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“Thank you! You don’t know how much this means to me,” I said again. “Now, there’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I have it. I brought it with me. But…”
“You don’t have it with you?”
“It’s at the bottom of the ravine in the trunk of my car.”
Cali thought about it for a moment.
“Wait, you have thousands of dollars in the trunk of your car?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you just planning on leaving it there?”
“It’s not like I could have gone and gotten it,” I explained.
“Wait, you were really just going to leave thousands of dollars there. You never thought to go back and get it?”
“I mean, I considered it. But I saw the pictures. Your mother had to be helicoptered out of there. How is someone supposed to go down there to get it?”
“You hike,” Cali said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“From where?”
“From wherever we need to,” he said, still leaving me confused.
“Well, if you can get to it, like I said, it’s yours.”
“We can get to it.”
“We? I think you’re overestimating the skills of this city boy,” I explained.
“No, you can do it. We both can. We just need a little rope, a couple of harnesses, and maybe rash guards to protect our arms from the branches as we lower ourselves. But we can do it,” he said with a long, absent smile.
It took a day of studying the images from Google Maps for us to come up with a game plan. He was treating it like a football game. His brother, who had a company giving adventure tours to tourists, had all the equipment we needed. So, when we woke up the morning we planned to go, I felt nervous but well prepared.
Driving to the site of the accident, neither of us said much. Cali because, well, he’s Cali. And me because I still thought of it as the place I almost got his mother killed.
It meant so much to me that he was allowing me to make amends for what I had done. I wasn’t my father or brother. I couldn’t hurt people and then shake it off. I needed to balance the scales and make things right.
“We’re here,” I announced as he pulled the truck onto the side of the road. I was hoping it would make me feel less nervous. It didn’t.
“You can do this,” he said, seeing how I felt.
“I’ll believe you when I see it,” I joked.
Seeing the skid marks on the road, I walked to where they ended. It made me dizzy just to stand there. There were no rails to hold on to. With a strong breeze, I would have been thrown to my death.
Bracing myself, I looked down. There it was, my car. It was hard to believe that Dr. Sonya had survived that. Thank you, German engineering. Having landed front first, the car was ass up. It looked intact and accessible. If we could get down there, Cali’s plan could work.
Taking a deep breath, I shifted my attention to the horizon. The car was at the top of a hill but, in total, we had to be 400 feet in the air. The trees around us stretched out for miles. I couldn’t imagine how long it would take to go the long way around if we had to. The direct approach really was our best option.
“I still don’t get it. How are we supposed to get down there?” I asked him again.
“We’re going to tie this rope onto an anchor, maybe a tree trunk or a large rock, and then lower ourselves down.”
