Well, that was a more astute observation than I would’ve expected from Archie DuPraw. And, much to my chagrin, I realized it was also a pretty apt description of the way I’d always seen Avery. Maybe the way I still saw her.
“You’re close with her, huh?” I asked. “Avery.”
He wiped his red nose, then wiped it again. “You’d better not fuck her over, Gibby. She’s a nice girl. Smart, too. She’s been through a lot.”
“I don’t plan on doing anything to Avery.”
“No . . . don’t say it like that.” He shook a wet, boozy finger at me. “That girl’s too good for you. I’ve told her. I don’t know what the hell she sees in you.”
I rubbed my hands together. “Maybe you should tell her I’m with Rose.”
He snorted. “Maybe you shouldn’t have screwed her yesterday.”
“Tell me about your aunt,” I said quickly. “The one who drowned.”
Archie’s head bobbed. “Yeah, that was my dad’s little sister. Laney. She was eight when it happened. Long fucking time ago.”
“It happened in a lake?”
“Nope. Ocean. The Pacific. Down near Bonny Doon, north of Santa Cruz. You been there?”
“I’ve never been anywhere.”
He stared at me. “You serious?”
“Absolutely. This trip is my first time out of Humboldt.”
“No way,” he said. “That’s kind of crazy, you know. It’s sad.”
I folded my arms. “It’s true. And I don’t need you telling me how sad you think my life is.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, I got it. Don’t shit yourself. Anyway, they were on the beach, playing by the water, building goddamn sandcastles or something, when my aunt and my dad got caught by a sneaker wave. He was twelve. Pulled them almost a mile offshore. She couldn’t swim. He kept trying to hold on to her.”
“But he survived?”
“Clearly.”
“Who rescued him?”
“No one rescued him,” Archie said. “That’s just it. He saved himself.”
“How?”
He gave a sick grin. “By letting her go.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. Growing up with him, with someone who could do something like that. It’s been . . .” His voice trailed off.
“It’s been what?”
“Fuck it. Never mind. Let’s keep moving.” He turned and started walking again.
I dragged after him. My pants grew stiff with ice, making them even heavier than before. The temperature was plummeting, and if I was cold, Archie had to be miserable. Stuck in a freak snowstorm, he didn’t even have a jacket, just a dumpy hooded sweatshirt and some ugly beanie cap he’d pulled from his backpack. It had a walrus stitched on the front. “Archie, come on. This is stupid. We’re gonna die out here.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Is it worth it if we do?”
“Is it worth it?” Archie stumbled at that point and nearly went down. The flask in his hand went flying into a snowbank. I scrambled to retrieve it. “Look around us, Gibby. I already have nothing! My life, everything about it, is nothing!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It means, at this point, anything would be worth it.”
The desperation in his voice was painful to hear, but before I could respond, Archie regained his footing. His sense of purpose, too. Shoulders square, his head held high, he marched forward, leaving bold depressions in the snow. The prints were his, large and unmistakable.
I did my best to keep up.
—
My best was far from enough. The snow fell faster, thicker, and I was continually smacked back by the storm sweeping over the mountain’s peak. It barreled straight for us, and I was no match for its building force, the pelting rush of ice and more. If climbing the Scramble in the rain had been Sisyphean, this struggle made me feel more like Icarus—a journey flawed more by delusion than difficulty, and not only was it clear we were destined to fail, failure was quickly becoming a matter of life and death.
It wasn’t anything I’d planned for, obviously, but I knew a lot about hypothermia—all the survival guides I’d read covered it, complete with gruesome examples throughout history: the Donner Party, who’d been stuck not far from where we were; the Antarctic Terra Nova expedition, in which the heroic Captain Lawrence Oates had sacrificed himself to the elements, only to have everyone else freeze to death anyway; and Oregon’s horrific Mount Hood disaster, which was almost too awful to contemplate. I’d also learned how in the throes of dying, people often tore off their clothes or sought to bury themselves in snow. Once your body started to fail, it seemed, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Prevention was key. Good decision-making, too.
But Archie was as stubborn as ever. He kept going, the colder it got, toiling like an ox, and at some point, I pulled on his arm. As hard as I could.
“We’ll come back,” I shouted over the roar of the storm. “We’ve got to get back to the others. Otherwise we’re going to die of exposure!”
He shook his head. “We’re almost there!”
“You don’t know that! We can’t even see the trail anymore! We’ll never make it!”
“Then go! I’ll find my own way back.”
“I’m not leaving you!”
“Why not? You said it yourself. You’re going to die out here. You don’t want that. So you should go. Here.” Archie reached into his backpack and pulled out both sets of car keys. He handed them to me, his fingers dark with frostnip. “Now you don’t have any reason to stay.”
“Arch . . . ,” I said.
“Go! Leave. I don’t need you.”
I stood firm. “I won’t do that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m not your dad!”
Archie’s eyes flared hot, mean. “You know, Gibby, I’d respect you a hell of a lot more if you were.”
I threw the map at him.
The compass, too.
After that, there’s a part of me that wishes I’d done what he told me to do. That I’d possessed enough instinct or will for survival to abandon Archie on that mountain for my own self-preservation. That I’d somehow been able to make the right choice at the right time. But you know me—not only do I not make the right choices, I so rarely make any.
So what’s true is that he stayed on that mountaintop without me. That just as Captain Oates had stepped from tent to ice in one final act of self-determination, Archie turned and headed up that snow-covered trail, straight into the blustering storm. It was a death wish—no one could’ve survived those conditions, not dressed the way he was—and though I would’ve if I could’ve, I wasn’t physically able to follow him. Instead, I watched him go, disappearing into the wind and the whiteness, to be swallowed up by his conviction—which was something he had in excess and which I had never found.
What’s also true is that in the end, I didn’t choose to leave Archie.
What’s true is that he left me.
38.
IT’S SAID THAT the definition of insanity is attempting to do the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome. But if that’s the case, then my attempt to get down that mountain safely in whiteout conditions during a freak blizzard wearing nothing but frozen track pants, a bloodstained T-shirt, and a leather jacket I’d stolen from a dead man must’ve been something far worse because I expected to die.