Lessons In Gravity

by Megan Westfield

  She was supposed to start filming once Josh passed Ernesto’s second position. She turned her camera on and rehearsed her pan at the speed Josh seemed to be climbing, and then played it back in the viewfinder. Her hands had been shaking so badly that none of the footage would have been usable if it had been the real thing. And that had been with blank rock with no one on it. How would she do when the guy who loved her was in the frame without a rope?

  She shifted her legs and repositioned the camera. Zooming in, she could see hands and arms, and the peach color of his face.

  Even from this distance, he was not the invincible Josh from multiple covers of Vertical View magazine but the Josh she’d been with last night. The Josh who had taken her hand on the slackline and the Josh who’d danced with her so tenderly in fake Yosemite and again in the meadow just below them. The Josh she’d do anything for, in exchange for him surviving this feat.

  Except tell him that she loved him.

  The height seized her. She gasped and grabbed the rope. Looking down, she made sure her harness was doubled back and checked the rope’s path through the Grigri. Her mind drew a sudden blank on how it was supposed to look. She checked her ascenders, too. Without the stoppers hooked right, the slightest movement could undo the ratchets and send her sliding off the ends of the rope.

  He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.

  Her right foot slipped off the wall, making her shoulder slam into the rock. She stifled a scream and reached frantically for the camera. Thankfully, it had been pinned safely between her thigh and stomach.

  She took a breath of relief, but her eyes still felt wild, like they were rolling in their sockets. Think what could have happened if that scream had escaped and Josh heard it! Get a grip. Get a grip. Get a grip.

  April closed her eyes and forced herself to exhale every ounce of old air, all the way down to the lowest lobes of her lungs, until her rib cage was a sucking vacuum screaming for more oxygen. She held off for a full count of ten longer, until the pain overrode any other thought or fear. Only then did she let the new air flow in.

  Russell: “Rolling on seven.”

  She opened her eyes. It was time for her to start filming.

  This time when she looked down, she could see the silhouette of Josh’s windblown hair and the point of his nose. She could also see the color of his shirt. Bright orange. It was the same bright orange shirt he’d worn to dinner at Tall Pines, when he’d stealthily wrapped his ankles around hers beneath the picnic table.

  She raised the camera and hit the record button. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. Still nothing. This could not happen, not right now, of all times. She was fully hyperventilating.

  She flipped to the control panel, trying to visualize the troubleshooting table in the front of the camera’s technical manual.

  What are the symptoms? Viewfinder black. Error light on.

  The lens cap.

  She felt the front of the camera. The lens cap was on. Damn it! She refocused on Josh. “Rolling on eight,” she said into her earpiece.

  Below, Josh released a hand from the rock and dipped it behind him into his chalk bag. As he drew it out, a white cloud billowed like ashes behind him and into the vast air below. A shiver coursed through April’s body, making the camera shake.

  This was important footage for the film, and she was a professional. There could be no more shaky hands or rookie mistakes. She steadied the camera and zoomed in to the stops. The extra ten degrees gave her Josh’s face, his forehead wrinkled as he scanned the rock above him. He slid his hand into the crack like a knife.

  She kept the camera in place but looked away as he shifted his weight onto his hand. Her heart beat out of her chest. He chose to do this. There’s nothing you can do to help him now. All she could do was to wipe the terror off her face before Josh reached her position.

  She refocused the camera on Josh. His hair was wet with sweat, and he was definitely peaked. His heels were jackhammering—delicately, barely perceptibly, but jackhammering. Not good. She told herself it didn’t matter. He would be fine.

  He was so close to the top now. The hardest parts were behind him, and he was high enough that the parachute might be able to catch him if he fell. It was possible he might actually survive this. In a half hour, she could be throwing her arms around him at the top.

  He was getting closer and closer to her, so close that she was now getting the footage that would be used in the film. She panned out at the same rate Josh was climbing until she was zeroed out. In minutes, he would be passing by close enough to touch. He was almost there.

  Now, she had a clear view of his face, which was not marked by the indifferent coolness of every other climbing video of him she’d seen. His placements were solid, but his soft eyes were clouded with exhaustion. His words echoed in her ears: I love you.

  The balls of his feet were smeared on invisibly small protrusions. His left fingers were clamped against a rounded corner while he reached up to jam his right fingers in a shallow crack. As he did, sand flowed out of it like a waterfall.

  Beads of sweat popped up on Josh’s forehead. He blew the sand off the rock in front of him that would be his footholds on the next move. He reached up and situated his hand in the crack again.

  There was a grinding of rock against rock, and then a sickening crunch.

  Josh blinked, and then his hand flew out of the crack along with a plate of granite that sliced though the air before shattering against the side of the cliff.

  “Rock!” Josh yelled. He lunged to regrip, but as he did, his feet lost contact with the wall. In terrible slow motion, he was sliding down, clawing at the rock. Then, the friction gave out, and he was plummeting through the air.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Noooooooo!” April screamed.

  Her mother grabbed her. “Shh! It’s a new trick.”

  Someone in the crowd snickered, but the nose-diving black biplane was falling faster and faster, closing in on the red line, and her dad wasn’t pulling out.

  A cloud of thick black of smoke flowed out of the Pitts.

  Noooooooo! she screamed, this time silently in her head.

  He still wasn’t pulling out and he was almost out of altitude. He had to pull out now, right now!

  The crowd was impressed, holding a collective breath as the plane began to tumble tail over nose. A few people gasped in awe. But this was no bonus maneuver. It was the result of the unbalanced aerodynamics in her dad’s desperate attempt to get the engine going.

  Slow motion hit. The Pitts was plummeting toward the ground. April was shrieking hysterically.

  The crowd caught on as the plane veered toward the grandstand with no sign of slowing. The shrill scream of a woman high in the bleachers joined April first, then a dozen others, their screams uniting into the unrecoverable mark of a banshee.

  The whole place erupted in chaos. People stampeded to get out of the stands, running frantically in all directions. Parents flung themselves in front of their children.

  She knew the plane would land close but not in the stands, and thus, stood frozen in the milieu, watching the Pitts’s whistling descent.

  Even as the plane flowed vertically past the control tower, her father was trying to engage the clutch to restart the engine.

  It was so big up close. She’d never been this near to the Pitts when it was in motion. It was such a beautiful plane.

  In an instant, it was a tangle of crumpled metal with flames exploding from it.

  April hurdled over the fence and sprinted with the fire trucks across the runway.

  Two uniformed men caught her just before she reached the wreckage. They turned inward and redoubled their grip as she strained against them, the force slamming her down to the tar-covered pavement.

  She didn’t want to see what was in front of her, but she couldn’t look away.

  The Pitts was a sphere of rolling flames spewing smoke so black and heavy it sank to
the runway like octopus ink before rising up in a column. The erratic wind parted the smoke just long enough to get a glimpse of something familiar before the heat blasted the air into a shimmering mirage and the smoke rushed back in.

  A disembodied propeller blade, the melted logo, a wing tip curled in on itself.

  Her throat was scalding, and she was choking on the vile avgas fumes, but she couldn’t stop screaming. A third man clamped down on her and started pulling.

  “It’s going to explode, ma’am, you’ve gotta get back,” he yelled.

  They were dragging her away. But Dad! She had to wait for her dad! The smoke would open and he’d walk out. He’d be laughing. The joke would be on them. It was all part of the show.

  She dug her heels in and threw her body toward the flames where the smoke was even thicker. She was coughing hard. She couldn’t breathe. She vomited on her captors and then everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  She was in a harness, slumped over, with her helmet resting against the rope that was holding her in the air. Down on the ground, SUVs with revolving lights were everywhere, their sirens muted in the terrifying vertical distance between her and them. The pounding of helicopter blades echoed off the black rock from somewhere below.

  “April!” Madigan yelled into her earpiece.

  Her mind was blank. All sensations were numb. What did he want?

  Josh.

  He’d fallen.

  She was still clutching the camera. It slipped out of her hands. She grabbed the rope. The camera jerked when it reached the end of its tether, then dangled like a pendulum.

  “April!” Madigan yelled.

  She swallowed hard and felt for the radio. “I’m here.”

  “Thank god!” Madigan said. “Don’t move, Ernesto’s almost there.”

  Josh—he was gone. Josh was gone forever.

  And she’d had a direct hand in it all. Her peripheral vision turned fuzzy and started closing in.

  Ernesto was suddenly next to her, gripping her shoulder. “Let’s get up to the top, okay?”

  She pulled the camera back up. It was still rolling. It had recorded everything. She wanted to tear it off the leash and throw it into the depths that had claimed Josh.

  She switched her gear and started ascending. Far below, the helicopter lifted off and flew away.

  Josh’s family wouldn’t be at the funeral, but she would be. Even if his hands were crushed and soft like Play-doh, or stiff with death, she would hold them one more time. She would kiss his cold lips and smooth his wild hair. And once he was buried, she would stand vigil six feet above him. He would not spend his first night in the ground alone.

  Once they were off the fin, Ernesto put on his pack and waited for her to do the same.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I need a minute before I go down.”

  “I’ll wait—”

  “Please. Go.”

  Reluctantly, he left. As soon as he was out of sight, she sat on the ground and tore into her backpack for the things Josh had asked her to bring to the top: his gray hooded sweatshirt, a change of clothes, a water bottle.

  She put on his sweatshirt and bunched his clothes into a pile to wrap herself around. She inhaled deeply, trying to breathe him back to life within her by his familiar smell.

  This, right now, was so much different than three years ago, mainly because she herself had not been injured as a result of the accident and, therefore, had not awakened in a hospital where she had immediate access to sedatives that made the pain disappear.

  But in one way it was exactly the same: it was the long slide down into gaping chasm of hell that was the permanent, irrevocable loss of someone she loved.

  Because, yes, she loved Josh.

  She loved his crinkly hazel eyes, the intense caring that filled his soul, and how just being in his presence made it feel like his arms were around her. That lopsided, sheepish smile of his! The way he twirled his highlighter between his fingers when his textbook passages turned boring. That gray hood, always up in public, hiding his rumpled hair. She loved everything about him.

  Tears ran down her face. Sobs broke loose, and then she was falling, just like he had.

  Madigan was talking to her in the radio again, but she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to move; she didn’t ever want to move again. Inside her frozen body, her mind raced, replaying every moment together with Josh.

  I wanted you to know the answers to the questions you were asking me.

  I don’t want us to be over.

  The only reason I’m even sitting here is because of you.

  I didn’t care what happened to me. And no one else did, either.

  I care about you too much already.

  I wish this, right now, could last forever.

  Tonight, she would find a way to sleep in his truck, surrounded by his smell. If there were ghosts, and if his spirit were still lingering on earth somewhere, maybe he’d find her there and know the truth of what she hadn’t said aloud. She would stand up right now and she would walk down the trail, if for nothing more than to meet him there at his truck.

  She pushed herself off the ground, her mind in a numb haze. Her body shook with cold and tension as she started walking. Halfway down, there was Madigan, practically running toward her. Her trance exploded, and she collapsed into his arms. He held her tightly and rocked her gently. The tears flowed with no end. “It’s all my fault.”

  “April, it’s not your fault.”

  “No, it is. You don’t understand. It really is.” Josh would never know that she loved him. That she would always love him.

  “Shh, shh. It’s okay. Just stay right here until you’re ready.”

  Her tears flowed fresh.

  When she was too exhausted to cry anymore, Madigan put his arm around her and helped her walk down the trail.

  “Where will they take him?” she whispered when they were just a few switchbacks from the meadow.

  “Sacramento.”

  “I’d like to go there to see him, if that’s okay,” she said.

  “Of course. Everyone else is already on their way.”

  “Danny and Theo?”

  “And all of Josh’s friends. Did you see the huge crowd in the meadow? Most of them are headed to the hospital.”

  “The hospital?”

  Madigan stopped walking and looked at her. “You know, he was hurt pretty badly, April. I assumed you knew that.”

  “Hurt?”

  “He’s in bad shape, and he’s not conscious, but he’s breathing on his own.”

  She jerked away and stared with disbelief. “You mean, he’s not dead?”

  “You thought he died?”

  “I saw him fall. He wasn’t pulling his chute.”

  “But then he did. It slowed him just enough. Didn’t you hear us on the radio?”

  She didn’t bother responding. She was already jogging down the trail.

  “Wait, April!” Madigan called. He ran to catch up with her. “Just so you know, the rangers are probably going to want a report since you were closest when it happened.”

  When they hit the melee at the base, she tore the SD card out of the camera and shoved it at the nearest park ranger. “This is exactly what I saw,” she said.

  She gripped Madigan by the elbow, and they ran for the Walkabout van and jumped inside.

  “Drive fast,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty

  She saw nothing at first except Josh’s chest rising and falling. He was alive. He was truly alive.

  His leg was in a cast and elevated while his arm rested in a clear, inflatable tube, with metal screws protruding from it like a gauze-covered pincushion. Cuts and dried blood covered his skin, along with orange iodine stains. The IVs and beeping monitors were everywhere. An automatic blood pressure cuff came alive and clamped tight around his poor, bruised bicep.

  He was so out of place in the sanitary whiteness of the hospital room and bright lights. She was out of p
lace, too, caught between her public and private relationships with Josh.

  Only one visitor at time was allowed in his room, so technically they were alone. But there was an uncurtained window into the hallway, and right around the corner was the waiting room filled with climbers and her crewmates standing vigil.

  She wanted to fling herself across Josh and kiss him until he woke up and gave her a smile that assured her everything would be okay. Instead, she pulled a chair next to his bed and slipped her hand beneath his. The warmth of his skin was her final proof that he had indeed survived a three-thousand-foot fall.

  “Josh, it’s me, April,” she said. “I got here as soon as I could.”

  She checked the window. No one was there except the nurse typing at a computer stand. April rested her head on the mattress near Josh’s thigh. She searched his broken face for signs of the familiar, but there wasn’t much. His nose was flat and swollen, his skin yellow, and even if he were conscious, his eyes were so puffy he wouldn’t have been able to open them.

  She sat up and leaned closer to him.

  “I love you, Josh,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you last night, but I do. I have since the beginning.”

  Tears filled her eyes, but she stifled them back. “When you wake up, I’m going to be here for you. As soon as you’re well enough, we’ll go to Tuolumne. And after that, we’ll find a way to make it work. I promise we will.”

  His mangled body made her sick, but it couldn’t touch the euphoria of being in his presence. He hadn’t died, and furthermore, the one thing keeping them apart was gone. He would not climb again, and he would never know she’d planned to break it off with him after the Sorcerer. She could give her heart to him freely and wholly.

  What would he do next? He was working on the business degree, but he’d never mentioned what he wanted to do with it. And of all the places he’d temporarily resided, where would he want to live permanently? Maybe he’d come to Seattle after shooting wrapped, and he could work on his degree while she finished the internship.

  She was getting ahead of herself. Right now, she needed to focus on the present. He was in a coma. She needed to do what she could to help him wake up and heal.