I explained this all to Archie as we stood at the base of the Scramble. He stared up at the rocks and the waterfall and nodded like it was no big deal.
“So you’re okay with heights?” I asked him.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s always the possibility that you could fall to your death.”
“You’re an idiot,” he said. “That’s, like, the least of my concerns.”
Well, there were a lot of things I could’ve said in response to that. None of them nice. But I let it go, and we started off on the trail with me leading the way. The path was narrow from the start and Archie had to fall in line behind me, requiring him to walk with his face in my ass, which felt like a certain brand of justice. Spite, maybe, was the proper word.
Archie had problems right off the bat. His face did that red thing and his breathing grew labored. If I hadn’t seen him like that the day before, I would’ve guessed he was on the verge of altitude sickness—we were above 5,000 feet. Although he’d been fine on the earlier hike, he now struggled with each step. Pretty soon he was swearing.
“What’s wrong with you?” I finally asked.
“Asthma,” he gasped. “But I’m fine.”
“You have asthma? Don’t you have an inhaler or something for that?”
“No,” he said, wheezing more. Then a minute later: “Tell me where we’re going.”
I hesitated. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to tell him. I didn’t care about the money. I was only going to make sure he got up and back down the waterfall safely. “Okay, there’s a cave,” I said. “About a half mile past the lake. We’re going to walk around the perimeter of the lake, then follow a sign pointing toward the summit. When we turn north, there should be a tall cairn on our right. We’ll enter the woods there, and the cave’ll be a few hundred yards back and covered with rocks. I don’t know. It be might be hard to find, but that’s where Rose said to go.”
Archie nodded, seeming to take this all in. We soon came to the end of the switchback, reaching the part where we had to climb—scramble, really. Staring up at the talus slope and piles of loose rock, I took time to point out the easiest routes.
“You don’t want to choose the shortest way up,” I warned, echoing the words I’d read on countless climbing blogs and websites. “You want to pick the smartest. There aren’t any ropes and I sure as hell can’t help you if you get in trouble. You got it?”
“Yeah, sure. I got it.”
“Rest if you need to, Arch. I’m serious. You don’t look good. This isn’t a race.”
He sneered. “Jesus. Don’t be such a pussy. Let’s go already.”
We started climbing. It wasn’t long before I was gasping, too. Progress was slow, the sun rising to lick our backs as the wind whipped harder. I’d selected the most direct route toward the top, which meant crawling along the spine of a steep ridge, clambering up boulders and over fallen trees—those brittle victims of drought. Archie, on the other hand, veered east, his choices more deliberate and cautious than I would’ve predicted.
A narrow ledge jutted up from the ridge peak, and I pulled myself up and over to land on solid ground. I still had a ways to go, but I took a moment to breathe; the view from the ledge was vast and yawning, and Archie was nowhere close to reaching me. I peered over to watch him toil below, picking his way from marker to marker and having to rest every couple minutes in a way that felt more lazy than necessary.
I stayed there like that, leaning over the side on my hands and knees, until a rush of dizziness closed in on me—a sudden bout of vertigo that seemed to come from nowhere. Alarmed, I straightened up and crawled back, then tried pushing myself to standing, only to have my arms crumple under my weight. I collapsed forward onto my face. With a groan, I rolled to one side, scissoring my hips, and struggled to rise again. And again. But something was wrong. My limbs had gone all pins and needles, as if my body had fallen asleep without me. I lay there, like a dying horse, my right foot churning uselessly in the air.
I had no clue how long I was on the ground like that. Time spiraled into something bleak and unreliable, and I was vaguely aware I was experiencing the precursor to a migraine—aura, it’s called and mine takes many forms. I also knew the pain would consume me soon, battering me with suffering, bright and flashy. If I couldn’t get to my meds, my only hope for relief would be to die of a stroke or else find a way to roll myself over the edge of the cliff.
Heavy breathing signaled the arrival of Archie onto the ledge, which was followed by the sound of him gulping water from the bottle I’d brought with me. He hadn’t bothered bringing his own.
“What the hell are you doing, Gibby?” he asked when he was done.
Migraine, I wanted to say. With parasthesia. That was the word for the numbness and lack of coordination winding through my limbs. It was also the reason I couldn’t form words to tell him what it was I needed and why opening my eyes felt like trying to grasp objects that had fallen to the bottom of the deepest well. These were the worst of my migraines; the ones that came on fast, without warning, only to leave me ruined.
Archie stood over me. “You having a seizure or something?”
I still didn’t answer. I gaped like a fish.
He made his wheezing sound again. “Well, now, crap, Gibby. You don’t look too good. But like you told me, if you can’t climb, I sure as hell can’t do anything to help you. I’m real sorry about that. But I’m gonna keep going. Catch up with me if you can.”
I groaned again as he reached down to unzip the side pack I wore around my waist. A spark of hope flared within me as he rummaged around in there. Maybe he was getting my pills. But instead, he plucked out both sets of car keys, my compass, and the trail map, jamming all the items into his own backpack.
“You really can’t blame me,” he said before he left. “You’d do the same thing if you were me. I know damn well you would.”
34.
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, THE types of migraines i get are due to a condition called persistent post-traumatic headache. It sounds simple enough and, in a lot of ways, it is. All the name really means is that my brain still hasn’t gotten over what happened when I was ten, when my mother drove her gold Kia off the highway, hitting a light pole as she went before rolling twice and ending up at the bottom of a hill in front of a defunct gum factory. I was thrown from the vehicle—I wasn’t wearing a seat belt—and it’s always seemed ironic that despite not being anything close to athletic, I’d somehow succeeded in hurling my body through the front windshield.
I don’t remember anything after that. I’ve been told I landed facedown in a drainage ditch that was filled with maybe four inches of rainwater and algae. Shallow, but still deep enough to drown. I don’t know how long I was underwater but apparently I had to be resuscitated. That sounds overly dramatic, if you ask me, and I’d like to think that if I’d really died and come back to life, I’d know. Even if my mind couldn’t hold on to the memory, I want to believe there’s some part of me that would.
When I woke up in the hospital two days later, no one told me anything other than I’d had an accident and hit my head. Well, maybe they told me other things, too, and I just forgot. I did a lot of that in those first few days. Forgetting. Sleeping, too. I was instructed not to move without help, a directive I didn’t understand until I tried making it to the bathroom on my own, too bashful for a nurse’s help. I was upright for mere seconds, the world seemingly unmoving, while inside my own body, I spun and spun, circling the drain of consciousness before sinking to the waxed linoleum floor.
My head hurt all the time in those early months. I don’t think that’s surprising given what happened. A lot of people wanted to know the details of what I’d done to Marcus, forcing me to repeat over and over that it was a moment my damaged mind had stolen from me. That I didn’t remember a thing.
W
hat was known was that he and I were alone in the house together with a loaded gun that he’d foolishly left on the coffee table. Apparently, I’d picked it up, it went off, and he’d died from a bullet to the brain while sleeping on the couch. Accidental, it was deemed. How could it be anything but? I was a timid kid, not an angry one, and in the end, Marcus was lamented as both a good man and a bad gun owner. But I refused to give him that, even in death, and so I’ll tell you this: Timid or not, I hated him for hurting my mother. For hiding behind Scripture and righteousness and making her feel as if she deserved to suffer at his hand, by making her hate herself.
By making her hate me.
No one worried too much about my headaches at first. They were the least of my problems, compared with cops and social services and my mother’s black, black moods. They were also ordinary, given my injury, and I was told I would heal. However, healing, like God’s mercy, failed to appear. The headaches grew worse. More frequent, too. And when the numbness and vision loss kicked in, that was when I had to go see a specialist.
The doctor I went to was a neurologist, who ran a bunch of tests and made me wear a stupid medical alert bracelet. He also let me know that while my most severe symptoms closely resembled a rare condition known as hemiplegic migraine, which carried the risk of coma and possible death, it was usually due to genetics, not injury. In the end, I was diagnosed with plain old regular migraine of the persistent, post-traumatic variety. But the more I learned about the hemiplegic thing, the greater my doubt. Perhaps the truth was that my injury had only set off what was already there, lying in wait.
Perhaps pain had always been a part of who I was.
And look, there’s no point not to anymore, so I’ll tell you this, too: I remember everything that happened that day with Marcus, and here’s what the coroner got wrong—my stepfather definitely wasn’t asleep when I shot him. It also wasn’t an accident. He woke up that afternoon to find me standing beside him, holding the gun he’d taught me to fire to his temple, and he knew what I was going to do. He also knew why, which was how I wanted it. I was the one who squeezed my eyes shut before pulling the trigger, and I don’t think I opened them again until hours later, when my mother came home and found us. And no, she never once asked what I’d done or how it had happened.
She never had to.
—
After Archie abandoned me on that ledge, there wasn’t much I could do about the situation. With great effort, I managed to reach into my unzipped side pack for my medication. My fingers fumbled with the blister packs, but I finally popped a Zomig out only to have it roll out of reach, somewhere near the edge. I whimpered at the loss—I wasn’t about to go searching for it—then fumbled for another pill. I held on to that one, shoving it under my tongue and letting it melt, before chasing it with two codeine-laced Tylenol. Then I prayed for sleep, the way I always did. I didn’t care if it was the easy way out.
A rumbling came from above. Followed by the sound of crumbling earth. Twisting my head, I glanced up just in time for a rush of falling rocks and dirt clods to hit me square in the face. I spat mud from my lips in disgust. Archie had done that on purpose. I was sure of it.
Laying my head on granite, I closed my eyes. Soon I was conscious of nothing but the wind prickling my skin, the rising pain in my head, and the yawning free-fall distance from the ledge to the ground below. My mind grasped for reason, an analytical solution to my current problem. Geometric even, because like points to a triangle, it seemed my strange trio of perceptions must have something to tell me—if only I could figure out what it was. But my awareness was far from equilateral, the pain most acute, and if I knew anything right about relationships, then that meant the Pythagorean theorem should hold.
I labored with the calculations. Rose was better at math than I was, but I determined that the distance to the ground was farthest, meaning it had to be the hypotenuse. Would its square be measured in yards or meters? Yards were easier, and I estimated the ledge I was stuck on hovered maybe two hundred yards in the air. Only I had no clue how to convert pain into any equivalent value, much less wind velocity.
Solutions drifted from reach. Hope, too, and I gave in to the glove grip of failure, having come to the very end of my reason. My brain was broken, addled by pain. By drugs. By more. Twisting onto my back, I forced my eyes open only to have them roll into my head. The blue sky above sparkled, dreamlike, but its beauty was wasted; I could stand neither the weight of the sun nor the cruel shove of the breeze.
Flailing my arms to the side, I propped my legs against the cliff wall and stayed that way, lying backward, half suspended in the air. My mind shimmered toward madness; I was sinking but I was also hanging, a pig on a meat hook, and I craved my gutting. I could picture the act in vivid detail—the first thrust of the knife; the deep carving of flesh; the ragged wound running all the way from breastbone to rectum. Everything after would be easy. That’s what I told myself, as the blackness rushed in.
Release.
Death.
Nothingness.
—
I awoke cold. Freezing, really.
My lungs contracted, gripped with chill, making me cough. I had no clue how much time had passed, as I lay curled on that ledge in a state of codeine-induced half consciousness, half death. I did know that when I opened my eyes, it was because I was shivering. But this awareness filtered in slowly as I untangled myself from sleep and pain, only to realize the sun had ceased to warm my skin.
I sat up. Tested my limbs. I was relieved to find everything working in all the right ways. That relief was trampled, however, as I remembered Archie’s betrayal. That he’d stolen the keys. That he’d left me here. Alone.
I felt it again—the frigid blast of air that had woken me in the first place. It washed over the cliff top and hurtled straight down the mountain to lap my bones, a greedy slurp of winter. I shuddered, bleary-eyed, and looked up. Shadows fell across my face as I stared at the darkening sky. What had been blue was now steel-gray and churning, but it wasn’t night. I knew that. I couldn’t have slept that long.
That left only one other explanation.
I braced myself. The storm’s door slammed open with a bang. Wind whistled in with primal force, slapping my face as the rain began to fall, those first drops runny and large. They landed, one after the other, like a leaking faucet, but soon fell faster.
And faster.
The hail came next, mixing with the sheets of rain to pelt me with ice and welt my skin. Thunder boomed in the distance and the wind tore at my clothes, screaming as it blew through every opening and weakness in my body it could find.
I was soaked in an instant. Shelter was imperative. I had to move. I had to do something. Or I was going to die out there.
35.
ATTEMPTING TO MAKE my way up the rest of the scramble to the top of the waterfall appeared at best Sisyphean, at worst suicidal. The earth turned to mud, melting before my eyes, and each time I lifted my head torrents of water barraged my face, rushing to fill my nostrils and throat.
Gasping, sputtering, I stayed crouched on the narrow ledge with my hands over my head and pondered my dwindling options. The water pooling at my feet had found its own current, sloshing, splashing toward the edges before spilling into the abyss. I couldn’t stay there much longer, but I couldn’t go down, either, which meant I had no choice; hell, I was only twenty feet from the top. Slipping my ugly sunglasses on and hoping for the best, I began the climb.
The rain fell harder as I ascended, matting my hair to my face. I focused on moving one limb at a time, straining with each shift of weight and balance. The frigid wind grabbed me, shaking my body the higher I climbed, causing me to cling desperately to keep from being blown away. As I held on, raw fingers digging into dirt, I dipped my head and peeked below. The view was horrifying, a sheer drop straight down into the massive waterfall’s thundering maelstrom, a foaming pool ring
ed by boulders and sharp edges—a gaping mouth, its teeth slick with rain. I whipped my head up, then shouted as one of my hands slipped, sending me sliding back toward the ledge.
I managed to throw one leg out, kicking it into the dirt as hard as I could. My hip wrenched at the action, torqueing sharply but stopping my fall nonetheless. I squeezed my eyes shut with shuddering gratitude, then pressed my face against the mud. I was a fool for coming out on this mountain in the first place. For ever believing I could take on nature and be more than who I was. All those nights doing push-ups on the floor of my room or running up and down our single flight of stairs when I knew my mom wasn’t going to wake up—those had been acts of willful ignorance. No different from believing in pots of gold at the ends of rainbows or in the hands of criminals willing to hand them over. Everyone crafted their own brand of dreams, I supposed, but from where I crouched that made hope the most Sisyphean act of all.
Eventually the wind and rain eased slightly, allowing me to breathe, and I dug deep for a sliver of resolve. Not in myself, but in the girl I longed to save.
I resumed climbing. Slowly. At last I reached the very top of the waterfall, the cresting edge of the massive Grizzly Lake—visible for the very first time. My heart rocketed at the sight. The icy water was a living creature, a body organic and wild, its waves choppy, smacking against its own shores with obvious ire. I stood balanced on the ridge that spindled out over the waterfall, the rock below hollowed from the current’s force, a powerful testament to both gravity and the whims of fate.
When I Am Through with You Page 18