“Stop it,” she mumbled, and she pushed my hand away. “Just leave me alone.”
I sat back, temporarily relieved. She wasn’t seizing, just fitful. She was asleep, it seemed, hovering in that space between rest and REM. She settled eventually and the thrashing slowed, although her limbs continued to twitch and jump, like a dog that was dreaming of running past its fence.
48.
DAY DRIFTED INTO afternoon.
No one returned to say they couldn’t make it through the melting snow.
No one came back with help.
No search-and-rescue team found us on their own.
Nothing.
It was just me and her.
But, I whispered in her ear, it was also us.
—
Rose’s fever climbed. She woke again but didn’t recognize me. Her cheeks, which had been so pale and sunken, were now flushed bright like she’d been slapped, and she was breathing hard. Too hard. Steam train fast. Puff-puff-puff.
I’d tied open the tent door earlier to let the air circulate, and I glanced out at the trees. At the growing patches of wet earth and budding moss. The shadows looked longer. The sun lower. Or maybe that was my imagination? I had no clue when night would fall but Rose couldn’t wait until then.
I couldn’t, either.
“Please,” I prayed out loud to no one in particular—or to everyone, really; my desperation was nonspecific. “Please come. Please, please save us.”
—
Rose needed more Tylenol, but before she could swallow it I had to boil more water. Spring or no spring, I couldn’t risk getting her sick from giardia, which was everywhere around here. That meant starting up the fire again—the propane was long gone, as were the water purification pills. I flirted with the idea of jogging back up to the upper campsite and foraging there for supplies but couldn’t bring myself to do it. A fire wasn’t hard. I’d watched Clay every time he’d started ours.
“The flame is like your voice,” he told me, back on our first night by the river, after he’d hauled in all those fish. Then he’d glanced over at me, tomcat scowl etched across his skinny face. “That’s not, like, a shitty metaphor or anything. Acoustics and fire behave really similar to one another. It’s all energy, okay? It’s waves. And if you need more of something you don’t have, you bring in a second energy source to amplify the first. Like this.”
I’d leaned in close as he crafted a nest of dry grass kindling beneath the larger logs he was trying to light. As the kindling caught, its flames flickered short of goal, unable to reach the thicker wood. Its heat quickly dimmed, but before going out completely, Clay crawled forward on his knees and blew beneath the ashes. Oxygen flooded in and the kindling erupted again, its flames shooting higher this time, sending lit sparks spiraling upward to set the logs ablaze.
He sat back on his knees in a haze of satisfaction.
“And that,” he said, “is how you do it.”
Unable to rely on my own skill or experience, I worked hard to re-create just what he’d done: stacking the wood I found into a triangular shape. Finding kindling was more difficult. There was no dry grass or bark—everything was wet and mushy—and as the wind picked up again, whistling through the gorge, I did the only thing I could think of: I pulled the cash I’d found in the Preacher’s jacket from the inside pocket and began to shred it, stuffing the torn bills beneath the branches.
When I’d stuffed enough in there, I set it all ablaze with a match. Only unlike Clay’s fire, there was too much of a breeze for my kindling. It threw the flames in every direction, and I had to cup my hands around the burning money to contain all that energy. Finally, the flames shot straight up and took. I frantically stuffed more cash in to keep it going, and when the wood began to crackle and the heat felt constant, far out of my control, I stuck the water kettle directly on the flames. Once rolling, it would have to boil for three minutes for purification purposes, but the time until then was anyone’s guess.
Rose began to scream.
“Shit.” I slipped and fell trying to run to her, landing on my bad shoulder with a howl. I got up again, quick as I could, and when I got to her, all I could tell was that she’d gotten sick on herself and the blankets. She screamed more when I touched her, tried to help her, and flailed her body.
“Rose, Rose, Rose,” I said. “Please, baby, it’s okay. I’m making water for you. I’ve got more pills. They’ll help.”
Her screaming trailed into hacking coughs and sobbing, only her tears were dry, and that was a bad sign. It meant she was dehydrated and I had no fluids to give her. I put one of the Tylenols in her mouth and tried to get her to swallow it, but she ended up choking. Spitting it out. Sobbing more.
The tent reeked of vomit. I brushed flies from her body, but they kept coming back. I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t stop telling Rose I loved her, that help was coming and that she would be okay. The pain would stop, I said. She just had to hold on. Her heart jittered against my chest, a wild double-time beat it couldn’t possibly sustain, and while my tears were as dry as they always were, it wasn’t long before I heard my own sobs mix with hers. A hoarse sound both ragged and rare, but not wholly forgotten.
She jerked hard and fell against me. I threw my good hand out to steady myself, letting it land first on the squishy air pillow Rose had been using. I knocked it aside only to set my hand on cold metal. Startled, I looked down to see Archie’s loaded handgun, the one he’d brought on the trip to ward off any apex predators. It lay there on the tent floor, where it must have been, all this time—hidden not close to Rose’s heart, but mere inches from her head.
My stomach soured. The first thrum of a migraine began worming its way into my skull as I took in what I was seeing and what it meant. Rose had stolen that gun from Archie on purpose. I knew she had. She must’ve lifted it from his backpack before sending the two of us up on that mountain together. Or else she’d had Avery do it. Either way, knowing me well—and not knowing about the storm—Rose had trusted me not to leave him. Not even to save her.
But she’d done more than that, I realized. Far more. I was sure of it. Because Abel was no bank robber—Tomás had told me that. And while he’d been far from innocent, I didn’t believe he’d told Rose a story about any fake money, not even out of spite or malice. He’d been too close to death for dissembling. Not to mention, it couldn’t have been him who’d spun the bank robbery story in the first place. That had happened back up on the mountain. All of which pointed to the fact that Rose had been telling the truth when she said that everything that had happened was her fault. Because the gift Rose had given Archie was a lie.
A hopeful one.