Paul lies on the ground below, his body twisted in an unnatural way. He must have come through the bushes too quickly and missed the drop they concealed. The snow can play tricks on your eyes that way, leveling out the dips and drops. White on top of white becomes a constant. And eventually, if you’re tired or distracted or both, the ground blends into a smooth, flat landscape.
“Paul!” I scream. My voice echoes through the valley. He lies like a dead deer next to a pile of stones. Blood is splashed brightly against the snow. I look down at his lips and hands and boots, but there’s no movement at all.
“Paul!” I shout again. The silent, lonely echo reverberates around the valley bottom and back again.
I look left, then right, and find, not more than seven feet to my right, a steep but manageable path down to where Paul lies. The randomness of it all, our crash, our survival, the near misses climbing the cliff the day before, and now the single misstep that caused Paul to fall fifteen feet into a bed of rocks, defies logic. There’s no rhyme or reason to life, despite my deepest hopes that I’ll find one. Why wasn’t his jacket caught in the prickers like mine? Was he careful to avoid them and now lies dead because of it? Why didn’t I die?
I scurry down as fast as I can, reaching Paul in a matter of minutes.
I pull off my gloves and touch his face with my hands. Warm. I feel his neck for a pulse and then place my index finger beneath his nose. Warm breath flows onto my fingers. I lean down and kiss his head.
“Paul,” I say, gently slapping his cheek.
He stirs but looks glassy-eyed and dull, like a baby who has eaten too much sugar.
“Paul!” I shout at him. “Can you hear me?”
His eyes focus a little and I stroke his hair.
“What happened?” His question is more a croak.
“You fell.”
I sit back on my knees and look down at his body. His right arm is bent backward. My stomach twists at the sight of the unnatural line of the bone. I have to put my hand up to cover my mouth. There’s nothing there, but my muscles strain to release drips of bile.
“Fix me?” he says calmly. “You can do it; I’ll show you.”
I’m not sure what to do, but I nod assuredly. “Of course.”
“Find two straight branches, very straight. No, make it four. And give me all your sleeping pills or whatever you were taking. The ones you were going to kill yourself with.”
I hesitate for a moment and then reach into my pockets and pull out whatever is left. It is a good pile: enough to knock somebody out for a long while. Not enough to off him, but probably enough to get through whatever we have to get through.
I hand them to him and I remove a bottle with melting snow from underneath my jacket. He opens his mouth and I pour a bunch of pills onto his tongue and then help him as best I can with the water. A lot of it spills, which pains me, but I ignore it and slowly he swallows the pills. He falls back and groans from the pain, and I realize that’s my signal to find the branches.
I look around and realize Paul’s fall has brought us to the base of the bridge that connects the two valleys. If Paul can survive this, we are close to making our way home. We have to survive, I tell myself.
The woods are thick, but not impenetrable. Breaking off the branches from a live tree proves to be difficult for me. Some of the branches are too thick and provide too much resistance and the very breakable ones are simply too thin to serve as splints.
I walk into the woods, looking for fallen trees or branches. Fifty feet in, I look back and realize I am farther away from Paul than I’ve been since the ascent. My boot prints disappear under the shrubbery. I think of shouting to him, but I realize I’m on my own at this point. It’s up to me. He will need me now to leave this valley.
I stop for a moment and take stock of everything. I close my eyes and try to imagine the trail back to Paul. I know where I am, I think. I open my eyes and kneel in the snow, looking at the trail of steps I have just taken, and I visualize myself walking back to Paul.
I keep moving forward until I find a clearing with a fallen pine. It looks like it has been lying here for a while. I walk to the top end, where the branches are younger and thinner. I break off four sturdy branches and head back to Paul, following my prints, still fresh in the snow.
I think about one therapy session with Old Doctor when the trees were just beginning to bud, so it must have been early spring.
“You like to read, Jane?” Old Doctor asked.
“Yes, but not if you tell me what you want me to read.”
“I see. I’m the same way.”
“Good.”
“But,” he mumbles.
I couldn’t take it. “Always a ‘but’ with you people. I wish you would just say what you want to say. Always a bait and switch. I’m just like you, BUT. I like movies myself too, BUT…” (Of course, this was early on, before I got the hang of what was needed to manage Old Doctor.)
“You’re right, Jane.”
“But? Come on, what’s the BUT?”
“No, no. You’re right.”
We sat there staring at each other for about a minute, maybe two, and I waited for his qualification. I thought if I spoke, he might be able to dodge it and make his point with some other turn of phrase. If I waited, I knew, he would undoubtedly provide it.
“Emerson believed that all the human world could be explained, in Nature, if one sat long enough, patiently enough, with enough focus and insight to pull the lessons from beneath the hard bark of an old tree.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I like the sound of it.”
“You want me to read him? Emerson?”
“Not really, not unless you’re interested.”
We sat again in silence. His watery-blue eyes had no emotion on the surface, but in that moment I thought about all the tears, shame, anger, and misery they had probably witnessed. I wondered if he absorbed all the pain he listened to. Then I snapped out of it.
“Double reversing now. I am not falling for it,” I finally said with a smirk and a great deal of satisfaction.
“I am not your enemy, Jane.”
“Are you in charge of when I can get out of this place?” I asked. “Because, actually, I think you might be.”
He smiled.
“You are the most important person in this process.” He said this calmly. It bugged me that he wasn’t getting really angry.
“So I could be at home studying a tree in my own backyard.” I snorted. “Is that what you have my mother paying you the big bucks for? So you can tell all of us trapped people to go out and contemplate trees?”
“I was offering up something for your further thought or meditation, in response to your suspicion about our conversation.”
“Bullshit,” I said, looking right at him. I knew he was being honest, but backing down would be too embarrassing.
“Our time is up for today.”
“You always have that trick.”
“I suppose we both do.”
Chapter 28
I follow my path in the snow back to Paul quite easily and find him sleeping. I lay the branches down on the ground and shake him gently. He comes to fairly quickly.
“You can’t sleep now,” I tell him.
He looks at me dully, the information not processing through his brain as quickly as normal.
“Right,” he says, “should stay awake after a head injury.”
He looks at the pile of branches.
“You’ve taken a lot of pills, Paul. I’m going to have to wake you every hour or so, just to be safe.”
“Take off the branches and find the straightest one,” he whispers.
I pick out two short, thick pieces and pull off the small branches.