“Oh my God, are you all right?” he yelled down to her.
“I don’t know,” she whimpered.
“Can you hold on?”
“For a little while, I think.”
“Just do it, for God’s sake -- just hold on,” he shouted. “I’m going to get help!”
And then he was gone, taking the children with him, of course, and there was nothing -- no contact, no comfort, no sounds, only the cold, hard reality of being alone and wanting, more desperately than she could ever have believed, to survive.
***
Clare had no idea what time it was or whether she had been dangling from the jutting piece of rock for a minute or for an hour. All she knew was that her arm was getting tired, so tired she didn’t think she could hold on much longer. And she was cold, so cold she couldn’t feel her legs. And, too, her mind was starting to get fuzzy. She couldn’t remember whether she packed the first-aid kit.
It hurt to move, it hurt to breathe, and she began to shiver. She knew she had to do something before her arm gave out, she thought she could already feel it beginning to slip, and she knew it was only a matter of time before her whole body would go numb, before she would lose consciousness, before she would fall.
With one great heave she raised her left arm up and threw it around the rock. A shot of pain hit her with such force that she screamed, but she didn’t let go. Instead, she held on even tighter, because the pain cleared the fuzziness from her mind and kept her alert. After that, each time she felt herself beginning to slip away, she jerked her left shoulder so that the pain would bring her back.
“A, B, C, D . . .” she said defiantly to the mountain above, to the ravine below. “E, F, G . . .”
Although she had no way of knowing, it was almost an hour and a half before she heard noises above her -- almost an hour and a half that she had been clinging to the rock, reciting the alphabet out loud, first forwards and then backwards, through chattering teeth, and then counting to a hundred and then to a thousand, doing whatever she could think of to do to force herself to stay awake.
She twisted her head to see Richard staring down at her again, but now there were several other men, wearing park ranger uniforms, standing beside him.
Clare closed her eyes and for the first time felt tears trickling down her cheeks, tears that were warm against cheeks that were cold. She was no longer alone. She was going to be all right. Somehow she knew that the men with Richard weren’t going to let her die.
Using a rope and pulley system meant for just such emergencies, two of the park rangers rappelled down to Clare in a matter of minutes. One of them took hold of her while the other pried her locked arms loose from their grip on the rock. She groaned from the pain. Carefully, the rangers placed her in a wire basket manipulated from above by the third member of their team, covered her with a blanket, and then slowly brought her back up the mountain.
“Well, sir, this must be your lucky day,” the park ranger working the pulley told Richard.
“She just slipped and fell,” Richard kept repeating, wringing his hands. “There was nothing I could do.”
“This can be a very tricky trail if you’re not experienced,” the ranger said.
“I didn’t realize,” Richard murmured.
The rangers carried Clare down the rest of the path, doing their very best not to jostle her unnecessarily. They needn’t have been so concerned. Only half-conscious, she barely felt a thing. A cursory glance told the rangers that there was little they could do for her at the park’s first-aid station, so an ambulance was summoned to take her to the nearest hospital, Olympic Memorial in Port Angeles.
“My goodness, and what have we here?” a sympathetic Emergency Room nurse asked.
“She slipped and fell off the mountain,” Richard explained. “She was right in front of me, but it all happened so fast, there wasn’t a thing I could do.”
“Oh my,” the nurse said, sympathetically. “Well now, why don’t you take the children and go on down to the big room at the end of the hall and have a seat. There are vending machines down there, if you’re hungry or thirsty. Meanwhile, we’ll have the doctor examine her, and then, as soon as we know something definitive, someone will come on out and talk to you.”
Richard took Julie and Peter into the waiting room, where the vending machines supplied enough sodas and cookies to keep them quiet. He looked at his watch. It was almost five o’clock. He moved away from the children, far enough to be out of earshot, while still close enough to keep his eye on them, and then he pulled out his cell phone to make a call.
The Emergency Room was filled with its usual share of holiday mishaps, but perhaps none was as serious as this. An orderly wheeled Clare into a curtained-off cubicle, and then a nurse came in to remove her tattered clothing and cover her with a sheet. She hardly noticed.
“So, your husband says you slipped and fell off the mountain,” the emergency room doctor said, it could have been a moment or an hour later. “It doesn’t sound like you had much fun, and it probably wasn’t what you had in mind to do on Father’s Day, now was it?”
Clare did not respond. She was too dazed to understand that both of her legs were broken, that her left elbow was shattered and her shoulder dislocated, that three of her ribs had pierced her
