Until Spring

Grant had been married to Maren long enough to know when she was pretending not to be annoyed with him. It was mostly in the way she became helpful. “Do you want me to carry that?” He looked down at the coil of rope across his chest. “No.” “Because I can.” Grant told her he knew. Maren kept her eyes on the coil across his chest and said he looked uncomfortable. He admitted that he was. She had packed the rope. Maren reminded him it was the lighter rope, which earned her a solemn, “Then I’m grateful.” Maren gave him the expression she used when deciding whether he deserved an answer. They were standing on a narrow shelf below the steeper section of the route, crampons biting into old hard snow, the trees far below reduced to a dark comb along the side of the valley. A strip of cloud had settled across the upper ridge during the last twenty minutes and was thickening while they watched it. The forecast had promised a cold, dry morning and snow after two. It was not yet eleven. Maren reminded him that she had told him to leave the stove. Grant said that the stove weighed four ounces, which brought them immediately to the ridiculous emergency soup. She had mocked it the previous winter and then eaten half of it. “I had hypothermia.” Grant told her she had been hungry. Maren considered this distinction for a second. “Same symptoms.” He smiled despite himself. Maren turned away before he could see whether she had too, although the slight movement at one corner of her mouth gave her away. They had stopped because the wind had changed. On the lower approach it had come at them in clean, predictable gusts from the northwest, enough to make conversation irritating but nothing they had not expected. Here it moved around the bowl in unsettled bursts, lifting loose snow from the slope above and sending it sideways across the rock. The first grains had clicked against Grant’s glasses like sand. Maren pulled one glove free with her teeth and checked the time on her watch. Her hair was tucked under a dark blue hat, the ends damp where snow had melted against her neck. She was forty-three and always looked younger outside. Climbing narrowed her attention. At home she carried lists in her head: marking, groceries, a plumber who still had not called back, whether Grant had remembered his mother’s birthday. Up here there was usually only the next piece of ground. “We’re turning around,” she said. Grant looked past her toward the ridge. They were perhaps forty minutes from the point they had meant to reach, less if the next section was as firm as the lower one had been. “Agreed.” Maren paused. “That was easier than expected.” Grant offered to argue if she wanted. Maren said she did not need him manufacturing resistance just to make her feel useful, so he proposed the alternative: they would go down, find somewhere warm and let her complain in the car that they had driven all this way for half a mountain. Maren approved. Complaining in the car, she said, was an efficient use of time. Grant moved aside to let her pass. They had turned around before; anybody who spent enough winters in the White Mountains had. There was no point resenting the weather for making the decision obvious. The people who treated retreat as failure tended to become cautionary stories told over beer by people who had known better. The first section down was slow rather than difficult. Maren went ahead because she moved more confidently over the mixed rock and packed snow, testing placements before committing her weight. Grant followed far enough back to see her feet without crowding her. They had turned before the steeper ground where the rope would have come out. Here, with no protection between them, simply tying themselves together meant that a bad fall by one could take the other as well, so Grant kept the coil across his chest. For several minutes they did not talk. The wind made conversation require too much effort, and each of them had work to do. Grant watched the points of his crampons, the shine of ice between stones, the places Maren had stepped before him. The route was not exposed in the dramatic sense; there was no sheer wall dropping thousands of feet beside them. That almost made the slope more deceptive. A stumble could become a slide, and a slide would gather speed before the terrain offered anything forgiving enough to stop it. At a band of rock Maren waited and pointed left. Grant looked at the cleaner-looking line to the right. “Really?” “Unless you’ve developed a hobby of falling through snow bridges.” He went left. When he came level she gave him a satisfied look. “See? Useful.” Grant told her she had always been useful. Maren wanted that in writing, and he promised an email from the car. She said she would print it and keep it for the next time he became unbearable. He was about to answer when a gust hit hard enough to make both of them brace. Snow lifted from above in a white sheet and vanished over the edge of the shelf. Maren turned her face away while Grant put one hand against the rock beside him and waited for the pressure to ease. When it did, she looked up. The teasing had gone from her face. “We should get below this section.” Grant followed her gaze. The cloud had dropped lower, swallowing the top of the slope, and what had been isolated grains of driven snow had become a steady movement across the surface. There was no sudden wall of weather. The mountain was simply becoming a place they did not want to remain. “Yep.” They moved again, and what Grant remembered later was that he had been thinking about lunch. There was a diner on the drive home where Maren always ordered the grilled cheese and then ate some of his fries, despite insisting she did not want fries of her own. He was considering ordering a second portion specifically to prevent theft and already had the argument prepared in his head. He could hear her answer to it. Maren was eight or nine yards below him when the sound came: a dry crack, small enough to be mistaken for a branch breaking under a boot. She stopped. Grant did too. For perhaps a second nothing moved except the blown snow, and then the surface beneath and slightly above Maren shifted. It did not become an avalanche in the way Grant had seen them in videos, an entire slope turning liquid at once. A plate of hard snow fractured around her boots and slid. She dropped abruptly to one knee and drove her axe into the surface. Grant heard the metal bite. “Maren!” She looked up at him just as the slab moved again. Her axe tore free. Grant lunged downhill, driving his points hard into the slope. Maren slid several feet, caught herself for half a heartbeat, and then the snow under her broke apart and carried her sideways toward exposed rock. He saw her try to turn onto her stomach. One leg struck first, then her shoulder, with a sound dull enough that his body understood it before his mind did. She went over the rock band. “MAREN!” He ran two steps and nearly followed her. The slope vanished under his left foot as loose snow sheared away, and he threw his weight toward the mountain. His axe went in. The stop wrenched his shoulder hard enough to send pain down his arm. Below him Maren was moving again, but she was not climbing. She fell across the next section, struck a second outcrop lower down and disappeared beyond it into the gully. Grant screamed her name. Nothing answered. He stared down for movement: a glove, an arm, the blue of her jacket. When nothing appeared, he hauled himself upright and began descending. The part of his brain that still understood risk kept working somewhere behind the noise. It registered the snow moving across the slope, the absence of a secure line, the increasing angle below. Grant ignored all of it. His axe went in, crampons followed, then the axe again, faster than they should have. He reached the first rock band and looked over. The gully below narrowed between two shoulders of stone before dropping out of sight, its surface uneven where fresh powder had blown over older, harder layers. Pieces of the slab that had carried Maren were still settling. “Maren!” The wind took her name apart. Grant reached inside his jacket for his phone, missed the pocket, swore and tried again. His fingers had become clumsy inside the gloves. The screen showed one bar, then none; two steps sideways brought the bar back. His first call failed. The second connected. “Nine-one-one. What’s the address of your emergency?” Grant looked down into the gully. For several seconds he could not answer because there was no address, and because the normality of the woman’s voice seemed obscene. Then habit and training forced their way through. He gave the trail, the route, their approximate position, the last landmark and what had happened. The dispatcher asked, “Is the injured party conscious?” “I can’t see her.” When she asked whether he could safely reach Maren, Grant had already started moving again. The voice sharpened. “Sir?” “I’m going down.” “Do not put yourself at additional risk. Search and rescue is being notified. Stay where you are if you can do so safely.” He ended the call and kept descending. He did not make a decision to disobey; the instruction simply had nothing to do with what he was doing. There was a way around the first rock band to the left. Maren had pointed it out on the climb up, saying the break in the stone might be useful if conditions forced them off the normal line. Grant found it now and worked through with one hand on rock and the axe in the other, shouting her name every few seconds. Once he thought he heard something and stopped so quickly that his own breathing filled his ears. “Maren?” A scrape came from below, then the soft movement of snow somewhere out of sight. No voice. He went lower. The route deteriorated quickly. The gully steepened and snow deepened between exposed rock. Grant could see where debris from the fracture had funnelled downward, and among it a dark mark perhaps thirty yards below. Blue. Maren’s blue. He moved toward it until the shape resolved into fabric caught against a protruding stone. For one violent second he thought he was looking at her sleeve. It was the outer pocket of her pack, torn away along one seam. There was blood on the edge of it. Grant held the fabric long enough for the object to stop making sense, then shoved it inside his jacket and continued. Snow was falling properly now, finer flakes finding the gap between his glasses and his cheek. He could no longer see the upper shelf where they had been standing minutes earlier. The next drop finally stopped him. The gully fell perhaps twenty feet over broken rock into a deeper channel that might have carried a stream in summer. Now the bottom was filled with piled snow, hollowed and ridged by wind. Along one side he could see impact marks and a disturbed line continuing downward before disappearing beneath a smooth drift where the gully bent. Grant searched for a way around. The left side was glazed rock. The right might go, but reaching it meant crossing a loaded patch of snow. “Maren!” He stepped toward the traverse. The snow beneath him settled with a low, muffled whomp. Every part of him understood that sound. He stood still, listening to his own breathing, and after a few seconds tried one more step anyway. The slope shifted under his crampons, perhaps an inch, perhaps less. Enough. Grant backed up and swore. Below him the disturbed line vanished beneath the drift. Maren was somewhere under or beyond it; he knew that as surely as he knew what he had seen when she struck the first rock and then the second. His mind would not allow those facts to belong to the same sentence. “I’m here,” he shouted. “I’m here, Mare.” His phone began ringing inside his jacket. He ignored it twice before answering because some part of him understood that whoever was coming needed to know where he was. A man asked for his position. Grant gave it. “Do not descend any farther,” the man said. “We’re moving a team toward you now.” “My wife is down there.” “I understand.” “No, you don’t.” There was a pause before the man asked his name. Grant gave it: “Grant Larkin.” “Grant, stay where you are. We have people coming up. Conditions are deteriorating and we don’t want to turn this into two rescues.” Grant looked again at the right-hand traverse. “How long?” “They’re moving now.” “How long?” The dispatcher said he could not give an exact time. Grant stared down the slope. “She’s been down there ten minutes.” The man said something else. Grant did not hear it. He ended the call and crouched at the lip of the drop, staring into the bend of the gully as though concentration alone might produce her. He checked his watch twice and could not remember either time. Snow gathered on his sleeves and stayed there. He shouted until his throat hurt, then kept looking down. The last place he had seen Maren was no longer visible.