The Mountain Between Us

by Charles Martin

  She nodded. “I like this woman. A lot.” She narrowed her lips, sizing me up and chewing on what she was about to say. “Have you won a bunch of awards? Like doctor of the year or something?”

  I tilted my head to one side. “Or something.”

  “So, seriously…I’m in pretty good hands?”

  “You’re in my hands. But the best thing you’ve got going for you is your sense of humor. It’s worth its weight in gold.”

  “How do you figure? It’s not like telling jokes to the trees is going to hasten my escape.”

  “See what I mean?” I cinched a strap on my pack. “One night, late, maybe early morning, I was working the ER. LifeFlight brought in a guy who’d been shot in the side of the neck. Ordinary Joe buying ice cream for his wife. She was pregnant, sent him to the store—wrong place, wrong time. Got there just as a robbery went sour. When they brought him in he was still wearing his slippers. They opened the door, rolled him off the helicopter, and he was shooting blood from his carotid.”

  I touched her neck. “Looked like something out of a squirt gun. He’d lost a lot of blood, but was still coherent. Still talking. I put my finger on the hole, and we began running to the OR. We were about two minutes ahead of the reaper, who was gaining on us. I got down in his face and said, ‘Are you allergic to anything?’ He pointed to his neck and said, ‘Yeah, bullets.’ I thought This guy’ll make it.

  “Then, with all that chaos swarming around him, he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Doc, you operate on me like I’m alive, not like I’m dying.’ He let go, then jerked and said, ‘And my name is Roger. What’s yours?’

  “He made it, too. Wife gave birth two weeks later. They paged me, called me into their room, and laid their son in my arms. Named him after me.” I stared at her. “Textbooks will tell you that he should be doornail dead. No reason he’s still with us. I think it had something to do with a DNA-level sense of humor mixed with a rather strong desire to meet his son.”

  I brushed her face and the edge of her smile. “You’ve got the same thing. Don’t lose your sense of humor.”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled on me. Her tone serious. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise you’ll tell me the truth?”

  “Promise.”

  “Can you get us out of here?”

  “Honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “No idea.”

  She lay back. “Phew. That’s good to know. I thought you were going to say ‘no idea,’ and then we’d really be in a pickle.” She shook her head. “And I’m not even going to ask you about the direction we’re headed, ’cause I know you’ve got that figured out. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She tapped herself in the chest, then me. “We’ve got to work on our communication.”

  “We were.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not asking you this stuff because I want honest answers. I want you lie your butt off. Tell me we’ve only got a mile to go when there might be a hundred ahead of us.”

  I laughed. “Okay. Listen, if you’ll quit talking, we can get going. There’s a helicopter waiting for us just beyond that first rise out there.”

  “They bring Starbucks?”

  “Yep. Orange juice, couple of egg sandwiches, sausage, muffins, raspberry Danish, and a dozen glazed doughnuts.”

  She patted me on the back. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

  IDEALLY, I’D HAVE BUILT a sled of some sort. Something that would glide over the snow and not beat her to death. Problem was, that’d work great on the flat parts, but from what I could see, there weren’t a lot of those. And given the angles we’d be traversing, I knew I couldn’t handle a sled. If I got caught off balance, if the angle was too steep, or her weight started pulling against me, it could get away from me and I’d never recover. She’d survive the plane crash only to die on the stretcher.

  I decided on a hybrid between a sled and stretcher. Something she could lie down in—facing away from me—that would glide behind me over those rare flat parts but, when needed, I could lift with two hands and pull behind me, giving me better control.

  I started with the wing that had been ripped off. Given that its surface was some sort of material that was more cloth and plastic than metal, it was light and maybe just as important, slick. Its internal structure was metal, and given that the wing had been ripped away from the fuselage, the gas tanks had drained via gravity. The problem with a wing was that it was, well…wing-shaped. Rounded on both sides. So I cut a woman-sized cavity lengthwise and reinforced the bottom with the support poles from the other wing.

  The simplicity of it actually surprised me.

  My next question: Would miles of dragging across rock, ice, and other rough objects tear the material? Obviously, yes.

  I had to reinforce the bottom. Reinforcing would increase drag, but without it, we’d wear through the wing in no time. Where to find a suitable piece of sheet metal? Didn’t take me long. The engine had been shrouded by sheet metal. One side had been bent severely upon impact. The other only scratched. And, thanks to some mechanic who invented a way to work on the engine, it was secured with removable pins. I removed it, tied it to the bottom of the wing, about where Ashley’s butt would sit, and eyed my creation. It might work. Given what I had to work with, it had to.

  I packed everything I could find into my backpack, including all the meat I’d cooked—more like jerky than filet mignon—and tied that bundle crosswise over the wing where it could elevate Ashley’s leg.

  I fed her four Advil and held the water to her lips. She sipped quietly as I explained my idea.

  “I don’t have a good fix on which way to go, but I do know that northwest, behind us, the mountains rise up, and we’d need to be part goat to get over them. That way…” I pointed. “The plateau rolls away southeast. The streams run that way too. It’s pretty simple: we need to get lower, and fortunately for us, that’s the only way down. So we’re going to pick our way downhill. I lead. You follow. I’ll have my hands on you all the time. When it’s flat, I’ll fix a harness that will allow me to use the straps and waist belt from my backpack to pull you. Any questions?”

  She shook her head and chewed slowly on the meat. I checked her leg, wrapped her warmly, zipped up her bag, and pulled the wool beanie down over her ears. “For the first time, your leg is now down below your heart. It’s going to swell during the day. Best we can do is ice at night. That’s going to cause you…some discomfort.”

  She nodded.

  “But”—I pointed—“nothing is going to hurt like getting you out of here.”

  She gritted her teeth. I put my hands beneath her arms, pulled gently, and began sliding her toward the stretcher, a few inches at a time. The sleeping bag slid rather easily over the snow and ice until it hooked on a rock or root, and when I pulled it jerked her leg.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs, turned her head away from me, and threw up. Everything she had eaten, including the Advil, splattered the snow. I wiped her mouth and then her forehead where she’d broken out in a sweat.

  “Sorry.”

  She nodded and said nothing. She was grinding her teeth.

  I got her to the wing, slid her and her sleeping bag onto it, and then went back for Napoleon, who looked happy to see me. I picked him up and laid him next to her. She put an arm around him, but didn’t open her eyes. She looked clammy.

  I propped her head up with Grover’s bag. I secured the bow and Grover’s fly rods alongside. It was ridiculously overloaded, but I was operating on the principle that it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Even if it meant a little more weight. Although I did leave both our laptops, cell phones, and all paperwork related to either her or my work. Figured that was all dead weight.

  I searched the site, double checking, then t
ied a tether of cord from her to me. If everything else failed, she’d be tied to me and me to her. This was only a bad idea if I fell over a cliff and took her with me.

  I stared at the crash site, then up at the rocks where Grover lay, the rock where I’d had him perched and the faint blood trail from the wounded mountain lion leading away through the rocks. Then I took a long look down into the plateau where we were headed. I took a compass reading, because I knew as we descended or got mixed up in the trees below, my perspective wouldn’t be as good. I zipped up my jacket, grabbed the makeshift handles behind me, took a step, then another, then another. After twenty feet, I said, “You okay?”

  After a second she said, “Yes.” The fact that her teeth were not gritted told me more than her actual answer.

  I didn’t know if we had ten miles to go or a hundred, but those first twenty feet were as important as any of them.

  Well, almost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The first hour, we said little. The snow was knee-deep most places. Deeper in others. Couple of times I fell to midchest and had to crawl out. This was good for Ashley and bad for me. It made my walking two or three times more difficult, but made her path across quite smooth. I focused on my breathing, my grip—or rather, making sure I had one—and took my time. The pain in my ribs was considerable.

  We walked down off our plateau, toward the stream where I’d caught the trout and into a small forested area of evergreen trees. The limbs were thick with snow like frosting. If you bumped one, it’d dump several shovelfuls of snow down your back.

  After an hour and what might have been a mile she said, “Excuse me, Doc, but we’re not going very fast. You need to giddyup.”

  I collapsed in the snow next to her, breathing heavily. My chest rising and falling in the thin air. My legs were screaming.

  She looked down at me and tapped me in the forehead. “You want me to get you a Gatorade or something?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  “You know what I was thinking?”

  I felt the sweat trickling down the back of my neck. “There’s no telling.”

  “I was thinking how great a cheeseburger would be right now.”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe two patties. Extra cheese, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Tomato. Got to be a good tomato. Onion. Preferably Vidalia. Ketchup. Mustard. Mayo.”

  White, cottony clouds drifted overhead. Another commercial airliner streaked through the sky some 30,000 feet above us.

  “And extra pickles,” she added.

  “And two orders of fries on the side.”

  “I think I could eat that whole thing twice right now.”

  I pointed up. “It’s cruel, really. We can see them just fine, but I’m pretty sure they can’t see us.”

  “Why don’t you build a really big fire?”

  “You think it’d do any good?”

  “Not really, but it would make us feel better.” She looked beyond us then, through the trees, in the direction I had been walking. “You’d better get to pulling.” She tapped the wing-contraption in which she lay. “This thing’s not battery-powered, you know?”

  “Funny, I figured that out about an hour ago.” I took a few steps. “I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Don’t push your luck with me.”

  I handed her a clean Nalgene bottle. “We’re going to need to drink. A lot. If, while I’m pulling, you could pack this thing with snow, then slip it inside your bag and let your body warmth melt it, it’ll help us both keep hydrated, and we don’t need to get into the habit of eating cold snow. You mind?”

  She shook her head and took the bottle, scooping the mouth into the snow. She screwed the lid on. “Can I ask you something?”

  The temperature was probably in the single digits, yet sweat was pouring off my forehead. I’d pulled off my jacket so I didn’t soak it with sweat, and was pulling in a base layer and one shirt. My body was drenched. This was good when we were walking, but real bad when we stopped because I had no way to get warm and dry. As long as I kept moving I was okay, but when we stopped I’d have to immediately start a fire and start drying out my clothes. And this was before I could do anything to help Ashley. A tricky balance.

  “Sure. Fire away.”

  “The voice mail. What’s the deal?”

  “What voice mail?”

  “The one you were listening to as we were taking off.”

  I bit a piece of dead skin off my bottom lip. “We had a disagreement.”

  “About what?”

  “About a…difference of opinion.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  I shrugged.

  She smirked. “Is she right?”

  I nodded without looking. “Yes.”

  “That’s refreshing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man who admits when his wife is right about something that matters.”

  “I wasn’t always this way.”

  “While I’ve got you talking…I’ve got a question for you. Have you talked about me in your recorder?”

  “Only in a medical sense.”

  She held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

  I smiled. “No.”

  “Then you have.” She raised a single eyebrow.

  “My speaking into this box has little to nothing to do with you.”

  “So you admit it? Some of it includes me.”

  “As a doctor dictating a patient diagnosis.”

  “There’s no personal opinion? No talking behind my back?”

  No amount of conversation would convince her. I pushed the BACK button, then PLAY, rolled the volume wheel as loud as it would go, and laid it in her hand. My last recording to Rachel resonated through the air. Ashley hovered over it, listening intently.

  When it finished, she clasped her fingers over it and gently handed it back. “You weren’t lying.”

  I slid it into my pocket, close to my chest.

  She watched me a minute, the question on the tip of her tongue. I knew it was only a matter of time. Finally she let it out. “Why do you clam up every time I bring up the recorder?” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you not telling me?”

  I took a deep breath that did not fill me.

  “Silence does not qualify as an answer.”

  Another shallow breath. “Rachel and I are…separated.”

  “You’re what?”

  “We had a fight. Kind of a big one, and we’re working through…an issue, or two. The recorder helps to do that.”

  She looked confused. “She doesn’t sound like she wants to be separated.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The voice mail.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “We’ve been stuck out here for what, eleven days now, you’ve set my leg, sewed up my head, even wiped my butt, and you’re just now telling me you’re separated from your wife?”

  “I was acting as your doctor.”

  “What about the other 99 percent of the time when you were acting as my friend.”

  “Didn’t think it was relevant.”

  She held out a hand. “Give it here.”

  “What?”

  She turned her palm up. “Put it in my hand.”

  “Are you going to hurt it, throw it, or cause it not to work in any way whatsoever?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to give it back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will it work when you do?”

  “Yes.”

  I laid it in her hand. She studied it, then clicked RECORD.

  “Rachel…this is Ashley. Ashley Knox. I’m the idiot who agreed to get in the plane with him. Your husband has many wonderful qualities, and he’s a very good doctor, but he plays his cards close to his chest when it comes to talking about you. What is it with men and the whole stoic-controlled-I’m-not-talking-about-my-emotions thing? Huh?” Sh
e shook her head. “Why can’t they just tell us what they’re thinking? It’s not rocket science. You’d think they’d find a way to just open up their mouths and say what’s on their mind. Evidently it’s not that easy. Well…I’m very much looking forward to meeting you, provided he gets me out of here. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on him. I think the recorder idea is a good one. Now that I think about it, I may give one to Vince when I get home. But—” She smiled at me. “And I hate to be the one to break this to you—Ben may be a lost cause. He’s one of the more tongue-twisted men I’ve ever met.” She was about to click it off when she added, “’Course, that’s forgivable if a man is honest and can make a pretty mean cup of coffee.”

  I slid the recorder back into my pocket and stood up. I’d grown stiff. Cold filtered through my wet clothes, clung to me. We’d stayed too long.

  She looked up at me. “I’m sorry I doubted you. You can delete my message if you like.”

  I shook my head. “No. I’ve already told her all about you, so…it’ll help to add a voice to the story.” I retraced my steps, backed up to the stretcher, lifted it, and began pulling.

  “So…where does she live?”

  “Just down the beach.”

  “How far?”

  “Two miles. I built her a house.”

  “You’re separated, but you built her a house.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Complicated. The kids…”

  “Kids! You have kids?”

  “Two.”

  “You have two kids, and you’re just now telling me?”

  I shrugged.

  “How old?”

  “Four. They’re twins.”

  “Names?”

  “Michael and Hannah.”

  She nodded. “Good names.”

  “Good kids.”

  “I’ll bet they keep you busy.”

  “I don’t…don’t see them much.”

  She frowned. “You must’ve really screwed up.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “In my experience, it’s usually the guy. Always thinking with your plumbing.”

  “It’s not that.”

  She didn’t sound convinced. “Is she dating?”

  “No.”