Stephen Cole stood up, color returning to the sky, to the man.
She coughed.
He looked away from her, eyes asquint.
It sounded like a barrage of gunshots, and then she realized they were aspen, snapping like firecrackers.
Lana sat up.
The preacher simply disappeared, exploding back in a wall of powder, and she moved, too, glimpsing sky and snow and sky again, somersaulting, the trees screaming by, saw the horse sawn in two by a jagged aspen, mushrooming into a pink cloud, Stephen Cole ricocheting off a boulder.
Everything stopped, the air fragrant with crushed spruce and freshly hewn wood, Lana surprised to see the sky, that she wasn’t buried in snow.
She sat up, her heart pumping, slowly moved her arms to verify they still worked, ran her hands down the length of her legs.
She looked back up the mountain.
The slide had carried her a few hundred yards downhill, the debris path littered with forest carnage—curdled snow and spruce and splintered aspen.
She got up and listened for a long time, the key she’d taken from Stephen Cole still clutched in her left hand, watching for any sign of movement.
She thought about the child, buried somewhere nearby.
The cold rushed back.
She lifted an uprooted aspen sapling and began to stab it through the snow, slowly working her way up toward the glade, probing for the little girl.
Stephen Cole lay cemented in snow and darkness.
He thought his arm wouldn’t work because he’d been packed under several hundred pounds of snow and trees. This was true, but the reason he couldn’t move a single appendage owed to the shattering of the bones in his arms and legs, the severing of his spine in four places.
He tried to call out for Harriet, but the snow had crammed into his mouth, gagging him.
It became difficult and then painful and then impossible to breathe.
He saw colors—violet and brown, columns of scalding light.
He tried to pray for Harriet, for an end to any suffering, but his mind wandered to a windy South Carolina beach.
He was buried deep in sand, lost, running out of air, but he could hear her voice shouting his name.
And then the miracle happened: Something punched through, jabbing his chest, and he smiled now, because Eleanor had found him. She was digging him out, a shot of cold, fresh air streaming into his lungs, and he saw the sky and Eleanor staring down at him.
But she wasn’t smiling. She looked angry.
He spit the sand out of his mouth and said, “Help me. Please, Eleanor. Please.”
She began to bury him back.
2009
EIGHTY-FOUR
A
bigail descended into a forest of ponderosa and Gambel oak, passed through curtains of mist between the trees, rain falling cold and steady, the air scented with wet pine. She’d been going for an hour when she came to the stream, fell to its muddy bank, and shoveled into her mouth handfuls of water so cold, her eyes ached.
Early afternoon, she walked out of the valley. The rain had let up, and what lay ahead looked familiar—a broad piece of open country surrounded by wooded mountains. Where the low dark clouds collided into the upper slopes, the conifers shone white with snow.
She spotted a ridge a mile away across the field. The map her father had drawn for her indicated that she needed to climb over it.
Though she didn’t like the prospect of venturing out into the open, she caught her breath and went on anyway,
