No one had much to say, not even Beverly, who was right behind him (and Louis behind her, as if they’d drawn lots). Every once in a while, negotiating the sharp corner of a switchback, he’d hear a snatch of Mal’s voice in mid-discourse, but the rest were quiet, focusing on their own thoughts and maybe their disappointment too, because if you didn’t reach the summit, no matter how illuminating the scenery or soothing the exercise, the hike was a failure. For his part, he was disappointed too — the bear had cast a pall over everything and then the weather had come down on top of that, and if he had to think about it, there was Mal too, Mal as pure irritant, and why he’d ever agreed to get back together with him he’d never know. Some misguided notion of being cool or democratic or nostalgic or whatever it was. His neck ached from looking back over his shoulder and his left knee was sore where he’d strained it to keep from falling. He was thinking he’d beg off on dinner plans, thinking maybe Mal could get a ride back with somebody else—Next time, he’d tell him, we’ll do it next time—and then they were down at the seventy-five-hundred-foot level and the snow tapered off to sleet and then a light rain and by the time they reached the parking area it had stopped altogether.
He stood there patiently at the trailhead, making a checkmark by each name on his reservation list as people filed by him. Most just nodded or gave him a muted thanks, eager to get to their cars and back to their recliners and sofas and wide-screen TVs, but the old man stopped to jaw awhile—Hell, I could have made it to the top, no problem, but I respect your decision, what with the women, but maybe next time we’ll do an all-male hike and really put some miles under our boots, huh, what do you say? — and Beverly stopped too, standing there beside him as if she were ready to hand out certificates of achievement.
Five minutes passed. Ten. He kept looking up the long flat final stretch of the trail, expecting to see Syl and Mal come striding round the corner at any minute, but they never showed. The old man climbed into his car. The lot cleared. Beverly snapped open her compact and touched up her lipstick, making a kissing noise that seemed unnaturally loud in the silence that had descended after the last of the cars rattled up the rutted road to the highway. “Where could they be?” she murmured, as if thinking for him. “They were right behind us, weren’t they?”
He looked back across the dirt lot to where his car stood beside a bulky black SUV that must have been Beverly’s, straining his eyes to see into the darkened interior, as if somehow Syl and Mal had slipped by him and were waiting there for him, talking quietly, making jokes, wondering why he was lingering here with this boxy widow while the sky darkened and everybody just grew colder and hungrier.
At fifteen minutes he cupped his hands and began to shout. “Syl!” he called, “Syl!” until he was bleating it. At twenty, he started back up the trail, Beverly tagging along like a dog, though he tried to dissuade her. “You don’t have to feel responsible,” he told her. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“I want to help. I can’t just leave you out here by yourself.”
He had nothing to say to this. He could feel the incline in the long muscles of his legs. His breath steamed before him. “I can’t imagine what happened,” he said, moving quickly now, but not panicking, not yet. “They’re both experienced in the woods and they’re both — Syl especially — in good shape.”
“Maybe she turned an ankle. Maybe—” Beverly let the thought trail off. She was eager, keeping pace, her arms swinging at her sides.
He didn’t want to think about heart attack or stroke or even broken bones. He called out till his voice went hoarse and the shadows deepened and the trail was gone and they had to turn back. It was full dark by the time they got back to his car. He sat there, the heater going, Beverly shivering beside him, and tapped the horn at intervals, signaling into the night. An hour crept by. The battery light kept going on and he had to keep starting the car up to run the heater and then shutting it off again. What they talked about, he and Beverly — this stranger who was sitting beside him in the dark while his thoughts raced and collided — he had no recollection of afterward. But at seven, when there was still no sign of Syl, he backed the car around and drove the three miles to the lodge, where there would be a telephone available to him, a ground line that could get him through to anybody, to the county sheriff, the paramedics, Search and Rescue, and what was he going to say? Just this: I’ve got two people missing.
—
He was in a brightly lit place, voices swelling round him, an undercurrent of jaunty guitar and country baritone washing through the speakers at either end of the room. The man from the local SAR team — mid-forties, squat, carrying a big breadbasket of flesh round his waist like a badge of authority — had told him they’d be on the case as soon as they could, volunteers and sheriff’s department people driving up the mountain even as they spoke, but that they really couldn’t expect to do much till first light in the morning. The temperature was likely to go down into the teens overnight — that was what he’d heard on the radio anyway — but the snow was expected to hold off, so there was that. Were they dressed for the elements, these two? Did they have a space blanket? A tent? The means to make a fire?
Brice had just shaken his head. He had everything he needed for an emergency in his pack, but who knew what Syl was carrying? Or Mal. Mal should have known better, should have been prepared, but then he’d always been a free spirit — give him a minute and he’d tell you all about it — and whether he’d thought beyond a couple sandwiches and a bottle of water for a routine day hike, who could say? And then he was picturing them up there on the mountain in the fastness of the night, lost and cold and hungry, huddling together for warmth, maybe injured — maybe that was it, maybe Mal had broken a leg or knocked himself unconscious doing the butterfly face-first into a tree — and then he was staring down at the plate set on the bar before him, a sandwich there, untouched, and the drink beside that, bourbon and water, no ice. “I don’t blame you,” Beverly was saying, “because if I was in your place the last thing I’d be thinking about is food, but you’ve got to keep yourself up.”
She was perched on the stool beside him, the remains of a steak and salad scattered about the plate at her elbow, a drink in one hand. She’d gone to the ladies’ and cleaned herself up, the smear of mud gone now, her makeup freshened, her legs crossed at the knee. He saw Syl again, up there in the dark. Huddling. With Mal. And then he saw himself in bed with this woman, with Beverly, who’d confessed to him in a breathless voice that she’d signed up for the hike under false pretenses: “I’m really only fifty-three, and that’s the truth. But then you didn’t exactly I.D. me, did you?”
He kept telling himself that everything was going to turn out all right, that Mal and Syl must have missed the turnoff and taken the trail that led in the other direction altogether, eight miles down to Coy Flat, and that once it got dark they would have seen it was too late to retrace their steps — and he’d told the Search and Rescue man the same thing. They must have missed the fork, that’s all, but the man had just said, How old did you say they were?
What if she died? What if Syl died up there?
He tried to put the thought out of his head, tried to focus: here was the emergency he’d always thought he was prepared for, but when it came to it, he wasn’t prepared for anything. How could he be? How could anybody? The whole world was just chance and misstep, that was all. A bear wandered too far afield and wound up gutted and dead, you took the wrong turn and died of exposure on the flank of a mountain under a thin black sky that was no covering at all. The truth was, he hadn’t taken Syl away from Mal. Mal hadn’t wanted her. He’d gone to South America, to the Andes and Tierra del Fuego, to climb mountains and tramp the wide world, but he couldn’t wait for Syl to finish college and so he left her behind. And Brice had been there for her. Every Friday, no matter the weather or how beaten down he was from the shit job he’d taken out of college just to pay the bills, he drove the two hundred miles up the cleft of the San Joaquin Valley to take her to dinner or a movie or to cruise the student bars and then sit in the lounge of the dorm sucking at her tongue and feeling for her breasts till the lights flickered for curfew. Then they were together. Then they were married. And then, childless by design because children were an extravagance in a world already stressed to the limits, they devoted themselves to right living and ecology, to education and preservation. They grew old together. Older.