The Mountain Between Us Read online

  “We had names for the positions that people fell in when we knocked them out.”

  I distracted her. “Such as?”

  “The porpoise, the white man’s dance, the cockroach, a few others.”

  I tied the third knot and cut the line. I nodded at her eyebrow. “What I’ve done is good enough to hold you until we can get to a hospital and let a good plastic surgeon fix my Band-Aid.”

  “What about my pretty two-poled brace? My leg is killing me.”

  “It’s the best I can do. I set it, but without an X-ray, it’s hard to tell. Again, when we get to a hospital, they can take some pictures and check it. If it’s not aligned, I’ll recommend, and I’m sure they’ll agree, that they rebreak it and give you a few presents that will set off the metal detector when you pass through security. Either way, you’ll be good as new.”

  “You’ve just said ‘get to a hospital’ twice, but do you really think anybody is coming?”

  As we looked up at the blue sky through the hole created between the leaning wing and the eight-foot snow wall, we saw a commercial airliner cruising at what looked like 30,000 feet. It’d been nearly sixty hours since our crash, and we hadn’t heard a sound other than our own voices or the wind or a scratching limb. And that plane was so high, we couldn’t hear it either.

  I shook my head. “We can see them just fine, but I’m pretty certain they can’t see us. Any evidence of our disappearance lies under three feet of snow. Won’t be seen until July when it melts.”

  “Don’t crashed planes send out some sort of SOS signal or something?”

  “Yes, but the thing that sends it is lying all around us in about a thousand little pieces.”

  “Maybe you should crawl out and wave your shirt or something.”

  I chuckled. Which hurt. I clutched my side.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s up?”

  “Couple of broken ribs.”

  “Let me see.”

  I pulled up my shirt. I hadn’t seen it in the daylight and figured that the bruise would have set in by now. The whole left side of my rib cage was a deep purple. “Only hurts when I breathe.”

  We laughed.

  She looked up at me, her head not moving, as I tied the sixth knot in her arm. She looked more worried. “I can’t believe I’m lying here like this, with you sewing on me, in the middle of God only knows where, and we’re laughing. You think there’s something wrong with us?”

  “Chances are good.”

  I turned my attention to the side of her arm. Either the rock or a branch had cut the skin on her non-dislocated shoulder, about four inches in length. Fortunately for her, when the plane came to a stop with her unconscious in it, she was pressed up against the snow on that shoulder. Pressure, mixed with snow, stopped the bleeding. It would need twelve or more stitches. “Give me your hand.” She did. “I need you to slip your arm out of your sleeve.”

  She pulled slowly, wincing. “By the way, where’d I get this handsome shirt?”

  “I changed you sometime yesterday. You were wet.”

  “That was my favorite bra.”

  I pointed over my left shoulder. “You can have it back once it dries out.”

  The cut on her arm was news to her. She looked down at it. “I didn’t even know I had that one.”

  I explained about the snow and pressure and tied off another stitch.

  She watched me work and spoke without looking at me. “What do you think our chances are?”

  “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “What’s the use? Sugarcoating it won’t get us out of here any faster.”

  “Good point.” I shrugged. “Let me ask you a few questions. Did you tell anyone you were getting on this plane?”

  She shook her head.

  “No e-mail? Phone call? No nothing?”

  Another slow shake.

  “So, nobody on planet Earth knows you stepped into a charter plane and attempted to fly to Denver?”

  A final shake.

  “Me either.”

  She whispered, “I imagine everyone thinks, or thought until yesterday, that I was still in Salt Lake. By this point they’d be looking for me, but where would they look? For all they know, I took a voucher and started toward the hotel.”

  I nodded. “Based on the way Grover was talking, I can’t for the life of me think of any reason why anyone would come looking for us. There’s no official record that we flew, cause he filed no flight plan, and according to him and something about VFR he didn’t need to, and, here’s the best one—my favorite actually—we, two professionals with probably twenty years of combined college and graduate schooling between us—never told a single living soul we were going.” I paused. “It’s as if this flight never existed.”

  She stared at Grover. “It existed all right.” She paused, her eyes lifting upward. “I just thought it’d be a quick hop to Denver, outrun the storm, make two new friends in the process, and life would continue.”

  I cut the line. “Ashley, I’m really sorry.” I shook my head. “You should be somewhere getting a manicure or pedicure or something, getting ready for a rehearsal dinner.”

  “Don’t.” She shook her head. “Don’t beat yourself up over good intentions. I was glad you offered.” She stared around her. “Not so much now, but was then.” She laid her head back. “I was scheduled to go with my girlfriends to the spa and get a massage. You know one of those hot rocks deals? Instead I’m lying on ice with only one rock…” She nodded at her friend behind me. “And no heat. Somewhere out there is a dress with no girl and a groom with no bride.” She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how much I paid for that dress?”

  “It’ll be waiting on you when you get there. Him, too.” I held the cup to her lips, and she sipped a final time, finishing off twenty-four ounces. “Your sense of humor is a gift.”

  “Well…would you think it funny if I told you I had to pee?”

  “From a certain point of view, that’s good.” I looked at the bag and her immobility. “From another, it’s not.”

  “Which way are we looking at it?”

  “We’re looking at it from whatever way lets you go without putting pressure on that leg.” I looked around. “What I wouldn’t give for a catheter.”

  “Oh, no, let’s don’t. Those things give me the creeps. That part of me is not an innie, it’s an out-only sort of thing.”

  I grabbed a Nalgene bottle out of my pack and laid it next to her. “All right, here’s the deal.”

  “I’m not going to go like this, am I?”

  “It’s better than the alternative, and you get to stay right there, but I’ve got to help.” I pulled out my Swiss Army knife and opened the blade. “I’m going to finish slitting your pantsuit on up to the side of your hip. That way, while you’re lying there, you can lay it over you. Then, since there’s about twelve feet of snow below you, I’m going to dig a hole beneath your butt big enough for my hand and this bottle. Then we’re going to ease your underwear out of the way and you’re gonna go in this bottle.”

  “You’re right, I don’t like this.”

  “We need to measure your urine output, and I need to see if there’s any blood in it.”

  “Blood?”

  “Internal injuries.”

  “Don’t you think I have enough of those?”

  “What, injuries?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, but we need to make sure.”

  I slit her pants, pulled them aside, dug out the snow beneath her, held the bottle in place, and she used her one healthy arm to lift herself slightly, without changing the position of her leg. She looked at me. “Can I go?”

  I nodded. She went.

  She shook her head. “This has got to be one of the more embarrassing moments I’ve ever shared with another human being.”

  “Given that I blend orthopedics and emergency medicine, there are few days that go by that I don’t study several people’s urine. Even insertin
g the catheter.”

  She winced, stopping the flow.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Just my leg.” She relaxed and started again. The sound of a rush of liquid filling the empty bottle rose from beneath her. After a second she said, “Your fingers are cold.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, my fingers are too cold to feel anything.”

  “Gee, that’s a relief.”

  I tried to deflect her discomfort. “Most of the folks I see in the ER have suffered some trauma, meaning an accident which usually means a substantial impact which means internal injuries which can mean blood in their urine.”

  She looked at me. “Are you trying to make me feel better?”

  I pulled up on the bottle and studied the color. “Yep.”

  She looked at me, and then at the bottle. “That’s a lot of pee.”

  “Yeah, and the color’s good too.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever had someone comment on the color of my pee before. I’m not quite sure how to take it.”

  I helped her dress, slid the sleeping bag back underneath her, and then covered her up. The process of doing so brought her skin into contact with mine. And while I was acting as her doctor, her nakedness, her total vulnerability, was not lost on me.

  I thought of Rachel.

  By the time we got it all finished, she was shivering and I felt like someone had stabbed me with a stiletto in the ribs. I lay down, breathing heavily.

  She spoke down at me. “You taken anything for the pain?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “To be honest, if you think you’re hurting now, just give it three or four days. I’ve only got enough Advil to get you through a week. After that you’re on your own.”

  She nodded. “I like the way you’re thinking, Doc.”

  “I’ve got a few prescription-strength narcotics somewhere in that pack, but I thought I’d save them for tonight when you can’t sleep.”

  “You almost sound as if you’ve done this type of thing before.”

  “Rachel and I love to hike. One of things we’ve learned is that while you may have a plan and a hope for what you’ll do or how far you might go in a given day, conditions will determine what you do and how far you actually go. Hence, it pays to be prepared—while not carrying so much weight you can’t move.”

  She eyed the hole in the snow where my pack was buried. “Got any red wine in there?”

  “No, but I could make you a gin and tonic if you’d like.”

  “That’d be great.” She eyed her leg. “Tell me about this contraption on my leg.”

  “Amongst doctors, orthopedists are known as the carpenters. Afraid that’s true of me. Good news is this brace is rather effective. Or at least will be for the short term. You can’t move around, you’re stuck right here or wherever I move you to, but it will keep you from moving it some way you shouldn’t and will help protect it. If the pressure gets too tight around your thigh or calf, let me know and I’ll loosen it.”

  She nodded. “Right now, it’s throbbing like somebody hit it with a hammer.”

  I lifted the top of the sleeping bag off her leg and repacked the snow beneath the break and around the side. “I’m going to keep doing this for several days. It’ll speed recovery and help anesthetize the pain. Only problem is you’re going to be cold.”

  “Going to be?”

  I screwed the cap on the Nalgene bottle and started crawling toward daylight. “I’m going to take a look around and empty this bottle.”

  “Good. I’m going to clean up a bit around here, maybe order a pizza or something.”

  “I like pepperoni.”

  “Anchovies?”

  “Never touch them.”

  “Got it.”

  I crawled out of the fuselage, or what was left of it, under the wing, around a tree, and into the sunlight. The temperature was probably in the single digits, but I had been expecting worse. I’ve had people tell me that a dry cold isn’t quite as bad as a humid cold. But in my book, cold is cold. And nine degrees is nine degrees. Or whatever it was.

  I took one step off the packed snow where the plane had landed, and my foot submerged all the way to my groin. The impact shook my chest and started me coughing. I tried not to scream in pain, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very successful.

  Ashley’s voice rose up out of the plane. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just wishing I had some snowshoes.”

  I dumped the bottle and looked around as best I could. Nothing but snow and mountains. We seemed to be on some sort of plateau with a few higher peaks to my left, but most everything else spread out below and before us. That meant we were higher than I thought. Maybe 11,500. No wonder it was tough to breathe.

  I’d seen enough. I crawled back in and collapsed on the shelf next to her.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Really, you can tell me the truth. I can handle it. Just give it to me straight.”

  “Grover was right. More Mars than Earth.”

  “No, seriously. Don’t sugarcoat it. I’m used to people shooting straight with me.”

  I stared up at her where she sat, eyes closed. Waiting.

  “It’s…beautiful. Can’t wait for you to see it. The view is…panoramic. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen. One in a million. I’ve got two lawn chairs set up, and a little guy with umbrella-drinks will be back around in a few minutes. Had to go back and get some ice.”

  She relaxed and laid her head back. The first ear-to-ear grin I’d seen since we’d been in the snow. “For a minute there I was worried. Glad to hear it’s not as bad as I thought.”

  Somewhere in there it struck me that Ashley Knox was one of the stronger human beings I’d ever met. Here she lay, half dead, probably in more pain than most people have felt in their entire lives, in the process of missing her own wedding, not to mention the fact that we had no probable chance of rescue. If we got out of here, it’d be up to us. Most people would be panicked, despondent, illogical at this point, but somehow she could laugh. What’s more, she made me laugh. And that’s something I actually hadn’t done in a long while.

  I was spent. I needed food and I needed rest, but I couldn’t get food without rest. I put together a plan.

  “We need food, but I’m in no shape to go find it. I’ll go tomorrow. Right now I’m going to try and build us a fire without melting the cave around us, keep feeding us both warm water, and try and conserve my energy.”

  “I like the fire idea.”

  “Rescue people will tell you never to leave the sight of a crash. And that’s true, but we’re high, real high, breathing less than half the oxygen we’re used to, and we both need it to heal. Especially you. Tomorrow…or the next day, I’m going to start thinking about getting to a lower elevation. Maybe try and do some scouting. Right now…” I turned the mounting screws for the GPS and unplugged it from the dash. “I’m going to try and get a fix on where we are while this thing still has life in it.”

  She stared at me. “How do you know to do all this? I mean, what if you didn’t?”

  “When I was a kid, my dad realized I could run faster than most. He took that ability and turned it into his passion, his raison d’etre he called it, and I grew to hate him for it, because no time was ever fast enough and he was always measuring me with this stick that looked an awful lot like a stopwatch. Once Rachel and I were on our own, we gravitated to the mountains. I had, have, good lungs and pretty good legs, so when we could get away from class or the track, we started buying up gear and we spent the weekends in the mountains. Maybe I learned a thing or two. We both did.”

  “I’d like to meet her sometime.”

  I smiled. “’Course…there was Boy Scouts, too.”

  “You’re a Boy Scout?”

  I nodded. “The one freedom my dad gave me away from him. Figured it was training that I needed that he didn’t have to give me. He’d dro
p me off, pick me up.”

  “How far’d you get?”

  I shrugged.

  She lowered her head, gave me a disbelieving look. “You’re one of those Hawks, or Ospreys or…”

  “Something like that.”

  “Come on, what’s it called?”

  “Eagle.”

  “Yeah…that’s it. Eagle Scout.”

  I got the sense that talking took her mind off the pain.

  She lay back and murmured, “Guess we’re about to find out if you really earned all those patches.”

  “Yep.” I hit the power button, and the GPS unit flickered.

  A wrinkle appeared between her eyes. “Did they offer an electronics badge?”

  I tapped the unit. “No, but I think it’s just cold. You mind warming it up inside your bag?”

  She pulled back the sleeping bag, and I set it gently on her lap. “Electronics don’t really like cold. Interferes with their circuits. Warming it up helps.”

  “Vince—my fiancé—wouldn’t know the first thing about all this. If he had been in this plane, he’d be looking for the nearest Starbucks and cussing the fact that there was no cell service.” She closed her eyes. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee.”

  “I might can help with that.”

  “Don’t tell me you have coffee.”

  “I have three addictions. Running. Mountains. And good hot coffee. And not necessarily in that order.”

  “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for one cup.”

  The Jetboil is seriously one of the greatest advancements in hiking technology, next to the compass. Maybe ever. ’Course, the down sleeping bag is pretty good too. I scooped snow into the Jetboil and clicked it on while I dug through my pack looking for my Ziploc bag of coffee. The good news was that I found it. The bad news was that there wasn’t much left. Maybe a few days at best, and if we were conservative.

  I slid the bag out of my backpack. Ashley saw it.

  “Ben Payne…will you take a credit card?”

  “A fellow coffee-lover. It’s amazing what we value when we’re at our lowest.”

  Jetboil makes an accessory that allows me to convert the canister into a French press. It only cost a few dollars, but I’ve used it a hundred times and always marveled at its simplicity and how well it works. The water boiled, I measured and dumped in the coffee, let it steep, and then poured her a cup.