She stepped backward off the edge.
She could have cried with joy when the soles of her boots found the wall. She began to descend. Slowly. Cautiously. Just a couple of feet at a time. Her right hand never left the brake. A cold cloud of mist from the waterfall enveloped her. The noise was immense. Her heart thumped even louder. It was like she was being chased.
She tried to ignore the waterfall, but it was shooting out of the wall with the force of a fire hydrant. Water splashed her boots as she descended. The spray crept up her body, drenching her legs, her arms, her chest. She was grateful for the wet suit beneath her clothes. She fought the impulse to drop faster, to drop farther, to free-fall to the bottom.
The water found her neck now. Her face. It was so frigid it felt like a claw against her skin. She twisted away. She needed a new plan. She needed to get farther away from the falls.
Zoe began inching sideways, away from the torrent. She was descending at an angle now, like a pendulum. The muscles in her legs were objecting, tensing up, sending out warning shots of pain. The rope was scraping against the rocks. Zoe crept five or six feet sideways, but still the spray lashed at her. If she could just make it a couple more feet. She reached out with the toe of her right boot.
It landed on ice.
She slipped. Her heart flew into her mouth.
She felt herself being yanked back toward the falls, her body twirling like a top. She couldn’t stop—couldn’t find anything to grab. Up above her, the rope sawed against the edge of the cliff.
Zoe was swinging so hard she was pulled under the falls. The water pounded her back, furious and cold. It banged on her rickety helmet. It soaked every part of her. She tried to move, to push off the wall, to do something, anything, but her body was rigid with shock, and suddenly there was a terrible flower blooming in her head.
This is how my father died—terrified and swinging on a rope.
At last, the rope pulled her back out of the water, as if it had all been gravity’s way of telling her that the only way down was straight. Zoe hung suspended for a moment, tears clouding her eyes. She felt shaken, stupid, humiliated. The walkie-talkie trilled in her pack. Did Dallas somehow know what had happened? Had she shouted and not known it? Had he heard her? He couldn’t have.
She didn’t answer. Dallas would hear the shakiness in her voice and tell her to come out. She was fine now. She was fine. But for a sliver of a moment it’d felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and she was hurtling downward.
She took the glove off her right hand, tearing at the Velcro with her teeth. She dropped it into the darkness.
She inspected her harness and her brake. The metal was so cold it seemed electrically charged. She brushed the ice off everything as best she could. Her heart was galloping.
She couldn’t get the thought of her father out of her head.
This is how he died.
She found herself staring at her bare right hand, weirdly fascinated by it, as if it didn’t belong to her.
There’d been blood and skin on her dad’s rope. Was it from his hands? From his neck? Had the rope wound around his throat? Had it choked him—suffocated him—like he was a baby trying to be born?
She was sobbing now. She would have made an awful noise if there hadn’t been a torrent of water spilling along with her tears.
The walkie-talkie rang again, and she answered it angrily: “Can you please leave me alone, please!”
“Can I (what)?” said Dallas.
The explosions of static were worse than ever.
“Can you please leave me alone for a second!” she said.
“Can I what for a what?” said Dallas.
Screw it, she thought.
Zoe dropped the walkie-talkie now, too. She didn’t hear it land, but pictured it smashing on the rock down below, the battery springing out and skittering across the floor of the cave. She turned off her headlamp. She just wanted to hang in the dark a moment. She didn’t care about the spray from the waterfall. She couldn’t get any wetter.
The darkness was absolute. It was as if the water, with its astonishing noise, had decimated all her other senses.
She thought of her dad. She thought of X. She thought of how they’d both be extremely concerned about the borderline-crazy adventure she was embarked on. It was so strange that they would never meet. One had exited her life just as the other entered it. They’d brushed past each other, missing each other by moments.
Zoe twisted slowly on the rope in the dark. She concentrated on the water now. She tried to pick it apart, tried to hear every tiny sound in the middle of the roar. She let the relentlessness of the noise drive all thoughts out of her head—to douse them like fires, one after the other. Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing got deeper.
Later—she couldn’t have said how long it had been—she switched her headlamp back on, and continued her descent. The ice in the rock sparkled all the way down.