Chapter 22 #2
Because if they had a phone, they would at least know if help was coming. Part of the reason Zach’s heart strained with anticipation was because he could picture the device buried there, ready to call out to its shining satellite.
Zach reached in his coat, checked his beacon.
“There’s no signal,” he said. “No signal on my beacon. Which means—it has to be Steve, doesn’t it? Because Jon would be transmitting.”
A look of confusion fluttered over Bram’s face. “Steve?”
“The guide?” Zach said.
“Right,” Dave agreed. “It has to be him.”
“I don’t—maybe I could just rest a—” Pike muttered.
“Dig, Pike,” Dave ordered. “We’ve got to get him out fast. Not just for him, but so we can get back to Russ.”
At this Dave again got on the radio to check on Russ, their brief conversation drowned out by the sound of digging.
Zach could only penetrate the frozen, compressed snow next to the boot a half inch at a time, slowly exposing a bit of black ski pant.
Radio back in his pocket, Dave settled into a back-and-forth rhythm with Bram.
Pike jabbed grudgingly and ineffectually between Zach and the two other men.
With the way the leg vanished straight into the snow, whoever it was might be trapped upside down.
How awful to be so deep.
Maybe they’d uncover injuries that were crude and quick.
That would be much better than suffocation.
Much better than hope slowly dying with each breath, being unable to move, to see, cold and alone and bent under snow.
And worst of all, being aware of what was happening, tortured by the scream of your own thoughts at being buried alive.
Zach sliced his shovel in beside the boot and felt it skitter off of something.
Was the body positioned so that he’d hit an arm? The other leg?
Probably just a rock.
He pried out a crust of snow with his shovel, then pawed with his mittens to sweep the crystals off whatever he’d struck.
What was it? Zach took off a mitten the better to brush the flakes aside with his bare fingers.
Tipped his head and examined the pale, matte strangeness in the snow.
Then his lungs tore out a quick, unnatural shriek, and he fell backward, hands and feet windmilling him away, away, away, his body a foreign thing that propelled crablike across the snow to distance itself from what lay exposed there.
“Shit, kid, what the hell?” Pike’s voice was venom, displacing his anger at being scolded onto Zach.
“You okay, bud?” Dave asked.
Zach couldn’t speak. He wrapped his arms around his legs to hug himself tight and put his head between his knees.
The men turned toward where he’d been digging. They hesitated, realizing what might be there but not yet ready to confront the brutality of another shattered man who could have been them.
Embedded in the snow, a face stared toward the sky. Its eyes were open but blistered with ice crystals. The point of Zach’s shovel had cut into a cheek, had bloodlessly drawn up a flap of skin the size and shape of a clipped thumbnail.
But what it had taken Zach a moment to absorb, to truly see, was that it was a woman’s face. He felt the sight branding itself deep inside him, looping and tangling with other memories to become the same memory, the same wound, and the face in the snow became his mother’s.
The sound of his scream when he’d found her submerged in the bathtub was the same as the shrill, shocked wail of denial he’d just released. And just like before, the longer he looked the more the reality of death dovetailed and locked together, unchangeable.
It was too late. He’d failed her. His mother was gone for always, body sloughed off, only the husk left behind.
In Zach’s throat swelled the same panic over the same nearness to pale, still-hovering death.
His fingers had touched the same cold skin.
He felt the chill of the water as he’d tried to pull his mother out of the tub.
The chill of the snow he’d just scraped away from her face.
The same blond hair. Same open eyes staring through and past all things. The same smoothness of cheekbones, nose, chin. He felt the same fierce need to yank his mother out from the suffocating dimension where she was trapped and the same conflicting terror at the idea of touching her again.
He looked up at the men. “Get her out.”
When none of them moved, Zach crawled toward the hole he’d made on hands and knees and began digging out his mother, one hand still bare.
Would she sit slumped, like she had before, blond hair going dark over her face when she was taken from the water? The frozen water? Would she still be naked? Would the same small, thin line of pink slip from her mouth and coil upward like a plume of smoke?
“Out,” Zach whispered to himself, hands widening the hole; a scrim of snow slipping back over the face. “It’s too cold. It’s too cold. She can’t breathe.”
The men spoke, voices distant, muted. Someone put a hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. After a pause, arms threaded under his armpits and lifted him away, dropped him, and he sat, stunned, a few feet away from where his mother was buried.
Would they find a bottle under there, the shards of a broken wineglass scattered? Mess and disarray his mother would have never left behind, never ever, no matter what condition she was in. Because she knew how Bram would react.
But maybe she hadn’t been expecting Bram up here, because he never came with them. Or maybe just like the day she’d decided to die, or decided to risk dying, she’d simply stopped caring, hadn’t hid what she’d had to drink because she knew she’d never have to face her husband’s wrath again.
“It’s not the guide,” Dave said. “That’s a woman.”
“Get her out. Get her out.” But no one seemed to hear Zach, their backs to him as they faced the spot where his mother was trapped.
“A woman?” Bram said. “That’s impossible.”
“She’s wearing jewelry, for God’s sake, look!”
“She needs air,” Zach said. “She can’t breathe.”
“We don’t know what this is.” Pike threw out an arm in the direction of the buried body, as he paced back and forth. “Should we be doing this? I told you we shouldn’t do this. We should leave it. If it’s not the guide we should leave it. Isn’t it the guide?”
Bram pressed his face close to the snow. His mouth went small and his eyes wild, voice cracking in the middle as he said, “It’s Ginny. It’s Ginny!”