Chapter 28
For the first time in months, Zach fell asleep so swiftly he failed to relive his parents’ final argument.
He woke in the dark bunkroom with no idea of how long he’d slept.
But no—no!
He’d actually done it. He’d wet himself. Zach explored his body with his fingertips. His long underwear was soaked from mid-belly to mid-thigh. The nylon of his sleeping bag was slick.
A groan of shame stopped short in his throat as he remembered where he was. He held still as possible, eyes darting rapidly.
He was alone. The others must not have returned yet. Mr. Fantastic, wound close to his neck, had stayed clean. He set the fox aside. But the smell. He balled his fists and squeezed his eyes shut to fight the rolling humiliation of it.
The hut was silent. With relief Zach realized that he could simply replace his sleeping bag with Steve’s in the hall, dark blue just like Zach’s.
There’d be no reason for anyone to notice.
But Zach’s relief went to guilt at the gutting memory of Steve saying he had a daughter, a teenage girl who right now didn’t know her father was dead.
All Zach’s efforts to avoid getting his legs and feet wet as he crawled out of the sleeping bag were useless.
Shivering, he stripped off his clothing and stashed it in his sleeping bag, the cold so tight against his wet, naked body it felt as though it were constricting his organs, biting his bones.
Zach tiptoed naked down the stairs past the closed door of the other bunkroom, exposed and trembling under the black gaze of the hut’s windows.
After sneaking a look around the corner to be sure Pike wasn’t downstairs, he worked by firelight, a wary eye searching for any movement, any hint of someone approaching the hut or coming downstairs.
He wet paper towels using the snowmelt pot on the stove and wiped himself down until he could no longer smell the low odor of ammonia.
He patted dry, then stuffed the used paper towels in the woodstove with two fire starters and a new log.
The flames leapt up and blackened the wet paper.
Zach slid into the long underwear he’d hung to dry by the fire. Though the clothes smelled lightly of sweat, they were reassuringly warm and stiff. Standing by the stove the cold drained from his thin bones and he stood sleepily, gratefully, in the orange firelight.
Men’s voices outside brought immediate panic.
Zach fled to the stairs and froze out of sight on the first step.
The outside light switched on, illuminating the porch, visible from where Zach stood in the stairwell because the image of it reflected in the window of the hut’s back door a few feet from him.
His father stood under the light talking to Pike, who was smoking.
Pike must’ve been outside all along. Had he seen Zach, shivering and naked, change by the woodstove?
The muffled voices grew louder. The liquid outline of Pike’s reflection gestured emphatically with an arm, the ember on the tiny nub of whatever he’d gone outside to smoke leaving an orange trail behind it through the darkness.
Bram opened the hut’s front door.
“That’s not what I meant, Pike, not at all.”
His father’s tone aimed for soothing, but came out tense.
“Of course it is!” Pike bellowed.
“Shh, my kid could be awake, Dave’s right—”
“What do I care?”
But Pike did seem to care, because he lowered his voice to a harsh whisper.
Zach, plastered against the wall of the dark stairwell, was sure they would hear the loud suck of his breaths, the rat-a-tat of his startled heart.
The men stood unmoving in the entry, their heads tipped, listening, assessing if anyone was awake, then looking over shoulders to see if Dave and Russ were in earshot.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
Zach didn’t dare move.
“They can’t be that far behind,” Bram said quietly.
“Who cares, who cares?” Pike hissed wildly, but still at low volume.
“Can you throw that shit outside? It’ll stink up the whole place.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
Pike tossed whatever he’d been smoking into the snow, then slammed the door shut with such force Zach was sure he felt a vibration. Pike’s wide, muscled body seemed to expand and contract.
“Hey, now, man,” Bram said. “Let’s take a minute. Think this through.”
A short, shrill burst of laughter. “You’re crazy.”
Bram spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “If I wasn’t sure, if I didn’t have proof, you think I would’ve confronted you?”
“You didn’t find anything”—Pike’s pitch edged higher—“because there’s nothing to find.”
“Look.” Bram pointed outside. “I can see their headlamps. So how about we talk later, when they’re asleep, all right?”
“You show me this ‘proof’ you found. Now.”
“Just—shit, there’s Dave. We’ll—we should get out there to see if he needs help. I won’t say anything, all right? For now.”
A dismissive huff from Pike.
“We’ll talk later. I’m gonna go help Dave.”
Pike sat and took off his boots, a showy refusal to assist. When Bram slipped outside, Pike’s dark, runny image put head in hands.
Zach moved up one step, then drew his neck into his shoulders in anticipation of some noise, some squeak or twitch of the boards that might give him away. But there was nothing.
In the upstairs hall he took Steve’s sleeping bag off the bunk and replaced it with his own, the quiet slither of nylon making him cringe. He cradled the clean sleeping bag in his arms, tiptoed down the hall, and laid it out on his own bunk.
It looked all right. No one would notice.
The loud slam of a door and a flood of overlapping voices traveled from downstairs.
Should he get into Steve’s sleeping bag? Pretend to be asleep?
No, exhausted as he was after the day’s events, it still wouldn’t be believable that he’d slept through this much noise.
Dave spotted him first as he hesitated at the base of the stairs. “Zach! How you doing, bud?”
Zach padded toward them.
“Okay, Mr. Dowling, how’re you?”
Russ listed slightly to one side as he sat at the dining table eating beef jerky. Dave put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’re better now. And you see this tough guy here? Needed help on the way up, but made it downhill on his own steam. Your skis did the trick, bud.”
“How do you feel?” Zach asked Russ. The teenager looked more like himself somehow, and Zach realized it was because Russ was wearing his glasses again, his prescription goggles left broken in the Bowl.
“I’m okay. I mean, it hurts, you know?” Russ put a palm to his chest, then his head, to indicate the places that pained him, and a new, vulnerable sincerity crept into his voice as he added, “But I’m like, pretty glad to be back here.”
“That’s right, that’s right!” Dave said.
“We did it. You did it! We’ll warm up. Rest. Then tomorrow someone will head down, get a cell signal, and call Mountain Rescue so we can be sure once and for all they’re coming.
And we’ll be none the worse for wear, right?
” Dave grinned around the little circle, but as his eyes reached Pike his smile vanished.
“Shit, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light of—anything.
I mean Shane, his dad, and I are close, it’s going to be… ”
Bram cleared his throat. “If Pike’s up for it, he and I can head down in the morning.
Russ is in no shape, and I know you’ll want to stay with him, Dave.
Could be Mountain Rescue’s here by morning anyway, after the guide doesn’t check in with his bosses tonight.
He said he was required to call in and update them twice a day. ”
“Sure,” Pike said, “we can talk about it in the morning.”
Zach sat at the table with them, hungry again. As the group tore open bags of chips, hacked off slices of frozen salami and cheese, he snuck a glance at Pike, then unwittingly began to stare.
If Pike had killed Ginny, it hadn’t marked him, hadn’t twisted him to anything recognizable as evil. Zach’s head ached with the effort of trying to pick out a shadowy Underself that might be hiding in his belly. His skull.
Dave helped Russ upstairs to bed before returning to eat more. Pike went up to his bunkroom next, shooting Bram a heavy look that Zach knew meant, This is pretend. I’m coming back down to talk, and you better be here.
Fearful of another accident, Zach used the outhouse before going upstairs, pulling hard at the fine hairs on his neck as he planned what to do.
“Russ?” Zach whispered into the dark bunkroom. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah.”
“I was thinking, tomorrow, when they go down to try to get a cell signal to call for help? I was thinking I’d go with them. Do you mind if I take your phone?”
A long pause before Russ answered, “I don’t think you should go, Zach.”
“I want to help.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Russ snapped.
Zach stayed silent, unsure if he should confide his real plans to Russ. Deciding against it, he said, “Maybe I won’t go? I just—it’d be good to have the option is all.”
An exasperated sigh in the darkness before Russ responded, “You can have it. But it’s beyond dumb to go, man.”
“Are you sure? You don’t want to play games or whatever?”
“I tried using it and the light hurts my head kind of?” Russ shifted in the darkness. The rectangle of the phone lit up, and he handed it to Zach. “Here. Just—don’t say anything about my head. To my dad.”
“Okay. What’s the password?”
“Oh, it’s stupid. It’s just nine, like, repeated.”
“Is there a charger?”
“Yeah, it’s plugged in by the couch. There’s hardly any outlets in this place.”
“Thank you! And maybe, would you not tell the grown-ups? That I have your phone, I mean. My dad, he doesn’t think kids should have a phone.”
“It doesn’t even have reception, dude.”
“I know, but still. He wouldn’t like it.”
The darkness provided a kind of anonymity, and into its blackness Russ’s voice poured a desperate earnestness free of his usual eye-rolling, sarcastic self-consciousness.
“Don’t go with them, Zach. Use the phone to play games, whatever, but stay here, okay?
None of them know what they’re doing. You see that, right? ”
“Yeah,” Zach whispered.
“My dad, yours? They’re selfish—they nearly got us killed!
And for what? Steve said you and me shouldn’t have skied it, and they ignored him, because God forbid they don’t get to do exactly what they want all the time.
And you watch, they’ll blame Steve for everything, but if he’d been louder about it they still would’ve ignored him.
Threatened him. You know I’m right. Our dads?
They never, ever see themselves as the problem.
And I saw you up there, Zach, you knew more than all of them combined, and not one of them listened, not one… ”
Russ’s words echoed Zach’s own thoughts in the grove of trees and during the awful hours of the search for the buried. Yet remembering Dave’s indulgent smiles at his son, his stricken face in the glade after the avalanche, Zach said, “Your dad seems okay, though, he cares, he’s—”
“I’m just, like, a busted, I dunno, car, that he can’t get rid of.
So he’s stuck trying to fix me up the way he wants.
” Russ was becoming more difficult to understand, voice growing sleepily slurred the longer he talked.
“He only brought me here because he thinks a trip like this’ll toughen me up, make me different, someone different, so he can brag, but he’s not tough, no matter what he thinks.
You saw it. He woulda let your dad die out there, wouldna searched, wouldna… ”
Zach waited, but Russ had faded out and didn’t continue. “Are you okay, Russ? You sound kind of strange.”
“Just tired. I’m, like, already asleeping. Asleep.”
“I’ll let you rest. Thank you for the phone, Russ.”
As Zach opened the door Russ roused himself, said, “Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you? For finding me. Digging me out. I know you were the one. Who saved me. And don’t go with them, okay? That’s me saving you this time. Okay?”
Zach felt his face flush hot. “All right,” he said as he closed the door behind him. “It’s all right.”
In the hallway he entered Russ’s passcode.
He swiped until a search bar came up, then searched the word “record.” Nothing.
Searched the word “voice.” An app called Voice Memos appeared.
He hit the red record circle, clicked the power button to make the screen go black, then whispered into it, “Testing, testing.” He touched the screen to wake the phone, hit stop on the recording, then entered Russ’s password and played it back, flinching in embarrassment at the unsteady sound of his own voice.
But it worked. Even with the screen dark, even if it was locked, the phone would record a conversation.
And if someone picked up the phone while it was recording? Would they be able to tell?
He hit record again. Turned the phone’s screen off, then woke it. A red icon showed on the bottom of the screen, making it obvious the phone was recording.
Zach’s stomach lurched, but he didn’t allow himself time to think about the choice he was making. He hit record, clicked the phone’s screen to black, and went downstairs.
“We were blessed, if you really think about it,” Dave said to Bram.
After checking neither man was looking in his direction, Zach plugged in the phone and tucked it out of sight under the couch.
“Found nearly everyone so close to the surface, even with two slides. It could have been much worse. God looked out for us today.”
Zach frowned. Because if God had been there, didn’t that mean he’d buried Steve, Jon, and Shane? Allowed Ginny to be murdered? Torn apart?
“Here, kid,” Bram said, shoving a water bottle at Zach. “You need to drink this. May not feel like it, but you’re dehydrated after today.”
Zach took the bottle, cast adrift by Bram showing signs of care, and trotted toward the stairs.
“I’m serious,” Bram called after him. “Have that finished by the time I come up.”
The humiliation of the wet sleeping bag loomed large, and Zach didn’t dare drink more water. Yet touched by his father’s attempt to tend to him, he feigned obedience by pressing his lips to the bottle, blocking the opening with his tongue, and pretending to sip as he went upstairs.
“Good boy,” Bram called after him.
In the bunkroom, Zach emptied the water out the window and set the bottle where his father would be able to see it.
As he crawled into Steve’s sleeping bag he listened to Russ’s loud snores, and tucked Mr. Fantastic into his shirt, close but hidden.
He tried not to think of the phone recording downstairs.
Tried to force away the reeling, intrusive thoughts of all the horrible ways Bram would react if he discovered that Zach was spying on him.