“When is this happening?”
“Tomorrow. But they’ve been making the arrangements—for hospital beds, ventilators, round-the-clock nurses—for the past week.”
“So,” Michael said, absentmindedly rubbing his left shoulder, “she’s going to be back in her old room. That might be good for her.”
“Actually, her old room is upstairs—I don’t need to tell you that,” she said, with a wry laugh, “and it’s too hard to get everything up there. So we’re converting the family room instead.”
“Oh, right. That makes sense,” he said, a burst of static suddenly interfering with the connection. He was trying to sort through it all—was this a good idea, or just a desperate one? Even with nurses coming and going at all hours, how could her parents and her sister really oversee her recovery?
A recovery that Michael had understood, from the doctors, to be impossible.
Lord knows he had tried to believe in it. For the whole of that long, cold night in the Cascades, and for much of the next day, he had forced himself to think only optimistically; he had willed himself to believe that she would wake up and come around again, just as soon as he got her back down the mountain. At daybreak, he’d crawled out of the sleeping bag he’d shared with her all night and rubbed as much feeling back into his own limbs as he could. He had a big purple bruise on his thigh, where he’d been lying on a carabiner, and his left shoulder still ached. He unwrapped another PowerBar and wolfed it down. As he looked up at the dawn sky, he could see a private plane buzzing by overhead. For the hell of it, he waved his arms, shouted, and even blew his whistle, but the plane didn’t bank its wings to signal that they’d seen him, much less return for another look. It disappeared to the west, and the only sounds remaining were the cries of birds and the rustling of the wind.
Kristin had not reacted in any way to the whistle or the shouts. He bent low over her, felt for her pulse and checked her breathing. It was low, but steady. He had two alternatives—he could wait where he was and hope that some other climbers would come by—or he could try to move her down the mountain on his own. He glanced again at the horizon. There were clouds coming in, and if they brought rain or fog, then nobody else would be climbing that day. No, he would just have to do it himself, with an elaborate system of ropes and jerry-rigged pulleys. He could lower Kristin maybe ten or fifteen yards at a time, then climb down, redo all the ropes, and try it again. If he could just make it down far enough, he might bump into some casual hikers, or even get close enough to Big Lake that the sounds of his emergency whistle would carry to some boater—provided, of course, that the wind was right.
He gathered up all the gear that hadn’t fallen off the cliff, or spilled out of the backpack, and started making his plan. There was another ledge, no bigger than an ironing board, about twenty-five or thirty feet below, and he thought he could maneuver Kristin down onto it. He knew he had to be careful with her head and neck, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out a way to stabilize them; he had nothing firm to use. He would have to take his chances.
It took the better part of an hour to rig up a system and tie Kristin’s limp body into it—and another hour just to get the two of them down onto the ledge. By then, Michael was soaked in sweat and covered with a thousand cuts and scratches. He sat on the ledge, one hand on Kristin’s leg—if only she would show some sign of consciousness, if only she could talk to him for even a few seconds—while the other held his canteen. He drained the last few drops. A few pieces of rock, disturbed by their recent descent, crumbled down onto their precarious aerie.
The dark clouds were coming closer.