When I awoke, my fingers were cool and blue, curled around the phone. 12:58 a.m. Its battery was drained, just 11 percent remaining. Didn’t matter, I reasoned; I couldn’t call 911, couldn’t call anyone.
I tried to all the same. Nothing.
I rotated my head to the left, to the right: Ed and Livvy, on either side of me, their breathing shallow but steady, Ed’s face spackled with dried blood, Olivia’s cheeks plastered with streaks of hair. I cupped her forehead in my hand. Cold. Were we better off sheltering in the car? But what if . . . I didn’t know; what if it rolled? What if it exploded?
I sat up. Stood up. Looked at the hulk of the car. Surveyed the sky—that ripe moon, that bath of stars. Turned, slowly, toward the mountain.
As I approached it, I brandished my phone and held it in front of me, like a wand. Drew my thumb up the screen, tapped the flashlight button. Hard light, a tiny star in my hand.
The rock face, in the glare, was flat and faultless. Nowhere to jam my fingers, nothing to seize, not a weed or a branch, not a lip of rock—just soil and scree, forbidding as a wall. I walked the width of our little cliff, scanned every inch. I aimed the light upward until the night smothered it.
Nothing. Everything had become nothing.
10 percent power. 1:11 a.m.
As a girl I’d loved constellations, made a study of them, mapped whole skies across scrolls of butcher paper in the backyard on summer evenings, bluebottles drowsing around me, the grass soft beneath my elbows. Now they paraded overhead, the winter heroes, spangled against the night: Orion, bright and belted; Canis Major, loping after him; the Pleiades, strung out like jewels along Taurus’s shoulder. Gemini. Perseus. Cetus.
In my wounded voice I murmured their names like a spell to Livvy and Ed, their heads on my chest, rising and falling with my breath. My fingers stroked their hair, his lips, her cheek.
All those stars, smoking cold. We shivered beneath them. We slept.
4:34 a.m. I shuddered myself awake. Inspected both of them—Olivia first, then Ed. I applied some snow to his face. He didn’t flinch. I rubbed it against his skin, sloughing off the blood; he twitched. “Ed,” I said, jostling his shoulder. No response. I checked his pulse again. Faster, fainter.
My stomach complained. We never ate dinner, I remembered. They must be famished.
I ducked into the car, where the dashboard light had dimmed, almost died. There it was, squashed against the rear passenger window: the duffel bag I’d packed with PB&Js and juice boxes. As I gripped the strap in my fist, the light went out completely.
Back outside, I peeled the plastic wrap from a sandwich, shook it to one side; a strand of wind caught it, and I watched as it floated up and away, gossamer, like a fairy, a will-o’-the-wisp. I tore off a corner of bread, brought it to Olivia. “Hey,” I murmured, my fingers playing against her cheek, and her eyes drew open. “Here,” I offered, tucking the bread into her mouth. Her lips parted; the bread bobbed there, like a drowning swimmer, before sinking to her tongue. I picked the straw off the juice box, stabbed it in. Lemonade bubbled through it, dribbled onto the snow. I pushed an arm beneath Olivia’s head and lifted her face to the straw, squeezed the box. It overflowed her mouth. She spluttered.
I lifted her head farther, and she sipped, hummingbird gulps. After a moment, her skull lolled into my hand, and her eyes slipped shut. I laid her softly on the ground.
Ed next.
I knelt beside him, but he wouldn’t open his mouth, wouldn’t even open his eyes. I tapped the pinch of bread against his lips, stroked his cheek as though it might unhinge his jaw, yet still he didn’t move. Panic rose inside me. I put my head to his face. A current of breath, weak but insistent, warmed my skin. I exhaled.
If he couldn’t eat, he could still drink, surely. I rubbed his dry lips with a bit of snow, then slid the straw into his mouth. Clenched my fingers around the box. The juice ran down either side of his chin, clotted in his stubble. “Come on,” I pleaded, but liquid kept hurrying down his jaw.
I withdrew the straw and placed another dollop of frost on his lips, then on his tongue. Let it melt down his throat.
I sat on the snow again, sucked on the straw. The lemonade was too sweet. I drained the box anyway.
From the car I pulled a duffel bag stuffed with down parkas and ski pants. I yanked them out, laid them across Livvy and Ed.
Looked up at the sky. It was impossibly huge.
Light settled on my lids like a weight. I opened them.
And squinted. Above us stretched the sky, unbroken, unending, a deep sea of clouds. Snow sifted down in dandelion flakes, burst against my skin. I checked the phone. 7:28 a.m. 5 percent power.
Olivia had shifted slightly in her sleep, banked herself upon her left arm, the right trailing loose along her side. Her cheek was pressed into the ground. I tipped her onto her back, mopped the snow from her skin. Gently thumbed her ear.
Ed hadn’t moved. I leaned into his face. He was still breathing.
I’d pushed the phone into my jeans pocket. Now I fished it out, squeezed it for luck, dialed 911 again. For a breathless second I imagined it ringing, could almost hear it, trilling in my ear.
Nothing. I stared at the screen.
Stared at the car, turtled on its back, helpless, like a wounded animal. It looked unnatural, even embarrassed.
Stared at the valley beneath us, spiky with trees, a thin silver ribbon of river unfurled in the distance.
I stood up. I turned around.
The mountain reared over me. In the daylight, I could see that I’d misjudged how far we’d dropped—we were at least two hundred yards from the road above, and the stone face looked even more impassable, more impossible, than it had the night before. Up, up, up my gaze climbed, until it reached the summit.
My hand wandered to my throat. We’d plunged all that way. We’d survived.
I tilted my head back farther still, to take in the sky. And squinted. It all seemed too vast, somehow, too massive. I felt like a miniature in a dollhouse. I could see myself from without, from afar, tiny, a speck. I spun around, wobbled.
My vision swam. Something twinged in my legs.
I shook my head, rubbed my eyes. The world subsided, retreated to its boundaries.
For a few hours I dozed beside Ed and Olivia. When I awoke—11:10 a.m.—the snow was crashing on us in waves, wind cracking like whips overhead. A low growl of thunder sounded nearby. I swept flakes from my face, jolted to my feet.
That same flutter in my vision, like ripples in water, and this time my knees snapped toward each other, magnet-jerked. I started to slump toward the ground. “No,” I said, my voice raw and chapped. I swung a hand to the snow, propped myself up.
What was wrong with me?
No time. No time. I pushed against the ground, stood. Saw Ed and Olivia at my feet, half-submerged.
And I began dragging them into the car.
How did the time creep by? It seemed, during the following year, that the months were passing more quickly than those hours with Ed and Livvy on that inverted ceiling, the snow rising against the windows like a tide, the windshield creaking and popping under the weight of white.
I sang to her, pop songs, nursery rhymes, tunes I invented, as the noise outside grew louder and the light within got dimmer. I studied the whorls of her ear, traced them with my finger, hummed into them. I wrapped my arms around his, braided my legs with his, twined my hands with his. I wolfed a sandwich, guzzled a juice box. I unscrewed a bottle of wine before remembering that it would dehydrate me. But I wanted it. I wanted it.
We were underground, it felt; we had burrowed someplace secret and dark, someplace sheltered from the world. I didn’t know when we would emerge. How we would emerge. If.