Free of the truck, I look up and the world hits me like a collision: everything is too bright, too cold, and when Luke turns my way, the left half of his face is smeared in blood.
“You’re bleeding!” The words tear from me in a panic and Luke nods slowly, like it hurts to move, or like maybe he’s afraid of breaking apart. His hand reaches up to his head before I can intervene and comes away coated in red.
I go to him, pull him further from the hulking mass of truck, its long bed bent around a tree, which must have been the thing that stopped us from our rolling. There’s no fire, no smoke, but it’s a threat and I want us away from it.
It’s hard to look at the blood on Luke’s face, hard to see him so hurt, but I take in all the visible parts of him anyway, searching for more injuries. There are scrapes and some red areas where bruises will bloom, but compared to his head wound, everything seems minor.
He needs a bandage, which is something we don’t have, so I think of my shirt, of its cotton fabric, absorbent. I slip it over my head and when I reach for him, shivering in my tank top, see that my right arm is covered in blood. “Oh,” I say, halting mid-motion.
Luke’s squinting at me through his good eye, wiping blood away from the other one with the back of his hand; he reaches out and catches hold of my fingers, pulling my arm closer to inspect it. Heavy drops of red slide off my elbow to plop into the snow, forming dark little wells of color.
“Shit.” His eyes widen and his face goes a shade paler.
I snatch back my arm and locate a jagged gash along its soft underside; the cut runs from the base of my palm, nearly to my elbow. Except, I can’t be seeing things right. The injury must not be on my body, because it isn’t causing me pain. At least not until I poke at it with trembling fingertips.
“Don’t touch,” Luke says, pushing my hand away.
“Fine. Just…let me take care of your head and I’ll deal with this after.”
Luke won’t hear of it. “No. You’re hurt; you first.”
“You’re hurt, too, and mine isn’t that bad,” I say, but the set of his jaw tells me he’s determined. We can argue things out, or I can settle them for the sake of time and safety.
I push my bunched-up shirt into his grasp. “Hold this to your head. I’ll go find something for my arm.”
My scarf is caught on the broken frame of the truck’s window—I must have dragged it with me when we crawled out. I take it to Luke, and with his help, tie one end of the fabric over my hand and coil the rest around my arm, so that it wraps again and again across the cut. Luke secures it at my elbow, too tightly, and I grumble out a string of complaints, despite my better impulses.
“Shh. Keep it raised,” he says, lifting my arm. He stares at me and the deep red of his blood stands in stark contrast to his colorless face; he looks bewildered, shaken. I search his eyes, hoping for more, but this is all I can find.
Tears cloud my vision, but I blink them back; it’s important to stay focused: Luke’s head is still bleeding. He stopped applying pressure to take care of me.
“You dropped my shirt.” I keep my voice soft.
He squints at my chest, looking puzzled, and I use my free hand to cover whatever my tank top doesn’t. “The shirt you were holding to your head, Luke.”
He’s still gripping my elbow, so I pull away from him to reach for the discarded shirt. Before I can, he bends to retrieve it from where it’s lying on the ground, and ends up collapsing in pain.
“Luke!” I grasp at him, but he stops me.
Down on one knee, grabbing his head, he holds the other hand out, either to keep me at bay or to receive the shirt—which, I’m not sure. His face is caught in a permanent cringe, so I’m afraid to ask, afraid to do anything that will add to his suffering.
I pick up the crumpled shirt, hand it over, and help him stand—slowly, carefully.
“Your turn now, Luke,” I say, insistent. “I have to help you.”
He waits, quiet. The pain cutting through his features is disturbing, but his silence is more so. I’m hoping it’s only the shock of the experience—that his mind hasn’t yet caught up to events—but I can’t help fearing worse.
I draw my shirt from his grasp and wipe his face as well as I can, reaching up one-handed while holding my injured arm close to my body. What I really need is some fresh water, but what I have is snow. “I’m going to wash away some of the blood. Okay?”
Luke doesn’t answer, so I scoop a handful of clean snow and apologize for the cold before touching my palm to his skin. He shivers but lets me use the icy water to remove most of the blood, until I’ve traced it to its source on the left side of his forehead.
“Ow.” Luke closes his eyes tightly as my icy fingers work their way closer to the cut, verifying its size.
“It’s about two inches wide, a little in front of your hairline. It’s not too deep, but it hasn’t stopped bleeding, so if we could get you some stitches, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
For now, though, pressure will have to do. I find a clean spot on my shirt and hold it again to the side of Luke’s head. He winces but agrees to keep it there while I retrieve our coats from the truck. I zip mine up over my tank top, the fabric cold against my chilled skin, and help Luke into his. While he slides an arm into a sleeve, I lift my gaze skyward.
It’s not even half past noon, but the sky is dim, quilted in shades of gray, and the night always arrives sooner in the woods—Luke and I both know this from experience. As kids, we loved how the forest would change as the sun set, darkness sweeping through the trees like broad-winged owls, silent and stealthy. I don’t want to think about darkness in this place. We’re alone out here in the cold; we’ll have only three or four hours to find help, before it becomes difficult to see where we’re going. What kind of hours might they be?
I return to the truck, and kick a boot-clad foot at the remaining bits of glass clinging to its bent window frames. It’s safety glass, so most of it has crumbled into squares or clung together in pieces rather than shattered, which means no dagger-like points should be lying around, waiting to gouge us.
I help Luke lower himself to a crouch on the driver’s side and talk him through our next steps. He closes his eyes. Maybe it hurts to listen, or it might be taking everything he has, just to concentrate.
“Put on layers of clothes,” I tell him, also concentrating. I’m trying to remember the advice my mom’s boyfriend, Jared, gave me on how to keep warm while skiing. “Keep the fast-dry fabrics close to your skin—wool, polyester…um…silk,” I say, still focused on recall. Except, I doubt Luke’s in the habit of wearing silk. Moving on. “Okay, Luke? No cotton; it holds moisture.”
He only stares in reply. Too many directions at once, maybe.
I try again. “Luke, take your clothes out of your bag, all right?”
He opens his bag and pulls out wads of clothing, one stuffed handful and then another. I sort through it, handing over the inner-layer materials. “Put these on first, then more layers, and put your ski stuff on top—pants, hat, gloves, scarf. Did you bring a ski mask and goggles?”
A long pause before he gives me a quiet yes.
“Wear those, too,” I tell him, trying to remember which bag of mine holds the mask and goggles Jared lent me.
I pile Luke’s ski accessories beside him to make dressing easier. He’s stopped moving, like he’s lost his train of thought, so I nudge him along. “You need to wear as much as you can and fill your backpack with everything else that will fit. All right? We’ll have to leave the duffel bags behind; they’re too hard to carry.”
Luke switches the hands holding my wadded-up shirt to his head; he lifts his elbow to stare at me from under his arm. “I’m hungry.”
“Food. Good thinking.” I hope he hears the encouragement in my tone. “I packed some granola bars and a bottle of water for the bus ride. Did you bring anything?”
Luke sifts again through his belongings, pulling out one food item after another fro
m his bag. A fistful of beef jerky, a large can of cocktail peanuts, two candy bars and a couple of Gatorades all come out. I wonder how many calories football players need to get themselves through a day.
“Do you want to eat now?” I ask.
He stares at the food, turns his face away.
“Okay, then let’s get your bag packed.” I hold open his backpack, so he can stuff all the food inside. He picks up one item, then the next, methodical and slow. Time remains a concern, but I’m still more worried about Luke and his behavior.
We finish filling his bag, and I go to my side of the truck to pile layers of clothing onto my body while Luke does the same on his. He still seems to be moving in slow motion, but once more I don’t rush him. I know he’s hurting.
After I’m finished dressing, I go to help him pull on his final pieces, including ski attire, so that we’re both thickly padded and moving kind of stiffly, but at least we’re warm. I’m hardly shaking from the accident anymore.
“The screen on my cell phone’s busted. It won’t turn on,” I tell him. “Do you have yours?”
He looks at me like he doesn’t understand my question.
“Your cell phone,” I repeat, staring into his blank face.
He leans in through the truck’s broken window and searches, coming out empty-handed.
“Maybe you already packed it?” I tip my head at his backpack.
His brow furrows, but he starts rummaging through the bag. When he locates his phone, he holds it out to me as if I’d requested it. “Here.”
“Should I hang onto it for you?”
“Mm-hmm.” He continues holding it out, the vagueness still clinging to his features.
“Okay, if you think that’s best.” I accept Luke’s phone, and the knot in my stomach twists tighter.
He’s even more dazed than he was after the accident, and I can no longer hide from the fact that his head injury is more than a bad cut. A concussion, most likely. I don’t know much about them, but the thought alone swells my fears. He has to be okay.
I check his phone for a signal, desperate to contact someone for help, but it only tells me the time: a quarter to one. I stand, walk around, reach up to hold it as high as I can in several spots, but it doesn’t offer the hint of a single bar. The cell’s about three-quarters charged, so I turn it off to prolong the battery life and drop it into my pack.
Luke’s wincing when I look back at him. My shirt’s still gathered in his hand and he’s keeping up the pressure on his head, but it’ll be next to impossible for him to hike anywhere like this. I bend to gently lift his hand away, and the slow seep of blood resumes.
“Luke, your cut is still bleeding. I have to figure out something that’ll work better.”
“Sure, just…” He tries to stand, loses his balance, and has to sit on the ground. Then, he unzips his backpack and starts digging through it again.
I crouch next to him. “What’s wrong?”
“Can’t find my phone.” He looks back at the truck.
“I have it, Luke. You just gave it to me?”
“Oh, yeah. What the hell?” he says, sounding like himself again.
He looks up at me with an amused smile and I smile in return, absorbing the light in his face, the warmth. I wish I had my camera back. I wish, even more, that I’d never been angry with him, not for a minute of our lives.
His smile fades as he wipes away a trickle of blood that’s headed toward his eye.
There must be something around here that could act as a bandage. A sock might work, but it would be hard to tie around his head. I have something longer, though.
“All right, I’m not stripping,” I tell Luke, sitting down on my backpack to pull off my boots, ski pants, leggings. He watches with round, saucer eyes. “You don’t have to stare,” I say. He looks away, but by the time I’m drawing off the black thigh-high from my left leg, which I’ve layered on top of my fishnets, his gaze is back on me. I’m glad I decided to leave my skirt on, even if that meant tucking it, all lumpy, inside my ski pants. “Seriously, Luke…”
I don’t bother with more.
I pull on my pants—plural—plus my boots, fold up a clean sock from my bag to serve in the place of gauze, and secure the thigh high carefully, but snugly around Luke’s head.
I lean back to check its placement and have to suppress a smile. Luke looks like some weird, glammed-up version of The Karate Kid. He touches the stocking, fingering the edge of it, makes a doubtful face and turns toward the hill. “We need to go up,” he tells me.
With backpacks on, and masks and goggles in place, I wrap my uninjured arm around his, give him a tug, and up we go.
It isn’t easy, and it takes a while, and Luke seems confused once we reach the road, as though he thought there’d be something more when we arrived. I check his cell phone again, find no signal, and stow it back in my bag. He stands still for close to a minute afterward, pressing his hand to his injury, looking left and right, like he’s waiting to cross.
“Guess we should pick a direction,” I say to bring him back from wherever he’s gone.
He turns and the earnestness filling his eyes, their hint of pain, makes him look for all the world like an eight- or nine-year-old Lucas. I fight the urge to wrap my arms around him in an enormous hug until he’s all better.
Instead, I wrap my gloved hand around his. He looks down at our joined hands and then at me.
“You’re hurt, Luke.” I keep my words quiet. “I think you hit your head pretty hard back there.”
He gives my hand a little squeeze. “I think…maybe.” Then, he lets go, leans over, and vomits into the snow.
I hesitate before I start rubbing his back.
It feels odd to do it, like something I’m not entitled to—not anymore—but I keep going until he straightens to stand. He spits a few times and apologizes for getting sick in front of me.
“Stop. I don’t care about that. I just want you to be okay.”
I stretch my hand out to him again and he clutches it, trembling. “Nasty,” he says, kicking snow on top of the darkened spot.
I offer him some water so he can wash out his mouth, and he lets me guide him along the road. We decide to continue our climb, since there isn’t much but emptiness the way we came, not for a long distance. Maybe some recluse built a chalet at the top of this mountain and he’ll have a phone there we can use. Possibly a snowmobile or private helicopter, too, along with a hot chocolate fountain and s’mores on demand.
I keep Luke to my left, in the middle of the road, feeling pretty certain no one else—at least no one who knows better—is attempting to drive under these conditions. I’m deathly afraid he’ll topple over the edge if he trades places with me. His fingers remain clasped in mine, but I don’t trust our glove-impaired grip to keep him safe, especially not with our backpacks already throwing us off balance.
After walking for half an hour or so, Luke slows to a stop.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, but looks at me, looks down at our joined hands, takes a step forward and stops again. “My head hurts. I want to take a nap.”
He starts looking around us, searching for a comfy spot in the woods, I suppose, and I become adamant. “No. You can’t. I think you have a concussion, so we’re walking until we find help.”
“I’ve had concussions…they didn’t make me walk.” He tugs his hand from mine and heads over to a boulder just beyond the edge of the road to sit.
“You’ll freeze if your clothes get wet,” I tell him, using my weight to pull him up long enough to brush the snow from the boulder and the seat of his ski pants.
He tips his head slightly, and I wait for him to make a comment about my touching his butt. Instead, he stares at the boulder and the ground, like maybe he’s just noticed the snow. He sits and I sit beside him awhile, needing the rest, too, until he begins drooping against me.
“Luke, we can’t stay here.”
“I jus
t need a little sleep. That’s all.”
“Luke.” Fear hardens my words, adds a point to my tone. “We have to keep walking until we’re safe.”
He flinches and turns away, pulling off his ski goggles. “You hate me,” he says, giving me a rough-edged glance.
Pain opens inside my chest. “I’ve never hated you, not even when I wanted to, Luke, and that’s the truth. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” I tell him, “but we have to keep walking.”
His hand goes to his forehead and stays there, so I drag off my goggles and mask and move to stand in front of him. Wordlessly, I reach out and cup my hands around his face, tipping it back so I can inspect his pupils. I lean in, thinking they look a little bigger than they should, but it’s hard to tell. At least they don’t appear to be different sizes or anything else extra-disconcerting. Luke watches me wordlessly, continuing to stare when I release him and step back.
The part of his mouth that’s visible through his mask tilts up into a half-smile; he looks a little drunk. “Where do you want me?”
I narrow my eyes, suspicious of his wording and tone. “I want you to walk with me.”
I reach for his hand, and he takes hold and stands, still smiling that same drunken grin.
Four
Anyone Home?
As the sun sinks, my anxiety rises.
It turns out mountains take a long time to climb, especially when your companion is struggling and the snow and ice only seem snowier and icier as you go up. Luke and I stop several times, mostly so Luke can cope with his dizziness and the pain in his head. He tends to doze whenever we rest, so I have to keep waking him. He gripes and I remain steadfast; we picked our roles early and we’re playing them out.
The thing is, I never paid all that much attention in health class, but I kind of think sleep is supposed to be dangerous—potentially deadly—for someone with a concussion. It’s probably not recommended for two people in danger of freezing to death, either. Never mind how desperately I want to curl up somewhere and drop into warm dreams.
In addition to checking Luke’s signal-less cell phone from time to time, I’ve been scanning the forest as we’ve walked, and about an hour ago, maybe less, I spied an extra-dark area in the woods far uphill to our right. There was no way to be sure, but it looked like some kind of structure. Even a tight cluster of trees could offer shelter, so we abandoned the road in search of it. If there’s anything to what I saw, though, it’s further away than I’d guessed.
Picturing You Page 3