38
Some unknown hours later, unknown distance, she becomes aware of a change in her stride, in the nature of the effort it takes to keep moving forward, and in the sound of that effort.
She stops and looks around at the valley she’s come into. A mountainous small amphitheater. The angle of the trees confirming what her body has been telling her, that she is no longer going down but is crossing snow that has massed evenly on level ground. Without the feeling of down in her legs, a stone of fear rolls from its place behind her heart. All she knows, all she counts on, is down. Without down, and without a thing in the sky to go by, with no horizon to lock onto, she might walk and walk until she arrived suddenly in the cold night at her own tracks.
To either side of the valley the banks of the mountainsides rise into the gray. Whatever lies ahead at the far end of the valley lies behind the veil of falling snow and the dusk, and there’s no way to know but to go there. It seems very far away and I wanted to stop, says the girl in her head, the girl in the gymnasium, I wanted to dig into the snow like an animal, bury myself, listen to him pass over me in the dark. Sleep. Wait for the spring. But I didn’t. I knew if I stopped, I died. I asked my legs to keep moving and somehow they did.
She goes down the center of the valley in the failing light and there is more valley here, though narrower, the wings of mountain drawing steadily closer, moving toward a fusion she can’t see. She notices the shifting, scuttling snakes of powder at her feet and then notices the tailwind that drives them. It whips up and gains strength the nearer she comes to what she expects to be the convergence of the two mountainsides—the hard inevitable slamming that will crush out any passable trail and leave nothing but a steep rocky crotch, a dead end. It will almost be a relief.
The wind plays a cold note in the boughs of the trees, in the needles; the sound of absolute aloneness. She moves forward and the mountains move together and she is under the trees again, their laden arms dragging against her, the snow spinning up from the ground and littering the back side of her lenses with a distorting rash of crystals. She removes the glasses and stows them and works her way through the dark underworlds of the boughs, the wind rocking her on the snowshoes one way, and then the other, and finally forward, only forward, like the current of a river. It pushes her onward through a pair of low boughs crossed like swords, and stepping through these with her arms raised to protect her face she almost does not see, and nearly goes over, the edge of a sudden drop in the mountain.
Down.
She stands looking down the straight and treeless chute of what she knows is the bed of a stream, a dry wash like the one they went up that day in July. Not the same one; she knows she’s a long way from that place. But this one brings her closer to that one. Or closer to some conjoining artery by which she can spill once more into life, into family. The wind howls in the gap behind her, the hysterical snow rushes past, and within that funneled gale she hears the droning of a motor. A large and laboring motor such as a semi in low gear, dragging its load up the mountain. A man sitting warm in the cab, country music in the speakers, his solitary headlights boring into the storm. The image is so stark in her mind that she can imagine nothing at the bottom of the dry wash but the paved and plowed road itself.
It’s steeper than she expects and her instinct is to lean back, but when she does so the tails of the snowshoes slip and ski. She shifts her weight to the forward crampons but feels she will pitch headlong over the snowshoes. Finally she turns herself crosswise to the slope and continues her descent in a series of deliberated steps, like a newly walking child on a staircase.
It takes her five minutes, it takes her five hours. All she knows when she reaches the bottom of the dry wash is that she’s reached the bottom and there is no road. Here the stream when it runs spills into a broad wallow in the mountain where it either pools or else drains away in multiple smaller streams, none large enough to carve a recognizable path through the trees. No road. No truck. No wind here. No sound again but her own ragged wheezing, in which she hears some desperate note and says, Stop that, God damn you.
And there comes an answer—a whooping cry from the woods. From far upslope. The far-traveling call of some great bird, announcing its greatness to the mountain, and it splits her open, this sound, and takes her heart in its claw.
She turns to look back up the dry wash and there’s nothing but the white rising chute and the dark conical shapes that are its borders. Then, arriving out of the heights, there appears a dark falling thing on the snow. Black as night and gliding down. An immense bat of the woods. A black angel on skis.
She takes two wild steps away and on the third the snowshoe doesn’t rise and she falls heavy and facedown into the snow. She kicks but the snowshoe won’t move, it’s snagged on something, gut-hooked like a fish. She tries to get her other foot up and around but can’t drag it through the weight of the snow, the weight of herself. Worse than that: she sends the signals to the leg and nothing happens, no response from the muscles. She begins to dog-paddle in the snow, trying to get herself turned over. Though she can’t see it she knows there’s a tree nearby—the sensation of needles raking her face as she fell, the piney smell of them is still with her. If she can get a hand on a lower branch she can pull herself out.
She shoves at the empty snow, and twists, and manages to turn herself enough to see, over the edge of the depression, the last of his descent. Arms out and legs spread in flying rapture, riding the tails of his snowshoes. When he hits the level snow at the bottom, his crampons bite and he pitches forward, aloft, and lands in a sure-footed concussion of powder two feet from where she lies. In the darkness above her his teeth are brilliant.
He squats down and puts a hand on her snowshoe and all her flesh trembles. She stares up into the steeples of the trees, the falling snow, with weird absorption. The flakes in their slow, distinct tumblings—the brightness and clarity of each one of them. They fall without care or intent, will go on falling no matter what. Her mind knows this, and disbelieves it, and is sick with it.
You’re snagged on something under the snow, he says, breathing hard. Didn’t I warn you? He wrestles the snowshoe free and gives her foot a kind of rough toss. He looks down on her. This curious thing in the snow.
You know what? I don’t believe you never snowshoed before. Nobody moves that good their first time. Damn. I about gave up. I puked up eggs and bacon three hours ago.
Christmas Day, she remembers then. In two months she would be twenty.
He shrugs off his pack and brings out his water bottle. Look at this—frozen solid! Doesn’t take long. He scoops a gloveful of snow and pushes it into his mouth. Works it around. Swallows. He glances about the dark woods.
You’ve really done it now, haven’t you? We’re way the heck out here now. No tent. Too far and too dark and too cold to walk back tonight. There isn’t anything we can do but get under the snow and try to keep each other from freezing to death.
He stares at her and she looks beyond him. The black-and-white patterns of the trees. The careless ghostly flakes. You got any ideas how we do that? he says, and she shakes her head.
I do. Now give me your hand and let’s get you on your feet. I want to see what all you got in your pockets.
No, she says.
What’s that?
No.
Don’t tell me no, kiddo. He grabs her by the jacket and lifts her into a twisted, half-sitting position and holds her there—and then lets go, and she falls onto her side again. He stands and reaches down and takes her jacket in both fists and hauls the dead weight of her up and onto her back, where she sinks once more into the snow. He stands over her, bright clouds like fury erupting from his lungs.
I could use a little cooperation here, he says, and a small voice in the dark says: Please. I just want to go home.
What did you say?
Please, says the voice.
He looks into the black sky and fills his lungs and wails. There’s no other word for it. The sound tears away into the night and stops the small hearts of whatever small things hear it.
He walks straddle-legged over her and drops to his knees, his weight landing squarely on her hips and sinking her more deeply into the snow. He takes glovetips in his teeth and pulls one glove off and tugs off the other and seizes the zipper-pull at her throat and jerks it down, opening her chest to the cold.
Kiddo, he says. Don’t you understand you are home?
His hands are up inside her jacket. They find the water bottle and slip it into his own jacket, then they pull up her flannel shirt and push the dingy sports bra roughly from her breasts. Steam lifts palely from her pale skin, rising and moving off like some banished layer of herself. He is talking but she isn’t hearing him, she is deep in the snow and within the snow is the gymnasium, and Allison Chow is on her left and Colby Wilson is on her right, and they are sitting in the wooden bleachers listening to the girl who’s come to speak to them, to tell them this story, and their eyes are wide as they listen, and their hearts are beating. But although they know that what the girl is saying is something that could happen to them, it hasn’t, not yet. It has happened to her, to this girl standing before them. To her, not them. And for that they love her, as fiercely as they love each other.