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Silas shrugged painfully out of his coat. “I dunno,” he answered. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s what you always say.”
It was true. Silas glanced up to where he had rolled the boulder from its perch. “I just thought it would be ...” What? Funny? “It was just a stupid prank.”
“Well, you went too far this time, dumbass.”
Meg peeled up his shirt carefully while instructing Jessica to breathe slowly with her head between her knees. Silas was busy adding “squeamish around blood” to the list of things he was learning about her when the cold air hit his wound.
“A dumbass who might need stitches,” Meg said, with a sharp intake of breath.
Silas was still working out how else to apologize when she pulled off her own jacket and top layer. Shivering in her undershirt, she looked down at her long-sleeved tee in her hands with regret before pressing the warm cotton onto the gash in Silas’s back.
He shivered, too.
The sun was fully gone now, obliterated by clouds looking heavy with snow. A low wind had begun to blow. “Time to go, I guess,” Meg said, shrugging her jacket back on.
“Wealwaysknow when it’s time to go,” Danny added. “It’s whenever Silas does something stupid.”
No one argued with this. They made their way back to their snowshoes in silence, where Silas was forced to brace against Danny, his shoulders tight with tension, while Jessica clasped his boots into the bindings. On the trail, they moved even more slowly than before, despite the fact that the way was almost entirely downhill.
After an hour it began to snow, and after two, Silas’s eyes strained through the driving snowflakes on each turn in the trail for the welcome sight of the main road. The pain of his wound escalated with each step, and he hiked with an unbalanced gait, one hand pressing Meg’s shirt to his back under his coat. At one point, he felt sure he saw the shape of Les’s old pickup, only to realize he was looking at a mountain hemlock bent with new snow. He groaned out loud.
“We might as well have gone all the way up to Long Lake after all, at the rate we’re moving,” Danny said.
“Maybe we’d be warm and dry up in the mine right about now,” Jessica added, note of forced brightness in her tone. She offered Silas a small smile, but she was irritated too, he could tell. Of course she was.
“You’re way too nice to him,” Danny declared. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
“I don’t,” Silas agreed glumly. He reached for Jessica’s gloved hand with his free one and gave it a squeeze.
Only Meg stayed silent, breaking trail ahead of them all. Silas focused his attention on Danny instead. Some best friend Silas was. His screwups always came crashing down around him, and when they did, Danny was right there, caught in the cross fire. He’d lost his best lure the day Silas had fallen from the trestle. He’d practically caught hypothermia the time he’d rowed out to him on Marble Lake. And today? Silas had full-on tackled his girlfriend, while hisowngirlfriend—Silas still wasn’t sure about that term—stood by, terrified. When the lodge finally came into view, its craggy features softened by a heavy draping of freshly fallen snow, it looked to Silas as isolated and defeated as he felt.
13
MEG
Matheson search
November 20, 2018
9:20 a.m.
Marble Lake Wilderness
Long Lake sits in a bowl of peaks on the far eastern rim of the Marble Lake Recreation Area. The Lakes Loop trail skirts its closest bank from above; after a long, steady uphill climb thick with ponderosa and sugar pine, the wide expanse of the lake pops into view unexpectedly, sparkling below a sheer cliff of gray granite and scraggly underbrush. It’s the largest in the entire basin, and from the single overlook along the main trail it seems to sink into the very granite of the mountains, dropped to the depths of the Sierra like a puzzle piece fit perfectly into place. If the smaller lakes on the other side of the loop call to mind calm, picturesque fishing ponds, Long Lake is their polar opposite, embodying a rugged, stark beauty that for Meg has never failed to both frighten and exhilarate.
Her team stops at the overlook for a water break, and for a long moment, while McCrady fiddles with his radio and Danny helps Maxadjust his pack, she just stops and stares. It doesn’t matter how many times she’s hiked it: this trail never fails to inspire awe. Sometime during that year of exploring these mountains with Danny and Silas, even with Jessica, this place became part of her DNA. She mainlined it, the pulse of this high-elevation air oxygenating her blood.
After regrouping, their team picks their way down a smaller side trail that provides the only marked lake access. The path is so steep here—cut into the side of the slope in jagged switchbacks—that Meg’s ears pop with the change in pressure within less than a quarter of a mile. The muscles in her calves feel like rubber; in some places she half stumbles and half jogs, lacking the strength to slow herself down. They drop nearly five hundred feet before arriving at the Long Lake shore, the trail emptying out at a small, rustic boathouse. There’s a narrow dock and two aluminum rowboats flipped over on the shore, their oars and fishing gear no doubt locked away for the season. The dock dips as it absorbs Meg’s weight, swaying under the gentle lapping waves caused by a light but steady wind. The sun has disappeared again, replaced by a low bank of dark-gray clouds, and the surface of the water, usually cobalt blue, is a dull metallic silver.
She’s shed her jacket with the exertion of the hike, stuffing it into Danny’s pack at his insistence, and now the wind chills the sheen of sweat along her back and neck. It feels good, but she feels a stab of remorse. Because what does this windchill feel like to Spencer and Cameron? Are they, too, wet with sweat? She looks out over the lake again. Or wet from falling in? And if these thoughts are plaguing her like this, what must they be doing to Silas right now?
“Dan?” she calls. “My jacket?” She’s just shrugged it back on when she hears the heavy scraping sound of metal on stone; she turns to watch McCrady lift one side of a rowboat and heft it up at an angle. It makes her think of the boats on Marble Lake and the story of Silas and Danny first meeting, and she glances at him, wondering if he’s remembering,too. But he’s just digging out his own jacket from his pack, his face unreadable.
Crouching to one side, the newbie, Max, peers underneath the rowboat before shaking his head with a look of abject relief. “Nothing,” he confirms, and they both straighten, letting the sides of the boat fall back to the ground with a clang of metal against stone that echoes in the still air.
They move on to the second boat, and McCrady’s shoulders stiffen as he bends again, curling his fingers underneath the rim of the bow. At the next metallic screech, Meg closes her eyes until Max’s second grunt in the negative tells her they’re in the clear.
