Ridgeline - Part Fifteen: The Reckoning

The cold had a texture. Not the absence-of-heat cold from earlier — the goosebumps, the prickling, the muscles clenching. That cold had been the body doing something. This cold was the body not doing something. The muscles that had been shivering for hours were still. The skin that had been prickling was smooth. The heat that had been leaving her in waves was leaving her in a slow, continuous drain, like a bathtub with the stopper pulled, the water going down so gradually you don't notice until your back is against the porcelain and the water isn't touching you anymore.

She was thirsty. The thirst had arrived somewhere in the last hour and planted itself in the center of her consciousness the way the rib wound had planted itself hours ago — a fixed point around which everything else organized. Her tongue was thick. Her lips had cracked — she could feel the splits when she ran her tongue across them, the copper taste of blood at the corners. She hadn't had water since the trail. The water bottle had been in the stroller. The stroller was somewhere on the trail, tipped, bloody, the water bottle somewhere in the gravel near the keys.

The dog pressed against her spine. The heat from its body was the only warmth she had and the warmth was different now — less. Not gone. Less. The way a radiator is less when the boiler starts failing, the metal still warm but the warm not reaching the edges of the room. The dog's body was spending its heat the way Dana's was spending hers — on the business of not dying, the furnace running to keep the core alive and the extremities going cold and the surface temperature dropping because the body had decided that the surface didn't matter as long as the center held.

A sound from the direction of the body on the trail.

Not the crashing from earlier — not the large thing, the huffing, the grunting. This was smaller. A rustle in the brush. Then a yipping — high-pitched, rapid, a staccato bark that didn't sound like a dog and didn't sound like anything Dana had heard on the trail tonight. The yipping came from forty yards away, from the direction of the shape on the gravel, and the yipping was followed by another rustle and a second yipping from a different angle and the sounds converged at the same point.

The body on the trail was being found.

Dana pressed Bree closer. The baby's face against her sternum. The baby's breathing — the subvocal vibration, the bone-conducted frequency — still present, still there. She pressed Bree's head against her chest and didn't think about what the yipping meant and didn't think about what was being investigated forty yards away and the yipping continued in short bursts and the rustling continued and the thing that was happening forty yards away was going to keep happening whether she listened or not.

She stopped listening. The yipping became part of the night the way the frogs were part of the night and the crickets were part of the night and the sound joined the other sounds and Dana let it join and didn't separate it out and the thing it meant lived in a room in her mind that she closed the door on and left closed.

The cold deepened. Her fingers — the ones on the right hand, the hand holding Bree — had gone from numb to absent. She could feel the pressure of Bree's body against her arm but she couldn't feel the individual fingers, couldn't tell if they were gripping or slack, couldn't confirm that the hand was doing what the brain was telling it to do. She flexed. The thumb responded. The index finger responded. The other three didn't, or responded at a delay she couldn't distinguish from not responding, and the five-second gap between the instruction and the execution — close the hand, hold the baby, grip — was a gap she'd been running calculations on since the shivering stopped.

If she couldn't hold the baby.

The thought arrived and she let it sit the way she'd let the arithmetic sit and the way she'd let the confession sit. If she couldn't hold the baby, Bree would slide from her arms onto the leaves. If Bree was on the leaves, Bree was on the ground. If Bree was on the ground, the heat transfer stopped. If the heat transfer stopped, the bone-conducted vibration that was Bree's voice would drop below the frequency that Dana could feel and below that frequency was the frequency Dana couldn't feel and below that was nothing.

She flexed again. The thumb. The index finger. The others at a delay. Holding. For now, holding.

Something turned over in her chest. Not the rib wound. Deeper. The weight that comes when you look at a thing you did and the thing looks back and you can't close your eyes because your eyes are already closed and the looking is internal. It arrived with the cold the way nausea arrives with a fever — the physical condition creating space for the other thing to surface.

The Facebook post. The thirty-seven thumbs-up. The woman who'd written about the sawhorses and the fresh air and nobody around. Dana had read that post at midnight while Bree nursed and Dana had liked the post and unliked it and read the comments twice and memorized the directions and driven to a closed trail and ducked under a sawhorse and run on the gravel with her earbuds in and the post had felt like permission and the permission had felt like freedom and the freedom had brought her here, to this trail, to this night, to this gravel. Every person who'd given the post a thumbs-up was asleep in a house with the doors locked and the lights off and Dana was lying in the leaves with her baby running out and the weight in her chest was the weight of knowing she'd done this to herself. She'd broken the rules. The rules were wrong — the 2020 rules, the lockdown, the sawhorses, the caution tape on the swings — the rules were wrong and she'd known they were wrong and she'd broken them because they were wrong and the breaking had led here. The wrongness of the rules didn't cancel the chain. The chain existed. She'd built it. Link by link. Choice by choice. And the choices had been reasonable — every one of them reasonable, every link in the chain forged by a woman who needed air — and the reasonableness was the thing that pressed against her sternum in the dark.

The marriage. She'd said it to the dog in the dark and the dark had absorbed it and the saying had changed nothing. But lying in the leaves with the cold pressing in and the baby running out and the dog dying against her spine, the thought about Scott had a different weight. Not the weight of leaving. The weight of the leaving she'd rehearsed being the wrong leaving — the wrong departure, from the wrong place, at the wrong time. She'd been practicing how to walk away from a man who came home smelling like cardboard and handed her the baby like a shift change, and the walking-away she'd practiced was a Sunday afternoon with the car packed and the Civic heading toward her mother's house and a conversation she'd rehearsed in the shower a dozen times, not this. Not bleeding on a trail in the dark while the man she'd been planning to leave didn't know where she was because she'd hidden from him the same way she'd hidden from the patrol car and the sawhorses and the rules.

She'd hidden from everything. From the lockdown, behind the Facebook post. From the marriage, behind the trail. From the instinct that told her the man on the trail was wrong, behind the earbuds and the override and the voice that said she was that woman again. She'd hidden behind every available surface and the surfaces had given way one by one — the trail, the phone, the stroller, the dog, the flashlight — and what was left was a woman in the leaves with no surface between her and the thing she'd been hiding from, which was not the man on the trail or the shape in the gravel but the knowledge that she had chosen every step of the chain that led here and the choices had been reasonable and the reasonable choices had brought her baby to this ridge to die.

She tried to pray again. Not the formal prayer from earlier — not Our, not the words from the third pew. Something less. Something that was barely language. A please. Directed at nothing she could name — not God, not the dark, not the trail, not the sky she couldn't see. A please that lived in the exhale, that left her body with the breath and went into the cold and didn't come back. She waited for it to come back. It didn't. The not-coming-back was the answer or the absence of an answer and she couldn't tell which and it didn't matter because the please had left her body and the leaving was the point. The exhale was the prayer. The breath was the giving-over. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen and the please was the last voluntary sound she made before the involuntary sounds — the breathing, the catch in the ribs, the heartbeat she could hear in her own skull — took over and ran the body without asking.

The dog shifted against her back. Its body pressing closer — not the incremental approach from the bonding hours, not the fractional closing from ten feet to six to four. This was a press. A leaning in. The body against Dana's back pushing until the contact was full, chest to spine, the heat exchange as complete as the remaining heat allowed. The dog's thrum — the vibration Dana had felt through the contact point for hours — was barely there. A pulse so faint it was indistinguishable from the tremor of a body at its structural limit. But the press was strong. The body had nothing left except the capacity to lean toward warmth, and the leaning was total.

She flexed the fingers.

The thumb. Slow. The index finger. Slower. The middle finger — a delay so long she wasn't sure it had moved. The ring finger and the pinkie: nothing. The instruction went out and nothing came back. The hand that was holding Bree was operating at forty percent, maybe less, and the forty percent was declining — each check revealing less than the previous check, the trajectory clear, the numbers running in one direction.

If the hand couldn't hold.

She pressed the arm tighter against Bree. Used the bicep, not the fingers. The bicep was closer to the core and the core still had blood and the blood still had heat and the arm tightened against the baby and the rib wound flared and she held and the holding was the last arithmetic she had — the calculation of which muscles still worked and which didn't and how long the working ones could compensate for the ones that had stopped.

The cold pressed in. The dog pressed back. Bree vibrated against her sternum. The night was still dark and the dark was still permanent and the three heartbeats continued their separate cadences in the leaves.

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-sixteen-stay