And I did it anyway.
I set myself to the task the way I approached every difficult or distasteful thing I’d ever done in my life—that is to say with a touch of avoidance and a whole hell of a lot of guilt. Clearly those were qualities I possessed in part from how I’d grown up, but I also think I was born that way. If my mother was flame, I’d always been ice, endowed not with a zest for expression or action but with a tendency toward stillness.
My father, my real father, as much as I knew of him, was similar—moody, sensitive, prone to shutting down. He’d met my mother after college while in the midst of an existential crisis. Not his first, I’m sure, or his last. His parents begged him to return to Rhode Island to attend medical school, but twenty-one-year-old Gus Gibson rebelled against their wishes, traveling instead to California where he wandered Kerouac-style up and down the Pacific Northwest with all his belongings shoved in a duffel bag. After a sun-soaked weekend spent at Reggae on the River, where he smoked hash, dropped acid, and fell in love with a dancing, green-eyed girl from Teyber, Humboldt became his natural resting place. He moved in with my mother, took up surfing, and wrote a lot of bad poetry, surviving, I guess, on what he made selling his driftwood furniture.
My mother likes to tell me he was prone to ennui. Or melancholy. Or any of those words that are meant to sound as if a person’s more attuned to the world than the rest of us who don’t go around feeling as awful as they do. I’d always taken that to mean he’d grown unhappy being tied down to an emotionally unstable woman and the screaming brat they’d produced. I also took it to mean he didn’t want to settle, which I can sort of understand even if it’s hard to sympathize with when you’re the brat in question.
Either way, medical school must’ve started looking pretty good after a while. I was barely out of diapers by the time he took off, the prodigal son returning home to become an internist, leaving nothing behind but promises as empty as the way my mother must’ve felt, being stuck having to raise the son of the man she wasn’t good enough for.
But in that way, I guess, I was nothing like my father. Because he’d given up and left, and I knew I never would.
—
When it rains it pours, and when it snows, everything turns to shit, I guess. God knows how long it took me, but I made it back down the waterfall somehow, only to slip on the icy steps at the very bottom and screw up my left shoulder. Something crumpled inside the joint, like a cardboard box that had been stepped on. Later I’d learn I’d blown out the cartilage, but at the time, it was just one more link of misery in a whole daisy chain of failure.
I waded back through the blizzard, the wind slashing my face hard enough to draw blood. After crossing the meadow, I searched for what I could find of our food and camping gear. There wasn’t much. The snow was nearly a foot deep and everything left outside was buried in white, great swirling smears of it. I gathered what little remained, shoving it all into my bag.
Next, I staggered to the tent Rose and I had shared. My goal was to dismantle it, to bring it back to the others, but the metal stakes slipped from my grasp, too slick to pull from the ground. Unhooking the poles from the outer shell was equally futile, and my shoulder wasn’t the only body part unwilling to do what was needed; my fingers had gone completely numb. I thought they might be dying and ended up wrapping socks around my hands for grip, but they were wet in seconds, and still, I couldn’t grab anything or do anything so I just gave up and lit one of the camping stoves I’d found—a small single butane burner—and hunkered down with it in Mr. Howe’s narrow tent. Thank God for boasting. Knowing he’d taken it up Denali made me feel a lot better about sheltering in there.
Once inside, I warmed my hands and boiled snow and gulped a packet of instant soup before realizing how badly I needed to lie down. I knew better than to take off my clothes, but made an exception for my wet shoes and socks. I also remembered to piss in a water bottle because the books I’d read told me that the effort to heat urine in one’s own body was a waste of precious energy. Then I burrowed deep into Mr. Howe’s sleeping bag and rolled onto my back. Stared at the roof of the tent.
The storm grabbed the structure on all sides and shook it, a howling roar. I lay stiff, my breath puffing above me, too terrified to move. I was Dorothy in her twister, waiting for liftoff. But as the tent walls rippled and pulsed like crashing waves, my mind drifted from Dorothy to another girl: Archie’s lost aunt, little Laney, just eight years old, playing with her brother on the California coast only to be stolen from shore. My lungs choked, imagining her fear. Had she died with hope, with the belief that Archie’s father would save her? Or had she known what was happening as he set her free in a world she couldn’t navigate, turning back only to save himself?
Neither option brought comfort, but I knew I’d rather drown than know I was the cause of someone else’s pain. That was noble, wasn’t it? To think of others first? I’d always told myself that, but doubt chewed at the edges of my certainty. Maybe the truth was that I preferred death to guilt. It was hard to see anything noble in that.
The air grew colder and my mind sleepier. I placed my face as close to the stove as I dared, not caring what fumes I might inhale, so long as they were warm. I breathed and shivered and nothing changed. Every part of me ached. I wanted Rose. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for everything I’d ever done wrong. And then I wanted to save her.
But even in my struggle to survive, my will to death was the greater pull, and I closed my eyes. Told myself to stop dreaming. I’d saved her before, yes, but mostly from herself, her own pain. I had no way of saving Rose from up here. Hell, I couldn’t even save myself.
DAY FOUR
39.
SOMEONE SHOOK ME. Slapped my face.
I groaned. Opened my eyes to darkness and sucked in corpse-like air.
“Ben,” a voice whispered. “Ben, wake up!”
“Is he okay?” someone else asked. “Tell me he’s okay.”
Hands were on my body, and I was pulled up to sitting. I cried out, my shoulder in agony, but my heart lurched, believing maybe I was being rescued or already had been rescued and just didn’t realize it and wouldn’t that be something? But no, it was only Avery and Clay, and they were filthy and freezing and they were somehow squeezed in the tent with me, only I didn’t know how or why.
“What are you doing?” I gasped, then squeaked with pain.
“Where’s Archie?” Avery asked. “We can’t find him.”