“Yeah?”
“Your rope is jammed in the rock. That’s why you can’t get onto the ledge.” His voice is calm. “We need to cut it.”
Cut the rope. The words might as well be Jane, we need to cut your heart out of your body. I panic.
“I’ll fall!”
“No you won’t. Tighten your grip and let me know when the rope isn’t supporting you.”
I grasp as tightly as I can until I know in my heart that it is me who is holding my body on this mountain. Not Paul. Not God. Not a rope. Just Jane.
“That’s as firm as I can get,” I finally call. My voice is cracked. “I’m scared, Paul!”
“I’m gonna cut. You need to hold tight for less than a minute. You can do that. In about thirty seconds, my hand will come down to your left. Reach out and grab it, and I’ll pull you up. Trust me. I won’t let you go.”
“Okay.” I say it so softly I’m sure he can’t hear.
“Less than a minute,” he promises.
I grip with all the force in my being. I think of my angels again, like I’m taking off on a plane. Hold me here, I ask. Hold me on this earth. I think of my grandfather and my father and my cousin. I imagine their hands on my back, pressing me into the mountainside. Suddenly, I feel light.
“Jane, you’re going to have to cut the rope. I can’t get the right angle from here.”
His hand comes down holding the knife out for me and I reach out and grab it with my right hand.
“You can do this,” he says. I can’t even spare the energy to answer him.
The line is taut and firm. I push my toes into their hold and jam my left hand as firmly into its hold as I can. I grip the knife and lay the serrated edge against the rope and begin to saw. I am literally pressing my head into the side of the mountain as I saw, trying to keep the rest of my body as still as possible. The blade is sharp, and even though the rope is made to resist fraying, the knife makes its way through. As I near the final threads, I regrip just before snapping the line completely.
It snaps and my weight shifts more than I expect it to. For a second, I wobble. The wind hits me at the same moment and my left foot shifts a millimeter. Reflexively, I thrash out with my right hand and drop the knife. I pull with both hands and cat scratch with my feet, trying to find grounding. I look down and see my boots, the wall, and then one hundred feet of void.
“Grab my hand! Grab my hand!”
I hear Paul shouting. I look to my right and there it is, maybe a foot away. My left hand starts to slip and I flail with my right, over to Paul’s, and we grasp just as my left slips free. I’m dangling by one arm over the cliff. Paul’s massive hand grips me, but we are suspended in mid-air. All his strength holds me but can’t seem to move me up and over.
“Your feet, Jane, get a foothold!”
But my feet are a foot from the wall, swinging wildly in the air. My left hand reaches up and finds a tiny landing on the top of the ledge. I pull as hard as I can, and suddenly, together, Paul and I begin to win the battle. I feel my body moving inch by inch. Paul is screaming like a wild beast, giving everything he has. And then my chest hits the edge and I throw my right leg up and over, landing and rolling onto the ledge.
I let out a scream and pound the ground. I feel like my heart might explode out of my chest, it’s throbbing so hard. Paul moves over and rolls me over and wraps his arm around me as tightly as he can. When my ears stop ringing, I realize he is whispering to me.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
I sob, thinking how close I came to dying, and to pulling Paul over that cliff with me. We lie there for a few moments, just holding each other and catching our breath.
“I dropped the knife,” I finally say.
“I know. You couldn’t have done anything else.”
He looks at the overhang above us and he smiles. “That’s okay. We finally caught a break.”
Chapter 23
Standing on this tiny ledge, staring up at the inverted overhang that I can’t imagine a champion climber ascending, never mind the physically challenged like myself, I am flooded with joy. It comes as I discover for myself that the inverted overhang is split into two distinct pieces of rock.
“You’re thinking we can climb through the crack rather than around and over.”
“You’ll stand on my shoulders and then I’ll push your feet up until you can find a grip and pull yourself up,” Paul instructs as he scans the crevice. His attention snaps back at me when I don’t respond. “Okay?” I nod.
“What happens after?” I ask.
“You’ll pull me up or something,” he says. “We’ll figure it out.”
“‘Or something’ sounds like a great plan,” I say.
“It’s worked so far.”
I don’t know how he lives like this. Planless. Instinctive. It drives me nuts, but I bite my tongue.
Paul kneels and I step on his shoulders and hold his hands. He stands up and holds my ankles firmly. I reach up, and my hands feel the bottom of the crack until I’m able to slide my left hand into a hold. I pull, but don’t have the strength to lift myself through to a foothold in the crack.
“It’s too high,” I say.
“Hold on,” Paul grunts, and his hands come under my boots and he pushes up with all his might. I reach and stretch until my left hand lands on the floor of the cliff and my right boot finds a foothold. I push hard and Paul gives me one last shove. I hoist my body over the top and land, hard, on the floor, scurrying to pull my legs over.
“I’m over, I’m over,” I holler.
“Stay there.”
In a matter of minutes, Paul climbs the wall and then shimmies across the crack like he’s climbing hand over hand on a pull bar. When he reaches the wide part of the crack, he pulls himself up and over the top.
He stands and looks out over the valley. He has a big smile on his face.
“Not bad, Solis.”
He sits down next to me. He puts his hand around my shoulders and pulls me in. My head falls onto his shoulder.
“Yeah, not bad, Hart.”
He looks around and then behind us.
“Not exactly what I’d hoped for.”
I look around again. My heart sinks. I’m not sure this is the right term for what I’m seeing, but I’m calling it a false top.
We are surrounded by mountain peaks far higher than the one we are standing on. Unless the sky was to turn crystal blue, it’s unlikely that a search plane could find us here.
“We can’t be found here, can we?” I ask.
“Do you mean alive?”
“Of course.”
“Unlikely.”
He lies on his back and looks up.
“We have to find shelter, before the sun falls.”
I look around and then up toward the sun, or where it should be. I can’t believe that we’ve gone through all of this and haven’t changed our situation at all. Except, of course, that we no longer have the bathroom shelter. A cold wind hits my face and I turn into Paul’s chest to protect myself.
“Don’t freak out on me now,” Paul whispers in my ear.
“I’m not.” I sit back up. “It’s the wind; it surprised me.”
He sits up and puts both arms around me, pulls me in tight, and kisses the top of my head.
“The worst is below us now,” he says. “Look.”
I don’t look, because I know looking back is a haunting feeling all its own.
