Jenna Kernan - Adirondack Attack

Her fists went to her hips. “So I couldn’t send you home, right?”

Her two female adults had not climbed up to camp, opting to linger and watch the awkward reunion. Dalton glared, but they held their position, their heads swiveling from her to him as they awaited his reply, reminding him of spectators at a tennis match. Dalton pinned his eyes on his wife, an opponent, wishing they were alone but knowing that the women bearing witness might just play in his favor. Erin’s tone was icy, but she had not raised it...yet.

He grinned, leaned in for a kiss and caught only her cheek as she stepped back, scowling.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered, pushing past him and heading up the trail. Her campers scuttled ahead of them and out of sight.

He trotted after her, ignoring the tug of pain that accompanied each stride.

“Did you bring a kayak?” she asked.

“No.”

“You planning on swimming the rapids tomorrow?”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

She kept walking, leaning against the slope. Her calf muscles were tight, and he pictured those ankles locked about his lower back. It had been too long.

“I’m taking a vacation. Just like you wanted,” he added.

She spun and stormed a few steps away, and then she rounded on him.

“You didn’t hear a word I said back there.” She pointed toward a tree that he assumed was in the direction of Yonkers, New York, and their pretty little split ranch house with the yard facing woods owned by the power company and a grill on the patio that he had planned to use over the July Fourth weekend. Instead, he was adventure camping without a kayak.

She continued, voice raised. “A vacation? Is that what you got from our last conversation?”

“I missed you.” He held his grin, but felt it dying at the edges. Drying up like a dead lizard in the sun. She didn’t look back.

“You told me you understood. That you’d take this time to think...” She turned and tapped a finger on his forehead as if to check that there was anyone home. “Really think, about my concerns.”

“You said a break.”

“You knew exactly what kind of a break I wanted. But, instead, you went for the grand gesture. Like always.”

He reached to cup her cheek, but she dodged and his arm dropped to his side. “Honey, listen...”

She looked up at him with disappointment, the hill not quite evening their heights. Then she placed a hand over his, and for a minute he thought it would be all right. Her eyes squeezed shut and a tear dribbled down her cheek.

Dalton gasped. He was making her cry. Erin didn’t cry unless she was furious.

The pinkish woman appeared at the edge of the meadow, stepping beside them as her eyes shifted back and forth between them. She tugged on her thick rope of a braid as if trying to decide whether she should proceed or speak.

Dalton looked at his wife. She hadn’t kissed him. When was the last time that she had greeted him without a kiss?

When she’d left for adventure camp yesterday, he recalled.

An icy dread crystallized around his heart. He would not lose her. Everything was changing. He had to figure out how to change it back. Change her back.

“Erin, come on,” he coaxed.

She was listening, and so was the interloper. He turned to the camper.

“Seriously?” he said, and she scuttled away toward the others, who all stood together facing him and their camp leader, his wife.

Erin faced her group. “This man is my husband, Dalton,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting him.”

The assemble stood motionless, only their eyes flicking from him to her.

Erin growled and strode away. She reached her tent, paused at the sight of his pack and dropped the rope. Her hands went to her hips. She turned to glare at him. He swallowed.

When he gave her his best smile, she closed her eyes and turned away. Then she stripped out of her tank top and into a dry sweatshirt, leaving her wet suit on underneath. He tried to hide his disappointment as she dragged on dry shorts. She spoke, it seemed, to her pack.

“If you were listening, you would have respected my wishes.”

“I heard everything you said. I did. I just...” Ignored you , he thought, but wisely stopped speaking.

“I don’t think listening is enough.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You always listen to me, Dalton. And then you do as you darn well please. My feelings don’t change your decisions. They don’t even seem to weigh into your thought process anymore. You want to go on living like you always have, and that’s your right. And it’s my right to step off the roller coaster.”

“Is stepping off the roller coaster punishment, Erin? Is that what you’re trying to do? Is that why you left?”

“I can’t talk to you here. I’m working.”

“I’ll wait.”

“It won’t matter how long you wait, Dalton. You don’t want to change.”

“Because everything is fine just the way it is.”

“No, Dalton. It isn’t.”

The way she said “it isn’t” froze his blood. The flat, defeated tone left no doubt that she was ready to cut him loose.

Erin opened her mouth to speak, but instead cocked her head. A moment later she had her hand shielding her eyes as she glanced up toward the sky. Her hearing was better than his.

He’d fired too many shots with his M4 rifle without ear protection over in Afghanistan. So he followed the direction of Erin’s attention and, a moment later, made out the familiar thumping drone of the blades of a helicopter.

“That’s funny,” Erin said.

The chopper broke the ridgeline across the river, wobbling dangerously and issuing black smoke from the tail section.

Dalton judged the angle of descent and the length of the meadow. The pilot was aiming for this flat stretch of ground beyond the tents that ringed the clearing. Dalton knew it would be a hard landing.

He grabbed Erin, capturing her hand, and yanked her toward the trees. In the meadow, standing like startled deer amid their colorful tents, her charges watched the approaching disaster in petrified stillness.

“Take cover!” he shouted, still running with his wife. “Get down!”

Erin cried out in horror as the rails below the chopper snapped the treetops above them. Branches rained down from the sky, and Dalton dragged her against him as the roar of the engine seemed to pass directly over her head. She squeezed her eyes shut as her rib cage shuddered with the terrible vibrations of the whirling blades.

She opened her eyes as the chopper tipped in the air, the blades now on their side rotating toward her and churning upright like a window fan gone mad. It was going to hit the ground, blades first, right there before her.

In the meadow, Brian Peters, the skinny seventeen-year-old who was here because his father wanted him away from his computers for a week, was now running for his life. She judged he’d clear the descending blade but feared the fuselage would crush him. Brian’s acne-scarred cheeks puffed as he bolted, lanky and loose limbed. Behind him Merle Levine, the oldest of her group, a square and solidly built woman in her late fifties, lay prone beside her cheery red tent with her arms folded over her head. Merle was a single biology teacher on summer vacation and directly in the path Erin feared the chopper would take as it hit the ground.

Erin squeezed her face between open palms as the propeller caught. Instead of plowing into the earth, the helicopter cartwheeled as the blades sheered and folded under the momentum of the crash.

Erin saw Carol Walton lift her arms and then fall as debris swept her off her feet. The timid woman had reminded Erin of a porcupine, with small close-set eyes and spiky bleached hair tufted with black. Erin’s scream mingled with Carol’s as the woman vanished from sight.