by Alex Morel
Standing on this tiny ledge, staring up at the inverted overhang that I can’t imagine a champion climber ascending, never mind the physically challenged like myself, I am flooded with joy. It comes as I discover for myself that the inverted overhang is split into two distinct pieces of rock.
“You’re thinking we can climb through the crack rather than around and over.”
“You’ll stand on my shoulders and then I’ll push your feet up until you can find a grip and pull yourself up,” Paul instructs as he scans the crevice. His attention snaps back at me when I don’t respond. “Okay?” I nod.
“What happens after?” I ask.
“You’ll pull me up or something,” he says. “We’ll figure it out.”
“‘Or something’ sounds like a great plan,” I say.
“It’s worked so far.”
I don’t know how he lives like this. Planless. Instinctive. It drives me nuts, but I bite my tongue.
Paul kneels and I step on his shoulders and hold his hands. He stands up and holds my ankles firmly. I reach up, and my hands feel the bottom of the crack until I’m able to slide my left hand into a hold. I pull, but don’t have the strength to lift myself through to a foothold in the crack.
“It’s too high,” I say.
“Hold on,” Paul grunts, and his hands come under my boots and he pushes up with all his might. I reach and stretch until my left hand lands on the floor of the cliff and my right boot finds a foothold. I push hard and Paul gives me one last shove. I hoist my body over the top and land, hard, on the floor, scurrying to pull my legs over.
“I’m over, I’m over,” I holler.
“Stay there.”
In a matter of minutes, Paul climbs the wall and then shimmies across the crack like he’s climbing hand over hand on a pull bar. When he reaches the wide part of the crack, he pulls himself up and over the top.
He stands and looks out over the valley. He has a big smile on his face.
“Not bad, Solis.”
He sits down next to me. He puts his hand around my shoulders and pulls me in. My head falls onto his shoulder.
“Yeah, not bad, Hart.”
He looks around and then behind us.
“Not exactly what I’d hoped for.”
I look around again. My heart sinks. I’m not sure this is the right term for what I’m seeing, but I’m calling it a false top.
We are surrounded by mountain peaks far higher than the one we are standing on. Unless the sky was to turn crystal blue, it’s unlikely that a search plane could find us here.
“We can’t be found here, can we?” I ask.
“Do you mean alive?”
“Of course.”
“Unlikely.”
He lies on his back and looks up.
“We have to find shelter, before the sun falls.”
I look around and then up toward the sun, or where it should be. I can’t believe that we’ve gone through all of this and haven’t changed our situation at all. Except, of course, that we no longer have the bathroom shelter. A cold wind hits my face and I turn into Paul’s chest to protect myself.
“Don’t freak out on me now,” Paul whispers in my ear.
“I’m not.” I sit back up. “It’s the wind; it surprised me.”
He sits up and puts both arms around me, pulls me in tight, and kisses the top of my head.
“The worst is below us now,” he says. “Look.”
I don’t look, because I know looking back is a haunting feeling all its own.
I made it up the cliff and I feel good about that, but I’m still terrified of what’s to come. If I add obsessing about my near-death climb into the mix, I’ll end up a morass of nerves.
“I’m scared,” I say with honesty.
“I nearly shit my pants back there. It’s okay to be scared.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Who’s they?” Paul asks.
“People.”
“Doctors, you mean?”
“Yes, doctors, parents, friends, and now strange boys I meet on mountaintops. But everyone tells me to walk around like there’s nothing to be afraid of. Then they drop dead or something.”
“I’m sorry about that quip, about daddy’s girl.”
“You didn’t know.”
“It’s funny how people just drop dead one day. My mom died when I was ten. I remember the scent of her hair. Strawberries. That’s what I remember most about her.”
“My dad shot himself in the head. I just think about blood when I think about him. He used Old Spice. Blood and Old Spice. That’s what I remember.”
We just stand there for a few moments taking in each other’s histories. We are so different and yet so alike, I think. We both lost a parent.
“Do you suppose they think we’re dead?” He breaks the silence.
“I don’t know, but I think my mother would be pleased I finally met a guy.”
Paul laughs out loud.
“Did you find a guy, Solis? That’s nice to know.”
Chapter 24
Less than an hour later, in the middle of a crop of slab-like stones, we find a small cave. Inside, the ground is dry and the wind is blocked. It is short and tapered, so we have to have our heads at the entrance.
“As good as it gets,” Paul says after inspecting the cave.
I can feel the cold air circulating around the opening of the cave and I fear the exposure could be too much.
“Is it enough?” I ask.
“It has to be. It’s all we’ve got.”
We unroll our sleeping bags and lay them side by side. Our shelter is snug and the ceiling at the apex couldn’t be more than four feet.
“Take off your boots and socks and gloves,” Paul says. “Socks in your bag, boots underneath. Put on the dry pair; we’ll rotate each day if we can.”
I nod in agreement.
“We’ll get in my bag, then pull this one over our heads. It’ll be warmer this way. Unzip the jacket so our bodies will heat each other more efficiently.”
My embarrassment hardly registers. I do everything he’s asked and slide down into the bag. He’s opened his jacket and I can feel the warmth off his chest. He reaches down into the bag behind himself and pulls out the two plastic soda bottles he had underneath his jacket all day.
“Did they melt?”
“Mostly, yes.”
I take a long pull from the first bottle. And then a short follow-up. I hand it back, knowing he must be dying of thirst too.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was.”
“It’s okay, but don’t drink too fast—when you’re this thirsty, you can heave it back up. That wouldn’t be good.”
He takes a long pull himself and hands it back to me. “Good system; I’ll refill in the morning.”
I take a few more swigs, feeling the water flood through my body, and then, reluctantly, I hand it back so he can finish it off. Hunger kicks in as I watch him finish the water.
“We have Raisinets and three energy bars, right?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“So let’s eat the Raisinets and we split one bar a day.”
“But you’re so much bigger, it doesn’t seem fair,” I say.
“Honorable of you, but I’m fine.”
He’s reaching into his bag, and for a moment, I think he’s going to ask me which kind of bar we should choose to eat tonight, but he doesn’t. He just rips one open, breaks the bar in two pieces that are roughly the same, and hands one half to me.
“Cheers!”
“Eat slow,” I say. “That’s what my mom would tell me.”
“I miss my mom. I would fight and scream about cleaning up my room. Then she died and I missed how much she took care of everything.”
“How did she die?”
“Cancer. Breast cancer. Her dad was a two-pack-a-day man.”
“Sorry,” I say. “What about your dad?”
“My dad didn’t care about anything a
fter my mom died. He threw himself into his books and work and left my brother and me to fend for ourselves. There were weeks at a time when Will, he’s my brother—he’s dead too—cooked dinner. We only knew how to make two things: grilled cheese and scrambled eggs.”
“That sounds horrible. I mean about Will too; I’m so sorry.”
“Cancer. I prayed for him every night and day and absolutely nothing happened. He wasted away in less than a year.”
I stare at him. It is dark, so I’m not sure he can see me, but I’m sure he senses me.
“It wasn’t so bad before he got sick. My dad and Will, they got along. Will loved to read what dad was reading. I hated reading. I’m dyslexic or I was, and was probably ADD, too.”
I touch his back and tell him I’m sorry.
“We haven’t spoken in two years. My dad and I. I was flying home to see him.”
“Why?”
“Was I flying home?”
“No, why haven’t you spoken to him?”
“Will died,” he said, and there was a pause and what I thought was a little sniffle, but maybe not. “And I didn’t want to go to college. My dad said I couldn’t stay home and live with him. If I wasn’t going to school and seeing a shrink with him, I’d have to make it on my own. So I went to the shrink with him for a year or so and the doctor sided with my father on everything. I mean he didn’t say it directly like that, but everything always got twisted up and about me. And just before I left for good, we had a session where Dr. Klein, that was his name, kept hounding me about doing homework and chores and whatever my dad wanted me to do and I exploded. I jumped at him, but my dad held me back. After that I just left.”
Paul shifts his arm and reaches out and touches my face, then my hair.
“Sorry,” he says, “I need to know where your face is; I was disoriented.”
“It’s okay. It felt nice,” I say.
He strokes my face and hair again.
“I flew out west with the money I had. I work as a ski instructor in the winter. In summer I surf in Cali. That was almost two years ago.”
“And you’ve never spoken?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing—not a text?”
“An email once every six months or so. We’re like that; the Harts are sort of brutal. My grandfather once made my father spend an entire summer pulling rocks out of the yard because he got a C on his report card. Each day, as the story goes, my dad squared off six by six feet of yard and on his hands and knees picked out every stone and rock under the turf. It took him sixty-six days to finish it off. When he was done, he brought my grandfather the bucket of stones and my grandfather tossed them into a river and then said, ‘Study harder next time,’ and walked away.”
“Wow.” I think about it. “My mother never punished me, really, for anything.”
“I suppose he had it tough,” Paul says, placing his whole hand on my cheek. “But he was worse on me. His dad, at least, gave a damn.”
We settle in and finish off the Raisinets. My stomach roars with the expectation of more food. Paul’s is even louder, and I feel a tinge of guilt over splitting the food evenly.
Total darkness descends quickly and the wind picks up, howling past us, but our cave provides a lot of protection. There’s a long stretch of silence, his warm breath on my neck. I’m afraid to speak, to say the wrong thing after his confession. My head throbs and muscles I didn’t even know I had are aching. My head feels weirdly off-kilter.
Paul grasps my left hand and for a split second, I know he can feel the scars from where I tried to hit the switch last year.
“I’d never ask,” he whispers.
“I know. I know you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t like knowing other people’s shit.”
“I can tell. You’re too mean.”
“Am I?”
“I think you threatened to leave me for dead back there.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“But I melted water for you and you did end up climbing a really big-ass mountain.”
“Yes,” I say, squeezing his hand.
He holds my other hand in his and he squeezes back. Not in a stay-warm kind of way, but more in the I-like-you kind of way. Maybe these aren’t the best conditions to try to discern those types of messages, what with the weather, the medication withdrawal, the hunger, the layers of random outerwear, and the darkness, but I feel a change in the air and something like affection rises in me.
“I was turning fifteen,” I say into the darkness. “I had lived in New York City my whole life, but we had just moved to New Jersey. My father had been dead for nearly four years and money was tight, or that’s how my mom would describe it. And that didn’t matter. None of it did. I’d never had many friends anyway. I’d been a loner since high school started.”
I stop talking for a minute. Paul doesn’t say anything, but he puts his left hand through my hair and I can hear his heartbeat. I take a deep breath. Then he stops.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No one’s ever touched them before. I mean nobody I didn’t pay to touch them.”
“You employed some male hookers to touch your scars?”
I laugh. The dumb jokes are starting to grow on me.
“Yeah, I liked to make them dress up like doctors.”
He laughs. “You’re funny, for a girl.”
“Most girls are,” I say.
“You’re probably right,” he whispers. “That’s the kind of thing my dad would say. I hate when I sound like him.”
I clear my throat and think about the words I want to use. I think about how my first impulse is always to lie or obfuscate the truth, but how with Paul I just want everything to be honest and straightforward.
“Let me start over. My father shot himself on Christmas Eve. He didn’t just die—that’s how I talk about it, like he died the way people normally die. My great-grandfather hit the switch too, and my grandmother spent the last decade of her life in a house for crazy women in Vermont. My dad never told me this, but my mom let me know after he died that his mother killed herself inside that home—she hung herself. Being crazy is a family hobby.” I laugh a little as I say this.
“Well,” he says, interlocking our fingers. “I guess we’ve gotten kicked around by the same shit, in a way.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say.
He leans in and kisses my forehead. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Thanks,” I whisper. I feel a flood of emotion come up and settle in my throat and chest.
“It was the beginning of September and I was standing in the kitchen, making lunch. I started slicing some tomatoes. There was something about the way the knife went through the skin of the tomato that caught my eye. Then, in a moment of what felt like crystal clarity, I decided to slice my fingers and then my palm. The first cut felt like euphoria. Then the blood poured out of me, and it felt like liquid relief as every ounce of anxiety burst out of my veins. Blood was everywhere but I didn’t care, and then I made the cut you just traced with your fingers. It could have killed me, but my mother came in and stopped me.”
“Were you really trying?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
I’m silent for a while.
“How very Hart of you,” I say. “That’s sort of harsh to say to someone.”
“Wouldn’t you be happier if you owned up to it and moved on? Whether you were serious or not doesn’t matter, really.”
I want to be mad and angry, but I can’t ignore the blunt truth, that I think he’s right.
“The other night on the plane,” he said, “were you going to cut yourself too?”
I shake my head. “No. Pills. A concoction of things I researched and put together. They spilled on the floor during the crash before I had taken very many.”
I stop talking. I am unable to speak as the enormity of what has happened—what could have happened—hits me.
Then Paul lightly touches my neck with his fingertips and gently pulls me to him. He kisses me. His lips are open and wet. My mouth opens and our lips slide together without hesitation. Then he pulls back for a moment, and we lock eyes. In that instant I know he knows my heart. He kisses me again. I can’t speak. I can barely think. My body tingles with hope and lust and love and desire.
We kiss over and over again, and then he gently bites on my ear. I want to explode out of this bag. I turn toward him, ignoring the pain that shoots through my back when I move, and our legs get all tangled up. He kisses my mouth and I hear a rushing sound in my head. My left arm reaches around and underneath his shirt, rubbing his hip bone and belly. He groans softly. And then just as suddenly, the day weighs on me and I curl deeper into his body and hold his hands and arms against my body. He kisses my neck a few more times, and then we fall asleep.
Chapter 25
I dream. I am in the hospital and Old Doctor stares at me, but when he talks, I hear my mother’s voice. He asks me the same question over and over, like he doesn’t hear me. Finally I scream.
“You don’t fool me! You don’t fool me!”
Old Doctor stands and walks to the window. He stares out into the courtyard for a moment and then he turns back to me and beckons me to come over. I do and it immediately starts to snow and I smile.
“What are you smiling about, Jane?” he asks.
“The snow—it’s beautiful.”
He looks outside and then says: “What snow? There’s no snow, Jane. You know that, right?”
“You’re a liar,” I say.
He just smiles, and suddenly my mother is sitting next to him, and my dead father and grandmother are off in the distance, making snow angels.
“Can I play?” I ask.
“No,” Old Doctor says, shaking his head, still smiling. My mother cries. And Old Doctor puts his arm around her. He whispers something in her ear and she nods. He kisses her on the cheek, and I want to kill him for my father. She digs in her purse and pulls out my father’s watch, hands it to me, and tells me not to lose it again. I get up and walk toward Dad and Grandma, and by the time I reach them, they are gone. The snow angels are there, and their eyes come alive and then they fly away. I look up to watch them, and then my father is standing next to me and I’m opening and closing his watch over and over again. Then Paul walks toward us. But he is dead. I try to reach out and touch him, but there is glass between us. I smash my hands against the glass over and over and scream his name.
