She had to let him know she was there.
The poems. She leaned close, whispered in his ear with her hoarse, failing voice, over the sound of her chattering teeth. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone when the moon was awful clear…”
*
HE HEARS SOMETHING. Jumbled sounds that mean nothing, letters flung in a pool, floating apart.
He tries to move. Can’t.
Numb. Pins and needles in his skin.
Pain. Excruciating. Head exploding, leg on fire.
He tries again to move, groans. Can’t think.
Where is this?
Pain is the biggest part of him. All there is. All that’s left. Pain. Blind. Alone.
No.
Her.
What does that mean?
*
“MATTHEWMATTHEWMATTHEW.”
He hears that sound. It means something to him, but what?
Pain obliterates everything else. A headache so bad he can’t think. The smell of vomit and mold and decay. His lungs and nostrils ache. He can’t breathe without gasping.
He is beginning to study his pain, see nuances. His head is pressure building, pounding, squeezing; leg is sharp, stabbing, fire and ice.
“Matthew.”
A voice. (Hers.) Like sunshine on his face.
“I’mhere. I’mhere.”
Meaningless.
“Ssshitsokay. I’mhere. I’lltellyouanotherstory. MaybeSamMcGee.”
A touch.
Agony. He thinks he screams.
But maybe it’s all a lie …
*
DYING. He can feel the life draining out of him. Even the pain is gone.
He is nothing, just a lump in the wet and cold, pissing himself, vomiting, screaming. Sometimes his breathing just stops and he coughs when it starts again.
The smell is terrible. Mold, muck, decay, piss, vomit. Bugs are crawling all over him, buzzing in his ears.
The only thing keeping him alive is Her.
She talks and talks. Familiar rhyming words that almost make sense. He can hear her breathing. He knows when she is awake and when she’s asleep. She gives him water, makes him drink.
He is bleeding now, through his nose. He can taste it, feel its viscous slime.
She is blearying.
No. That’s a wrong word.
Crying.
He tries to hold on to that, but it goes like everything else, at a blur, too fast to grasp. He is floating again.
Her.
IloveyouMatthewdon’tleaveme.
Consciousness pulls away from him. He fights for it, loses, and sinks back into the smelly darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
After two terrible, freezing nights, Matthew moved for the first time. He didn’t wake up, didn’t open his eyes, but he moaned and made this terrible clicking sound, like he was suffocating.
A trapezoid of blue sky hung above them. It had finally stopped raining. Leni saw the rock face clearly, all the ridges and indentations and footholds.
He was burning up with fever. Leni made him swallow more aspirin and poured the last of the Bactine on his wound and rewrapped it in new gauze and duct tape.
Still, she could feel the life ebbing out of him. There was no him in the broken body beside her. “Don’t leave me, Matthew…”
A distant whirring sound reached down into the darkness, the thwop-thwop-thwop of a helicopter.
She unwound from Matthew and scrambled into the mud. “We’re here!” she shouted, sloshing to the break in the rocks where the sky showed.
She flattened herself to the sheer rock wall, waved her good arm, screaming, “We’re here! Down here!”
She heard dogs barking, the buzz of human voices.
A flashlight shone down on her.
“Lenora Allbright,” yelled a man in a brown uniform. “Is that you?”
*
“WE’RE TAKING YOU UP FIRST, Lenora,” someone said. She couldn’t see his face in the mix of sunlight and shadow.
“No! Matthew first. He’s … worse.”
The next thing she knew, she was being strapped into a cage and hauled up the sheer wall. The cage banged into rock, clanged. Pain ricocheted in her chest, down her arm.
The cage landed on solid ground with a clatter. Sunlight blinded her. There were men in uniforms all around, dogs barking wildly. Whistles being blown.
She closed her eyes again, felt herself being transported to the grassy patch up the trail, heard the thwop-thwop-thwop of a helicopter. “I want to wait for Matthew,” she yelled.
“You’ll be fine, miss,” someone in a uniform said, his face too close, his nose spread like a mushroom in the middle of his face. “We’re airlifting you to the hospital in Anchorage.”
“Matthew,” she said, clutching his collar with her one good hand, yanking him close.
She saw his face change. “The boy? He’s behind you. We’ve got him.”
He didn’t say Matthew would be fine.
*
LENI OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY, saw a strip of overhead lighting above her, a line of glowing white against an acoustical tile ceiling. The room smelled cloyingly sweet, full of flower arrangements and balloons. Her ribs were wrapped so tightly it hurt to breathe and her broken arm was in a cast. The window beside her revealed a pale purple sky.
“There’s my baby girl,” Mama said. The left side of her face was swollen and her forehead was black and blue. Wrinkled, dirty clothes told the tale of a mother’s worry. She kissed Leni’s forehead, pushed the hair gently away from her eyes.
“You’re okay,” Leni said, relieved.
“I’m okay, Leni. You’re the one we’ve been worried about.”
“How did they find us?”
“We looked everywhere. I was beside myself with worry. Everyone was. Tom finally remembered a place his wife had loved to camp. He went looking and found the truck. Search and Rescue saw some broken branches on Bear Claw Ridge where you fell. Thank God.”
“Matthew tried to save me.”
“I know. You told the paramedics about a dozen times.”
“How is he?”
Mama touched Leni’s bruised cheek. “He’s in bad shape. They don’t know if he’ll make it through the night.”
Leni struggled to sit up. Every breath and movement hurt. There was a needle stuck in the back of her hand, and around it a strip of flesh-colored tape over a purple bruise. She eased the needle out, threw it aside.
“What are you doing?” Mama asked. “You have two broken ribs.”
“I need to see Matthew.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t care.” She swung her bare, bruised, scratched legs over the side of the bed and stood. Mama moved in close, became a stanchion of support. Together, they shuffled away from the bed.
At the door, Mama lifted the curtain and looked through the window, then nodded. They slipped out; Mama closed the door quietly behind them. Leni inched painfully forward on stockinged feet, following her mother down one corridor to the next until they came to the brilliantly lit, coldly efficient-looking area called the intensive care unit.
“Wait here,” Mama said. She went on ahead, checking rooms. At the last one on the right, she turned back, motioned for Leni to follow.
On the door behind her mother, Leni saw WALKER, MATTHEW written on a clipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
“This may be hard,” Mama said. “He looks bad.”
Leni opened the door, went inside.
There were machines everywhere, thunking and humming and whirring, making a sound like human breathing.
The boy in the bed couldn’t be Matthew.
His head was shaved and covered in bandages; gauze crisscrossed his face, the white fabric tinged pink by blood seepage. One eye was covered by a protective cup; the other was swollen shut. His leg was elevated, suspended about eighteen inches above the bed by a leather sling, and so swollen it looked more like a tree trunk than a boy’s leg. All she could see of it were his big, purple toes peeking out from the bandages. A tube in his slack mouth connected him to a machine that lifted and fell in breaths, inflated and deflated his chest. Breathing for him.
Leni took hold of his hot, dry hand.
He was here, fighting for his life because of her, because he loved her.
She leaned down, whispered, “Don’t leave me, Matthew. Please. I love you.”