The skies were clear the next morning after they finished provisioning at the château. The owner, Raif, a Flemish man in loose overalls, said bad weather was expected overnight, lasting probably the rest of the week, so it was good they’d set out early. George couldn’t help but feel that this was, in some way, fate. The moment he stepped out there into the fresh air, he felt young again, as if he were still discovering what his body could do. When was the last time he’d worn hiking boots? He’d been a Boy Scout once upon a time, out there in the Senecaville Lake campground. It all came back to him, during the first two hours of the hike. Cutting up worms for a day of failed ice fishing. Canteen at his hip. Flimsy little compass in one hand, a nice hiking stick in the other. Only now instead of his father he had Sara at his side, with a bottle of Côtes de Thongue and an assortment of cheeses wrapped up in her pack for lunchtime. In his own pack he had a bottle of J&B from the hotel, which he thought he’d save to celebrate with after emptying the heavy urn he was carrying. The weight had hardly bothered him at first, but the pack felt heavier and heavier in the third hour. George looked forward to their return to the château, eight pounds lighter and warm with scotch.
They were still creeping carefully down into the gorge, advancing toward the little curving line of water at the bottom. There were well-placed footholds in the rock and cables bolted in to grab for safety. For a while Sara was aware of the occasional white and red markings along the trail, but there were so many other hikers making the same trek that day that she hardly noticed when she stopped seeing other people ahead of or behind them. George had brought a map from the chalet, but they hadn’t needed to look at it even once. It was simple to follow the trail and the river, which got wider and more powerful, the closer they came. At first they’d been chilly, well shaded by the giant cliffs, but as the sun rose higher in the sky, it became very hot, very quickly. When in the fourth hour they came at last to a little pebble beach by the water’s edge, they decided they definitely deserved a break for lunch.
George wanted to cool the wine down a little, so he undid one of his bootlaces and made a sort of noose around the neck of the bottle, tying the other end to a branch that had fallen by the bank. While they waited for the wine to cool, he and Sara strolled barefoot through the stream, letting the freezing water soothe their blisters. Light danced down through the leaves. It was like something out of a fairy tale — for the first time, George felt good about their choice for Irene’s final resting place. It had that same quality as the shores of Shelter Island. What had she called them? Mythic.
“We never do things like this,” Sara said.
“Back in Ithaca we used to go hiking all the time,” he replied.
She remembered going hiking exactly once, for about fifteen minutes, before Jacob ran into a spiderweb on the trail and refused to continue. The farther they got from those times, the less she idealized them and the more George seemed to. He didn’t remember how often they’d fought and argued.
“The wine should be cold enough by now,” he said. They’d walked a lot farther than he’d intended. “I say we drink half now and save the rest for the next stop.”
Sara agreed, and they turned to walk back to where they’d left the bottle cooling. After a few minutes she began to wonder how they’d gotten so far upstream, because they should be back at the pebble beach by now. George was sure it was just a little farther, so they kept going, but still there was no sign of it.
“That’s crazy. How could we have missed it?” she asked.
They decided to walk back a little ways and double-check. So they turned around, and now everything seemed different yet again from what they had seen before.
“Did you see any kind of fork in the stream?” George asked for the eighth time.
There was no sign of the beach, the wine bottle tied to the branch, or their backpacks, or Irene. Sara wasn’t especially worried, sure that if they didn’t find it soon, they were bound to find some other hikers who could point them on their way. But as the minutes ticked by, they saw no one and heard no one, and she became aware of something even more distressing.
“It’s getting kind of dark.”
“Kind of,” George agreed, just as they felt wet drops fall onto their faces. He looked up through the leaves above, thinking maybe this was just some mist or dew from the morning, dripping off of the treetops, but the powerful sound of rain in the distance was unmistakable, and soon it began to pour.
“Let’s get over by that cliff.” George tried not to sound worried. “This will pass by us pretty quickly. You get all kinds of weird weather patterns in canyons. Lots of very fast changes in air pressure when you have altitudes like this.”
Sara could hear thunder and tried to remember how to count the interval between thunder and lightning to see how far away it was. The trees were swaying wildly as the wind picked up. She couldn’t help but worry about their packs, and Irene, out there somewhere.
They got their boots back on, though George moved a bit awkwardly with only one of his laces, and they hurried over to a rocky ledge. In an indentation deep enough to slide into and out of the rain, they got out of what clothes they could, shivering, and tried to wring everything out, their wet bodies pressing clumsily against each other in the narrow space. They made jokes to pass the time; they thought back to the dinner of the night before and lying out on the Riviera beach; they imagined what Jacob would say if he were with them. George could just see him, shouting lines from The Tempest or something.
But the minutes worryingly ran into an hour, and one hour into two, and the rain only got more intense. They had no flashlights or phones, no blankets or shoes or food. George realized that his watch had stopped and he didn’t have his compass. He remembered Raif at the château assuring him that the bad weather wasn’t due until nighttime but was likely to last for a while. George prayed — that the rain would stop, that they would find their way back to the pebble beach where their things lay. He hadn’t prayed in a long time.
Terrifyingly fast and brilliant lightning sparked blue-white down a tree and out along the branches. At first George thought the incredible crackling sound was the earth itself coming apart underneath their feet. By the time he had realized what had happened, it was over — just a burned acid smell in the air and darkness. Sara was scared that it was getting darker, and they were pretty soaked, so finally George agreed that they should move out along the bank of the stream. They went carefully, looking out for bushes, rocks, tree roots, and other hikers as they walked through the storm.
The rain pounded around them like bullets; branches slammed their bodies from both sides; the wind twisted in all directions. At first George kept talking, trying to stay upbeat, but before long Sara couldn’t hear him. In fact, he couldn’t even hear himself, so they fell into a silence. It lasted a long time. Another hour, maybe more. They held hands so tightly that their knuckles began to ache, and their wet palms began wrinkling against each other, so that when they did have to briefly detach — to get a better grip on a rock or to push a branch out of the way — it felt like Velcro wrenching apart.