When Luke holds out his drink again, I ditch my goggles and the clingy ski mask, needing a break. Luke leans in as I take a sip, watching. I drink and swallow, watching him watch me.
“What?” I ask, at last.
He pulls off his goggles and my sunglasses, cringing with the movement and with the increase in sunlight. Shading his eyes with a hand, he takes a step closer to me and I step back.
“Stop moving,” he says.
“Maybe I would if I knew what you were doing.”
“How cold are you right now?”
“I don’t know. It’s freezing out here. Don’t act like I’m weird for being cold.”
“Not weird, but…your lips—are they really cold?”
“Every part of me is really cold.”
“Yeah, but their color seems a little off.”
“Um…wouldn’t that be the black lipstick I wear?”
Luke forces out an irritated breath. “The lipstick’s pretty much gone, but it looks like your lips might be a little bluish. It’s hard to tell. So, I’m asking, do they feel cold?”
I tug off a glove, hold the back of my hand to my lips. “I guess they do. My hand’s cold, though, so who knows?” Luke’s staring at my hand and before I pull my glove back on, I see my fingers are red—reddest at the tips, maybe a little puffy.
Without a word, Luke removes his glove and mimics my actions. With the warmth of his hand pressed to my lips, I don’t know where to look. I shift my eyes to the side but can’t help glancing back at him. His head is tipped down, but when my body gives an involuntary shiver, he gazes into my face.
“I felt that,” he says, putting his glove back on, “and your lips are cold and your fingertips look like they’re getting frostnip.”
“Like they’re gonna die and fall off?” I draw my hands into my chest.
“Frostnip, not frostbite. They should be okay, but we need to get you warmed up, soon. Your temperature might be dropping.” He replaces his sunglasses and goggles before continuing. “So put your gear back on and drink more. Dehydration’s dangerous.” He pushes his bottled drink at me, so I take another couple of sips and try to hand it back. He refuses. “You keep it. Finish it, okay?”
I’m still nauseated, but I do as told, taking sips every so often. I can’t tell if it’s helping; everything’s too cold to be sure of anything at all. I swing my arms and legs, trying to get the circulation moving again, but it doesn’t help like it did before, and it makes me extra tired.
At least half an hour, maybe a full one, passes before we reach the highest point of the mountain, mostly because I’m the one who keeps stumbling, now that Luke’s coordination seems to have stabilized.
What a letdown it is when we arrive. The land is flatter than we’d expected, less peak-like, and with heavier tree growth, so there isn’t much of a view.
Luke pulls his cell from my backpack, because I’d rather not try to make my stiff fingers work, and the phone tells us the time is almost eleven. We’ve been out here in the cold for nearly twenty-four hours. The cell still refuses to pick up a signal, never mind the fact that we’re already in the highest location around, and the battery’s creeping closer to the halfway mark. I can’t take my eyes off its screen as Luke shuts it down and pushes it into his back pocket.
There’s nothing to do but trudge along what serves as the ridge, scanning the landscape for some sign of human life. If we fail to find anything and have to go back down the mountain again, there’s a good chance we’re not going to make it. That’s our new reality.
We hike for a while, Luke gripping my uninjured arm to keep me from falling. “What’s that?” he asks, stopping. Following the direction of his gaze, I stare at a random clump of trees beyond an outcropping in the distance.
I can’t see what he means, so he moves in close behind me and carefully adjusts my head, extending his arm over my shoulder and putting his face next to mine. “Over there,” he says, pointing, “behind the rocky area. Isn’t that a house where the trees thin a little?”
Sunlight is there, lying in a horizontal line, revealing what could be the edge of a roof.
“Maybe.” The word emerges quieter than it should, but I can’t help it: I’m afraid to hope.
Luke straightens and steps back from me, clearing his throat. “I’m pretty sure that’s a house.” He shields his eyes to venture a peek at the sun, still climbing the sky at our backs. “So…guess we’re heading, um, west.”
I frown at the distracted look on his face. He’s improved a lot since the accident, but he still goes foggy from time to time, and even though he tries to hide it, it’s clear that he’s in pain.
We travel silently in the direction of Luke’s discovery, my actions blocky and slow. I’m moving like a moon astronaut, stiff in my overload of gear, not connecting with the ground right—except in my case, I got extra helpings of gravity.
Luke guides me and I bumble along. He suffers in silence, and so do I.
Eventually, we come to a broad hollow, which we’ll have to cross before reaching the next ridge, the one that holds what we hope will be our salvation. Between here and there is so much—too much—walking. Tears leak from my eyes and I can’t even wipe them away, not with my rebelling fingers, not without removing my goggles and exposing my icy skin to the frigid air.
Luke has paused by my side and I feel his gaze on me, but I don’t look at him. I can’t. I’m too busy staring at the wide scoop of waiting ground, waging a war between my struggling brain and my slowly freezing body.
“You’re all right,” he says gently, and I’m not sure if it’s a suggestion or a telling. Either way, if I try to respond, I might fall apart completely.
“Okay,” he continues, with a little more force, “I know you’re not, but you can’t give up. The only way to make this better is to keep going.”
I turn to him, clutching at his words. Hope is frightening, but I’m desperate for it.
His eyes soften at whatever he sees in my face. “I’m with you, Layla. Got it? I won’t leave you, but I need you to push yourself.” He doesn’t say it, but I know he means for both our sakes.
He steps closer to wrap an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go. Let’s keep moving.”
It’s not all that long a journey, truth be told, but I’ve never encountered a more difficult one. By the time we reach the hollow’s far side, another ridge remains to block our view; it’s the only thing separating us from what we’ve come all this way to see.
“Wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.”
Luke won’t meet my eye, but it doesn’t matter; I know why he’s going on his own: the ridge is short, but steep. If it turns out there’s nothing on the other side, climbing it will use energy I can’t afford to lose.
Luke goes; he pauses at the highest point before returning to me. He’s wordless the whole time, but when he comes close again, his eyes are shining. They tell me everything I need to know.
I clamber up the slope like I’m turning to stone, one slow step at a time. Luke’s grip is on my arm, so maybe he’ll turn to stone with me.
“Not a house,” he says, when he’s pulled me up the final bit to the top. “But maybe a hunting cabin will work?”
Six
Recovery of Fire
Iwrestle my way out of my goggles and mask, needing to be sure what I’m seeing is real. It is.
“Big, thick logs,” I say of the cabin in the distance. “Safe and solid and warm.” The words come out in strange, blurred sounds, but I don’t even care that my mouth is too cold to work properly.
Luke’s taken off all his headgear, too. His eyes widen at my impaired speech, but he recovers quickly, reaching out to mess up my hair. “Come on, ya drunk. Let’s go get warm.”
When we arrive, Luke knocks once on the door, giving me a shrug and a smile, and I think of last night’s shack. No one’s home here, either, but this time, there’s a padlock securing the latch.
“Let me check out the
place, before we go in,” he says.
He circles the cabin, shark-style, and it feels like a long wait before he comes back into view, this time bearing an armload of wood. “There’s a pile by that huge tree out back, which means that chimney”—he lifts his chin and I look up to find a metal tube, capped and screened, exiting the roof—“leads to a fireplace.” He dumps the wood by the door and turns to me. “There’s a rain cistern, too, so there should be water inside.”
There are also two small windows, from what I can see: one here on the front of the cabin, the other on the side. Both are clouded with dirt and, since the cabin sits on a raised foundation, they’re also set pretty high in the walls. I tried to peer through the grime covering the closest one while Luke was exploring out back, but to get a better view would have required that I stand on tiptoe, and I wasn’t about to ask such a thing of my freezing feet.
Luke leans close to the glass, blocking the sunlight with his gloved hands. “Hard to tell, but it looks like there’s a cast iron stove in the middle of the room.”
Shelter and fire are good—beyond excellent, in fact—but neither guarantees food or rescue. “Let’s hope it’s not abandoned,” I try to say.
“And that—whatever you just slurred—is my cue to break and enter.” Luke scans the ground, holding his hand to his head injury. He bends and comes up cringing, gripping a fist-sized rock.
After maybe twenty tries—some with gloves, some without—plus lots of inventive cursing, he gets the lock to release. He steps into the cabin, has a look around, and returns to hold the door open for me.
“Home sweet home,” he says, sucking the blood off a split knuckle.
“Okay?” I peer at his injured hand as I shuffle my way past.
“Fine.”
Once inside the room, I spot the stove and lose track of everything else. Warmth cannot happen quickly enough.
“I know,” Luke tells me. “Fire.”
He gathers his loose pieces of firewood and piles them in front of the stove, nodding to a stack of additional wood in the corner of the cabin. “Look. They knew we were coming.”
Dragging over a chair, he directs me to sit while he busies himself with the stove, filling its belly with small logs and kindling. He also figures out how to work the flue on the chimney, but not before smoke fills the small room.
Since neither window will open, I have to wait outside—which feels like authentic, soul-rending torture—while he airs the place, taking off his coat and using it to swish smoke out the door. The scent of flaming wood fills my nostrils, but it’s too far away to do any good.
Finally, Luke comes to bring me back inside and I lose myself to the sight of flames: they lick at air and blacken the surfaces of old wood, leaving them blanketed in crackly gray.
A chill has spread beyond the freezing in my fingers and toes; it’s soaked down into my bones, attaching itself with a shocking ferocity. I believe I’m actually radiating coldness, but when the heat from the fire gradually coats my face, I focus on it, willing it to soak deep into my blood.
I’m envisioning my veins carrying it to all my parts, when Luke’s voice breaks my concentration. “Maybe you should take off your gloves, now that the air’s warming up in here.”
The cabin door has been closed and locked with a bolt and chain; Luke has carried a chair over to sit beside me. Two changes I missed during my fire trance.
I panic when he starts slowly removing my gloves, but he holds my gaze, and I offer him my trust. When the warmth touches my palms, I can think of only one thing to say. “You made fire, Luke.”
“I did,” he says, smiling. “The matches helped.”
He unlaces my boots and carefully pulls them off; I scoot back in my seat to perch my feet on its edge. My toes aren’t in as sorry a condition as my fingers, but they need to benefit from the fire, too. Encouraged, I stretch my hands closer, wanting to defrost as quickly as possible, but Luke pulls my arms back. “Not too close. You can’t feel the temperature well enough.” He hesitates, his gaze lifting from my hands to my face. “Mind if I help?”
I wait and he pauses to frown at the floor, the skin between his eyebrows crinkling. Then he cups my hands in his, holding them gently, blowing on them, never once making eye contact.
“Yours are red, too,” I say, staring at the fingers wrapped around mine. We share some frost damage, but this is where the similarity between us ends: I can’t help noticing how much larger his hands are than my own. Luke and I used to be the same size, once upon a time.
He nods. “Started going numb a little while ago, but they’re already improving.”
“Feet, too?”
“Feet, too.”
After a while, the feeling in my digits—every last one of them—returns. People say freezing to death isn’t painful after the initial discomfort, and while my thoughts on that are mixed at present, I can attest to the fact that thawing out again definitely is.
Something of my suffering must show in my expression, because Luke asks, “Is it hurting a lot?”
I nod a few times, staring at my fingers. They’re pulsing and burning, redder and more swollen than before.
“You know that’s normal, right? Part of the recovery?”
I nod again, withdrawing into myself to cope, and Luke gives me some time to suffer through in quiet. Somewhere in that long wait, he wraps his coat around me to help release the shivers’ hold over my body. It works.
“So, two chairs,” he says, later, when the burning has dulled to a throbbing ache, and my fingers and toes, though still angry and injured, are also thoroughly heated. I’ve become lost again in the snap and hiss of the fire, in its glow like the sunrise. I look over at Luke, wondering at his words.
He pats the edge of his seat. “Two chairs,” he repeats, “and two mugs.” He points to the little section of counter that makes up the kitchen portion of the cabin, where two earthenware mugs wait, their green-glazed bodies turned upside down, dressed in dust.
His gaze lifts and goes to the far corner of the cabin, where two narrow, unmade beds meet at right angles to one another, each pushed up against a wall. He doesn’t say anything more, but his eyes shift back to mine. “It’s like this place was waiting to be found.”
I look away, because it’s my turn to explore. Now that the pain has become manageable, the world can come back into view.
The scent and warm hue of wood is everywhere, floor to rafters. The stove occupies the center of the room, the beds share the farthest corner from the door, and the kitchen sink is set in a small counter resting above a couple of cabinets, nestled beneath the front window. Another cabinet and window occupy the far wall, near the foot of the bed that’s lined up against it.
The beds themselves are unsettling to see, because they mean lying down and breathing and unguarded moments of sleep; plus, they’re close to one another. I twist in my chair to survey the wall behind me, instead. Two doors. Those are promising.
Cramped from sitting for so long, I stand and bear the aching in my feet to creep over to the first door. Turning back to Luke, I raise my eyebrows; he echoes the expression, adding a smile to complete it.
“Bathroom,” I say, stepping softly into the small space, lit only by a horizontal, crank-open window set high in the wall. “Complete with weird bathtub that looks like a horse trough, and…yuck, I think that’s one of those composting-toilet things my science teacher is obsessed with.”
Luke’s voice answers from the main room. “Yeah, but still: better than an outhouse.”
“True, but still: ew.” In the corner sit some large buckets filled with mixed mulch and sawdust, along with several stacked rolls of toilet paper. I don’t share any of this aloud. “No water from the sink,” I announce, trying the taps.
After a pause, Luke says, “None out here in the kitchen, either.”
Above the bathroom sink hangs a mottled, antique-looking mirror. I lean in close to the glass only to recoil at my reflection; the remains o
f my makeup make me look as though I’ve survived some sort of apocalypse. The worst of my eyeliner smears are pretty easily tidied, but the lipstick’s no more than a fading stain, bruise-like; nothing more can be done there.
Luke has gone quiet, so I go to see what he’s found. He’s standing just inside the only other doorway and in front of him are several shelves, mostly empty, save for a bunch of candles, along with a large galvanized-steel trashcan. Luke takes off the lid and we both tip forward to peek. Inside are multiple bags of rice.
“Oh my God, Luke. Food.”
“Exactly.”
He steps back and his upper arm comes to rest against my shoulder, touching lightly. He doesn’t move, so I do. I crouch down to run my sore fingertips along a groove in the floor, a place where the floorboards appear to have been cut. “What’s this?”
The line runs beneath the trash can, so Luke slides the can forward to reveal the remainder of a rectangular cutout, complete with handle. He bends, cupping a hand to his head wound, and pulls on the handle to reveal an opening in the floor leading to a set of rough wooden stairs. He pulls his cell phone from his pocket, switches on its flashlight, and starts to descend. Halfway down, he stops to smile up at me. “What do you want for lunch?”
It’s mid-afternoon by now, as close to dinner as to lunch time, but more beautiful words have never been spoken.
As it turns out, it’ll be rice and beans for lunch…and dinner and breakfast, too, which is only a slight exaggeration, and not at all a complaint. Luke and I discover this after agreeing that because the cellar is absolutely and in all ways creepy, we’ll work together to bring up the food from below ground, thereby avoiding a need for return visits.
Not that we’ll be here long, we say. But just in case, we add.
We light a couple of candles to save Luke’s cell phone battery, and carry up cans and jars and bottles to stack on the pantry shelves. We review the items aloud as we go, trying to keep a running tally. Along with Luke’s single remaining Gatorade, his peanuts, beef jerky, and candy bars, we count: four one-pound bags of rice, seven jugs of bottled water, one box of nonfat powdered milk, one carton of powdered eggs, a container of dried rolled oats, ten cans of assorted beans, two boxes of macaroni and cheese, three cans of fruit cocktail, one jar of peanut butter, a bottle of honey, and one box of brownie mix. Plus, salt and pepper, for some added zest.
Picturing You Page 5