The hike down into the valley is difficult. It is also silent. Whatever passed between us the night before has evaporated, and hardass Paul has reappeared again, but this time there’s anger in his voice. I read his letter, and now he resents my very presence on this mountain.
“Keep up,” he shouts sharply every couple of minutes.
His pace is fast and purposely punishing. Plus, I’m stiff from yesterday. I don’t hear any playfulness-even compassion-in his voice. On the cliff yesterday, even when he was brutally tough on me, his voice always had a sense of kindness, or at least I’d thought it did. But now I just feel something different emanating from him: a seething, righteous anger. He hates me. It appears reading his brother’s letter was an unforgivable offense. And I agree with him.
There’s only one benefit to all of this, which is that my head is so singularly focused on Paul and his mood that I’m actually ignoring the deep hunger in my stomach, the blisters on my feet, and the weakness in my legs.
“Look there,” I say.
Paul stops. He turns to me.
“What?”
“There, on the tree? Somebody carved a triangle into the tree with a knife. That’s a sign, right?”
He turns quickly and stares for a second at the tree and the triangle. Despite his efforts to hide it, a big grin spreads across his face.
“Holy shit,” Paul shouts. “We’ve got a trail!”
He turns to throw his arms around me, but then he catches himself midway, remembering his anger.
His hands fall to his sides and his smile fades.
“It might mean something. It might not.”
I nod. He’s right, and anyway, even this great stroke of luck can’t turn his heart back toward me. I feel a sob in my throat, but I will not show him how he is hurting me. I just mouth, “Right.”
“We’ll follow the trail down a bit,” he says. “But it’s heading in the wrong direction if we want to cross the bridge. It might be easier walking, but it’s going to take us to the bottom of the valley. That’s a death march. We’d never make it back up.”
I regain my composure and take a deep breath as if I’m contemplating the landscape with him, but I’m honestly just checking the emotions roiling through my body. I am, I remind myself, coming off my meds. I might be supersensitive right now and attributing thoughts and feelings to him that are completely products of my own anxiety. And then I hear the Old Doctor: Push the voices aside, Jane; stop the second-guessing. Do what’s in front of you and focus on your true voice.
“I think there’s a reason people have set a marker here,” I say to him. “I think there’s a reason we’re seeing this.”
“Like God sent it to us.” Paul smiles condescendingly. “Lot of good that did us on the plane.”
“We’re still here, aren’t we?”
“Thanks to what-random seat placement? I certainly wasn’t the one praying or only you’d be here,” Paul says. I hate when he’s right and logical.
“Nobody knows anything, Paul.”
“Here’s what I know,” Paul says in a low, angry growl, like he’s letting out a decade of anger at the world, but at me because I’m the closest one to him. “God isn’t here. And he wasn’t in that plane. He wasn’t there when my mom or Will died or your dad whacked himself. He wasn’t there for Margaret or the captain or the others. And let’s say he was here, what made us so special? We’re a suicidal and an atheist, right? Why save us? Here’s the only truth I can be certain of right now: There’s a cold, icy world on the top of this mountain. Fall, you die; eat snow, you die; if you’re not found, you die. Those are the facts and God isn’t going to swoop in and change that. And just because there’s a triangle on a tree, carved by who knows who and who knows when, doesn’t mean it is going to lead us out of here. In fact, it could lead us down there to our deaths or back around from where we just came. Sometimes signs are just signs; sometimes they lead you in the wrong direction.”
There’s a long silence between us. I hate him for giving voice to a deep-seated doubt about the world that has lived inside me since the day my father offed himself. Relentless. Cold. Brutal. Doubt has no antidote, except maybe on days when you climb a mountain.
“I get it, Paul. My father’s dead and your brother’s dead, and nothing is changing that.” I stand there, directly in front of him. I don’t know where those words came from, but there they are, settling in the space between us, a swirl of words instead of snow. And then I add, “I’m wrong about a lot, and God knows I’m not a poster child for mental health, but I know a few things. Pain isn’t good, but it isn’t bad either. Hiding it, nurturing it-that’s what’s bad. That’s what I’ve been doing for years. And it’s toxic, rotting me from the inside out. But it’s rotting you too. You can’t hide from your father and use your brother’s and mother’s death as an excuse to do it.”
Rage fires his eyes for a moment and I fear for myself for just a second. I’ve gone too far. But the truth in it is pure. I can’t deny it.
“Just because you stole and read my brother’s letter doesn’t mean I fucking want to talk with you about it.”
“Have you asked yourself why you kept leaving that ‘fucking’ book out beside me?”
“Oh, is that the kind of thing you learned from your shrink?” He practically spits.
There’s a quiet between us that’s deep and still. He turns away and looks at the carved sign again. His body shakes with anger, but he doesn’t say anything else. Don’t say anything, Jane. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs me off immediately. Stand down, Jane.
“We’ll stay off trail.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Let’s go.”
An hour later, we near the bridge and we’ve made good time. The sun is high up in the sky, hidden behind a stampede of rolling white clouds coming down from the north. White and dense, they’re not storm clouds, but they keep the sun from warming us. The air temperature hovers around zero.
We push through dense brush, and there are thickets and prickers hiding under the snow that make walking very difficult.
The snow isn’t deep here because of a weird combination of the steepness of the mountain and the thick canopy of brush and leaves that cover the ground. But every step brings a new scratch on my legs, neck, or face. I try to bring my scarf up over my face, but it keeps getting caught and tangled. I put my arm across my nose, tucking it into my elbow, and use my other arm to separate and move through the bushes. Paul has been trudging through first, which is helpful, but there’s always backlash, and the moment he clears a path, it closes. I can only see two to three feet in front of me, and I realize that I’m essentially on my own. But unlike my initial foray up the cliff yesterday, I don’t feel an overriding sense of fear. I’ve survived worse already, and I can suffer the thorns and branches of this forest.
At one point, I hear a rustling below me, and I see a small rabbit caught under the pressure of a branch that my boot has just landed on. It is enough to pin the white rabbit into the snow, where she must have hidden herself. Her reddish eyes shine at me. I see terror, but I also see food.
I reach into the pocket of my coat and pull out one of the climbing sticks Paul carved for me the day before. I can feel the rabbit squirming even more. She must sense my thoughts, I think. She must know I aim to kill her and eat her. The thought of it makes my mouth salivate with hunger. I press down as hard as I can with my boot and I hear a little screech.
I raise the stick in the air and I plunge it into the neck of the rabbit and blood spurts out onto the snow. It struggles wildly for a second and then it lies flat. I reach inside my pockets and pull out one of the plastic bags we’d taken to keep stuff dry. I pick up the rabbit and toss it into the bag. I look at the blood on my hands and remember the day when my own blood covered my hands and arms. I did try to kill myself, I think. I’ve known the answer to Old Doctor’s question all along: The first time I tried to commit suicide wasn’t just a practice run. It was a step on a ladder. Dark seeds had been planted long ago on that Christmas Eve; and with each daydream and thought and, eventually, my practice runs, I climbed closer to killing myself. Had I not dreamed of copying my father or made those small cuts that first day, I could not have gotten on that plane with a handful of pills.
But I guess the opposite is true too: had I not taken that first step, I would not be who I am now: a fighter. I make a small promise to tell Old Doctor just that if I ever get out of here. “But why? That’s the question,” he’d say.
My thoughts are interrupted by a bloodcurdling yell, followed by a heavy thud. My adrenaline spikes and I run as fast as I can, crashing through the brush. A thorn rips across my face. I feel blood drip down my face and I lick it instinctively. It is salty and thick with iron.
I’m listening for Paul but hear no further screams or movement as I fight through the thick brush. A pricker bush hidden in the middle of the patch grabs hold of my jacket and yanks me back. The fabric tears, and I stop and slowly disentangle myself. The thorns lie deep in the shell. As I pull them out, feathers and stuffing follow. It takes more than a minute to pull free of everything.
Once free, I step backward out of the bush and move around it slowly, careful not to snag my jacket again. I push through a small clump of baby spruces, and that’s when I see what Paul did not: a hidden drop of about twenty or thirty feet. The jagged edges of the snow cover below betray what must be a bed of stones at its base. My knees buckle, and I have to reach out and grab a tree to keep myself from falling.
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.”