teeth chattered.
“I’m here,” Leon told her on his radio. “Nobody’s hurt.” He spoke in his cool, calm voice, only slightly broken up with static. “We’re ready.” He meant ready to send up the supplies.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“What?”
She felt that at any moment she would plummet. Like the tree branch, she would whistle through the air, cratering the forest floor. Just as she began to fall, the world would rise to meet her. She would detonate on impact, her brain would splatter. She gasped for air. Strange, she knew that she was having a panic attack. She knew exactly what was happening, but she could not stop it. She couldn’t breathe. The earth kept rising up to meet her.
“I can’t,” she gasped into her radio.
“Your friend is here,” Leon said.
“What?” She could barely process this.
“Jess,” Leon warned. “You committed to a week. If you bail, someone has to take your place.”
“I have to come down.”
A long pause on the other end. “Come down then.”
But Jess could not take the climbing line in her two hands and make that descent. Fear swallowed her up. She tried to draw strength from the redwood. The storm was over; the winds were gone. She would sit and contemplate the ants, so small and strong and organized, always moving forward, up and over every obstacle. She would marvel at the secret gardens of moss and brambles and new trees in the redwood’s crown. She told herself all this, but the crack of falling timber echoed in her ears. “Please, please, please, come get me.”
When Leon appeared, climbing nimbly, balanced beautifully on his rope, he found Jess crouching with her head between her knees. He saw exactly how frightened she was, and he looked at her with a mixture of pity and anger. Jess had insisted she could handle climbing, pronounced herself cured, insisted on a full-week shift. Now she cowered like a cat up a tree, a total liability.
He examined her with his clear blue eyes, and looking up at him, she felt his distance. She felt, despairingly, that she had failed a test, and she hated herself for failing, but she hated him more for testing her at all.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have encouraged you. You didn’t want to be here,” he murmured.
“I did,” she said.
“You just wanted to prove to me that you could last.”
“No, I wanted to prove it to myself,” she said.
“Really? That was …” His radio crackled. “It was wrong of me to let you.” He gestured for her to stand.
“Why?” She held fast to the boards of the platform.
“Because you weren’t prepared.”
He remembered a day, a soft, windless day when they’d lain together undressed under the trees. A single pine needle had drifted down. He’d watched it fall on her white skin. “Get up. Come on.” As he helped Jess to her feet, he pushed that memory away. “Your friend is waiting for you.”
“Oh, God.”
“He came up yesterday, lecturing everybody, demanding to see you.” The next words were almost taunting. “Now he’ll get his wish.”
That was the hardest moment. That was when she wanted most to stay up in Galadriel, but her body rebelled. Her heart raced. The crash of the tree limb resounded in her ears. She could not calm herself. She had to find her way down.
Miserable, she stood before Leon as he checked her ropes, her clips, her harness, and she knew what he thought of her. She knew what he suspected, and she saw that he wasn’t angry. This was worse than anger. He viewed her coolly, absolving her even as he disengaged from her.
He clipped the steel link of her harness to the secondary rope he’d rigged from the ground. “I’m coming down with you. I won’t let anything happen, but you have to listen. Do you understand?”
Her hands were stiff with fear, inflexible. She held the rope too tightly, and her palms began to bleed. She saw the blood but could not feel.
Her ascent to the platform had been giddy, joyful. Clear sky and celebration, a picnic under the trees the night before. Sweet cool air, a calming joint, smoke mingling with the fragrant forest, pine and mulch and bay laurel. Climbing had been an otherworldly magic-carpet ride. The descent was like rappelling into the circles of hell. She saw the Tree Savers standing in their green sweatshirts. Standing silent. Waiting for her. And then she saw George watching for her as well. George, who didn’t acknowledge Jess to his friends, had no problem materializing in front of hers.
“Jess!” he called, even before her feet touched the ground. “Are you all right?”
Leon slid down and unclipped his harness and then unclipped hers.
George rushed to her and Jess stepped back.
“What were you doing?” George berated her. “Do you have any idea what might have—”
“Please, please, please, shut up,” Jess said. She couldn’t bear to talk to him in front of everybody else.
But the others were busy. Leon was helping Daisy with her harness. The Tree Savers gathered around her as she started her ascent. “Free the tree,” the Tree Savers chanted joyfully, as Daisy lifted off to take Jess’s place. “Free the tree. Free the tree. Free the tree.”
The Tree Savers were focused on Daisy. Only George was watching Jess as she knelt on the ground, clutching herself, breathing hard.
“Are you hurt? Are you okay?” George tried to help her to her feet, but she shook him off and stood up on her own.
“Let me see your hands.”
“No! Go away.”
“You can push me away as much as you want,” he said. “It won’t make any difference.”
Jess looked up at Daisy, suspended in the gloaming, small as a silkworm hanging from a slender thread.
“Tell me you won’t go up there again,” George said.
“You’re embarrassing me!”
“I don’t care.”
“Of course not!” She started walking, taking the trail to the parking lot.
“Wait, Jess.”
She didn’t answer.
“Where are you going?”
“None of your business!” she called back.
“I was worried about you.” He jogged a little to keep up.
She spoke without looking at him. “You’ve got quite a double standard driving up here.”
In the dirt lot, she found the Honda that George had loaned her. Her hands shook, and George called after her, carrying on that she wasn’t safe to drive. She didn’t listen. Her ripped hands still shook, and the old car shuddered when she turned the key, but she never hesitated as she drove away.
26
Her hands bled on the steering wheel as she wove from one lane to the next. She drove for miles, and her wet jeans felt like lead. There she’d been, guarding Galadriel, and what did she do? She gave up. No dimpled spider for her. No swinging birches. She drove on, and spots appeared before her eyes, tiny points of light, and visions of Daisy climbing, and George making a scene, crashing the Tree-Sit. What was he thinking? Why was everything about him? But most of all, she remembered Leon’s face. All their time together ending in his quick glance, his cold assessment, as commanders consider casualties. She was dead to him, and he wouldn’t leave Galadriel unguarded. How fast could he replace Jess once he got her to the ground?
