The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

She could have cried with joy when the soles of her boots found the wall. She began to descend. Slowly. Cautiously. Just a couple of feet at a time. Her right hand never left the brake. A cold cloud of mist from the waterfall enveloped her. The noise was immense. Her heart thumped even louder. It was like she was being chased.

  She tried to ignore the waterfall, but it was shooting out of the wall with the force of a fire hydrant. Water splashed her boots as she descended. The spray crept up her body, drenching her legs, her arms, her chest. She was grateful for the wet suit beneath her clothes. She fought the impulse to drop faster, to drop farther, to free-fall to the bottom.

  The water found her neck now. Her face. It was so frigid it felt like a claw against her skin. She twisted away. She needed a new plan. She needed to get farther away from the falls.

  Zoe began inching sideways, away from the torrent. She was descending at an angle now, like a pendulum. The muscles in her legs were objecting, tensing up, sending out warning shots of pain. The rope was scraping against the rocks. Zoe crept five or six feet sideways, but still the spray lashed at her. If she could just make it a couple more feet. She reached out with the toe of her right boot.

  It landed on ice.

  She slipped. Her heart flew into her mouth.

  She felt herself being yanked back toward the falls, her body twirling like a top. She couldn’t stop—couldn’t find anything to grab. Up above her, the rope sawed against the edge of the cliff.

  Zoe was swinging so hard she was pulled under the falls. The water pounded her back, furious and cold. It banged on her rickety helmet. It soaked every part of her. She tried to move, to push off the wall, to do something, anything, but her body was rigid with shock, and suddenly there was a terrible flower blooming in her head.

  This is how my father died—terrified and swinging on a rope.

  At last, the rope pulled her back out of the water, as if it had all been gravity’s way of telling her that the only way down was straight. Zoe hung suspended for a moment, tears clouding her eyes. She felt shaken, stupid, humiliated. The walkie-talkie trilled in her pack. Did Dallas somehow know what had happened? Had she shouted and not known it? Had he heard her? He couldn’t have.

  She didn’t answer. Dallas would hear the shakiness in her voice and tell her to come out. She was fine now. She was fine. But for a sliver of a moment it’d felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and she was hurtling downward.

  She took the glove off her right hand, tearing at the Velcro with her teeth. She dropped it into the darkness.

  She inspected her harness and her brake. The metal was so cold it seemed electrically charged. She brushed the ice off everything as best she could. Her heart was galloping.

  She couldn’t get the thought of her father out of her head.

  This is how he died.

  She found herself staring at her bare right hand, weirdly fascinated by it, as if it didn’t belong to her.

  There’d been blood and skin on her dad’s rope. Was it from his hands? From his neck? Had the rope wound around his throat? Had it choked him—suffocated him—like he was a baby trying to be born?

  She was sobbing now. She would have made an awful noise if there hadn’t been a torrent of water spilling along with her tears.

  The walkie-talkie rang again, and she answered it angrily: “Can you please leave me alone, please!”

  “Can I (what)?” said Dallas.

  The explosions of static were worse than ever.

  “Can you please leave me alone for a second!” she said.

  “Can I what for a what?” said Dallas.

  Screw it, she thought.

  Zoe dropped the walkie-talkie now, too. She didn’t hear it land, but pictured it smashing on the rock down below, the battery springing out and skittering across the floor of the cave. She turned off her headlamp. She just wanted to hang in the dark a moment. She didn’t care about the spray from the waterfall. She couldn’t get any wetter.

  The darkness was absolute. It was as if the water, with its astonishing noise, had decimated all her other senses.

  She thought of her dad. She thought of X. She thought of how they’d both be extremely concerned about the borderline-crazy adventure she was embarked on. It was so strange that they would never meet. One had exited her life just as the other entered it. They’d brushed past each other, missing each other by moments.

  Zoe twisted slowly on the rope in the dark. She concentrated on the water now. She tried to pick it apart, tried to hear every tiny sound in the middle of the roar. She let the relentlessness of the noise drive all thoughts out of her head—to douse them like fires, one after the other. Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing got deeper.

  Later—she couldn’t have said how long it had been—she switched her headlamp back on, and continued her descent. The ice in the rock sparkled all the way down.

  The Chandelier Room was breathtaking—Zoe’s eyes didn’t know what to devour first. In the middle of the chamber, there was a giant boulder encased in translucent ice. The waterfall struck it dead center, then splashed in every direction like a demented fountain. The walls were coated in ice as well. Here, though, the ice was as thick and wavy as cake frosting, and it glowed with the sleepy, blue-green light of an aquarium. Every 20 feet or so, there were massive, almost melted-looking columns of rock. (Her father wouldn’t shut up today: “They’re not columns of rock, Zoe! They’re limestone pillars! Come on—respect your rocks!”)

  Zoe stepped carefully on the frozen floor, running her bare hands along every surface, then shoving them inside her jacket to warm. She was transfixed. Everything in the chamber seemed as ancient as the earth, yet somehow still evolving, still breathing, still being formed. And just when Zoe thought the Chandelier Room couldn’t get any more mesmerizing…

  She looked up.

  The ceiling was hung with icicles of every conceivable size. It looked like an upside-down forest, like some massive musical instrument that had yet to be invented. It was gorgeous. She swept her eyes along the ice, greedily. Her headlamp made the whole thing glow.

  It was only when Zoe felt something crunch under her feet—a shard of plastic from the walkie-talkie—that she remembered Dallas. He’d be up there, pacing around with his injured hand in his pocket, possibly freaking out. The walkie-talkie was busted beyond repair but she collected all the bits she could find and stuffed them in her pack.

  She returned to where the rope hung down the shaft. It was covered with ice, so she thwacked it against the wall like she was beating a rug. Looking up, she could see fragments of the water—little jets and beads—catch the light of her headlamp as they fell.

  She hooked herself onto the rope once more, and began to rise.

  Zoe crawled out of the cave 20 minutes later, dizzy and drenched. The crystals of frost at the entrance floated down on her shoulders like a good-bye present.

  She struggled to her feet, dropped her pack in the snow, and gulped in as much air as her lungs could hold. Her legs felt rickety. She wobbled like a newborn colt for the first few steps. Otherwise, she felt lighter in every way. She felt lifted.

  Dallas stepped toward her, beaming and offering an orange towel from his pack. He seemed not to know if he should hug her, so Zoe threw her arms around him and squeezed gratefully.

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” said Zoe.

  She worried it wasn’t sufficient so she added, in his own language, “You’re a full-on baller and a boss—thank you!”

  She felt exhilarated. The air was lighting up her blood.

  “Okay, okay,” said Dallas, breaking off the hug. “You’re starting to feel attracted to me. I warned you.”

  “How long was I down there?” she said. “Half an hour?”

  “Two and a half hours,” he said.

  “Two and a half hours?” said Zoe. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be, dawg,” said Dallas. “Shit like this is special.”

  Zoe took a pictur
e of them in front of the entrance to the cave so she could Snapchat it to Val when she had a signal again. She scrawled a caption across the top in yellow:

  Cave: Silver Teardrop! Crushed by: Zoe!

  Dallas’s wrist was still buried in his pocket. He wouldn’t show it to Zoe, so she assumed it was swollen and purple. He promised he was fine. He insisted they still go check out Black Teardrop. Maybe she was being selfish, but Zoe needed to see the place her father died, no matter how wet she was—she needed to see it right now, while the adrenaline was still racing around in her blood.

  “We’re just going to look today, right?” said Dallas. “We’re just gonna say hello, or whatever? You’re not gonna trick me, and rig up?”

  “No tricks,” said Zoe. “But you have to promise that we’ll come back if the police won’t do their job.”

  “With a blanket,” said Dallas. “For Jonah. I remember.”

  “Was that a promise?” said Zoe.

  “That was a promise,” said Dallas.

  “Because now you know I’m not scared of any cave,” said Zoe.

  Dallas’s snowshoes thumped softly behind her.

  “I knew that already,” he said.

  The hike to Black Teardrop was short, but exhausting. The snow rose in front of them in huge, untouched swells. Zoe could feel her back and legs complaining to each other, ready to mutiny.

  Her body recognized the cave before she did. She felt the storm gathering again in her stomach as they clomped over a final snowy rise, and looked down to see the rocky gash in the earth. Black Teardrop was ringed with a chain-link fence now, and hung with warning signs. The fence was about eight feet tall—but more or less useless. The wind had blown it back and forth, so that whole sections tilted crazily, like loose teeth.

  Zoe was surprised by how ordinary the cave appeared. It was just a hole in the ground. Still, the longer she stared at it, the more it seemed to be surrounded, not just by a fence, but by some kind of force field. She stared at it longer than she should have.

  Dallas had caught up, and stood silently beside her. The cave lay a couple hundred feet in front of them. Zoe found it hard to move forward.

  “I’d go with you,” said Dallas, “but I can’t get over that fence with one hand.”

  “No worries,” she said. “I got this.”

  Zoe clomped down the hill. The snow was powdery and deep. She paused at the fence. She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel, but what she did feel was a confused rush of emotions, each of them struggling to get to the front of the line: sadness, fury, fear.

  Zoe tried to give each of the emotions a moment in her heart. Wisps of warm air, which had been trapped inside the cave for months, slipped out the entrance. It looked like a mouth exhaling smoke. It was as if there were a dragon in there, rather than her father’s body.

  She dropped her pack, unstrapped her snowshoes, and climbed the fence. Once again, she could tell that the muscles in her legs hated the idea. Still, they obeyed, and soon she was dropping over the other side. Now the only problem was that she didn’t know why she had come, or what she intended to do.

  She forced herself forward. On the ground, close to the entrance, there were two objects just barely peeking out of the snow. She knelt and brushed them off.

  A stone crucifix. A stone Buddha. They were lying on their backs, staring up at the sky.

  Someone had been there since the search for her dad’s body. Someone had visited. Someone had left the statues as a gift.

  Her mother.

  Only her mother would have brought a Buddha and a cross. When she said she’d never stopped loving Zoe’s father, she’d been telling the truth. Then why wouldn’t she let the police bring his body home?

  The statues seemed to have fallen from an outcropping of rock above the entrance to the cave. Zoe picked up the crucifix, shocked by the weight of it. She wiped it clean, then climbed up the rocks, and set it back on its shelf. She did the same with the Buddha.

  The statues radiated calm, and seemed to be urging Zoe to find some peace of her own. She wanted to say something. But what? She was still angry that her father had been so reckless. When he fell into the cave, it was like he’d pulled all of them down with him. But she did love him. Maybe there was a way to say all that?

  She closed her eyes, and tried to find the words.

  “I love you for everything you were, Dad,” she said finally. “I forgive you for everything you weren’t.”

  “PS,” she added. “Jonah is going nuts without you, and I’m in love with somebody from out of town.”

  She opened her eyes, wishing she could do more.

  An idea lit up her brain. She searched the ground and found a piece of bark in the snow. She asked Dallas to toss her the multi-tool knife from her pack.

  Zoe scratched and gouged at the bark for five minutes. By the time she was finished, she was sweating, her arm was aching, and she’d started to lose the feeling in her hands. But she was proud of her handiwork. She set it on the ledge with the statues, and took a selfie to text to Jonah later. She’d even put it on Instagram so the police would see it and know how serious she was about going into the cave, if she had to.

  She’d carved a message to her father into wood:

  I WILL COME BACK.

  fourteen

  Dallas swore up and down he could drive the stick shift with just his left hand, but Zoe said she’d defied death enough for one day. She steered the 4Runner down the rutted roads and out of the wilderness.

  The instant they hit Columbia Falls—and civilization—their cell phones finally picked up a signal, as if they’d just splashed down from space. Zoe pulled over to text her mother. Seeing the Buddha and cross her mom had left at the cave had softened her a little. She wasn’t ready to forgive her mother entirely, but she figured she deserved to know that she was okay. So she texted her the same one-word message she’d sent on the night of the blizzard: Safe. As she pressed Send, she felt not just déjà vu, but amazement at everything that had happened since she saw X hurtling toward her and Stan across the ice.

  Her mother answered before Zoe even had a chance to put the phone back on Dallas’s dashboard.

  Thank god! she wrote. Thank EVERY god! OX!

  “OX” was her mom’s version of “XO.” Zoe had begged her to stop using it because every time it popped up on her phone she thought, for a split second, that her mother was calling her an ox.

  I’m still pretty pissed at you, Zoe texted back.

  Her mother began typing. The “…” bubbled up. As always, it seemed to promise something profound.

  I know you are, Zo. I get it & don’t blame you. I’ve been a wreck—so worried about you getting hurt that I haven’t been able to eat/breathe/operate heavy machinery. I’m at the hot springs. Come and let me hug you?

  Maybe. Not sure. Let me see if I can get un-pissed.

  Please-please-please?

  OK, OK, I will—just so you don’t start sending me emojis. OX (as you wd say).

  Thank you. And do NOT make fun of the ox! :)

  Piping Hot Springs was a run-down old place nestled in a hillside above Flathead Valley. It boasted two pools. (Literally: there was a sagging banner out front that read, We Have Two Pools!) Both were outdoors and fed by rejuvenating, mineral-enriched waters that shot up through the earth. One was an ordinary-looking swimming pool kept at 84 degrees. The other, a giant, kidney-shaped concrete-bottomed lake, was always precisely 104 degrees. Zoe’s mom was a conscientious manager, but the owners lived out of state and were always on the verge of selling the business and didn’t want to sink any more money into it. So every season Piping Hot Springs looked a little grubbier, a little more desperate. The green fiberglass slides were rickety and rusted. The colored pennants decorating the walls were faded. The enormous ’70s-style digital clocks were all malfunctioning so that, rather than telling the time, they seemed to be making announcements in Chinese.

  These days, the rich tourists all went
to spas where they got microfiber bathrobes and shiny wire baskets with lotions and loofahs. The more adventurous tourists drove up to Canada, where hot, swirling pockets of water appeared, as if by magic, in the middle of freezing rivers. Piping Hot Springs mostly attracted elderly couples who sat against the wall of the big pool with their arms draped sweetly over each other’s shoulders. There were also some European tourists and some drunk twentysomethings who thought the place was hysterical. Zoe would have been embarrassed about Piping Hot Springs except that she’d never seen anyone leave without looking blissed-out and dreamy and pink. The waters worked.

  It was early evening by the time Dallas had his wrist wrapped at an urgent-care place on the highway and then dropped Zoe off at the hot springs. Zoe caught her reflection in the door on the way in: she looked like hell. Beneath X’s overcoat, her clothes were wrinkled and torn. Thanks to the caving helmet, her hair looked like roadkill.

  Her mom sat perched behind the front desk, folding towels and watching for her. She stood up the minute Zoe stepped inside. They inched toward each other shyly, like a couple that’s forgotten how to dance.

  Zoe let herself be hugged but made a point of not hugging back. Her mother ignored the awkwardness.

  “Oh my god, that coat,” she said. “Is that X’s?”

  “Yeah,” said Zoe. “It heals you. The minute you put it on, it starts, like, erasing your bruises and mending your bones.”

  “Seriously?” said her mother, her eyes wide.

  “No, it’s just a coat,” said Zoe. “It’s superwarm, though.”

  Her mom laughed and swatted her on the shoulder.

  “Look, I need to apologize to you,” she said. “Come fold some towels with me, and let me try?”

  They sat with a basket from the dryer between them. Zoe remembered folding towels with Bert after he’d become senile. He’d been obsessed with how warm and fluffy they were, how clean they smelled. She had to stop him from shoving his face into them.

  “So,” her mother said now, “do you want the short, medium, or long apology?”