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She sobs with frustration and something else, something Silas wants to soothe, but cannot. He’s glad she’s here, just her, no one else but her and him and Cameron. Even as he thinks it, other voices call through the dark behind them, and people who are not Meg appear in the rectangular frame of the tunnel entrance. A searcher crashes forward through the crowd of packs and dogs, and someone shouts, “He’s a medic!” and someone else says,“Let him through!” and then this EMT is helping Meg pry Cameron from Silas’s grasp.
Silas is thrown off-balance, his back hitting the rock wall of the tunnel. The accompanying stab of pain shocks him into the present in a way that Cameron’s prone body did not. The EMT lays Cameron flat and stretches out on the ground beside him, belly to stone, listening for him to draw a breath. Everyone else holds theirs. He presses two fingers to Cameron’s neck hard enough that Silas yells out in protest. Everyone else yells for quiet. He bites his tongue, hard, watching the medic feel for a pulse as the rain drips in a steadyplunk, plunk, plunkfrom the tunnel roof. When he looks up and shakes his head, Silas wails.
The sound echoes off the stone, setting the search dogs pacing restlessly outside the tunnel to bark and howl. Somewhere to Silas’s right, someone reaches for a radio, and he braces for the wordblackto cut yet again across the airwaves, but it doesn’t come. Instead, the EMT clamps a hand down over the intercom, halting the searcher midmessage.
“Call in red,” he orders. “We don’t know anything for sure until he’s rewarmed.” He bends back over Cameron.
“He’s not dead until he’s warm and dead,” someone else intones, and Meg hisses, “Shutup, McCrady!”
Silas’s mind lurches like a pendulum swinging. Dead? Not dead? Around him, a flurry of questions and commands bounce against the slick walls of the tunnel: “Is he too fragile to actively rewarm?” “Someone hand me an emergency blanket!” “Can we maintain the heat here in the field?” Words likeprotocolandcircumstancesfollow fragments ofhow do we?andwhere should we?
After interminable debate, the medic begins removing Cameron’s clothing carefully. It seems awful, stripping what little protection a cold child clings to, but someone is still holding Silas back, and someone else is saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” over and over again. It takes Silas far too long to realize this voice is Meg’s.
As the soaked layers are stripped away from Cameron’s body, Silas notices for the first time that he’s wearing not only his Dinosaur Days sweatshirt he begged for at the science museum last spring but Spencer’s Riverside Elementary one as well. An unexpected surge of pride in his older son swells within him. Once Cameron lies completely bare on the rock surface of the tunnel, heating pads line his groin, armpits, and neck. Meg wraps the space blanket someone produced loosely around him, then pleads to Silas, “Don’t watch.”
He doesn’t have time to ask what she means before the EMT begins CPR. The heels of the man’s palms come down hard on the barrel of Cameron’s little chest, and his son’s entire body bucks. Silas screams, but the medic does it again. And again. Cameron scoots half a foot across the floor of the tunnel like a limp rag doll; the effort loosens one of his hands from the folds of the space blanket. It hits the ground with a soft plop, seemingly lifeless and blue against the silver of the blanket.
“His hand!” Silas cries. “It will be cold!”
He rocks forward on his knees, reaching to tuck Cameron’s fingers back under the blanket, his own fingers clumsy with cold. It makes no difference; Cameron’s hand flops away again on his next compression. Meg is still there, and Silas whirls back on her for help, but instead she takes her own firm hold of Silas’s arm to help halt his reach.
“Don’t,” she says, and for the first time since they entered the mine, she doesn’t sound in control. “It doesn’t help!” Someone nearby says something about warming the core before the periphery, and Meg explains, “We can’t rewarm his hands yet. Not here.”
She leans in to Silas, watching Cameron, and eventually he lets himself collapse back against her. Multiple flashlight beams dance over the walls of the tunnel, adding visual confusion to the cacophony of shouts and instruction, and Silas trains his gaze only on Cameron, rigid and gray, and the medic, compressing and compressing in his horrible, jerky rhythm. The denim of Silas’s pants clings to his cold skin, wet with rain, and his fingers remain too stiff to bend. It’s only the hum of body heat radiating from Meg as they sit, hunched together, that’s keeping him from splitting apart.
He’s just allowed his face to drop into his hands when the EMT straightens and lets out a triumphant yell. It rings like the crack of a whip in the hollowed-out space of the tunnel, and Silas’s head snaps up. Beside him, Meg springs to her knees.
“I have a breath!” the medic calls, and then, one carefully timed minute later, the pads of his fingers still pressed to Cameron’s carotid artery: “Three beats per minute!”
Three. Isn’t it supposed to be thirty? One hundred and thirty?Silas doesn’t know, but ...three?
The pendulum that’s rocked him since setting out for this mine swings again. He falls forward over Cameron and weeps into the folds of the space blanket until they pull him away again. He doesn’t fight them: his son’s heart was still and is now pumping. He won’t ask why or how. Beside him, Meg watches Cameron with a look of awe in the flicker of the lights, and Silas knows that redeemed or not, fair or not, what they have just witnessed is nothing short of a resurrection. He’ll take it, deserved or no: in his experience, very few people truly get what they have coming.
31
SILAS
One day post-Howard search, September 2, 2003
Marble Lake Lodge
Silas couldn’t sleep. It had been awful, staying every night at the lodge with all the search crews and media, but it was even worse now that it was quiet again, just him and Uncle Les and Aunt Mary. Just before 2:00 a.m., he rolled out of bed, retrieved his key ring from the peg above the check-in counter, and slipped out the side kitchen door. He climbed into the Jeep and then sat for a long moment in the parking lot, bracing for the turn of the ignition to prompt the quick illumination of lights in the living quarters upstairs. When he finally worked up the nerve to twist the key, the lodge remained dark, and he rolled down the access road to descend the highway toward Feather River at a reckless clip.
Meg had been avoiding him, not even answering her phone in her room when he rang her at night, but it was time to talk things through. They had been cast into a surreal, awful landscape, but finding one’s way out was simple navigation ... they just needed to study the lay of the land, find their bearings, and set a new course. Silas could plot his way out of any terrain.
Even after what happened to Jessica? Even after this week?
The memory of Meg’s touch returned to him, her lips on his, her breath, like little gasps, that kept time with the heavy beat of her pulse in her wrist. Yes. They could find their way back to one another. Silas knew they could.
He parked at the end of Meg’s drive, shutting off the lights a full block in advance, but the minute he reached her bedroom window and glanced inside, he knew she wasn’t there. He stood at her sill, peering through the dark to make out her still-made bed; the shirt she had worn at the lodge two days ago lay on the floor, her shoes tossed in the direction of the closet. Her mom’s car sat parked in the drive, all the lights in the house were out, and, all at once, heknewwhere she must be spending her nights.
Why hadn’t he seen it coming?We need to fix this,she had said, in that first terrible hour of searching for Jessica.We need to go back.
She hadn’t meant back up to the trail. She’d meant back-back ... to when it had been Meg and Danny, not Meg and Silas. Back to when her life had been predictable and manageable and safe.
He shouldn’t have been shocked by how badly it hurt, and yet the pain cut him down so swiftly he practically staggered back to the Jeep. Ironically, the first stab wasn’t betrayal, although he imagined that would come. It was loneliness. In all the time he’d known Meg and Danny, he’d never truly felt like the odd man out until tonight.
He had shared five stolen minutes with Meg, whereas Danny had spent years. Had Silas really thought he could compete with that?
