Chapter Twenty-Eight
Diana sat curled in Daniel’s lap on the floor, feeling his warm breath in her ear. She reached up and touched the back of his neck, the hollow where the prickliness of his shaved head met soft skin. He let her draw her fingers across the familiar contours of his cheek, his sandpaper jaw, the puckered cleft in his chin.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why didn’t you come back?”
“I can explain everything.” He put his finger under her chin and gently raised her face to his. “Just give me a chance. I can explain.”
“I’m listening.”
A muscle worked in the corner of his jaw and he took a breath. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but when I woke up in the hospital I had no idea who I was. They told me that I’d crawled out of the wilderness into a little village. I was in pretty bad shape. I’d been out there for days. I have no idea how I stayed alive or I how got there, but I did. They airlifted me to the nearest hospital. They said it was a miracle that I came through in one piece. Pretty much, anyway.”
He splayed his fingers, showing her their scarred tips. “Frostbite,” he said. “My toes too. The end of my nose. They were able to reconstruct it. I was very lucky. It could have been much worse.
“All I had on me was my driver’s license. I was so raw and swollen, no one would have believed that the face on it was mine. Water had gotten under the laminate, and the name, address—most of the print on the license was illegible.
“I spent weeks in the hospital, months in rehab.” He glanced down at her. “I started to walk again, but still I didn’t know who I was or where I’d been. I kept coming back to that driver’s license, holding it up to the light, examining it, trying to decipher the name. I had to guess at some of the letters. I Googled every possible permutation until finally I found my own death notice. I’d been dead for six months. It felt unreal.
“I tried to find out more about myself. Finally I found that ridiculous photograph of the three of us all dressed up for Halloween. Remember?”
Diana did. They’d started out thinking they’d go as the Three Musketeers and ended up as the Three Stooges. As Larry, Daniel had worn a flesh-colored bathing cap with teased-out steel wool glued around the sides and back. Jake had gotten a buzz cut so he could go as Curly. Diana as Moe wore a black wig with bangs down to the bridge of her nose. She’d practiced that sour, disgruntled Moe expression, fueled by a pugnacious chin. Daniel and Jake had drilled her on the routines, and for one drunken night, she’d completely gotten into what they found so hilarious about the slapstick shtick.
She’d broken down after that and actually watched some of the Three Stooges shorts. Soon she’d had enough. But it made her realize that for all the violence the knuckleheads inflicted on one another, they shared a genuine affection.
Daniel shifted Diana off his lap and helped her to her feet. Then he sat in one of the rolling office chairs. “Did we have a great time or what?” He tilted the chair back, crossing his arms and grinning at her. The familiarity of the pose took her breath away. “That photo of us, goofing around like that—it was the trigger. After that, things started coming back to me. Know what I remembered first? Before my parents, before my hometown, before anything else I remembered Toro, the black Lab we had when I was a kid. Memory’s weird.
“Soon, more and more memories came back. But it was months before I could even think about what I was going to do next. By then, I’d started to remember what happened.”
He went on, but Diana barely listened. Pick, pick . . . That was the sound she’d heard as she and Jake had waited on the icy ledge, their climbing ropes coiled on the ground. She’d tried to peer over the edge, but the wind had buffeted her, eager to bite any part of her that was exposed. She’d slipped her balaclava back on, crouched, and listened as Daniel sank his picks into the ice and drove in one crampon then another. She’d imagined him pushing and pulling his way up.
Then a moment of utter silence. She’d thought, He’s reached the second screw hold as she waited for the sound of his ax and a reassuring shout that he was on the move again. Instead there had been a cry and a sickening thud.
Diana had scrambled to the edge of the outcropping, desperate to see what had happened and almost slipping over herself. Daniel’s howl of despair had grown alternately fainter and louder as it bounced off frozen rock.
“Daniel!” Diana had screamed, the wind flinging the words back into her face.
Frantically, arm over arm, Jake had hauled up the climbing rope. From the end dangled an empty safety harness.
Afterward, after the search party returned with only his dented helmet, everyone had asked how this could have happened to an experienced climber. Theoretically it was impossible to fall out of a properly rigged safety harness. But it was even more impossible to survive the kind of fall Daniel would have taken.
She stared up the wall of the silo to the ledge on which Daniel had perched. He must have made the descent using the rebars. No ropes, no climbing harness. A single misstep would have been his last.
“Were you free climbing then too?” she asked, interrupting him. “Is that how you fell? Is that why you insisted on coming up last?”
He gave her a long look. “It was the Eiger.” He spread his hands, that bad-boy charm still working for him. “How could I do it any other way?”
Diana knew. She’d always known. They had each rigged their own safety harnesses, and it had been the only explanation that made any sense. Daniel never buckled a safety belt on a roller coaster. Never encountered a railing he didn’t climb over or an extreme sport he didn’t relish. Canyon gliding. Parachuting. Bungee jumping. Skateboarding through the city, holding on to the bumpers of cars.
“How long have you been back?” she asked.
“December,” he said.
That was four months ago. By then Diana had long ago moved into her mother’s house. The new business was taking off.
“So Jake knew,” Diana said. A statement, not a question.
“Not until I called him.”
“But why didn’t you get in touch with me?” Diana just stared at him, trying to fathom how he could have left her twisting in agony.
“Jake told me that you’d moved back home. Buried me in your mind. Collected the insurance. A million bucks.” He whistled. “Exposed that health insurance scam. Awesome. It was what you’d dreamed about. You were already a legend. I couldn’t just show up and pull the rug out from under you. I mean, it would have been a huge mess. You’d have had to return the insurance settlement.”
Diana felt her mouth drop open. So he’d been doing her a favor, keeping her in the dark?
He went on. “I’d created a new identity for myself. It’s a lot easier to do that abroad than it is here. When I got back to the States, Jake put me up. Then I found this place. But coming back turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. And it wasn’t the same without you. But you’d grieved and gotten on with your life. I felt like I couldn’t just show up.” He reached over for the cowboy hat and put it on his head. “But I missed you. I had to see you.”
Tears pricked in Diana’s eyes. “As GROB?”
“I couldn’t help myself. I guess that was selfish. But I knew we couldn’t be together. I thought at least we could talk.” He swallowed. “I thought that would give us both back part of what we’d lost.”
She wanted to believe him. Really she did.