“You really are an asshole.”
“Yeah, the legends are true.” I wanted to laugh—really laugh. “Listen, Mel, sorry I woke you. We’ve got a little problem.”
I paused and Melanie waited.
I was about to speak when she said, “How did you do it? The mountain lion. All that.”
I squinted against the sunlight. I was still thinking about Hannah and my failing plan to drive her to me, and wondering why I was such a dick most of the time, and why I couldn’t seem to change. And then I was thinking about the mountain lion. Her muzzle was pure white, like she dipped it in paint. Beautiful—and so terrible.
“The cat wasn’t part of the plan,” I said.
“Jesus…”
“Mm. I cut my wrist and my forearm. I took codeine … not enough. I had a tourniquet around my arm. The idea was to bleed enough to…”
“Enough to make it look like you bled out.”
“Right. Like I fell on my ice axe or something. Sounds stupid now.” I lit another cigarette with trembling hands. It felt good to tell someone what happened—someone besides Hannah. I’d spared Hannah the details because she’d go crazy with worry.
Melanie waited for me to continue.
“I fell,” I said simply. “I lost consciousness. The pain meds, the blood loss … the cold or the altitude, I don’t know, all of it. I blacked out. My plan was to hike out and wait for a fresh snow to cover my tracks. The cat…”—a cylinder of ash broke from my cigarette—“found me. Dragged me, I guess. Mel, I was out cold. I don’t know for how long. When I came to, she was shaking my leg, she was just shaking it and shaking it, and the skin, she was … it was tearing, she was shredding it without even trying. I was stuck on a rock. I saw, you know, I saw how she was trying to pull me over a rock and my pack was stuck.”
“Oh, my God,” Mel whispered.
I stared into the memory.
I wouldn’t tell Melanie how I thought I was dying—how I thought, This is it. How I wasn’t ready. How desperately I wanted to live, and how scared I felt.
“Anyway.” I laughed. “Long story short, I woke the fuck up and I screamed my fucking head off, and I waved my arms and all that, and I scared the shit out of the cat. She took one look at me and she was like, You really are an asshole, and she beat it.”
I forced another chuckle. I slid my bare feet through the snow on the deck. Cold. Cold that hurt, because I was alive.
“That’s insane,” Melanie said.
“Yeah, for sure.” I struggled to sound blasé. “Couldn’t have bribed the cat for a better performance. Blood, animal hair, the trail into the woods—mountain lion attack, case closed. I threw on my snowshoes and hiked out of there, and that was that.”
“Your leg—”
“Was fine, shallow wounds. I had a first aid kit. I’m fine.” I winced. Fine could never describe my hike off Longs Peak with a torn calf and bleeding arm in subzero conditions. Every few steps I stopped to make sure I wasn’t trailing blood. Every few steps I thought, I’m too weak to get to the cabin, if I sleep I’ll die, I’m going to die, I’m really going to die out here.
“Was it worth it?” Mel said.
“Was what worth what?”
“All that. Everything you went through to disappear. Was it worth it?”
“Hey, you don’t know me.” I stubbed out my cigarette in the snow. “You don’t know what matters to me. You don’t know how fucking bad it was, with half of Denver breathing down my neck every fucking time I went out for a cup of coffee—”
“Okay, okay!”
“Yeah. Okay. Story time’s over. You need to pull Night Owl off the Internet. Now.”