Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“Maybe,” Anna said.

“No maybe about it.”

Slowly he raised his arms out to his sides, a man crucified on white. He cocked his head, smiled and stepped back into nothing.

Anna fell flat on the brink of the drop, arms outstretched. The fingers of her right hand caught Adam’s sleeve above the elbow and closed convulsively over the fabric. Then his weight struck her, and shoulder and collarbone smashed into the stone beneath the snow. The noise in her head was the cacophony of pain. A loud, sucking pop, and her ulna was torn from the socket. Crack of a dry twig: the collarbone snapping. She would have screamed, but cheese-thick agony blocked her throat.

“Don’t let go,” she managed in little more than a whisper.

A ripping sound sawed her eyes open. Her face was hanging over the cliff, her body spread-eagled on the edge. Her right arm, weirdly elongated, wrist showing between glove and sleeve, drew a straight line to Adam’s arm, drawn rigidly above his head. Anna had not held on. No one could have stopped the plummet of one hundred sixty pounds with four gloved fingers and a thumb. Not even Anna. In a freak accident, her hand had jammed through the nylon of his ripped coat and her wrist was in a noose of duct tape he’d wound round the sleeve to keep it together. Had she wanted to, she couldn’t have let him go.

“I’m pulling you up,” she gasped. Breathing hurt where her collarbone had broken, but the pain in the dislocated shoulder made it seem like nothing and she snorted a laugh that turned to snot and mixed with the snow caked on her face.

“Damn you, Anna,” Adam said. She couldn’t see his face; it was gone below the tatters of his sleeve and her arm. For a moment, a moment that was made into a nascent eternity by the vicious firing of nerve impulses in the right side of her body, Adam said nothing.

Finally words floated up their conjoined arms: “Let me go.”

“I’m pulling you up,” Anna said. She doubted she could pull up a four-week-old kitten at this point, but there wasn’t much else to hope for.

“You haven’t the right. Let me go.” He didn’t sound afraid, only tired – so tired he could barely find the strength to speak.

Anna might have done it. People had a right to die if they wanted to. People had a right to die the way they wanted to.

“I can’t,” she admitted. “My glove caught in the duct tape.”

“You are a piece of work,” Adam said.

“Bob!” Anna yelled, an echo of when she’d called for him on the breaking ice. It yielded the same result. There wasn’t enough expansion room in her lungs to try again, and she laid her cheek on the sleeve of her parka, the bare rock of the cliff edge where Adam’s fall had scraped the snow away an inch from her eyes.

It was moving. Tiny increments of rock no bigger than sand pebbles were creeping past. Adam’s weight was dragging her over. Kicking hard, she tried to drive her toes into the snow to anchor herself. The duck-billed Sorels pummeled down to the basalt but found no purchase. The effort accelerated the slip.

“Uh, Adam?” she said.

The grating sound that had opened her eyes after her shoulder tore sounded again.

“Adam? I was wondering if you could grab onto anything. I’m sort of sliding up here.”

More grating. She slid another inch. Her nose was ripping across the basalt. Tears and snot and snow and fabric blinded her.

“You know, just anything. Maybe a branch or something?” she tried.

“Once you’ve saved me and I’ve saved you, you can always jump again.

“Bob!” The guy was a pervert and a rapist and stoned out of his mind, but he was strong as the proverbial ox. “Bob!”

She slid farther, the skin of her chin peeling off against the sharp rock. Her eyes cleared enough, she could see down her arm to where her wrist bent, the duct tape wound around like a manacle.

Wedging her free hand heel first into the snow beneath her chin, she pushed till the bones in her good shoulder cracked. Muscles wrenched at the collarbone, forcing the shattered ends farther apart, and she screamed. The slipping stopped.

“Adam? Let’s die later. Give me a hand here, okay?”

Grating. Metal, it sounded like, and Anna dared hope he was doing something constructive, maybe driving a fingernail file into the basalt like a piton or carving a foothold with his belt buckle.

“Anna?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Where the hell else would I be?”

“On a three count, you pull. Got that?”

Anna nodded, feeling the ice and stone cut her face. “Got it,” she managed.

“Anna?”

“I got it, for chrissake! Count already.”

Adam laughed.

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” she snarled.

“One… two… three.” There was a tearing sound as Anna pulled, digging her knees in the snow and pushing with the heel of her hand. Adam flew up over the cliff, sailing into the air, as she fell back on her butt and heels.

Not Adam. His ripped-up old parka. He had unzipped it and slid into the arms of his wife. Or the devil.

Anna flung herself back in a belly flop on the top of the escarpment. “Where’s Robin!” she yelled into the white void. There wasn’t even an echo. Adam lay shattered at the bottom of the rock face, coatless, his red flannel shirt a scrap of color in the landscape.

Life isn’t for everybody. Robin Williams had said that. Life wasn’t for Adam. When his wife had died, he had his hatred to sustain him. Had Anna let him kill Bob Menechinn, she knew he would still have stepped off the cliff. Without Bob, Adam was lost.

“Damn you,” she whispered sadly.

Bob.

Presumably he was still tripping at the foot of the tree. Rolling onto her side, good arm beneath her taking the weight, Anna curled her legs into the fetal position. There wasn’t as much pain as there had been; the cold was numbing her. She’d been still too long, and an injury burned heat. Using her elbow as a lever, she pried herself up till she was kowtowing to the east, forehead on the ground, injured arm throbbing. For all the motion her arm had, her right sleeve might as well have been empty. She sat up on her heels, the bones in her shoulder and chest dragging like knives across the soft tissues inside her body. For half a minute or more, she could do nothing else. She hadn’t even the strength to breathe. When breath came, it was in a cutting gust of icy air that set her to coughing. The coughing threatened to tear her collarbone from its damaged moorings.

Finally the coughing wore itself out, and she took careful sips of oxygen. When she could bear to move again, she unwound her neck scarf and laid it over her knees. Catching up the cuff of her right sleeve with her left hand, she lifted it, as a mother cat lifts a kitten by its scruff, and laid it over the scarf. With her left hand and her teeth, she managed a rough sling, and the pain lessened slightly.

“What in hell did you think you were doing?” she muttered. “Let people die. World’s overpopulated as it is. Christ.”

This last comment was in reference to the snowmobile. In the flurry of shared confidences, bone breaking and premature death, she’d forgotten she’d tipped it over. Whole, healthy, she could have wrestled it back onto its skis. In her present condition, even finding a lever big enough to shift this part of the world was going to be a Herculean task.

Bob.

He was still sitting, head atilt, mouth agape, a mute old hound trying to bay at the moon. Anna attempted to lift her butt off her heels and get one of the platypus Sorels out in front of her so she could stand. All she managed was a rocking motion that set the nerves in her shoulder and arm jangling. Pain was a good motivator. Death was better. If she stayed where she was, she’d die of hypothermia. Bob would die as well, but that wasn’t a particularly motivating factor. Her grunt of effort turned into a shout as she forced herself up to one knee.