I didn’t answer.
“Look, she kept touching me, had her hands everywhere and at some point I asked her what she was doing. She missed you, she said, she needed you, and I told her she had a funny way of showing it. Then she whispered in my ear that she was rolling, which made sense because the bitch was high as fuck.”
“What?” I was confused. That didn’t sound like Rose. She didn’t do drugs. Not that kind, at least. Or so I thought. Then again, she hadn’t known I was coming and I recalled her energy from that night, electric and charged, so different from how she usually was. The way she’d laughed and lit the air as she bounced against and away from me, a glittering ball of mirth and movement.
Archie shrugged. “I told her to give me some, but she just sat and drank with us. Then someone said they’d seen you drive up. Girl was out of my lap in an instant and dancing away. ‘That’s it?’ I asked her, and she nodded and said something like, ‘I have to find him now.’ I told her, ‘You seem perfectly happy right here.’ Well, she gave me this dopey smile and that’s when she said it.”
“Said what?”
“She goes, ‘I am happy, Archie. That’s why I have to find him. I can’t hurt him when I’m feeling this good.’”
“Hurt me how?”
“You tell me.”
“I have no idea.”
Archie scratched his chin. “Rose told me you’d say that. She says you insist on pretending everything’s fine, even when you’re miserable. That you’ve trained yourself not to see the hammer hitting you in the head, and that you’d rather just complain all the time about having a headache.”
I went cold. “She did not say that.”
“Not that night,” he admitted. “But she did say it.”
“When?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Then I don’t believe you.”
He laughed. “Believe whatever the hell you want. You think I care?”
“Why’d you call her a bitch that night, then?” I demanded. “If you two are so fucking close?”
“I called her a bitch because she treated me like trash. She left me to be with you, some useless white boy, which made me feel worse than trash, actually. More like a pile of shit.”
I was aghast. “You hate me, don’t you? That’s what this is about. You’ve always hated me. The only time you even acknowledge my existence is when you’re drunk. Or stoned. Or you want something.”
Archie pulled his flask out as if on cue and took a swig.
“Nice,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
He swallowed whatever was in there with a smack. “I don’t hate you, Ben. If I did, you’d know. Trust me.”
That was all I could take. I hunched forward and twisted my head to look the other way, out into the dark woods, where the sound of rain echoed off the sheltering trees and mist pooled on the ground as if the earth was struggling to stay warm the same way we were. Whatever thoughts were in my head at that moment were not ones I wanted to be having. At all.
“Hey,” Archie said after a minute.
I didn’t respond. He reached out and pushed me with his shoe again, like he had when I’d gotten sick. He did it lightly at first but then he kicked me, sending fresh waves of pain sloshing through my head.
“What?” I snapped.
“Look.” He pointed. I turned and looked, facing away from the woods and out onto the mountain and the lake and the distant valley below.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
It was snowing.
37.
“WHAT THE HELL is happening?” Archie hissed. I didn’t answer, just stared in disbelief as the cacophony of hail-thunder-rain gave way to the peaceful silence of white puffs tumbling down from the sky. Gathering on the ground in swirling drifts.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”
He pushed his wet hair back. Gave a barking laugh. “Christ almighty. Which one of us do you think pissed God off? It’s October.”
“We need to get back down,” I said. “This is bad. We’re going to get stuck up here if the storm gets any worse.”
Archie grabbed his backpack and crawled forward in the mud, carefully skirting around my puke as he prepared to leave the shelter of the thicket. “Yeah, about that. I’m not going back down.”
“Wait, what? What does that mean?”
“It means I’m doing what I came up here to do. I’m not quitting now. I’m going to get that money. No one else is going to get it. That’s for damn sure.”
“You’re serious?” I asked.
“Very.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He squeezed his way into the storm, leaving me behind. “It probably is.”
I crawled after him. I had no fight left. “Okay, you win, Arch. Let’s just go. Let’s get this over with so we can get off this fucking mountain.”
He turned to gawk at me, still on his hands and knees. “You’re staying?”
“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
Archie gave me the strangest look. “You tell me.”
“Let’s just go,” I said again. I felt itchy. Anxious. I wanted to get moving.
“Hell, all right, then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
—
It was easier to hike in the snow than the rain. The trail smoothed out and we trudged side by side. Archie kept drinking from that flask of his, until his words were slurring and his gait was wobbly, and finally I drank some, too, against my better judgment. I needed the warmth, I guess. Or the courage. I also made him give me back the map and the compass. He didn’t know the first thing about using them.
Another quarter mile on, with the icy summit looming above, we rounded a steep bend in the trail only to have a second alpine lake come into view, a smaller one, with snow dusting its shore, its water black and deep.
“Hey, what’s this one called?” Archie asked.
I pulled the map out, clutched it in my freezing hands. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. “Granite Lake.”
He shuffled right to the lake’s edge. Stared down its depths. “Looks like a good place to drown.”
“You think?”
“It’s like a quarry,” he explained. “You jump in, there’s no way out. Rocks are too high from the waterline.”
He was right. Unlike Grizzly Lake, Granite Lake was snow fed, which meant the low water was due to the drought. A paradox of sorts: What little water there was meant it was more likely to kill you.
We stood there, unmoving. The snow kept falling, the clumps growing heavier, thicker. It melted on the lake. It gathered on our skin.
“My aunt drowned,” Archie said softly.
I looked at him. “Avery’s mom?”
“Nah, I’m not talking about her.” He took another swig from his flask. “That was shitty, though. How that happened.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s still shitty. My uncle, he’s never gotten over that. Probably never will. Same with Avery. She’s always been the Girl Whose Mom Died. She fucking hates it, you know. It’s like people always put their own sadness on her because they figure she’ll know how to deal with it.”