Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
JADEN
‘Stop it, Jaden, that’s too dangerous!’ I hear Nyla shout from far away. Fear dominates her tone.
Behind me, the passenger is crying. This young woman with the long dark hair, the big blue eyes, and the skinny body.
Can you take a few photos of me? I want to apply for Canada’s Next Top Model.
Camee’s voice suddenly wavers through my head.
My chest tightens painfully. I focus on the car that I spot wedged deep down between two rocks.
As I move into position to climb down, someone pulls me back. Nyla. She’s holding a fall arrest kit in her hand, a firefighter standing beside her.
‘Put this on. Now.’ Her expression is relentless. She kneels down in front of me and spreads the leg loops out on the ground.
‘I don’t nee…’
‘No arguments,’ she snaps at me. ‘You’re only wasting time.’
And that’s the only reason I step into the loops without a word. She pulls the safety harness up. It takes only seconds for her to fasten the waist belt while I slip my arms through the shoulder straps. At the same time, the firefighter clips in the carabiner for the safety line.
Nyla gives me a nod. ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I reply, and start inching my way toward the edge, centimeter by centimeter.
Once again, adrenaline surges through me, but it’s not enough to drown out the memory.
The house, Jaden. My mom’s words from earlier on the phone echo inside me.
My God, why can’t she just shut up?
You finally have to take care of it.
My hands clamped tightly around a rock, I let my legs move faster downward.
The rocky ledge I step on breaks away immediately, but that doesn’t stop me from climbing on. Down there someone needs my help, and nothing is more important right now than that.
Sell it, otherwise this will never end.
No! I don’t want to think about this house, or about what’s supposed to happen to it. Because the truth is, I can neither repair it nor sell it. Shit, I can’t even look at it!
Hurriedly, I keep climbing down, slip, catch myself again.
Adrenaline floods me as the small branch I’m leaning on starts to sway.
It tears away what I don’t need—the past, the future, the pain, the guilt—and leaves behind only this one moment, in which nothing matters except the woman who has to be saved.
‘Jaden, be careful!’ Nyla yells in terror.
I block out everything around me. The unstable ground, the blue lights, the noise of the fire truck crane, the shouts of the police officers, the sea crashing against the cliffs below me.
Still a good five meters. I have to hurry.
A faint crunching sound.
The ground under my left foot slips away.
The world tilts.
Rock, scree, nothing to grab onto.
I’m falling.
Fuck.
The jolt is so brutal it knocks the breath out of me.
The safety rope!
A few loose stones and clods of earth crash into the depths. I watch them fall, watch them shatter on rocks, plunge into the sea.
Damn it, if Nyla hadn’t forced me to wear the safety harness, I’d be lying down there too.
Shattered.
My heart is pounding like crazy.
‘Are you okay, Jaden?’ Nyla’s voice is shrill.
‘I’m fine,’ I shout, even though nothing is fine right now.
I could have died. Really died. For good.
Nyla saved my life—with her caution, which I’d always thought was over the top.
These thoughts drift through my head like wisps of fog as I keep climbing. More carefully now, because the shock runs deep.
When I reach the rocky ledge, I leave the safety rope clipped to my harness, even though the ground seems stable. Then I open the passenger door. The woman is slumped unconscious over the steering wheel. Her blond hair sticks to her sweat-damp forehead; she’s trembling.
I plant one knee on the passenger seat and lean over her. ‘Hello, can you hear me? Miss? Can you hear me?’
She doesn’t respond.
I carefully tilt her head back and lift her chin slightly so she can breathe more easily. Quickly, I check her breathing and pulse and measure her blood sugar level.
38 mg/dL.
Damn it. I rip open the emergency backpack and yank out the glucose IV, as well as a cannula and disinfectant.
At that moment, a violent jolt runs through the car. A shrill scream pierces the air—Nyla’s scream. The car rocks.
Then I suddenly hear it. That soft, menacing cracking of the rock next to the driver’s door. Another jolt. The car tilts. Metal grinds, the front end pulls to the side.
‘Shit.’ My pulse races, my stomach tightens.
‘Jaden! Get out of there! Now!’ Nyla yells.
My gaze flies to the young woman in the driver’s seat. If I wait with the IV until we’ve gotten ourselves out of the car, it’ll be too late for her.
No. She needs the glucose right now.
Focused, I push the patient’s blouse up, insert the IV line, hook up the life-saving infusion and count the seconds. For barely a minute the car stays still, then it tilts further.
‘Damn it, Jaden, get the hell out of there!’ Nyla’s voice drills into my eardrum.
One more minute.
The woman needs another minute for the infusion to take effect.
The next jolt runs through the car. We slump to the left, the vehicle held up only by the right side mirror that’s caught on a rock.
Damn it.
Metal grinds.
I set the infusion bag on the woman’s stomach.
The side mirror is slowly giving way.
With both arms I wrap around the woman’s upper body and, together with the infusion bag, haul her over the center console onto the passenger seat with me.
The car lurches.
Stones break off the rock and plunge into the depths.
The woman pressed tightly against me, I push off from the seat – and save us both through the open car door, out onto the rocky ledge.
Nyla’s sharp scream pierces the air. The car swerves downward before my eyes, I cling to the rock, the woman clutched tightly in my arms.
Then it goes quiet.
My heart is pounding. The patient moans softly, her head resting on my shoulder. I see the IV bag dangling beside her legs, quickly grab it and check it for damage.
It survived the jump. Just like the tube. The cannula has shifted, but that can be corrected.
Thank God.
‘Get him up!’ I hear Nyla plead, fractions of a second later I see her above me at the edge of the cliff. Deep concern dominates her face. ‘Are you okay?’
I exhale shakily. ‘We’re fine. Get us up, I’ll secure the patient.’
‘Okay, slowly reel in the winch,’ someone yells. A loud beeping fills the air. Then we’re pulled upward.
We’ve barely got solid ground under our feet when Nyla’s expression shifts from worried to pissed off.
‘Damn it, that was close, you could have died, do you get that?’ she yells.
Crystal clear. And that’s exactly why I can’t answer now. Especially not when she’s looking at me like that and stirring up even more chaos inside me than there already is.
‘Patient unconscious on arrival. Suspected severe hypoglycemia. Blood sugar at 38 mg/dl.’ I present the case in a matter-of-fact tone and am glad I can at least manage that much.
Nyla pushes the gurney over to me. ‘That was way too reckless.’
I know. ‘Forty percent glucose IV. was administered, patient is now showing initial response. Repeat blood sugar measurement required,’ I say anyway, because I can’t deal with it myself. Carefully, I lift the still-dazed woman onto the gurney.
Nyla’s stunned gaze meets mine, but this time she stays silent. In the background I see the woman’s passenger running toward us. Hair flying, cheeks wet with tears, her expression shocked.
For the blink of an eye my gaze lingers on her, and even that is too much. On top of that, I can feel the adrenaline ebbing inside me. I want to hold on to it, but it still leaves me—and once again it takes something with it that belongs to me.
The high. The trance. The being far, far away.
You can’t keep the house. That’s way too… do something, Jaden. Out of sight, out of mind.
Just like before, the phone call with Mom forces its way into my consciousness, along with questions I’ve never asked myself before.
What would have happened to the house if I had plunged to my death?
What would have become of this place if I had stopped keeping it from moving on? Would everything it stands for have disappeared for good? And if so, would that be a good thing?
‘The patient needs to go to the hospital,’ I say quickly to Nyla.
She bites her lower lip. ‘Yeah,’ she answers, and as we transport the woman to the car together, I can feel that her fear is still right there with her.
What just happened isn’t over for her yet, even though I’m already safe again.
No more than it is for me.
And to think that up until fifteen minutes ago I was sure the biggest risk I’d taken today was answering Mom’s call.