The Mountain Story (34 page)

What happened next I’m slightly hazy on because I had doubled over to vomit gritty rainwater. In my periphery, I saw a massive red bird eclipse the sun. I heard the clatter of rocks behind me, and when I turned, I had to blink several times, because Bridget was, impossibly,
there
, balanced awkwardly on the slope in Nola’s oxblood poncho. She tried to speak but still had no voice.

We three stood there looking at Bridget, who was flushed and confused and as shocked to find herself with us as we were
to see her alive. It’s hard to imagine that she did what she did without divine intervention.

Vonn reached Bridget first, almost knocking her off her feet, then Nola, then me. We embraced each other fiercely, merging our sweat and filth and flesh, but only for a moment. The coyote was still a threat.

“I have no memory. From there to here,” Bridget croaked, gazing at the other side of the wide divide. We all turned to look across the crevice just in time to watch the coyote make the leap in a graceful arc. I stepped forward when the animal landed on the slope a few yards above us but he disappeared before I had a chance to protest.

That day, that third day we were lost, we didn’t relive Bridget’s astonishing jump across the fifteen-foot crevice. We didn’t even discuss the miracle of it. Once Bridget had rejoined the rest of us, we went on with the next task, which was to get us all up the slope to the plateau so that we could find a route that would take us to the distant lone pine.

We didn’t talk about the loss of the yellow canteen either, as we trudged up the slope, Vonn clumsy in my boots, and me bearing Nola’s almost dead weight. “Doing great, Mrs. Devine,” I said.

“Nola,” she said hoarsely, smiling.

“Doing great,
Nola
,” I said.

“I have a good feeling about this,” Bridget said.

“Me too,” I lied.

When we reached the plateau, I pointed out the lone pine. “See! See the pine!” I shouted over the wind.

“And the mesa!” Bridget shouted.

“I see it! There’s plenty of room to land a helicopter,” Vonn said, turning to smile at her mother.

Bridget, still sailing on her crevice-leap high, smiled back at Vonn and began to search the honeycomb canyons for the best way to reach our destiny.

“Isn’t this the most miraculous thing?” Nola breathed, coming alive with hope.

Something nagged at me—the truth—I suppose, which was that the lone pine was random, and the mesa likely another illusion, and the air still not stable enough for a helicopter rescue.

“What do you think, Wolf?” Nola asked.

I began to lead the Devines toward the lone pine, a place foretold by a spectre in a dream.

After a short while Nola stopped, lowering herself onto a long flat boulder. “I’m frozen. Can we rest a minute?”

We stopped.

“Frozen,” she repeated as we four embraced again to share our body heat.

Cue the sun. I can’t help how it sounds. That’s what happened. The sun burst forth, wiping away the curtain of cloud, warming our frigid bodies, saving our souls.

Nola turned her face toward the sun. “Can we stay here for a little while?”

“We have to,” I said. “There’s no sun once we get down there. It’ll be cold as hell. We have to dry off now, while we can.”

We sat on the warm rock, leaning against one another for support.

“Feels so good.” Vonn unzipped her peacoat and spread it over a rock to dry. Nola and Bridget and I did the same.

Vonn. I remember looking at her in that moment, Vonn Devine with her dust-smeared face and ratty hair and crusted eyes. Our days marooned on the mountain hadn’t dimmed her beauty, and her betrayal—our betrayal—with the granola bar had bound us inextricably.

The sound she began to make then wasn’t humming so much as moaning but I recognized it as the Bob Seger one I’d been singing to her. She looked up to catch me staring. “What?”

“I thought you hated that song.”

“Pip never cared for Bob Seger,” Nola said.

“He’d be proud of you,” I said, surprising myself.

“Pip? He would?”

“You’re tough as nails, Mrs. Devine.”

“Nola,” she said. “Please.”

“Nola,” I said.

“It’s nice to have a man call me by my first name,” she said. “Pip used to call me Noli.”

“I couldn’t do that,” I said.

“I didn’t sprinkle his ashes at the lake,” Nola said.

“That’s okay, Mim,” Bridget said.

“Pip would have thought it was cool. The coyotes and everything,” Vonn said.

“I think so too,” Nola said.

“Even better than the lake.”

“I suppose. It’s just that we didn’t have a moment with him. We should have had a moment.”

We were quiet for a time, listening to the wind, and then Vonn started to sing the Seger song in a parched, whispery voice. I joined in with my broken, scratchy vocals, and finally Nola sang too, wheezing but with perfect pitch. We must have
sounded horrible, painful, but to our ears we were a gospel choir, singing for Patrick Devine.

We were having a moment, singing that song together, and I was irritated, I think we all were, when Bridget broke the spell, shushing us, pointing to the sky. But this time it wasn’t a helicopter sound that she heard. It sounded like a plane. We heard it too. It sounded exactly like a prop plane.

“It sounds like a plane,” I said. I knew Mountain Rescue had a couple of prop planes.
Thank you, God
.

“Maybe I got the helicopter part wrong,” Bridget strained to whisper.

Planes couldn’t fly as low as a helicopter but they could see us if they were looking. We started shouting all at once. “Help! Here! Down here!” Then I had an idea. “The poncho! Stretch it out like a target!”

Bridget took off the poncho, and we stretched the plastic so that it formed a bull’s eye over the rock.

The steady, even hum of the motor grew closer and we began to shout again. “Over here! Over here! Here!” We went on like that for longer than you might have expected, given the number of times the wind had fooled us. Eventually our necks got tired.

At last Nola stretched out on the sun-warmed rock, looking up at the sky. One by one we took our places beside her, four in a row so we could rest while we waited to catch sight of the rescue plane that we were still convinced was about to appear from around the next peak.

Time—impudent, insufficient, incoherent time—passed. The sound of the plane died down, or shifted in tenor or tone. I couldn’t say how much time passed between elation and surrender.

“The wind,” I said stupidly.

“The wind,” Bridget agreed.

“We have to go,” I said, watching my feet attempt to plant themselves before I collapsed again on the warm rock beside the Devines. How was I going to hike without shoes or boots or even flip-flops to protect my soles? How was I going to leave the rock? It was so warm. We were so tired.

I knew it was folly to stay there. I was exhausted, dehydrated, hungry, but we had to press on or Nola would die.

“Not yet,” Nola said.

“We’re dry.” I struggled mightily for the strength to sit up again. “The sooner we hit the trail the quicker we’ll find something edible or maybe we’ll come on a stream.”

“I’m going to stay here,” Nola said. “I don’t see where I’ll find the strength to go on.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Maybe it’s my time, Wolf.”

“Not yet.”

“I won’t go without you, Mim,” Vonn said.

Bridget nodded in agreement.

“We’ll find food, Mrs. Devine,” I said.

“We could have had that granola bar,” Bridget said in a strained whisper.

“Bridget!” Nola snapped.

Bridget lunged at me then, swinging wildly. I caught her in my arms.

“It’s your fault,” she hissed.

“Bridget!” Nola shouted.

“It’s all his fault!”

I backed away. Maybe she was right.

“You got us lost! You made her eat the granola bar!”

“No!” Vonn rose up from the rock. “He didn’t make me do anything.”

Vonn stood before us in my too-big climbing boots and, reaching into the deep pocket of her cargo pants, drew out a rectangle of silver foil. One of the other granola bars. It was one of the other granola bars. I felt punched in the gut.

It took a moment for Vonn to find her voice. “This is the only one left. I ate the other whole bar on the first day. And I drank the water. All of it.”

We stared at the silver foil in Vonn’s filthy palm. A shadow darkened the evidence and we looked up to find three huge black birds soaring high overhead—three—when there had only ever been two. I don’t know if the others found that strange.

Did we shout at Vonn? Did we reproach her? Did we throttle her? No. We sat there in shock. Vonn heaved a deep sigh, then mumbled something we assumed was a plea for forgiveness.
What was that she said?

“I said I’m pregnant,” Vonn repeated, and then said it once more, in case there was any lingering confusion. “I’m going to have a baby.”

Dumbstruck by the first confession, dumbfounded by the second, we watched Vonn tear at the silver wrapper. I could smell it; cinnamon and oats, brown sugar. I wanted to snatch the bar from her thieving fingers and throw the whole thing down my gullet.

She snapped the granola bar into three equal pieces and passed one to Nola, and one to Bridget, and finally to me. “I’m sorry,” she said, unable to meet our eyes. “I was throwing up so much, and I was so worried about the …”

We, each of us, handed our morsel of granola back to Vonn. You’d think Vonn would have demurred, but she snatched back the pieces one by one and gobbled them all.

“Does the father know?” Bridget rasped after a very long time.

Yago popped into my head again. He’d already fathered six children at this point. Wouldn’t that be just my luck?

Vonn shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Do you know who the father is?” Bridget strained to say.

“Are you really asking me that?”

I’d wondered the same thing.

“I know who it is. I just don’t remember his name,” Vonn said. “I’m not sure I ever asked his name.”

Nola tsked.

“I can hardly even remember what he looked like.”

“You didn’t care what he looked like?” Bridget was aghast.

“I was at a low point,” Vonn said. “Obviously.”

“I usually turn to crossword puzzles,” Nola said flatly. “Or you might try crocheting. I can show you how to make mittens.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Vonn just looked at me.

“I mean—does everything feel normal?”

“I guess,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

Nola smiled through her pain. “I hope it’s a girl, Vonn. Or a boy.”

“You’ll be a great-grandmother, Mim,” Bridget said. She seemed oblivious to the fact that she would be a grandmother.

Exhausted Vonn sat down on the rock beside me. I shifted my gaze to take in her physique. She did not look pregnant.
It suddenly hit me that she might be lying. She’d already lied about the food and water.

“How pregnant?” I asked.

“First trimester,” Vonn said.

I didn’t know what it meant and was embarrassed to ask.

“Can we rest just a little longer?” Nola asked.

We all stretched back out on the rock again, watching the birds circling over our heads.

Vonn turned to me, speaking in a whisper. “What if we don’t make it?”

“We will,” I said.

“But if we don’t?”

I had no response.

“
Three
crows,” Nola said absently. “There used to be two. Weren’t there only two crows before?”

I didn’t tell Nola that these black birds were not crows.

Lying there in the warm sun, we must have fallen asleep, because a sound woke me—a sharp, screeching sound, metal on metal, the whirring, hacking sound of an engine turning but not catching. My mind was filled with the image of Yago trying to start his motorcycle. When I opened my eyes I could still hear the sound of Yago’s motorcycle, which obviously was not lost in the wilderness, but which I could nonetheless hear quite distinctly.

No matter which direction I looked there was nothing but trees and bush and rock. Still, the noise—I had to see what the noise was, and so I rose, searching the perimeter for coyotes.
I also found a few dozen large rocks here and there, and set them near Vonn, who I reckoned could throw the hardest in my absence, and left the slumbering Devines to follow the sound.