And somewhere above her and to her far right, she thought she saw a light. Please help me. I don’t want to die. A groan erupted out of her. The light disappeared. She hit the rock again. She tried to scream.
“Hello,” someone shouted.
And Amy Raye cried, “Help me,” and she struck the rock again and again. Please find me. Don’t leave me.
“Keep making noise,” the voice said. “I’m here. I’m going to help you.”
Someone was scrambling toward her, footfall and loose rocks and snapping branches. And more voices. And the light appeared again.
—
At first I thought a limb had fallen, that I had loosened deadfall along my path, that the debris might have tumbled onto the boulders below. But the sound repeated itself like Morse code. “Hello,” I shouted. Again the sound. My feet moved more quickly, as if body memory had set in. I had traversed this trail at least a dozen times. And by now, my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and there was the dim light of the moon, despite the smoke that was slowly pushing in, and the occasional glow from Colm’s light as I corkscrewed my way over rocks and scrub brush and dead limbs, and around the trunks of pinyon and juniper, ancient trees whose roots had found water in deep crevices along the cliff wall.
And then a voice, as plaintive as any I had ever heard.
I moved off the switchback trail and toward the voice, toward the rhythmic sound that continued to repeat itself, and as I did, I reached for my radio. “Alpha One, Command, assistance required.”
The noise continued, and as I stepped through sage and edged my way around another boulder, I saw a woman lying on her back, striking a rock with a stick. A few more steps and I was kneeling beside her thin body, and her brown eyes were looking up at me. Oh my God, could this be her? At least three months had passed since Amy Raye had gone missing.
“What is your name?” I asked her.
She might have said, “Amy Raye.” I thought she said, “Latour.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“My leg,” she said.
And then I noticed her bare feet and the odd shape of her left ankle. I also noticed a gash down her left arm, her torn shirtsleeve damp with blood. And the sleeve on her right arm had been burned and was adhering to her skin.
I slid my arms beneath her. “Let me know if anything else hurts,” I told her. “I’m going to get you out of here. We’re going to get you help.” I lifted her against me, her body like a broken bird. I thought I heard her cry, though her eyes were now closed. I carried her up to the trail and began making my way along the switchback from where I had come. I tried to move sideways, to avoid knocking her legs against any branches or rocks.
We reached a pile of boulders. I leaned my back against the smooth surface of one of the larger rocks, held the woman closer to me, used my feet for leverage as I pushed us over the impasse. Colm’s light grew brighter.
“Over here,” I yelled.
And then his light shone in my eyes, blinding me for a couple of seconds before he pointed the light to the ground and my eyes adjusted.
“Command, Dispatch, person down. Request immediate medical assistance.”
And then, “Dispatch, Command, ambulance in the area.”
Colm took the woman from me, and as he did, I grabbed the light.
“You’re going to be okay,” he told her. “We’re almost there.”
It took both Colm and me to lift the woman up the final vertical stretch, approximately six feet, to the bluff’s edge. From there, Colm carried the woman in his arms like a baby while I held the light to mark his path.
And up ahead we saw Dean’s light. Medics were responding. The sirens were close.
Dean told us he’d sent the boys back to the road to keep an eye out for the ambulance and direct it to the scene.
He walked alongside us, assisting us with his light. And then there were the vehicles, maybe fifty feet ahead. The ambulance was there. Two technicians were approaching Colm with a stretcher.
“Oh my God.” Farrell ran toward Colm. Gently and slowly, Farrell scooped the woman into his arms, his face in her neck, and I heard him say, “I love you,” and I might have heard her say it, too.
The woman was then loaded on the stretcher. I looked up to find my son. Thank you, I mouthed to him. I looked for Corey. I mouthed the same words to him, as well.
Colm’s big warm hand reached beneath my long hair, his fingers cupped the nape of my neck, and he pulled me against him, wrapped his other arm around me, held me like a hundred million years.
AMY RAYE
Amy Raye drove north on Highway 93 along the cliff band of North Table Mountain and just outside the town of Golden. The sky was blue like water without a shore, like she could swim in it forever, but she was still learning how to swim, and she knew that, too.
Farrell called. “How are you doing?” He asked her that a lot. It had become the words of an unspoken language between them.
“Today is another day,” she said, also words, like stones, and each day they picked up the stones and held them in their hands.
—
Two fire engine crews had contained the fire and extinguished the flames from the oil waste, as well as resecured the area. Amy Raye had been taken by ambulance to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. Farrell had never left her side. She was kept in the hospital for two weeks. Her right arm had suffered second-degree burns, the three-inch gap on her left arm had been cleaned and stitched, she’d undergone surgery for her left ankle, and in another six weeks the cast would be removed and her physical therapy would begin. For a week she had remained on IV fluids, and then liquid supplements were added to her diet. And slowly the taut skin around her bones regained its elasticity. The color came back to her skin. And yet she continued to feel pain, and her doctors said this was a good thing. “You’re beginning to comprehend everything that happened to you,” one of them told her. “Try to focus only on the next minutes, on only one moment at a time. Work your way slowly from there.”
She felt vulnerable in ways she had never felt before; the slightest gesture from someone could bring her to tears.
And when Farrell had brought the children to see her after her third day in the hospital, when she’d been afraid of their reaction to her, that her appearance might frighten them and they’d pull away, and they’d scrambled onto the bed despite the tubes and machines, and kissed her and squeezed their bodies against her, she looked up at Farrell. “I’m sorry,” she said.
And she told the investigators she was sorry also, and the firefighters, and the search volunteers who came to see her. At first she did not understand why she was not charged with the fire, but she was sorry for that, too.
The sheriff told her it was the drugs. “Keep her on morphine, and everything will be all right,” he’d told Farrell.
And then there was the day before she was discharged and the visitors had gone away. She was lying in the white room, with white lights, and Farrell’s blue eyes, but his eyes were too blue, and she turned away. “I am so sorry,” she said.
“Look at me,” he said. He was holding her hand, and he tugged it gently. And when her head remained turned away from him, he said, “Why won’t you look at me?”
“Because you’re not safe with me,” she said.
“That’s not true,” Farrell said.
“I don’t deserve you. I can’t make any promises. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”
“We just need to get you well. We can talk about this later.”
She turned toward him again and looked at him. “That’s just it. I’m not well. I haven’t been well for some time.”
“I know,” Farrell said.
“Do you love me?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
And both of them laughed.
She’d told Farrell about the cougar and the caches. She’d told him about the deer. She told him about her last day at the cache. “The birds hadn’t gotten to it yet. The lion must have been keeping them away. The eyes were still intact. And that’s odd. That’s not right. But I looked at those eyes, and I thought of you.”
The tears mingled on Amy Raye’s face. Farrell wiped them away. “It’s okay,” he said.
—
Before Amy Raye was discharged from the hospital, the female ranger came by one last time. Farrell kissed Amy Raye on the forehead and stepped out of the room.
“How is he?” Pru asked.
“He wants us to work things out.”
“He loves you,” Pru said.
“I don’t understand,” Amy Raye said.
Pru laid her hand over Amy Raye’s. “You don’t have to.”
—
Amy Raye took the familiar road on her right off Highway 93. She rolled down the windows of her truck, let the wind blow her hair, smelled the pastures and pines, the sun warm on her skin. The road veered to the left, and she followed the hard-packed gravel up to Saddleback Farm, where newly adopted mustangs and rescue horses were boarded and trained. She parked her truck to the right of the barn, took a swig of water from the bottle in her cup holder, and then climbed out.
Several weeks after Amy Raye’s cast had been removed, after she’d set herself up in a small rental in the town of Golden, joined an addiction support group and continued to work with a therapist, and she and Farrell had agreed on a visitation schedule for her and the children, she completed a mustang adoption application through the Bureau of Land Management’s Royal Gorge field office. Within a couple of weeks, her application was approved.
It was the second Friday in March that Amy Raye had visited the Cañon City Correction Facility, the BLM’s largest wild horse and burro holding area, and one of only five facilities in the country with a Wild Horse Inmate Program. Each month, seven to ten horses from the western rangelands would be available for adoption. It was on that Friday that Amy Raye met Storm, a five-year-old roan gelding, gathered from the Salt Wells Creek herd management area in Wyoming. He stood at fifteen hands, had been in halter training for a couple of months and led around with a saddle and panniers, but had not been ridden. Amy Raye fell in love with Storm from the moment she saw him in the pen, when the trainer led him to her, and Storm let Amy Raye hold her hand to his muzzle as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“He’s friendly,” she said.
“He still lunges from us in the field sometimes, but in the pen he’ll walk right up to us,” the trainer said.
Amy Raye kept the horse, and kept his name. She paid three hundred dollars, and the horse was delivered through an arrangement with the facility to the stables at Saddleback Farm.
When Amy Raye wasn’t with the children or at work, she would be at the stables. Farrell didn’t know anything about horses, but sometimes he would visit the stables with her. Easy talk would pass between them. And then they’d be standing beside each other, leaning against the fence, their shirtsleeves pressed together, forearms on top of the fence railing, the sides of their hips touching, too. They’d be watching Storm in the pasture, healthy and halterless. They’d be smoothing out a past, trying to leave its scraps behind, and each stone in their hand, each clear moment, was another stone to lay down.
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