Ridgeline - Part Eleven: Arithmetic

At some point the rain started. She couldn't remember when. The sky opened and the water came through the canopy in sheets and she pulled Bree closer and tucked the baby's head under her chin and the water ran down her neck and along her collarbone and into the space between Bree's scalp and Dana's chest and Bree screamed — the real cry again, the one from the attack, the one that came from the base of the throat — and the screaming went on and the rain went on and Dana sat on the trail with her back against the downed tree and closed her eyes and let the rain hit her face and didn't move.

The rain lasted an hour. Maybe less. Maybe more. Time had done something she couldn't undo — collapsed or expanded or simply stopped mattering in the way it matters when you have a phone to check and a clock on the microwave and a husband who comes home at 6:30. Here the only clocks were Bree's crying cycles and the bleeding and the temperature of the air on the exposed strip of her stomach where the t-shirt had been torn for the forearm bandage. The strip was soaked now. The rain had diluted whatever clotting the wound had managed and the seep had started again, steady, warm against the inside of her forearm in a way that felt like a faucet that wouldn't close all the way.

She did the arithmetic.

Not consciously — the way you do math in your head without deciding to do math. The numbers arrived on their own, the way the numbers for the household budget arrived when she sat at the kitchen table with the checkbook and the calculator and the stack of bills: known inputs, fixed outputs, how long until the account hits zero.

Blood loss. She didn't know the rate but she could feel the forearm seep and the rib wound leaking through the t-shirt fabric and the wetness on her leggings that was blood, not rain, because the blood was warm and the rain was cold. The leggings were dark from the left hip to the knee. She'd lost — what. A pint. Two. She weighed 138 pounds and the internet had told her, during one of the late-night spirals that sent her down medical rabbit holes at 3 AM, that a person could lose thirty percent of their blood volume before the body started shutting down. Thirty percent of — she didn't know the formula. She knew that her hands were cold and her feet were cold and the cold wasn't just the rain.

Exposure. June in the Piedmont, the daytime high had been eighty-something. But the ridge dropped fast after sundown — she'd felt it, the parking-lot heat radiating upward and leaving the ground cold. With the rain, with the wet clothes, with the torn t-shirt and the bare stomach, the body was losing heat faster than it could produce it. Bree was warmer than Dana because Bree was pressed against Dana's chest and Dana's chest was the heat source and the heat was leaving Dana and entering Bree and that was correct, that was the right direction for the heat to go, and at some point the source would run out.

The baby first.

Not a thought she chose to have. An arithmetic result. If Dana died of blood loss or exposure, Bree — pressed against a cooling body, in wet clothes, on a trail in the dark — would die of hypothermia. A four-month-old's thermoregulation was fragile. Dana had read this. She'd read it on her phone at 2 AM during a night-feeding, one of the spiral nights, the kind where you start with is my baby's room too cold and end with what temperature does a baby die at and you close the phone and stare at the ceiling and you don't tell Scott because telling Scott would mean admitting you searched for the temperature at which your baby dies.

Sixty-eight degrees. Below sixty-eight, a baby in wet clothes starts losing core temperature faster than the body can compensate. Dana didn't know what temperature it was on the ridge. She knew her arms were prickling and the rain had stopped and the air was still and the wet clothes were wicking heat from her skin at a rate she could feel.

She held Bree tighter. The rib wound answered.

Sirens, distant. She'd been hearing them for hours — or what felt like hours. The same lateral movement across the valley, south to east, the pitch rising and falling without direction change. Police cars. Ambulances. Whatever was happening downtown was still happening and the sirens were still pointed that way and nobody had turned one toward the ridge. She listened to them the way you listen to a neighbor's television through the wall — present, continuous, belonging to a different world.

Scott would be home by now. Six-thirty, seven. He'd walk in and the apartment would be dark and Bree's things would be there but Bree wouldn't be there and Dana's keys — the keys were in the gravel, somewhere near the blood. The car was in the lot. He'd call. The phone would ring in the stroller cup holder on a trail he didn't know existed because Dana hadn't told him about the Facebook post because the Facebook post was the small crime and the small crime had felt like freedom and freedom was not something she discussed with Scott.

He'd call her mother. Her mother would call back. They'd call the police. The police would take the report and the report would go into a queue behind whatever was burning downtown and the queue would run the way queues run — first in, first out — and Dana's report would not be first in and the Civic would sit in the lot in the dark and the sawhorses would stand in front of it and nobody would think to look behind the sawhorses because the trail was closed.

She could see Scott's face. Not the face he'd make when he got the call — she didn't have access to that face, she'd never seen it — but the face he made when he came through the door at 6:30. The flat, emptied face of a man who had driven a truck for twelve hours and wanted to sit down. He'd walk in and the apartment would be dark and the face would change and she wouldn't be there to see what it changed into. She'd been practicing a departure for months — the loose hands on the stroller, the view from the ridge, the thought she couldn't name — and now the departure was arriving and it wasn't the one she'd practiced and the arithmetic of that was its own kind of equation she couldn't solve.

She was thinking about her own body as a thing that would be found. The way a detective finds it. The way a jogger on a Saturday morning finds it, months from now, when they reopen the trail — the new gravel, the new stumps, and a woman and a baby in the brush at the trail's edge. The person's dog would find her first. The person would call 911 on a phone that worked. She was thinking about what she'd be wearing and whether the five-point harness on the stroller would still have blood on the buckle and whether Scott would identify her at the hospital or at the — she didn't know where they take you. She'd seen it on television. The sheet pulled back. The face. His face over her face. She couldn't picture it.

The rain was gone and the clouds were thinning and the stars came back through the canopy and she looked at them because she'd looked at them earlier when the dog was here and the dog was gone now and the stars were the same stars and they still didn't help.

Bree's crying had dropped to the register below keening. Not a sound Dana could name. A vibration more than a vocalization — the vocal cords still working but the diaphragm barely engaged, the sound carried on the exhale without force, a frequency so low Dana felt it in her ribs more than she heard it through her ears. Bree's body had gone from rigid to heavy. The heaviness was worse. Rigidity meant the muscles were working. Heaviness meant the muscles had stopped.

She pressed her hand against Bree's back. Warm. Still warm. The hand stayed.

Time collapsed. She'd been sitting against this tree for — an hour since the rain stopped? Two hours? The trail had darkened and the stars had appeared and the frogs had pulsed and the frogs were quieter now, the chorus thinning the way a phone call breaks up driving through the mountains, the sound losing its edges, the voices going to fragments and then to nothing. The crickets were still going. She could hear her own breathing, which had developed a catch on the inhale that hadn't been there an hour ago, a shallow stop in the left lung that was the rib wound's latest announcement.

She tried to remember the sequence of events. The trail. The man. The knife. The sirens. The dog. The confession. The dog leaving. The rain. She could place each one in order but she couldn't attach duration to any of them. The dog might have been with her for twenty minutes or three hours. The rain might have lasted forty minutes or the entire night. Her body had stopped measuring time in hours and started measuring it in losses — the warmth leaving, the blood leaving, Bree's crying dropping a register, then another, then the register below that. Each loss was a clock-tick. The ticks were getting closer together.

She wasn't cold anymore. She'd been cold for hours — the shivering, the prickling, the muscles clenching against the heat loss. And now the shivering had stopped. Not because the temperature had risen. Because the body had stopped trying.

She knew what that meant. She'd read it on one of the spiral nights. The body stops shivering when it runs out of glycogen to fuel the shivering. The shivering is the body's last active defense against hypothermia. When the shivering stops and you're not warmer, the arithmetic is running out of numbers.

She held Bree. The rib wound pulsed. The forearm seep continued its slow warm trickle and she couldn't feel her feet and couldn't feel her fingers on the hand that wasn't pressed against Bree's back and the stars were above her and the trail was dark and she was going to die on this trail and Bree was going to die on this trail and nobody was coming because she'd made herself invisible and the invisibility was total and permanent and the arithmetic had reached zero.

She accepted it.

Not with peace. Not with struggle. With the flat pragmatism of a woman who had done the math. The inputs were fixed. The outputs were fixed. The account was overdrawn and there was no deposit coming. She held her daughter against her chest and the daughter's body was warmer than hers and that meant the heat was still flowing in the right direction and that was the last thing she could control and she controlled it and the rest was the trail and the dark and the arithmetic.

She thought about praying. The Palm Sunday cross on the dashboard. The church before COVID. The Sunday mornings when she sat in the third pew and the organ played and she knew the words without reading them. She tried to find the words now. The first one came — Our — and the rest didn't.

The frogs pulsed. The crickets layered. The stars came through the canopy. Bree vibrated against her ribs.

She was looking at nothing when the nothing changed.

A light.

On the trail. Distant — a hundred yards, maybe more. A narrow beam, steady, sweeping the gravel in slow arcs. Moving toward her.

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