Alternate Endings Page 26

  She looked upward, trying to figure out where they were through the branches, but her view was obstructed, even if she had known where to find them on the topless mountains that lurched skyward. On each of the last three shuttles, more people got on than alighted. Those crossing the road toward her from the footbridge were wetter and wetter, soaked and scurrying like bugs toward the protection of the trees by the bus stop.

  Damion looked around himself, remembering the climb up.

  He turned toward his mother again, yet again, as he had just done three times previously, but she kept her back to him. He saw that she had moved fifty feet away from him already, and above him, where she was reaching out to a rounded boulder where the path sprang even more steeply. With both hands she lifted herself up and out of his sight.

  No one else was climbing upward toward him in that moment, and no one was heading down. He was alone and vulnerable to the elements on a slippery ridge, balancing just barely on a slant that vectored into mid-air. His legs, his tired legs, were rattle-shaking.

  “Don’t move,” he told himself, but then he realized that doing nothing would not serve him.

  “I have to move,” he said.

  But he couldn’t.

  “How far is it?” Effie asked a forty-ish woman.

  “I didn’t do it. I got to Scout Lookout and that was far enough.”

  “Could I get there?”

  “In this rain? Alone?” The woman eyed her. “You in good shape?”

  The winds surrounded Calyce, swirling. They circled to hide the far top she still couldn’t see. There was nothing but piles of boulders being hit by drowning water, as was she.

  Her knees trembled from fatigue. They hadn’t before and not until the fight with Damion, which had taken the rest of her strength, and now she was on an upsurge of rock that wouldn’t stop. There was no break in it, and nowhere she could stand levelly on the littered stone. All she could do was climb, climb it or turn back, and so she went on, making mistakes now that she was so tired.

  To her in her exhaustion, though, the path felt more stable in the rain, which seemed to have washed off the sandy powder that coated the sandstone and otherwise would likely have sent her feet skidding.

  On a steep uptick, she had to step aside suddenly into a small indent for a couple coming down toward her hunch-shouldered and speeding. They were shocked to come upon her.

  “You’re staying?” the sopping young man asked loudly as he negotiated by her, his green Utah Jazz hat stuck to his head.

  “Really black clouds are coming fast,” his female companion told her. “You can see them from the top. And bad lightning.”

  They scrambled to get beyond her.

  She considered, then pressed on, believing that the growing wet gave her searching fingers more grip on the sandstone.

  Calyce my daughter of my wife Ephimedia who left us for Poseidon, I see you below me, climbing to reach me. The winds that force me to crouch here where you cannot see me resent you. These gales, my children too, shrieking in their fury, do not want you here, for they mean for me to dwell alone, yearning for but never again holding them as they spin and taunt me. Take care my daughter, mother of Endymion, for they intend to kill you by throwing you off this cliff and I can do nothing but watch them.

  Rain poured as Damion looked at the deadly slope and the torrent that flowed over it. He was stuck, or he risked his life trying to scale downward. Along the front of him, water sluiced, slick on the shiny plastic.

  “Fucking vest.”

  He unzipped it and yanked it off himself, then balled it with his fists. He threw the wadded orange thing as hard as he could into the rain, up and rocketing. It unfurled. As it arced, it caught the water. A wounded bird, it twisted down. It dove and was gone.

  Calyce clung now to wet chains that stopped anyway above a blind drop deeper than her legs could reach. Was she meant to turn and face the rocks? Was there a place for her toes in the darkness of that cleft she couldn’t see? To her left, just there, was the plunge.

  Effie had crossed the footbridge and was hugging the western bank as she walked on sudden beach sand so thick it ate the bottoms of her sneakers.

  As Damion maneuvered over steep rocks, the thunder came. It clapped and banged as rain slashed sideways. He had no idea how to move safely through the lightning, so close it strobed like a broken ceiling light.

  “Where are they?” Effie said out loud as the hard rain hit her along with the wind.

  Calyce stared up and up as wet shards stung her face. There wasn’t another person on the climb. No bright colors, no hikers, no other idiots dumb enough to still be on the mountain.

  A boom of thunder clashed above her.

  There were no chains now in this spot where the barrage had stopped her. She struggled to balance, her feet at two different levels. She tried to lean into the wind that crowded her, for there were no handholds here but only the deadly-smooth, shining stone she was standing on with her vest flagging.

  She twisted around carefully to look back behind her, and her tight hat flew. It left her head and soared like a bird.

  Backwards, where Damion had gone, the path was even steeper and wet-slick.

  “Stop!” Aeolus cried to them, but they bark-laughed and Calyce heard it.

  What Calyce didn’t know was the chemistry. Sodium bicarbonate binds sandstone, which is just compressed sand, and in water sodium bicarbonate dissolves. Rocks impossible to break in the arid desert snap easily in a driving rain.

  She didn’t know, so she put out her right foot. She stepped on the wet ledge and it cracked. It broke under her weight.

  She fell.

  She tried to grab something but she couldn’t. There was nothing for her hands, so she slid. She flailed her arms but she was on the ground on her right side now, sliding, ripping quickly, and there was nothing to break her fall.

  “Was that a scream?” Effie said to the wind that whipped her.

  Calyce rolled, screaming. She tumbled on the wet rock toward the side of the cliff, slipping and screaming, unable to use her empty fingers, which were bleeding now along with her arms and her right hip from the desperate friction.

  Tumbling, she tried to tuck her body.

  Another five feet and she would leave the earth.

  He stood up straining but he couldn’t help her.

  “Was that a man or a woman?”

  Effie couldn’t tell because the storm distorted it, but she began to run.

  She didn’t know where she was but she knew she was below her family.

  Calyce hit a cutout. She slammed hard into a boulder in a dip that stopped her tumbling thirty feet down. Mid-roll, her twisting back crashed into the trunk of a pine tree on the steep slope.

  The trunk held and it braced her and kept her from flying.

  Effie saw the trail spike upward on the canyon wall but it didn’t stop her.

  “My Lord!” Catherine finally yelled at her son. “Do I have to tell you even when to use the bathroom? Can’t you do anything on your own? Stop thinking and do something. Do you want to be at Target all your life?”

  Ryan cringed. His thin shoulders hunched in shame and he dropped his chin so she wouldn’t see him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said immediately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. What kind of mother am I?”

  She hugged him close with his head on her chest. He wrapped one arm around her and hugged her tightly. The other hand he thrust into his mouth, to bite a bitten nail to the quick.

  They rocked together, mother and son, for more than a minute.

  Over the top of his head, she then whispered, “Heal thyself.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

  Calyce lay inert for a full minute, then opened her eyes at dirt-level. The rain kept coming but didn’t drown her. She realized she was on her side and hurting but still alive. Then she
realized she was in a chink and that chink and the tree there had saved her life.

  She sat up, then scooted herself to back against a boulder. She stretched out her legs gently and felt them with her bleeding hands, then pressed her arms, her neck and both sides of her face. She looked at the blood on her fingers. Her legs in her wet shorts were torn up and bloody too and covered with brown debris, but they were solid.

  Her right hip hurt and she felt a sharp pain under her chin. She held up her hands in the rain, which washed them, and she saw the cuts. But everything was still attached.

  She inventoried her brain, forcing herself to rehearse what had happened. As the panic slowed and her breathing measured, she realized she was injured but still capable. Maybe she could stand, and maybe she could locate a way up the unmarked and rocky mountain dumping rain onto her.

  Eventually, she realized as she sat that no one knew where she was. Even later, they would never find her. No one walking the trail would see her, not even in good weather. She had flown over a hump in the slope and was hidden from the trail she figured had to be somewhere above her.

  It took her long minutes to get to that one clear thought.

  Calyce crawled herself up to the trail. She never left her hands and knees but depended on them like a baby, seizing onto sharp rocks with her ripped hands where she could, and onto tree roots as her body screamed.

  Standing on the trail again, at the same point where she had fallen, she had to make a final decision.

  Above her, her father Aeolus said, “Come now. I want to hold you.”

  “No,” Calyce said out loud, “He wants me to chase after him, but I won’t. Not anymore. And I’ve come this far, and paid this price.”

  Effie hastened despite the panting, wheezing, pumping of her chest.

  She tackled each next vertical run of chain and each next chainless exposure. She put her feet sometimes not seeing where they would go or if the ledge she chose would hold her. She moved without knowing whether she would lose her wet grip or her balance or whether her weighty boots would slide on the molded surface. She hauled herself and lifted her legs and her body weight higher than she had ever done all while she judged with every step the lethal angle of the sandstone.

  The last approach was a series of links and posts and open spaces straight up forty feet, every coming moment visible to the eye.

  She took another deep breath and grabbed the metal. As she did she talked to the top of the mountain she saw only as an ending against the sky. There was no way to know it was the roof, but it was, at last.

  “I’m nearly home. I can do this.”

  The overlapping slabs came to a peak like a gable, only the sides weren’t even. On the shallow left, to the north, a woman could barely lay full-length outward without her boots dangling 1500 feet above the far thread of a river.

  The storm abated the slightest bit as Calyce crab-walked on the right instead, but the rocks never leveled. One wrong foot and she would tumble off, but she knew the end wasn’t there but out at a far tip she could not yet see.

  As she moved she never looked beyond her hands. She didn’t see the south-running Narrows gorge that was now inflamed with flash-flooding rain, and she didn’t see the rain streaking on the white-topped cliffs to her left, to the north.

  But there they were, finally, marking the end of her journey. She didn’t know they would be there but of course they belonged.

  Cairns. Handmade stacks of little stones like precarious dishes placed by hikers to mark their achievement, to say thank you to the gods who had delivered them safely.

  Cairns like the rock piles on Three Sisters Islands in the Potomac on the way to National Airport, only these at the top of Angels Landing weren’t thrown by God but assembled by people. She counted one that was seventeen pieces tall, while another had two funny arms like a cactus. A dwarf forest of rock totems grew. There must have been twenty of them, each still as upright as when they were first constructed by nameless pilgrims now far from this place, this temple of Zion.

  She sat down cross-legged carefully on the wet stone.

  She looked beyond the cairns at the sweeping view. She was up as high as an eagle soaring, and she saw a green valley bounded on both sides by monumental rock-teeth that widened to the south. As she breathed, suspended, it seemed the winds too died for as long as she willed it.

  She was not alone there on the top of the world, and she did not feel she was.

  A siren.

  Coming toward Calyce from her right, from the south where the shuttle bus came and the Visitor Center was. She knew it was approaching because the sound of it was raised. Past her, and it would lower, but it hadn’t lowered yet, so her hearing could place it grossly but not specifically, not yet.

  She peered far, far down to the gray wire of road but saw little, so she stood slowly, inching up and straightening. Still not enough, so she took three steps and re-balanced with her right foot twelve inches lower than her left. She couldn’t see any movement in the fuzz of rain below her, but then she did.

  She saw flashing red and blue lights on a speeding white roof making the turn, and she heard its shriek not continue around the great bend of the river toward the rushing Narrows, where it should have been going, because a flash flood there was a certainty.

  She saw a bit of the tiny parking lot below her. She saw the white flashing SUV pull in.

  She saw two Rangers running toward the metal footbridge.

  She gasped. She put her two hands to her mouth.

  An instant later, she had already turned to run but couldn’t because running there brought certain death. She crab-walked recklessly and as fast as she could.

  Damion heard it too.

  The shrill noise began as he was halfway through the slot canyon. In the tall, tight groove the siren reverberated. It cycled, echoing loudly.

  He covered his ears, so he didn’t notice the siren getting closer and more insistent. But he did notice when it finally stopped. He took down his hands and kept stomping through the overflow from the gushing creek bed.

  He got to the mouth of the squared-off hanging canyon and turned right on a steep down-ramp into the valley.

  As he did, he ran into Effie. Literally. Coming up, she didn’t see him. She was winded yet still trying to run, and she startled, then cried out when she saw him.

  “You’re all right!”

  She grabbed him. She was panting but he wasn’t.

  She took in huge gulps of air. “Where’s your vest?”

  She held him with both hands on his upper arms.

  She said, “So it’s her. It’s her. They saw her.”

  She passed by him in a rush. “We’ve got to get up there. Come on! The police are coming. They called them on the way down.”

  “Who did?”

  “They passed me. They’re meeting the police and coming back up. All I heard was they saw someone in an orange vest fall over the side of the mountain.”

  Far below her, Calyce saw the flash of orange. It was halfway down, straight down, fluttering on a rock beak on the sheer cliff. It wasn’t there before.

  She screamed and began running.

  Damion watched Effie run off upward, but he didn’t follow. His eyes calmly scanned the valley below, then the white sky above him as he thought.

  From where he stood hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, the rain was relenting as it moved southeast away from Zion, where it would peter out eventually over the desert. In the receding torment a far-off jolt of lightning sparked.

  He sidled close to the cliff, where it was driest, and began descending.

  As he walked with his right hand on the moist wall, he said to no one, “She’s the one who turned her back on me.”

  “Damion.”

  Calyce kept saying her son’s name over and over as she scurried. She grabbed chains and gripped rocks and inched her way. She stumbled but caught herself. She slipped and slop
ped but kept going.

  Effie made it finally to the endless stack of short, steep switchbacks and began up them. She looked to the top but couldn’t see where they ended.

  She asked herself inside her mind, to save her energy for breathing, “Doesn’t this ever stop?”

  They were running up as Damion was walking down, two hikers and two Park Rangers not in olive green but corn-yellow t-shirts and black backpacks. The hikers, a woman and a man wearing a Utah jazz hat, struggled to keep up with the rescuers.

  The front Ranger said to Damion, “It’s closed. We’re closing the trail. Can you stay at the bottom and keep people from starting up? You can leave as soon as the other vehicle gets here with the sign.”

  And they were gone without waiting for his answer, all four of them rushing upward, turning left around a kink in the trail.

  Calyce finally got herself down to Scout Lookout. There she gained speed on the level ground as the dirt trail jerked through the brush.

  Suddenly, Effie sprang out at her.

  Effie leapt from a turn in the path, and reached upward to her towering daughter.

  But Calyce jumped back. Surprised. Shocked to see anyone. Without thinking she shook her head and thrust both arms high in the air.

  She jumped on both feet, up and down and up and down, waving her long arms in half-circles.

  She yelled, tearing her lungs, “Get back! Get back! Get away!”

  “Calyce, it’s me!”

  “Get back from me!”

  Effie shouted, “You’re okay!”

  The old woman grabbed her and held on tight. “You’re not hurt! You’re all right.”