Abigail used Scott’s Krill glow stick for illumination, since it put out a soft blue light, which would be almost impossible to see beyond the thicket. Scott talked her through firing up the tiny propane stove out in the vestibule, and as the water heated for their freeze-dried dinners in a slug-punctured pot, Abigail broke out the first-aid kit. She used a syringe filled with filtered water to irrigate the wound, then wiped it with iodine, applied the antibiotic cream, resealed it with several closure strips, and taped on a gauze bandage. Scott took three tablets of extra-strength Tylenol with his supper, and by the time they’d finished eating, Abigail could see in his eyes that the pain had begun to ease.
The glow stick lay on the floor of the tent, casting their faces in a weak blue light, which made them look cold and cadaverous.
They talked—about Maria, about Abigail’s father—their painful memories a diversion from the fear. Abigail could feel sleep stalking her, waiting to pounce. She lifted a Nalgene bottle, took a long drink, the water excellent—pure and ice cold, tasting faintly of iron.
“Knowing what happened to you on Rainier,” she said, “I’m surprised you ever went back into the mountains after that. Doesn’t it feel like returning to the scene of a tragedy?”
“I never thought of it that way. These mountains, the West, they’re my first love. See, I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. A flatlander. Until I was fifteen, I’d never been west of Dallas. I’d seen the Smokies, the Adirondacks. But those are just big hills. Most exciting time of my life was the summer after my freshman year of high school, July of ’93, when my dad rented an RV and took our family west.
“God. The day we drove across Kansas into Colorado. Interstate Seventy. The plains. The vastness of the sky. That high, dry air. Sinatra’s The Very Good Years playing on the tape deck. Always think of that summer when I hear Frank’s voice. He was our sound track for that trip.” Scott’s smile contained a measure of wistfulness.
“Never forget, I’m sitting up front with my dad and we’re barreling west, an hour or so from Denver, when, way off on the horizon, I see what looks like a bank of clouds. I ask him what it is and he tells me that’s the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and what looks like clouds is actually snow. Snow in July. I couldn’t even imagine it. I’d only seen snow twice in Jacksonville. I wanted to be up in those mountains. On top of them. Needed to know every ridge, every crag. Next day, we drove up Mount Evans, one of the fourteeners. Me and my little sis had a snowball fight on the summit, and that was it. I was a mountain boy thereafter.” Scott leaned forward and zipped up the mesh door of the inner tent. They climbed into his sleeping bag, turned off the glow stick.
“Tomorrow scares me,” Abigail whispered.
“We’re gonna head out early, while it’s still dark. Just leave the tent here. We did good today. It’s only another six or seven miles to the trailhead.”
“You’ve got the keys to your truck, right?”
“Top of my pack.”
They were quiet for a while, the sound of rain working on them like a tranquilizer.
“There’s this part of me,” Abigail whispered, “just wants to leave him in that cave.”
Scott pulled her in close, their eyes shutting, both surrendering to the steady hiss of rain and far-off thunder.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
Abigail opened her eyes and looked at her watch—3:48 A.M. It was still raining, still pitch-black inside the tent. The sound of Scott unzipping the sleeping bag had woken her, and now he was crawling out of it.
“What are you doing?” Abigail whispered.
“I put it off long as I could stand it. I gotta go like nobody’s business.”
“Here, take this with you.”
Abigail twisted the base of the glow stick. It lighted up and she tossed it to him.
“This is the worst part of camping,” he grumbled, slipping into his fleece pullover. “When you absolutely, positively have to get out of your warm tent in the middle of a cold, rainy night to take a shit.”
Abigail nestled back into the bag, asleep again before Scott got his boots on.
Abigail shot up in the sleeping bag. She’d been dreaming about wandering through an endless cave, room after room after room, and for a second, she thought she was still in that cave with her father, and that climbing up the chimney and finding Scott and being shot at had all been a dream.
The disorientation passed. She was tucked away in a thicket, somewhere in the lower reaches of that long valley, and, she realized, on the cusp of dawn, because she could just make out the tunnel-shaped walls of the tent and the bottles of water at her feet.
She rubbed her eyes, glanced at her watch again—4:58 A.M. A quiet voice in her head asked, Why isn’t Scott here? She vaguely remembered waking some time ago. Then her mind cleared and it all came back. It’s been over an hour since Scott went out there to shit in the woods.
Abigail put on her fleece jacket and her parka, found that her fleece pants and wool socks had mostly dried out. She dressed, unzipped the inner tent, and climbed through the vestibule, the door to which Scott had left open.
She poked her head outside—little to see in this first light, surrounded by chokecherry shrubs still holding on to most of their sunset-colored leaves.
Abigail pushed her way out of the thicket and emerged into the aspen grove.
The rain had stopped, the wind had stilled, and the light was so fragile that she couldn’t yet tell if the sky was clear or uniformly clouded. She made a careful scan of the trees. She whispered, “Scott!” The only audible sound was the distant babble of the stream. The woods smelled of dead leaves, which made a deafening crunch under her boots. Her feet were already freezing in the damp socks.
She followed an old wash down through the trees, thinking Scott might have come this way to put some distance between the campsite and where he squatted.
Every few steps, she whispered his name. Her legs and tailbone were so sore from yesterday’s trek, her knees gone to mush. She stopped. Listened. Looked back at the stain of the chokecherry thicket barely visible up the hill.
“Scott!” she whispered. “Scott!”
Fifty yards down the wash, something caught her eye—a shiver of blue light.
She jogged along the dry creekbed, came to the glow stick lying in the wet leaves.
She bent down and picked it up, trying to process what this meant and all the permutations of what might have happened.