Ashfall

I kept thrashing, struggling to grab something or swim upward, but I couldn’t even free my left foot from the rocks trapping me. I wondered if my mother would ever find out what had happened to me, or if Darla would turn around and go back to Worthington once she knew I was dead. I hoped she would. Maybe she’d be safe there.

A hand searched through the water above me. I grabbed for it but missed. The hand withdrew. The current twisted me partially sideways, and I tilted my head, trying to watch the spot where the hand had appeared.

Something yanked my hair, hard. I felt the rock trapping my foot lift as I was pulled out of the stream by my hair. When my head broke the surface, I didn’t have enough breath for anything but a soggy cough. Darla stood there, holding onto a sapling and leaning out over the stream. I reached up and caught hold of her wrist.

God, but that girl was strong. She lifted me out of the stream with one arm and dropped me gasping on the bank. I turned my head and retched, bringing up creek water and the corn pone I’d eaten for breakfast. I took a grateful breath of icy air, but it triggered a convulsive fit of coughing. Darla rolled me onto my stomach and pounded on my back. When the coughs subsided, I lifted one of my hands to my face and noticed it was shaking. I tried to still it and found I couldn’t. Within a few seconds, the rest of my body started shivering uncontrollably as well.

Darla grabbed me under my arm and half led, half dragged me along the bank, heading upstream. I kept stumbling, tripping over my own feet. Every time I started to fall, Darla yanked hard on my arm, pulling me upright and dragging me forward.

I tried to ask Darla where she was taking me, but I was shivering so badly that the words came out garbled. It took every ounce of concentration I had to keep moving forward without falling, and I wasn’t even doing that well.

We pushed through thick underbrush, stripped of its leaves by the ashfall and the cold. Darla led me back to the bridge I’d missed. Underneath there was a dirt area between the foundation and the stream—shelter from the blizzard above.

When Darla released my arm, I fell in the dirt. I lay there, shaking so violently that I couldn’t stand back up. I’d lost track of my arms and legs. I assumed they were still attached to my body, but I couldn’t feel them at all. Darla rolled me onto my stomach and pulled the pack off my back.

I was vaguely aware of her going through the backpack, tossing stuff aside. A sopping-wet blanket made a splat on the dirt nearby. She tossed out a wet undershirt and then a pair of pants that seemed a little drier. I lay with my face in the dirt, shaking incessantly.

She found a mostly dry change of clothes buried deep enough in the backpack that water hadn’t seeped into it while I’d been submerged. She set the clothing beside me and rolled me onto my back. I tried to help, but the arms and legs that I couldn’t even feel wouldn’t respond to my mental commands. The motion of rolling over provoked an intense wave of nausea. I retched again, but there was nothing left in my stomach.

Darla fumbled at my shirt buttons. She couldn’t undo them; her hands were shaking too much. After three failed attempts, she grabbed the placket of my shirt and jerked on it. The buttons popped free, one of them pinging off the concrete bridge abutment.

Darla pulled off my ski boots and the rest of my wet clothes. Mostly she had to rip everything off by force. I was no help at all. The thought occurred to me as I lay there naked that I should hide. At that moment it seemed like a very good idea to dig a hole in the dirt and curl up inside, where I’d be safe and warm. This was nuts, of course. The ground under the bridge was almost as cold as the snow above it. But to my frozen mind, it seemed like a good idea.

Darla pulled a pair of underwear over my legs. They were backward. I thought about protesting, but couldn’t summon the energy. When she seized my arms to push a T-shirt over them, I saw I’d been scratching in the dirt. Trying to dig a hole, I guessed.

She got a pair of jeans and an overshirt on me but didn’t bother trying to button them. She draped the dry blanket from her pack over me. Then she disappeared into the blinding white blizzard beyond the bridge.

I felt a wonderful heat flood over my body. I stopped shivering. My arms and legs were hot—too hot, so I sat up, shrugged off the blanket, and tried to pull off my overshirt. Something still wasn’t working right. I grabbed for the cuff and missed. I tried again, but my fingers wouldn’t grip the fabric. On the third try, I got one arm of the shirt off. I gave up on the other arm. I smiled, enjoying the heat flooding my body. Everything slowed down; I watched individual snowflakes drift downward at the edge of the bridge, each one appearing to take several minutes to meander to the ground.

Darla returned carrying an armload of dead wood. She may have said something to me—it sounded hollow and far off, so maybe I imagined it. Something like, “Keep your goddamn clothes on, Alex!” She dropped the wood, stuffed my arm back into my shirt, and wrapped the blanket over my shoulders. I was way too hot. I tried to tell her so. What came out made perfect sense to me at the time, but later she told me I’d said, “Green hills wash sunlight blue.”

Darla dug in the pack and came up with a candle and book of paper matches. She rubbed a match on the striker. Nothing. She tossed the wet matches aside and fished deeper in the pack. She found a box of wood matches that had stayed dry and used one to light the candle. She fed wet twigs into the candle flame. They hissed and popped as they dried, but eventually she got a fire going.

She left the candle at the center of the fire. I thought about protesting—we had only a few candles left—but the words wouldn’t come out right. She added more wood, building up a roaring blaze that quickly made a black smudge on the concrete underside of the bridge above us.

Darla pushed me onto my side, facing the fire. She slid under the blanket behind me and threw an arm over my side, hugging me against her body. Her arm was still damp, but it felt warm against my flank. Her hand peeked out from under the blankets—even in the orange firelight, it looked blue and puffy. Something brushed my hair and I looked up; the rabbit was sitting on its haunches beside my head.

Ironically, as the fire warmed my body, I began shivering again. Darla had never stopped. I grabbed her arm and wrapped both my hands around it, clutching it to my chest.

We lay under the blanket trembling together, the way I had imagined lovers might hold each other in the afterglow of sex. But I wouldn’t have known. I’m not sure why my mind went there, at that moment, to think about sex and the fact that I was still a virgin. Maybe it had something to do with death, with how closely I’d come to the end. The awareness of it sat in my chest like a knife, making me short of breath. The Grim Reaper had visited me again, had even poked me with his scythe, but Darla had dragged me by the hair from his dark kingdom.

I crushed her arm tighter to my chest and savored the feeling a tear made as it slowly ran along the bridge of my nose. The instant I quit shivering, I fell asleep.

Chapter 34

When I awoke, I was cold but not unbearably so. The fire had burned to embers. Darla was gone.

I noticed both sets of skis and Darla’s poles stacked near the fire. There was no sign of my ski pole or staff. I was glad to see that my skis, at least, hadn’t been lost. Maybe I’d hit a root, ripped my boots out of the bindings, and left the skis on the bank when I fell in. I felt bad about losing Mrs. Parker’s bö staff, though.