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"I'm getting there."

"Are you safe? Are you eating?"

"I'm safe. I'm in the mountains. I'll tell you everything. I promise."

"I don't care where you've been. I only care that you called." A shaking breath. "I love you. I love you so much. I never stopped. Not for one minute."

I've said a thousand words into a radio this year, to strangers, in the dark. None of them cost me anything.

"I love you too, Mom."

She makes that sound again. I let her. I don't talk. I sit on the floor and listen to my mother cry, and it's the best sound I have ever heard.

"I'll call you Sunday," I say, when I can. "Every Sunday."

"I'll be here. I'm not going anywhere."

"I have to go. There's someone I have to find."

A pause. Then, in the voice from the bottom of the stairs when I was nine and late:

"Then go."

I hang up. I clip the walkie to my jacket, the one that was taped to the north stump. CH 4. TALK TO ME, YOU COWARD. I peel the tape off. I keep it.

Then I go.

On the east track I can't see the trees. I don't need to. I know every root.

At the foot of the boulder field I stop. I stand still, and I do what she told me. I listen.

Fog lies. That's the first thing you learn about it. It swallows what's near and hands you what's far. A kid laughing a mile down the valley sounds like she's at your elbow. Water off a spruce could be ten feet away or a hundred. I've said it on the radio to a hundred people. Don't trust your ears. Stay put. Let me find you.

Nobody's on the other end tonight. It's her, and me, and white.

I go up the slabs slowly. Heel last. Test every rock. Every few steps I stop and hold my breath.

Stone. Drip. The long hiss of fog crossing granite. My own pulse, too loud.

Then, above me and to the west, a breath.

Short. Caught at the top. The same as every night I stood under her wall and heard her lying in the loft, counting me.

I know that breath. I fell asleep to it for a week.

I climb toward it without a sound. When I'm close enough that the next step would put me on her, I stop. I unclip the walkie. My thumb finds the key.

I've said a thousand things on this channel to strangers. Every one of them came easy.

"Nora."

Above me, her radio crackles. A half second later, her breath stops.

I lean my forehead against the cold rock.

I've never said it for myself. I say it now.

"Stay on the line with me."