The Mountain Story (22 page)

“But if he’d known about me?” Vonn said. “He would have wanted to meet me.”

“His family was everything to him.”

“Apparently not,” I pointed out.

“Maybe he was a creep, but he was my father. I have a right to know him,” Vonn said.

Bridget turned to me, explaining, “My first husband was much better father material.”

“Except he wasn’t my father.”

“I hoped he would be forgiving.”

“No psychic dream to predict that one?” Vonn began to cough, then she doubled over and swept her hair back from her face to vomit. I was alarmed to see some dark-coloured stomach contents splash on the moonlit rock. I was pretty sure it was blood. A slow bleed. Nothing seemed out of the realm of possible, especially when it came to bad luck. The thought of losing Vonn terrified me.

“You good?” I asked, rising to kick loose gravel and soil over the mess. “Maybe we should change the subject.”

“No,” Vonn insisted, swallowing hard. “I’m all right. I’m all right. I want to hear this.”

“Hear what?”

“The story.”

“I’ve done my best,” Bridget said. “There’s no story.”

“I’m going to meet him. When we get back. When we get home. I’m going to introduce myself.”

“Okay,” Bridget said. “Do you want me to arrange it?”

“No,” Vonn spat.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Bridget asked.

Vonn paused. “Maybe.”

The wind blew hard into our little shelter, displacing the warm labours of our breath. My nose flash-froze. “Damn,” I said. It hurt. Pressing Vonn’s toes into my warm chest beneath my shirt, I wondered what I would look like with my nose blackened from frostbite. I considered the before and after photos, then had a horrifying thought that I might lose my keen sense of smell along with the tip of my nose.

I could still smell rain. Where was the rain? “Favourite movie?” I asked.

“I don’t want to play,” Vonn said.

“Romantic comedy or drama? You need to make categories,” Bridget said.

“If you have a favourite movie you don’t need categories. Favourite is favourite,” Vonn said.

“You said you weren’t playing.”

“I’m not playing.”

“Food?” I suggested.

“Dessert or main?” Vonn asked.

“You said it was gonna rain,” Bridget thought to mention.

I remembered that I’d vowed not to make any more promises I couldn’t keep. “I still think it will.”

They were fading before my eyes, by the hour, the minute. I knew that if we stayed on the mountain much longer, Nola would perish from her infection. Next to go would be Bridget—with scant fat reserves she’d succumb to hypothermia, dehydration. Vonn would go after that, frostbitten toes joined by frostbitten fingers and then blindness, and then that chill, sleepy farewell.

I found some deep sense of calm in accepting the reality of our situation. Had I not forced the truth on myself, I might have accepted Bridget’s prophetic dream about the helicopter rescue, and settled for Nola’s limitations, and agreed that Vonn couldn’t go anywhere with her flip-flops. Instead, I did the math and listened to my instincts, both telling me that we would all die if we stayed where we were.

I looked toward Nola in the dim light of the cave to find her turned toward me, smiling weakly. “Was I asleep?” she asked.

“For a little while,” I said.

“Anything good happen?”

I laughed, and then shook my head. “Nothing good, Mrs. Devine. But nothing bad either.” I saw the hint of her smile in the darkness.

“I’ve just been sitting here thinking that maybe I could use the straps of your knapsack to make some kind of loop. I need something to help me get to that ironwood stump under the cornice,” I said.

“That is very resourceful, Wolf.”

We were silent for a time, watching the night sky. Vonn lifted her legs on either side of me. Wordlessly I drew her feet beneath my shirt again. Even through the thick wool socks I could feel her toes melt on my skin.

“I wonder if animals are getting at those granola bars. I’d fight a badger for those things,” Bridget said.

I pictured crows pecking at the ripped silver foil. “You’d have found the wrapping.”

Nola sighed into the darkness before she said, “I want them to play my music. You know that piece? The sad one I always played on the console.”

“Why?”

“The violins,” I said.

“How did you know?” Nola smiled through her confusion.

“The Korngold,” I said.

“You know that sad music she’s talking about?” Bridget asked.

“From school. Nola was humming it when I was climbing.”

“I wasn’t humming,” Nola said.

Even in the darkness I saw my confusion in her eyes. “You were humming it, Nola. I recognized it from a film appreciation class. It was the teacher’s favourite piece. I’ve heard it a thousand times. I don’t remember the movie but I remember the music.” I hummed a section to remind her.

“That’s it!” she said, brightening. “You do know it!”

“Nola, you were humming it. Then you stopped humming and that’s what made me look down.”

“I never heard any humming,” Bridget said.

Vonn shrugged.

I shivered, anxious about my confusion, and what it meant.

Nola leaned in to squeeze my arm. “Play it over and over again on a loop at my memorial.”

“Oh, Mother,” Bridget said, and then bit her tongue.

“Over and over on a loop,” Nola repeated. “Five or six times. Then let the folks go. No words. Let the music speak.”

“Here, Mim, put the parka on,” Bridget said, moving the knapsack at her feet. There was a pause and the air changed in the cave as Bridget’s hand found the peanut butter jar in the knapsack. She pulled out the large plastic container, holding it up in the waning light. “What the
hell
?”

Nola was in no shape to protest or explain.

“Give me the jar, Bridget,” I said calmly. She handed it over without a fight.

“Is this
food
?” she asked. “Looks like protein powder. Have you all been …?”

I saw myself in her expression—wild-eyed and paranoid. “It’s … it’s Pip,” I said.

“Pip?” Bridget stared.

“Oh, Bridget,” Nola said. “I should have told you. I should have told you both.”

“Ashes?” Vonn said. “But?”

Bridget paused for a long moment then tilted her head toward her mother. “I thought you’d pick the eighth hole at the Doral.”

“His hole in one! Oh Bridge, I didn’t even think of that!” Nola croaked.

“I didn’t know about Secret Lake.”

“With our anniversary it seemed the thing to do,” Nola said. “So you knew about the ashes all along?”

“When I came up for Vonn’s birthday in September I saw the receipt from the crematorium and found the urn in the closet.”

“I sewed a plastic pouch full of ashes into all of those little sachets too,” Nola said.

“The lavender sachets?”

“That’s weird.”

“Could that be against the law?” Bridget asked.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Vonn said.

“I didn’t know how you’d react.”

“I like it,” Vonn said. “I think Pip would too.”

“Roses for me, please,” Bridget said. “I love the smell of roses.”

“Is everyone gonna pick their ash sachet scent now? Isn’t that bad luck?”

Vonn giggled, which made me, for a second, deliriously happy.

“Do people really have their loved one’s ashes in sachets all over town and I’m only finding that out now?”

“I’ve heard of people wearing tiny vials on chains around their necks,” Bridget said. “But I think Pip’s the only one I know in a sachet.”

“When Jack Mazlo died,” Nola said, “his mother asked Janice for some of the ashes.”

“To make sachets?”

“She put the ashes in a plastic bag and sewed the bag into Little Jack’s favourite teddy bear so his father could always be with him.”

“Oh.”

“She was Maltese so we thought maybe it was a cultural thing.”

“Did Little Jack know about the ashes?”

Nola nodded. “He wouldn’t go anywhere without his teddy bear. He called it ‘Daddy Bear.’ ”

“I hate sad stories,” Vonn said.

“When you get older you think of sadness in a different way,” Nola said softly.

“I’ll like being sad?”

“It’s not that you
like
being sad but you start to see the value of it. You don’t judge sadness so harshly.”

I wished I had a sachet containing my mother’s remains. Something lemon-scented. Or maybe peppermint.

“Everybody on the block had an opinion about Little Jackie and the Daddy Bear. I thought it was terrible at the time. Now I’d love to think that what’s left of me could comfort some sweet
child. I don’t want to be scattered though. I’m more an outdoors
liker
than an outdoors
lover
and I’m not big on the ocean so I don’t want to be thrown off the back of some squid boat.”

“
Squid
boat?” Vonn and I said together.

“And don’t bring me back here,” Mim said emphatically. We all laughed. “I was thinking a small urn for the mantel or even the kitchen counter if one of you keeps the condo.”

“Oh my God, Mim,” Vonn said.

“I don’t mind being split in half if that’s what you decide. I like the weather in Golden Hills.”

I did not confess my growing fear that none of us would survive to fulfill Nola’s final wishes. “Done,” I said.

“Sprinkle a dash around the boxwood near that bench at my church too,” Nola added after pausing to think. “That’s a comforting place for me.”

“Close your eyes now. You need to sleep,” I said. I didn’t want Nola to see my fear but she must have sensed it anyway.

“You’re doing a good job of keeping us all going, Wolf,” she said.

What a crock
, I thought.

The wind drove into the cave, lying to us about rescue choppers and waterfalls. The owl hooted overhead, not wise anymore, just irritating.

“Buttered noodles,” Bridget said idly.

Vonn laughed. “When you could imagine anything.”

“I know. Buttered noodles and that key lime pie that Mim does with the graham cracker crust. I haven’t had that in years.”

“She made it for you three days ago,” Vonn pointed out. “For when you got here.”

“I didn’t eat it. There’s some in the fridge right now.” She laughed somewhat maniacally. “Ow!” she cried. “I split my lip.”

“We should try to sleep a little,” I said.

“I’m afraid to sleep,” Bridget said. “I don’t want to dream. What if I have a future-dream where the helicopter
doesn’t
come? Where we don’t get rescued?”

“Seriously, Bridget,” Vonn said. “Don’t you think you would have had one dream or vision or whatever about getting lost up here in the first place if you were really clairvoyant?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“It doesn’t work at all.”

“You have no faith.”

“You have no track record.”

“Maybe I haven’t told you about every single dream that came true,” Bridget said. “Maybe I kept some of that private.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing.”

“Like what?”

“I dreamed your father called me a liar when we went to knock on his door. His kids were there.”

“But that didn’t happen,” she said.

“But it could have. It still might.”

“We live in completely different worlds, don’t we?” Vonn asked in earnest.

“We’re not spending another night here,” Bridget said confidently. “Mark my words.”

“The most important thing,” I said, “is that we’re going to
keep at it. Right? We’re going to find that bag, and I am going to get up that wall.”

We spent most of the rest of that second night in silence, watching over Nola, ashamed by the relief her warm forehead brought our cold hands, startled by her spastic pain, envious of what appeared to be her periods of deep sleep.

Too cold for conversation, we considered the morphing clouds, and listened for helicopters and rescue calls. My hands were stiff, mercifully numb to the stinging scrapes on my palms. My fingers seemed not my own.

Sometime in the night, the cave was flooded by the distinctive sound of Bridget’s whistling flute snores. Vonn reached over and adjusted the position of her mother’s jaw to make it stop—just as she’d done before. It worked briefly.

When Bridget started to snore again, Vonn gently tilted her head once more. Then she happened to glance at her grandmother. Her face went slack. “I don’t think she’s breathing.”

We leaned in a little closer and were startled when Nola coughed. Then Nola opened her eyes to meet mine in the darkness. She was afraid. I could see it. But instead of being filled with dread I was flooded with determination. I would not let Nola Devine die. I was sure there had to be some way to safety. If there were metates, the Native Americans had to have found some way off this horrible rock-ship, so what the hell was I missing?

“You’ve been awake for two days straight,” Vonn said.

“How did you know I was awake?”

“You’re so dehydrated I can hear you blink.”

“It’s going to rain,” I reminded her.

“So you said,” she said, struggling to sit up.

Coyotes howled in the distance as Nola shouted, not asleep but not altogether awake, “Let the dog out, Pip!”