Avalanche

by Melinda Braun

  “I was,” she admitted. “But I wasn’t that out of it.”

  “I thought you might die.” The word die came out of his mouth like a filthy curse—he twitched. “I thought you had hypothermia.”

  “I think I did, sort of. I mean . . . if I’d been alone . . .” She seemed to imagine this possibility in detail and shuddered. “Yeah, I would have been totally screwed.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.” A clump of snow fell off a high branch and plopped at the base of the tree. Already the sun was melting it. “And then I’d have been screwed.”

  “Well, you did just fine.” Leah took her place behind him, and Matt stepped into smooth powder, careful to keep his stride short. She followed, hop-stepping in the snowshoes. “Something tells me you’d be okay.”

  “Oh yeah? What gives you that impression?”

  “Years of experience.” Leah laughed. It sounded like an old door creaking open.

  “I’m not in the best shape,” he admitted. “And I’ve almost bit it more than twice.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word die again.

  “But you didn’t give up,” Leah said. “That’s why you made it. In the end, survival has to do with this.” She tapped her temple with her finger. “At least, that’s what Carter says.”

  “So it’s all mental, then?” Matt didn’t believe that. Not really. But he found he couldn’t argue with it, either. Some people did survive purely because they believed they would. They made a choice to make it. But there were plenty of others who never even got the chance to choose.

  “Mostly.” She smiled as if his doubts were obvious on his face. “Being lucky doesn’t hurt either.”

  Matt nodded. “It’s better to be lucky than good.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Not sure.” Matt bit his lip. “But my dad says it all the time.”

  “You believe that?”

  Tall spires of evergreens poked their tips into the blue sky. The sun was still shining and the sky was still blue. If he had a camera he’d take a picture, but all a photograph would show was snow and pines. Mountains and sky. An untouched wilderness. Pristine beauty. But underneath all that beauty was an unforgiving cruelty. Matt saw that now; it was like being able to see an underpainting on a masterpiece—the deeper layers becoming visible, rising to the surface, and he knew the truth. The wild was indifferent to his suffering; it would crush him like a bug. It could at any moment. Matt tilted his chin up, closing his eyes against the sun. “I do now.”

  They traveled for a mile through the snow-draped pines. His breathing came slower, deeper. It was easier to draw in the air he needed, despite all the work he did making the trail. They had definitely dropped to a lower elevation; he felt it in his chest and ears when he swallowed. “How high are we now?” Below his boots, the snow had shrunk to half its depth, and if the sun stayed it might be gone by the end of the day. This made him stop and eat scoops of slush until his teeth ached. Hungry was bad, but thirsty was worse. Way worse.

  “Eight thousand feet?”

  “That high still?” The trees were even thicker here, and he doubted that if the helicopter did pass over, it would see them. They might have to hike all the way out. “How many more miles, you think?”

  Leah sank down against a trunk. “I don’t know.” She unstrapped the snowshoes.

  “What about the helicopter? Do you think it’ll come back?”

  “No.” She shrugged and bent her head. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t . . .” She rested her forehead on her knees.

  “Leah?”

  No answer.

  “Leah!”

  “What?” She jerked her head up, eyes momentarily wild.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  Matt started forward. “You don’t look fine.”

  “Well, I am,” Leah said. “Just fine.” Her voice was brittle.

  “Okay, sorry.” He grabbed the snowshoes and trudged some distance away, unable to say more. He was trembling, he realized. Tired. Hungry. Scared. Injured. Overwhelmed. It all churned together like a toxic soup inside him; it backed up in his throat like a clogged drain, threatening to choke him. He hated feeling this way. Helpless. Useless. It was a quivering, blown-apart feeling, like he had shattered something priceless. And there was no way to fix it. No way to get it back.

  The last time he felt this useless was when his father left. That last night he was in the house, the last night they’d all been together as a family. But Matt had no idea it would be the last night. Over the years this fact infuriated him, to know that he had been deceived so easily. That he had no clue at all. If he had, maybe he would have done something different. As it was, the evening had been insanely normal, and he followed the same bedtime routine he always had. Pajamas, wash face, brush teeth, floss. Even though he was almost twelve at the time, his father still read stories with him at night, and after a chapter in the current book they were reading, Matt opened to a random page in his new Ultimate Quote Book, placing his finger blindly on a sentence. He spoke the words slowly.

  “What you are will show in what you do.”

  “Very nice.” His father smiled, looking down at the page. “Who said that one?”

  “Thomas Edison.”

  “Good, good.” His father nodded. “That man was a great scientist. A genius.” Then he tucked Matt in, kissed his forehead, and said, “Good night, Matty.” He turned off the light and the glow stars on Matt’s ceiling bloomed pale green in the dark.

  But his father sat on the end of his bed for a long time, and after a few minutes Matt pretended to fall asleep, breathing heavily through his mouth. When his father finally got up, the bedsprings creaked a bit, but it was a different sound that got his attention. That should have been the clue, Matt knew now. He should have known. It was a weird noise, something he’d never heard before, something he’d never heard since. But he didn’t have to have heard it before to know what it was. He’d never be able to forget that sound.

  His father was crying.

  The next morning, he was gone.

  • • •

  “I think there’s something wrong with my feet.” Matt propped his right foot over his left knee, then carefully tugged off the first layer. Then, as though he was opening a bag full of rotten garbage, he eased off the second sock.

  His foot. Actually his toes. Specifically, his big toe. Stained as though dipped in ink; his second toe similar but not as dark. Both were swollen with shiny blisters, evil, pus-filled balloons he had a perverse desire to pop. Whatever Matt had been expecting to see, it wasn’t that. It was almost too grotesque to be real—like a bad special effects makeup job, applied by a blind person.

  “Matt . . . oh my God.” Leah sucked in her breath, and for a second it looked like she might be sick. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  He sat there, unable to do anything but stare at his foot. His remaining toes were various shades of pink and red, white-tipped but normal size.

  Leah knelt down and ripped off her gloves, covering the damage with her bare hands. She was obviously not the squeamish type; something about her gesture knotted Matt’s throat shut.

  “It hurts,” he finally gurgled. “What do I do?”

  “We’re gonna get out of here. We’ll get you to a doctor. . . .”

  “Don’t . . .” He shook his head, wondering how he would get out of this, how he’d be able to make it the rest of the way. He wished he hadn’t looked. And now he couldn’t unsee it. “You said you wanted to know about me? About my family? Did you know I’m finally going to have a sibling?” Matt didn’t wait for her answer, he just kept speaking. “All my life I wanted a brother or sister. And now my idiot father just told me that his twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend is pregnant. That’s why I’m here,” he babbled. “I wasn’t supposed to be here. My parents were supposed to get back together. They weren’t supposed to get divorced. I even memorized the whole damn quote book he gave me, like it was some kind of tes
t.” He buried his face in his hands. “Every page. Every line.”

  “Why, Matt?” Leah’s hands gripped around his rotten-looking foot like a vise. “Why did you do that?”

  “I thought if I knew everything I could figure out the answer.”

  “The answer?”

  “The answer to why he left.” His voice cracked. “Why we weren’t good enough for him. Why he wanted to start over with someone else.” He looked up to keep the tears from spilling, hoping they would freeze instead.

  Leah was quiet for a while. “There isn’t an answer to that. People do things and they don’t even know why.”

  “I thought I could fix it if I knew why.”

  Silence. Wind in the branches. The sun was gone now, the sky above them dull and solid, the color of cold, wet cement.

  “And now I’m gonna die out here.”

  “No, Matt. You’re not.”

  “Maybe the baby will be a girl. Maybe they’ll tell her stories about me.” Matt wiped his eyes. “Maybe they’ll tell her about her brother. The one who died out in the mountains before she was born.”

  “Stop it!”

  “It would be a good story. After all, they’d say he helped rescue his friends. . . .”

  “Shut! Your! Mouth!”

  A whump of snow hit the ground from a nearby tree. A bird launched into flight, startled by Leah’s outburst. A great horned owl passed overhead, only to land in another towering evergreen. It peered down at them with wide gold eyes.

  Leah sat back on her haunches, Matt’s black toes and blisters forgotten as they watched the sky, the trees, each other. Her eyes were the only warm thing he saw, simmering brown with tears of her own. A long time passed before she spoke.

  “I used to think it was my fault too. Being in foster care.” She examined her hands, as if contact with his feet might have been a bad idea, as if he had leprosy, not frostbite. “Even though I knew deep down it wasn’t. I couldn’t help it. The guilt was . . .” Her lips flattened to a microscopic line. “I think it was worse for Carter. He idolized our mom.” After a moment she sighed, stood up, and shook her head, as if to shake the thought away. “How’s the other one?”

  It took him a second to understand she was referring to his other foot, and he slowly removed his sock, holding his breath. No darkness there. Not yet. He pinched the white tips, denting the skin with his fingernails, relieved to feel the sting, and watched the bloodflow rush back under the skin, returning them to pink.

  “Okay,” she said. “So far so good. We shouldn’t have much farther to go.” She held out a hand, and he wondered if much farther meant a mile or ten. “Can you walk?” By the tone in her voice it was clear to Matt that the pity party was over.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Well, technically you do.” For a moment she looked as though she wanted to pat his arm, say it was going to be just fine, tell him not to worry. Matt knew that wasn’t her style. It wasn’t his either. “But there’s only one good choice. And it’s downhill from here.”

  • • •

  Ten minutes later it was snowing again, but as they moved farther down the mountain it morphed into sleet.

  “We’re getting close.” Leah leaned against a slim aspen for support, sagging into it with a tired hug. “Either a road or a stream. That’s all we need.”

  She’s exhausted, Matt thought. She still might be hypothermic. Or maybe it was coming back. Leah had removed her hat and unzipped her coat despite the increasing wind, acting as if she were overheated instead of freezing. Was that a sign of hypothermia? He couldn’t remember. What Matt did remember was what happened the last time they found a stream. “I hope it’s a road.”

  “I doubt anyone will be out driving around in this.” Leah rested her cheek against the aspen’s stippled bark.

  “True.” Sleet was worse than snow, Matt decided. It was rain’s colder and meaner sister. “I’m sorry I said all that stuff back there.”

  “What stuff?” Leah’s hair was wet down her back, darkening from copper to a shade of blood-soaked brown. The ends curled under into smooth, tight hooks. “You mean about your dad?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said. “Just everything I said. It’s stupid. I’m stupid.”

  “Only really smart people say they’re stupid,” Leah said. “And what you said wasn’t stupid at all.”

  “But compared to you . . .” He couldn’t finish. Shame swelled his tongue like an allergic reaction.

  “Compared to me?” Leah said, squinting. “You mean because I was in foster care?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I guess.” She shrugged. “I mean, I went into the system when I was three or so. Carter was four, almost five. Honestly, I didn’t really know any different.”

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway. Did your parents pass away or something?” Pass away? What a lame expression.

  “Or something,” she said, as though she had rehearsed it many times. A scattering of freckles stretched across her cheeks with her forlorn smile. “We stayed with a foster family for a few years. A bit religious, but nice.” She gave the tree another hug. “It wasn’t all bad, not like some of the horror stories people hear. But then, when I was eight and Carter was nine, we left.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because that’s when our mom came back,” she explained. “Clean and sober, or so she said.”

  He relaxed. “So it worked out all right, then?”

  “No, Matt. It didn’t work out at all.” She sank down, eyes closed, legs splayed out, and for a moment Matt thought she had fainted. “Leah!” He grabbed on to her elbow, touched her cheek.

  She opened her eyes with some effort, staring up at him. But it was a blank look, as though she didn’t know who he was. “But this time she OD’d,” she whispered. “She didn’t wake up. Carter was the one who found her.”

  Matt wondered what that would do to someone, to find a dead person curled up in their bed or slumped in a chair. And not just a dead person. Your own mother. How long did Carter try to wake his mother until he figured it out. A minute? Five? What happens when you realize? What do you say? What do you do?

  Overhead, the sky was a pure gray light. No clouds. No sun. He held her hands in his. It wouldn’t hurt to sit and rest for a few minutes, at least until it stopped sleeting. Matt retrieved the tarp from his pack and unfolded it over them, making a small shield against the unrelenting wet. “How did you not go crazy?”

  “The library.”

  “The library?”

  Her laugh was weak. Broken, was the word Matt thought. “Before everything went down the shitter in Boise—that’s where we had been living—Carter and I would go to the public library. Carter did a lot on the computers, but I mostly read. We’d pack a lunch and spend the whole day there.”

  “Wow.”

  “Well, it was a lot better than hanging out in our crappy apartment,” she explained. “That’s how I found George Eliot. Silas Marner was my favorite.” She smiled wryly. “Can you guess why?”

  “I think so.” Matt nodded, recalling the plot. Old Silas Marner, the town recluse, was something of a miser. A money hoarder with no friends. One day he came home to find all his gold stolen, and a little girl left sleeping in its place. Silas raised her as his own daughter, and at the end the original thief is found drowned at the bottom of a pond with all the stolen gold. By this time the girl has grown up, and because of her Silas is now a respected member of the community, his lonely miser life redeemed by a little orphan girl’s love.

  “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

  “Who said that?” Matt blinked; he didn’t know that quote. It wasn’t in the Ultimate Quote Book. He had the thing memorized. And he would have remembered that one.

  “That’s George Eliot,” she said, sounding pleased. “But her real name was Mary Anne Evans.”

  “I didn’t know that, either.”

  “My mother had the same name. Mary Evans.”

&nb
sp; “Your last name is Evans?”

  “Yep. I’m Leah Anne Evans.”

  “I’m Matthew Joseph Ruban,” Matt said. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine.” She closed her eyes. Matt watched the thin capillaries on her eyelids, the small pulse of blood under the skin. The constellation of freckles across her nose. The tiny diamond stud in her nostril. She looked almost happy. “Too bad we had to meet like this.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I guess it could be worse.”

  “Well,” Matt yawned, “when I get out of here I’m never leaving my house again.” An image sprang forth of him lying on the couch with an entire pepperoni-and-jalapeño pizza. Paradise. The snowdrift felt like a blanket around them, heavy and snug. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to have a quick nap, he thought.

  “I can’t wait to see the world.”

  “Really?”

  “As soon as I turn eighteen,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “I’ll be able to go. I already have my passport.”

  “I’ve never been out of the country,” Matt said sleepily.

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” Leah said. “I’m saving up for my first ticket.”

  “Where?”

  “Hawaii.”

  “Mmm.” Hawaii sounded perfect to Matt. Warm sun, warm sand, warm water. Everything warm. By this point it felt physically impossible to keep his eyes open. Too much work. His eyelids fluttered weakly.

  “Those islands,” Leah murmured. “Green mountains, volcanoes, the water, the palm trees, the flowers. Black sand beaches. Tropical sunsets.”

  “Sssounds nice.” Matt sighed. They shouldn’t fall asleep, he thought briefly. No, not sleep. Just a little nap. Just until the weather let up. Because they had something they needed to do. They needed to keep moving, but a short rest would help. For the first time in days he felt comfortable. The pain in his feet seemed to have dulled. That was good. Definitely an improvement. He yawned again and dropped his chin to his chest. Leah slumped her head on his shoulder, and the sleet came down faster, a few minutes later changing back to snow. It enveloped them in a soft swirl of white.