“You know, I brought back all the medication Mr. Howe was keeping for us. There’s a prescription of yours in there. If you need it or anything.” I watched her closely, wondering if she’d share with me what the pills were for, if I’d earned that bit of intimacy.
But Shelby just lifted her chin. Let her eyes grow distant. “Cool,” was all she said.
—
We spent the next few hours engaged in activities that, in retrospect, seem stupid and uninformed. But I guess when you want so badly to be doing something, you’ll take almost anything. This involved not only collecting wood to keep the fire going and setting up the second tent, but we also got it in our minds that we needed to continue building a second bonfire closer to the water in a more visible spot. If a helicopter were to come by, went our logic, it would be easier to see.
We also talked about walking out to the south, the long way, but the storm started up again, first dusting us with more snow and hail, and then the wind really went wild, shaking the trees and dropping daggers of ice everywhere. We scattered then, crawling into our tents to huddle in safety, if not the illusion of.
I joined Rose, of course, but Avery came in with us, too, and you know, that might sound weird or whatever, but in the moment, it wasn’t. Rose needed another Percocet, so I gave one to her. Avery curled up on the opposite side of her, burrowing between a sleeping bag and the frozen ground. I didn’t mention the bedbugs. There wasn’t anything to be done about them, and pretending the problem didn’t exist felt like the most generous act.
My stomach growled. I couldn’t sleep but laid my head on a pair of wadded-up sweatpants and let my mind dream of food my mouth longed to eat. Cooking was a skill I’d picked up as a kid. When my mom was up for it, it was actually one of few activities she genuinely enjoyed. She was good at it, too. Neither of us were adventurous eaters, but she taught me how to roast a whole chicken and bake oven fries salted with garlic and how to flip an omelet in a way that looked fancy. That last she’d learned from her line-cook days. Rose, on the other hand, always wanted me to branch out with my culinary interests, growing impatient when I didn’t want to try things like ceviche or tripe or even our own local Humboldt Bay oysters topped with horseradish. “You have no culture,” she’d say, exasperated, and while I saw her point, I also thought she was wrong. I was the product of my culture, same as her, and I didn’t have to like or respect it any more than she did to know it was still a large part of who I was.
As I lay there, eyes closed, I overheard Avery talking to Rose. It was a quiet conversation, punctuated by the crack of falling branches and the sound of snow turning to rain to the strike the roof above us. I couldn’t hear it all, what they were saying, and I suppose I wasn’t meant to. Rose’s voice, in particular, was softer, barely there, but I took in what I could.
“You’re brave, Rosa,” I heard Avery whisper. “I mean it. You’re going to be okay.”
There was a long pause as Rose said something I couldn’t hear.
“No. It won’t be like that . . . Yes, I promise.”
Another pause.
“To the best of us,” Avery said softly. Then: “Yeah, I miss him. I didn’t . . . I thought this weekend was going to be different. I know you thought that, too. Maybe that was stupid, some of the things he said. But I know you tried. We all did.”
Rose’s answer still wasn’t audible, but I knew she said something and I knew Avery heard her, because she said one last thing to Rose.
“It’s how we should all go. I mean it. You gave him that. It was a gift. Your gift. We should all be so blessed.”
—
Although the temperature rose enough to cause rain, the storm lasted most of the afternoon, sending sheets of water down from the sky; and it was hard not to picture Archie up there throwing buckets on us with glee. Lying awake while the girls slept, I endured a stretch of panic, envisioning us being washed away by a flash flood. Nothing came of it, though. The rain tapered off by dusk and we crawled from our tents to survey the landscape.
Clay got the fire going again by some sort of alchemy. A lot of the snow was gone, but everything was soaked, pooling with rainwater, including much of our firewood. I was sent to check on the second bonfire, which was likewise ruined. Shelby and Avery gathered all the food they could find and set it on the card table for an inventory. It wasn’t much. Even with what we’d brought back from the upper campsite, we had only three packets of instant cocoa, a half-empty bottle of vodka, a package of beef jerky, two dehydrated camping meals, some trail mix, and a bag of cheese puffs.
“This is depressing,” Clay said. “No one’s coming for us.”
“What’re we going to do?” Shelby asked.
“We need to walk out,” Avery said. “We should try the access road first.”
Clay looked at her. “Tomás says it’s impossible. The whole trail collapsed.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”
“What about the long way?” I asked. “We could go out through Canyon Creek.”
“It’s ten miles,” Shelby said.
I did the math in my head. It had taken us at least two hours to travel four miles that morning. And that had been downhill. “Then let’s try the access road first. It can’t hurt. Maybe there’s a way around.”
“Now?” Clay asked.
“No . . . it’s getting dark. We’ll have to wait until morning.”
Shelby nodded. Rubbed her hands together. “Can we eat something already? I’m starving.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s not a lot left . . .”
She groaned. “I’m hungry, Ben. I don’t think I can stand spending the night like this. And if we don’t get out of here tomorrow, then it won’t matter anyway because we’ll all be—”
“Fine.” I cut that thought off. “Let’s eat the jerky and the cheese puffs. We’ll save the rest for the morning. How’s that sound?”
“Sure.” Shelby reached for the food. “I can live with that.”
42.
THE CURTAIN OF night came down, blanketing our world with darkness. The temperature sank below freezing again, turning everything icy and slick, a morbid chill.
We hadn’t decided who was going, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be the one to hike out for help in the morning. Not with my busted shoulder. To atone for my frailty, I volunteered to stay up that night and keep watch.
“Keep watch from what?” Tomás asked me, as the others trailed off to their respective tents. He’d been in with Rose for the past hour or so, which meant he’d missed the earlier conversation about the food rationing and what we planned to do.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything. I’ll keep the fire going.”
He dropped his body into the damp chair beside me, pulled it close to the flames. “Mind if I keep you company?”
I looked at him.
“I can’t sleep,” he explained. “It’s kind of a long-term problem.”
“I see.”
“And I’m worried about Rose.”
“Yeah, I am, too.”
His fingers pulled at a string dangling from his sweatshirt sleeve. “She can’t keep anything down. She’s getting weaker. She’s sleeping now—Shel’s with her—but it’s not good.”