The Mountain Story (20 page)

Nola turned to Vonn. “Normally I don’t like naming children after cities and states. I do like Georgia for a girl.”

“I like the old-fashioned names,” Vonn said.

“Millicent? Gwendolyn?” Bridget asked.

“Clara. Virginia. Annabel,” Vonn said.

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is Vonn helping me to my feet.

The blood rushed to my head when I stood, and I had a glimpse of my future. I’d never thought much of my future before that moment, not beyond the wilderness trips and extreme mountain climbing I’d do with Byrd, or the fantasies (which don’t count) of driving a Lamborghini with Lark naked in the passenger seat on some deserted road. Future. I remember turning that fat word over in my mind, desiring it, like food and sex. I must have been smiling, because when I looked up Bridget was smiling back at me.

“We’re going to get rescued. I know it. I have a very strong feeling about that,” she said.

When you’re in the wilderness, minutes pass like hours and days like years, or in a split second your whole world could be spun on its axis. It was about four hours past noon, judging by the sun, when I felt the brutish wind driving in from the north. I was making my way down the wall after my ninth failed attempt. There were scarcely two hours of daylight left.

Bridget was there when I reached the bottom, shouting, “Do you hear that? Can you hear that?”

The sound was unmistakable and yet I knew it was a lie. Nola sat up, scanning the sky. I didn’t dare waste my limited reserves of strength celebrating another deception. I didn’t even turn to look at the sky when Bridget shouted, “The helicopter!”

Her optimism was infuriating. With time leaking through
our fingers I’d have only a few more chances to make it up the wall. I didn’t feel like wasting my breath telling Bridget not to waste hers. It was the wind. Only the wind.

I found a rock on which to rest. In time Bridget and Vonn stopped waving.

“What if no one even knows we’re lost yet?” Vonn asked.

Bridget didn’t correct Vonn this time. “It sounded so much like a helicopter.”

“Or a waterfall,” Vonn said.

Nola agreed. “Waterfall. Yes. Are you sure that waterfall is as far as you said?”

“Corazon Falls? It’s miles and miles.”

“So it couldn’t be what we heard.”

“There’s no helicopter. There’s no waterfall.”

“I think the wind sounds like a train,” Nola said. “A freight train.”

“The tracks rolled right by our house in Michigan. The wind does sound just like a freight train sometimes.”

“All I care about is the helicopter,” Bridget said, sighing. “I’m so thirsty.” We watched her pick up the canteen and sip from it.

“Eventually someone will notice that one of us is missing and they’ll send Mountain Rescue to track us,” I said. “They have equipment. A great team of dogs, too.” I pictured Dantay throwing a long rope ladder down from the top of the ridge. Uplifted by the image, I stood, ready to tackle the wall again.

“Have you been in trouble up here before? Have you been lost up here?” Bridget asked.

I turned to find the Devine women staring at me. “I’ve never been lost up here,” I said. It was the truth. “My friend’s
uncle heads up Mountain Rescue.” Also the truth. “The tracking dogs will pick up our scent.”

I started up again, chanting a rhythm as my feet found boulders and my hands found grips. Higher and higher I climbed, calling on happy memories to fuel me; Glory, Byrd.
Always
.

I was certain this particular maze of steps and grips was the one that would put me in reach of the ironwood but I was wrong. That’s when I heard Byrd’s voice again, like he was shouting right into my ear. “What’s your plan,
Mountain Man
?” I smiled in spite of myself.

Climbing back down took the scant energy I had left. When I collapsed at the bottom the three women were all there. “You were so close,” Nola said, passing the canteen to me.

I drank sparingly. Vonn merely wet her lips before passing it to Nola, who passed it to Bridget, who stopped to watch us watch her. “You think I’m going to guzzle it like he did. I won’t. I want to. Not like you all don’t want to.”

The sound of a roaring waterfall ripped through the silence. We all heard it and turned to watch the trees like somehow we might witness the deception—catch them in the act. How did the wind in the pines sound like a waterfall? Or a freight train? Or a helicopter? What cruel magic transformed the air as it cut through the towering sugar pines and the fragrant Jeffrey pines and the practical lodgepole pines and the dense white fir?

“We have a little more than a cup of water left. No food,” Bridget said. “What if we get stuck here another night?”

I recalled the quick glimpse I’d had inside Nola’s black knapsack when they first asked me for directions and blurted at her, “Peanut butter! You have food!”

“I don’t have food,” Nola said, wide-eyed. “I don’t have
peanut butter!
”

“Why would she have peanut butter?” Bridget asked. “She doesn’t even eat peanut butter.”

“That was Bridget, Wolf,” Vonn corrected. “In the sports bag she had peanut granola bars. Remember?”

“Right,” I said, eyeing the women one by one. “Right.” It hit me that they were in a conspiracy to keep the food for themselves. Chances were they’d already found the blue mesh bag with the water and had eaten the three granola bars and the peanut butter too.

Turning to Vonn and Bridget I urged, “We need that bag.”

I must have sounded desperate, or threatening, because Vonn shared a look with her mother and they went off into the brush again without a word of protest.

“Don’t give up, Wolf,” Nola said. “There has to be a way up that wall.”

“Why are you lying about the food?”

“Excuse me?”

“You have a jar of peanut butter in your knapsack,” I said.

“I do not,” she insisted.

“You have crackers in there too? Are you holding out on all of us or just me?”

“I would not hold out. I would never hold out.” She glanced around to ensure that her daughter and granddaughter were out of sight before she dug into her knapsack with her good hand and took out the plastic jar, passing it to me gingerly.

“Okay.” The plastic jar was not filled with peanut butter but something that looked like ashes. “Is this …?”

“Yes.”

“The urn they sold me was so heavy,” Nola said. “I couldn’t lug that thing up here. I bought some disposable bags but at the last minute I realized they were snack-size. I needed something lighter that had a tight-fitting lid and …”

“Why is it a secret?”

“Bridget was against cremation. Since she was a child she’s … We had to take her to a shrink … So many fears and phobias. Superstitions. She thinks she’s clairvoyant. Poor thing. I suppose that’s my fault for indulging her but it comforted her as a child to think she could tell the future. Is that so bad?”

“No.”

“You don’t know if you ruined your kids or if they were born that way.” She paused. “Anyway, Bridget wanted to know that Pip’s body was at the cemetery where she could visit him.”

“So you buried an empty casket?” I asked.

“It’s done more often than you think. He’s been in the urn in the closet for
months
. Just been driving me crazy. I used to think I’d go nuts from his snoring but this … it’s like I can hear him yelling to be let out.”

“Okay.”

“I thought our anniversary would be the right time to sprinkle his ashes on the mountain. I was going to do it when Bridge wasn’t looking.”

Nola’s choice of
sprinkled
instead of
scattered
made Pip’s remains sound like cake decoration. “He wanted to be … sprinkled … at Secret Lake?”

“That was my idea,” she admitted. “We never talked about it. We’re barely into our sixties. We were still raising Vonn half the time. We talked about grades and allowance and curfew.
Sometimes it was golf and cards and what we were going to make for dinner. We didn’t ever talk about dying.” She paused again. “We should have though. Your loved ones should know your final wishes.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t leave him in the jar.”

“No.”

“He hated peanut butter,” she said. “We kept it in the cupboard for Vonn.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t think he’d be in there for long.”

“Right.”

“It was the only clean plastic container I could find.”

“Sure.”

“I feel terrible you thought I wouldn’t share with you if I had food.”

“Sorry.” I noticed beads of sweat collecting on her forehead and a dark cast beneath her eyes. Her arm appeared even more swollen, if that was possible.

She attempted to find a more comfortable position. “Has anyone you loved ever died, Wolf?”

I nodded.

“Do you feel them sometimes? Their presence?”

I couldn’t answer.

“I feel Pip like he’s still here. I keep going to tell him something and every time it’s like a slap in the face. It happens a hundred times a day.”

“It’s hard to break the habit of thinking a person’s alive.”

She stopped. “Who do you think of as still alive, Wolf?”

“My mother,” I lied.

“Since Pip died I haven’t seen the point of carrying on,” Nola said. “Now?”

She didn’t have to tell me. I knew she’d changed her mind.

Long shadows crept over the rock below me as I started up the wall once more. My fingernails were shredded, my palms ravaged, but worst was my sagging spirit. This would be my last attempt before darkness fell.

Midway up I paused to rest and heard, even from this distance, the sound of Nola humming below. I recognized the melody as a classical piece—a violin concerto from the old film version of
Much Ado About Nothing
. It was the only thing that I could remember from my brief time as a freshman at Santa Sophia High School. Most of the other students fell asleep during the film appreciation class but I was transported by the music. Korngold was the composer’s name.

Nola’s humming stoked my adrenalin and drove me on up the wall and soon I was climbing higher and faster than I had all day up a route I’d not considered, accompanied by the weeping violin. And there I was, inches away from the ironwood. I reached, and I strained, and finally I gripped a branch of the dead tree. I tugged and felt its roots deeply anchored in the rock. I paused to consider the best angle to hoist myself over the cornice.

The wind died completely. All was still, and I took a moment to look out over creation. “Thank you,” I said out loud.

That’s when I realized that Nola wasn’t humming anymore, and peered down to find her splayed awkwardly over the smooth rock metates where she’d been sitting. Even at a distance I could
see that there was blood pooling into the mortars where she’d hit her head. I felt quite certain that Nola Devine was dead.

The fickle wind kicked up again, driving in from the north like a train. I shouted for Vonn and Bridget but they couldn’t hear me over the gusts. “Mrs. Devine!” I called, but she lay there motionless. “MIM!” But the wind howled louder and my voice was lost in its refrain. “NOLA!” I shouted anyway. “BRIDGET! VONN!”

I don’t remember climbing down and I don’t remember stumbling over the loose boulders to reach her but I do remember taking Nola’s good hand, relieved to find a pulse. Blood was still dripping from the gash in her forehead, but I’d seen more blood than that in one of Frankie’s six-pack-pirouettes into the bathroom sink. I had no strength to lift her, yet I did, and thanked God.

I carried Nola to the cave, fearful for the first time since we’d become lost that one of us, or all of us, might die here. I covered her with my parka then used the sleeve of my hoodie to stop the bleeding on her forehead. Bridget and Vonn appeared looking drained and defeated. Bridget did not scream when she saw her mother’s head wound, which made me shiver. Vonn and I shared a look.

Nola woke, confused by how she got there. I could smell her wound festering beneath the cloth bandages. “We should look at it,” Vonn said.

Bridget stepped away when her daughter began to peel back the crusty brown fabric strips, which gave way to the freshly bloodied layer of the black bandana. “We have to clean it. We have to re-dress it. What can we use?” Vonn asked, looking around, swallowing a gag.