

  The radio crackles again as the mic is keyed from the other end. “Both birds will be here,” Jack says. “They’re stuck, too. So we’ll remain on standby at the airport, and we’ll contact you at say … first light?”

  “Sounds good,” Will says.

  “You take care up there.”

  “Thanks, Jack. We will.”

  After replacing the radio in his chest harness, Will picks up his dinner pack, stirs it a bit, and begins to eat, while Mojo sniffs and explores the circumference of our cave-like space.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Anytime,” he replies without looking.

  “So we’re staying the night, then?”

  “Yeah,” he says, focusing on his spoon. “It’s dark now and obviously the storm’s still insane. Best to see what we have when the sun rises.”

  He resumes eating, and I take my first bite. “Wow, this really is good.”

  He acknowledges me with a small smile, but concentrates on his food.

  How awful this must be for him, knowing I’m thinking about Rich, but making the radio call all the same, and doing so without hesitation.

  “Will, may I ask you another question?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s personal.”

  He lowers his spoon, bringing his eyes up to meet mine.

  “Have you ever…”

  I stop myself right there. Stupid question. Awful question. Why the hell would you want to know that, Alison? And why bring it up? What purpose could it possibly serve?

  “Forget it,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just … forget I said anything.”

  He brings his fingers to either side of his chin, rubbing the stubble there. “I’m not gonna let you off that easy. What did you want to know?”

  “It’s none of my business. Please, forget it.”

  “You said it was personal. And … hell, there’s no sense in hiding it. I want you to know me … personally. Just like I’d like to know you. So, I’d like to answer your question.”

  The firel
ight flickers red and gold in his eyes. A glistening spectacle. And a mesmerizing one. I know the eyes are the window to the soul, but I’m not just looking in; I’m being pulled in. And I want to know … “Have you ever … had someone special? I mean … well, you know what I mean.”

  The wind’s steady roar fills the “quiet” between my question and his answer.

  “No, not special in the way that you mean.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Did I just say that?

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re just…” And then—what the hell—my mouth runneth over. “There’s so much about you.… You’re giving and kind and … and you canceled an international flight just to come rescue someone. I mean, who does that?”

  “I didn’t cancel an international flight to rescue just anyone. I did it because it was you.”

  I try to pull in my next breath, like someone who’s had the wind knocked out of them, and it just doesn’t come.

  “You asked if I’ve ever had someone special. The answer is no … not until now, that is. But unfortunately, she’s taken.”

  He searches my eyes for a long moment, then returns his attention to his dinner. But rather than take another bite, he zips it closed, and stands, moving to his backpack. He pulls out a fleece sweater, some ski pants, and a silver space blanket, spreads the blanket near the wall, then rolls the pants and sweater together to make a pillow.

  “Can I get you anything else?” he asks.

  I haven’t moved in all the time he was arranging his bed, and I can’t seem to do it now, either, my brain still stuck on what he said before.

  “Alison?”

  I move my head slightly in the negative, so he turns, and drops to his blanket.

  “You don’t have a sleeping bag,” I say.

  “That’s okay. I’m good.”

  He lies down, turning away from me, and rests his head on his makeshift pillow.

  Any appetite I may have had vanishes. I draw the seal on the pouch closed and put it aside, then look across the fire to Will’s form. He lies so exposed. He’s dressed in his mountaineering gear, but still. The sleeping bag rustles as I adjust my position. He’s given me all of his things.…