Leaving Blythe River: A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “I’m in pain here.”

  “Then we’d better get this done,” Ethan said.

  His father narrowed his eyes and looked right into Ethan’s face. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You seem different.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment. I don’t like the new you.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing I did it for me, then. Not for you. So the doctor tells me you’d rather voluntarily die than lose one leg. Do you have any idea what a slap in the face that is for me?”

  “You? This has nothing to do with you.”

  “The hell it doesn’t. Do you really not have any idea what I went through to find you out there and get you back to civilization? Do you know how scary it was? And how sore I am? And not because we have such a loving relationship and get along so great. But I did it because I wanted you to have your life at least. And then, after all that, you say you don’t want it. Unless it can be just the way you want it to be. You’re acting like a child.”

  Ethan paused, almost as if to take a breath. But really he was making a space to allow some reaction.

  “What the . . . ,” Ethan’s father began. Then he paused as if editing out a stronger obscenity. “. . . hell are you talking about, Ethan? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know how you got here?”

  “Medevac helicopter. A rescue team brought me in.”

  “Because we called them.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Our neighbors, Jone and Sam. We went out into the wilderness on Sam’s horses and pack mules. The rangers and search and rescue looked for you for two days and then called off the search, because the more they found out what a swell guy you are, the more they figured you just took off and left me. You would have stayed out there to die, but we put together our own search team. And we found you. And Sam rode home and called it in.”

  A long pause. Noah’s eyes pressed closed.

  “I think you’re delusional,” he said. “I think you’re on too many drugs, and I’m on not enough.”

  Ethan sighed. He stood up, leaned over his father’s bed, and pressed the call button for a nurse. Then he sat back down.

  A moment later the door popped open and a middle-aged nurse with a pleasant face stuck her head in.

  “Problem?”

  “I’m sorry in advance,” Ethan said, “because this is not a medical emergency. But please tell my dad who found him in the wilderness. It’ll help with this important talk we’re trying to have.”

  The nurse looked at Noah, who looked back, but a little sheepishly. As if he already knew it was true, and didn’t want to hear it confirmed.

  “You don’t know yet?” she asked. “I was sure they told you. Your son found you. Everybody else had given up. He joined up with the man who does the pack trips and another neighbor, and they just kept looking until they found you.”

  “Thank you,” Ethan said to her.

  The door swung closed again.

  Noah squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Oh,” he said, quietly, as if to himself, but he drew the word out long. “That explains something. I thought I had this really vivid dream that you were sitting with me on that ledge talking about what a terrible father I’d always been.”

  “Not a dream,” Ethan said. “Real.”

  “That makes no sense. How the hell did you get on the ledge?”

  “With a climbing harness and a rope.”

  “You?”

  That marked the edge for Ethan. The dropping-off point. His voice came up. He lost his temper, which was something he rarely did. Maybe it was something he’d never done. In the confusion of the moment, he couldn’t remember. He just knew it felt unfamiliar.

  “Yes! Me, Dad! I did that! So it’s damn well time for you to stop treating me like I couldn’t. Because I did. And you can’t change that. No amount of put-downs will ever change what I did. You’re just going to have to drop the ‘Ethan can’t do shit’ routine and the ‘Ethan is so hopeless and funny’ routine and treat me with a little more respect.”

  Then he waited. Nothing. So he raged on.

  “It doesn’t ‘make no sense’ that I was on that ledge with you. It makes perfect sense. You’re just not thinking clearly. Which I don’t blame you for under the circumstances. It’s pretty much the only thing I don’t blame you for. If I hadn’t gone down onto that ledge, there’s no way I could have found you. You couldn’t be seen from the trail above. You couldn’t be seen from the valley below. You pulled yourself under a rock overhang, like you were trying to be invisible to the search teams. Jone and I had so much trouble figuring out why you would do that.”

  Silence. A long one. Ethan wondered if his dad might have slipped into a drugged unconsciousness again.

  But in time Noah spoke.

  “Because I didn’t want to lose my leg.”

  “Everything’s a joke to you,” Ethan said.

  “It’s not a joke, Ethan. I’m trying to tell you a true thing here. It got warm, and the snow was melting, and it was like rain. Like being under a waterfall. Except it was coming off the trail, so it was bringing down dirt and little stones. And I had this open wound right down to the bone. I knew it might be awhile until anyone found me. I didn’t want it to get infected. I didn’t want to lose the leg.”

  “But the searchers couldn’t find you under there. So you would have died.”

  “That would have been better than losing the leg,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” Ethan said. “You’re pathetic.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

  “Now, listen—” Noah began.

  He didn’t get the chance to finish. Ethan saw to that.

  “No, you listen, Dad. You think I don’t know why you feel so strongly about this? Of course I know. Because you think it’ll be harder to date girls with only one leg. That you won’t have this perfect body anymore. And they won’t find you attractive. And that is totally pathetic. There’s more to life than getting younger women into bed, and if you don’t know that, you’re just going to have to find out. Figure it out, Dad. There’s so much to the world, and if you don’t know what, find out. You’re forty-one years old. You have half a life left. By the time you’re eighty-two you’ll have to find something else worth living for besides twenty-four-year-olds anyway. Figure it out a little early. Don’t you dare insult the people who worked so hard to get you that second forty-one years by saying it’s not worth anything if you can’t sleep around. You think that’s being a man? Well, I don’t. I think you’re acting like a spoiled child. You’ll get a prosthetic leg and a new right knee, and you’ll learn to walk on them, and life’ll go on. Remember that movie you made me sit through about the guy who summited Mount Everest with two prosthetic feet? Look at the people in the Paralympics. You want to still be an extreme athlete? Then be an extreme athlete. You still can. You just have to buck up and show some courage. I’m not saying this should be easy for you. Of course it’s not. But it’s what’s in front of you. So deal with it, you know, Dad? Deal with it.”

  Silence.

  There was no way to read the silence, and Ethan only knew his father’s reaction was not at all what he had expected. Noah’s face looked drained. Almost calm.

  “Could you just leave me alone with this?” Noah said after a time.

  Ethan sighed. Stood.

  “And tell the nurse I need more pain relief,” Noah added.

  Ethan hit the swinging door hard with the heel of his hand and burst out into the hall. He hobbled back down to the nurses’ station.

  Jone looked up at him, her eyes full of questions, but Ethan only shook his head.

  “I messed it up,” he said when he was close enough to be heard. “I lost my temper. Probably only made things worse. But I don’t think anybody was going to get through to him anyway. Trying to change my dad’s mind about anything always was a big waste of time.”

  “The
y didn’t even tell him I was the one who found him,” he said to Jone.

  They were sitting in hard plastic bench seats in the waiting room. Waiting. But Ethan didn’t know for what.

  “Yeah, they did,” Jone said. “I was standing right there when they told him.”

  “You were here last night?”

  “Yeah. Sam and I both were. But he was groggy and on a lot of drugs. He probably just doesn’t remember.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  It was barely ten a.m.

  “You didn’t have breakfast?” she asked.

  “I forgot to. Did you have breakfast?”

  “Yeah. But that was before five. I could have a little something. You want to see what the cafeteria has going on?”

  “He might change his mind,” Jone said. She indicated Ethan’s plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. “How is that, anyway?”

  “For hospital cafeteria food, not too bad. I don’t know, Jone. It’s my dad. He’s not a ‘see the light’ kind of guy.”

  “But in a couple of days he’ll be staring death right in the face. That changes a person if anything ever will.”

  “He just spent almost a week staring death in the face. And he stayed under that rock overhang to try to keep that leg wound cleaner. Even though it made it impossible to be found.”

  “That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Because they could have saved the leg if he’d been found sooner.”

  “Welcome to my dad.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Ethan looked out the window and watched occasional cars flash by on the long, flat county highway. They were a good thirty miles south of Avery, and the land was not mountainous. And that struck Ethan as a shame. Even a loss.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange,” he asked, “that we haven’t heard a word from Ranger Dave?”

  “There might be a legal component to that.”

  “Not following.”

  “I don’t know if a person could sue over a thing like this. Probably not successfully, because the first rule of any national park or wilderness is that you’re responsible for your own safety. But people can try, and I’m sure they do. If Dave comes to you and apologizes, it might be like admitting fault. In a strictly legal sense.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. Because all I would say is that I don’t blame him. You know. Knowing what we know now.”

  They fell silent again.

  After a time Ethan spoke suddenly, almost without realizing he was about to.

  “If my dad doesn’t change his mind, I’ll just fly home. Leave him here. If he has the amputation, I’ll stay and help him out. He’ll need help getting home and getting all his stuff together. And then he’ll have to fly somewhere. Back to New York. Or maybe . . . he has family in Chicago. But until he gets settled in and has somebody else looking after him, I’ll stay and help him. But if he just keeps being the way he’s being now . . . I mean, what the hell am I even doing here, Jone? He can die just fine without my help.”

  He picked at his food for a moment or two in silence. His appetite seemed to have dropped off the edge of a cliff, and the food no longer tasted like anything. But he knew he should finish it, if only to help himself with the long and difficult day ahead.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said. “I meant if he chooses to die I can’t bear to stay and watch and not be able to do a damn thing.”

  “I knew what you meant,” she said quietly.

  “I can’t believe we went through all that,” he said, “and now it’s just for nothing.”

  “Hey!” Jone said. It was a sharp tone. Almost a bark. A man and woman at the next table jumped slightly. “Don’t ever say that to me again. It was not nothing. You did an incredible thing for your father. And you always have that. It’s part of who you are now. You stepped up to it, and now you’re up on a higher level than you were before. You gave the man a gift. The fact that he doesn’t know how to value it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great gift. It just means he has lousy taste in presents.”

  When they arrived back at the nurses’ station, the doctor was there, leaning on the counter and smiling broadly. It looked out of place to Ethan. Discordant. Like those “What’s wrong with this picture?” games Ethan used to like as a child. Finding one thing in the picture that didn’t fit with everything else.

  When he saw Ethan, his smile grew wider.

  “You are a worker of miracles!” the doctor called out.

  Ethan stopped and looked over his shoulder, seriously considering that the doctor might be speaking to someone behind him.

  “Me?”

  “Yes indeed, you.”

  “I told you. That was more luck than anything.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m talking about your second miracle. I don’t know what you said to your father, but thank you. He just now signed the consent form to undergo amputation surgery.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Ethan said.

  “Dad?” Ethan asked.

  He stood with just his head poking through the door into his father’s room.

  “Don’t,” Noah said. “Just don’t.”

  “I was just going to say it’s great that you—”

  “Right. That. Don’t.”

  Ethan hung in the doorway a moment longer, not quite sure what to do or say next.

  “You really want me to just go home and leave you alone?”

  A long silence.

  “No,” Noah said. “No, come in. Just . . . let’s not talk about that. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Ethan said.

  He pushed his way into the room and sat in the plastic chair beside his father’s bed.

  “You eat?” Noah asked.

  “Yeah. Just now. In the cafeteria.”

  “Yuck. Hospital food is always terrible.”

  “This wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad.”

  “What’d you have?”

  “Scrambled eggs and bacon.”

  “Okay.”

  A painfully long and awkward silence. Ethan thought he could feel it grind on both of them.

  Then Noah said, “We don’t really have anything to talk about, do we?”

  “Not really, I guess.”

  “We never really did have anything to talk about.”

  Ethan wanted to argue. But he had no facts on his side. So he said nothing.

  “I was a great dad for a baby. And a toddler. I was a great hero figure. You know, for somebody who’s too small to look too close or ask too many questions. But then you grew up and started talking. And you were smart. And I never really knew what to say to you after that.”

  “I didn’t need sparkling conversation, Dad. Just the truth would have been fine.”

  “I never much liked the truth. I always figured I could improve on it.”

  A pause, which Ethan didn’t fill. Couldn’t fill. How do you counter a statement like that?

  “Speaking of the truth,” Noah said, “what I told you about pulling myself under that rock wasn’t entirely true. I made it sound like I wasn’t afraid of dying. But I was. I wanted to be found. Truth is I went under there for the reason I said I did, but then I couldn’t get back out. I could move about an inch at a time backward—the direction my head was facing—without it hurting so much that I passed out. But then I got stuck. I couldn’t go sideways or in the direction my feet were pointing. It hurt too much. I tried it when I heard the plane overhead. But I passed out from the pain, and when I came to again it was gone.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “That makes more sense. Can I ask you one other question? If it has nothing to do with legs?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why did you take five hundred dollars in cash out of the bank the day before the accident?”

  “Oh. That. That was for you. I was going to give it to you and tell you to have a different kind of adventure. The kind where you find your own way home to New York. I was going to let you fly
back alone and stay on your own there.”

  Ethan thought back to the day before his father disappeared. At the time, he realized, that would have seemed like quite the adventure. It would have made his heart pound to think about crossing the United States alone. Now it sounded like nothing. Compared to riding the edge of a cliff over a two-thousand-foot drop-off? Or staring into the bared teeth of a peeved grizzly sow? Just buying a plane ticket and hailing a cab sounded easy.

  “Why?” Ethan asked. “Why would you do that? You were so dead set on keeping me here. At least until I had somewhere better to go.”

  “I told myself it was to make you happy. And I’m sure that’s what I would’ve told you. And it was true, of course. That was a big part of it. But also I wasn’t too keen on being stuck in that tiny place together all summer.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “Me neither.”

  “I mean, I wanted us to have the time together. I did and I didn’t. I wanted us to work again. To get along. But it wasn’t panning out that way. How did you even find out about that cash withdrawal thing?”

  “The rangers were doing some digging, because they weren’t sure you were up there in the wilderness at all. It was a big part of why they called off the search. People take cash out of the bank to make a getaway. Not to go running in the mountains.”

  “Just my luck,” Noah said.

  Then they ran out of things to say again.

  Before they could solve the problem, a male nurse or orderly came in and announced that it was time to prep Noah for surgery.

  Ethan took his father’s hand before leaving. Squeezed it tightly.

  Ethan searched his memory but couldn’t remember an example of physical contact between them. At least, not since Ethan was old enough to talk. Maybe there had been something. Sometime. But nothing came to mind.

  Noah squeezed back.

  “I don’t know who I’m going to be when this is over,” Noah said, avoiding Ethan’s eyes.

  “You’ll still be you.”

  “I don’t really know who that is, though.”