Jack assembled the filter and pumped while his family drank straight from the plastic tube. Fifteen minutes to satisfy their thirst, and then Dee pumped for him, Jack lying in the cool grass and letting the freezing lake water run down his throat and over his sunburned face.
He felt delirious, his head undergoing a slow implosion, and it was all he could do to construct the tent. A fire was out of the question, and he didn’t want to eat—no one did—but Dee opened a can for each of them and handed out three tablets of maximum strength Tylenol apiece.
“I’ll just throw up,” Jack said.
“No, you won’t. You’ll keep it down. We’re all severely dehydrated and suffering from altitude sickness.” She handed him a can of pork and beans. “Get it in you, and drink some more water, and go to bed.”
His family slept but the agony in Jack’s head would not relent. He crawled outside a little after midnight and staggered to the edge of the lake. Bitter cold. Moon shadows everywhere. He lowered himself onto his hands and knees and dipped his head through a crust of ice into the water.
* * * * *
IN the morning the pain had eased. He could hear his family up and about outside. Almost hot inside the tent with the sun beating down. He didn’t remember coming to bed. Couldn’t recall much of the preceding night in fact. His head mushy, like he was coming off a bender.
They were eating down by the lake and he joined them. The sun already higher than he would’ve liked. They’d be getting a late start.
“How we doing?” he asked.
“Aces,” Naomi said.
He sat beside his daughter and she passed him her can.
He sipped the cold corn chowder. “How are your feet, angel?”
“They don’t look too pretty anymore. Mom wrapped them up.”
“We need to start sleeping with our food,” Dee said. “There’s ice crystals in my cream of mushroom.”
“I personally like ice in my soup,” Jack said.
Cole laughed.
“I wouldn’t exactly call this rationing,” Jack said, handing the can back to Naomi.
“We have to eat, Jack. We’re expending so much energy in these mountains.”
“What are we down to?”
“Eight cans.”
“Jesus.”
The climb up the east slope of the valley took them into the early afternoon, and then they finally broke out above the timberline onto the top of a knoll. Those granite spires loomed several miles to the east, their summits puncturing the low cloud deck. Not a tree in sight and rock everywhere. Four lakes visible from where they stood. The water blue-gray under the clouds.
They hiked east as the clouds lowered.
It grew dark early and a fine, cold mist began to fall, but they pushed on to the farthest lake at the foot of the cirque, everyone wet and shivering as they raised the tent on one of the few patches of level grass.
Stripped out of their wet clothes. Climbed in and Jack zipped them up. They huddled under the sleeping bags and listened to rain patter on the tent and watched the light fade out.
“Can I say something?” Naomi said. “Something not very nice, but it’ll make me feel better?”
“Baby, you can say whatever you want.”
“This. Fucking. Sucks.”
They ate supper and Jack dressed in dry clothes. He dug the water filter and pot out of his pack.
“Back in a bit,” he said.
Slipped on his wet trail shoes and crawled outside.
Down to the lakeshore, crouched by the water. His breath pluming in the blue dusk. He strained to pick out the voices of his family, wanted to hear them talking, but nothing broke the awesome silence.
Across the lake, he made out the faintest impression of the cirque. No texture, no detail. Just a charcoal silhouette of a jagged ridgeline several thousand feet above. The ghost of a mountain.
He filled the pot and carried it to the tent.
“This one’s for Naomi.” he said.
Watched his daughter gulp it down in two long, ravenous sips.
He pumped a pot for Cole, then another for Dee, and went back outside one last time to drink his fill.
The cirque had vanished, the dusk deepened, and flakes of snow mixed in with the rain. He stopped halfway through filling the pot. His hands were trembling.
Get it over with. If you have to lose it, lose it here.
He buried his face in the bend of his arm and cried into it until there was nothing left.
They nestled together in the cold and the dark, Jack and Dee on the outside, the kids between them. No one had spoken in a long time and Jack finally said, “Everyone all right?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess.”
“Yes.”
“Wow, that was so convincing.”
“This the worst trouble you ever been through, Dad?”
“Yeah, Na. Far and away.”
Cole said, “Are we going to die?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that isn’t going to happen to our family. I’m not going to let it happen. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Goodnight, all.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
“Night.”
“You know I love you all, right? Do I say it enough?”
“Yes, Dad, you do.”
For a split second, a flash of the Naomi of old—sassy, sarcastic, acerbic.
It elicited his sole smile of the day.
* * * * *
A fragile inch of snow clung to the tent and glazed the rocks. Jack stared at the sky and the lake which reflected the sky—deep cobalt. He was hungry. Starving actually. But the purity of the morning light moved him with a fleeting weightlessness that broke his heart to see it go.
The cirque loomed. Simply no avoiding it. He stood there in the cold trying to see a route, but it all looked steep as hell. Like a stupid f**king thing to even consider, fact aside that he needed to get his seven-year-old son up and over it.
He woke his family, and while Naomi and Cole launched snowballs at each other, Dee pulled the stitches out of Jack’s shoulder. Then they packed up, re-bandaged their blistered feet, drank as much water as their stomachs could hold, and struck out before the sun had cleared the ridge.
They walked around the perimeter of the lake and into a field of car-size boulders. Didn’t even begin to climb until after lunchtime, which passed unacknowledged. By mid-afternoon the snow had vanished except for in the shadows and they were a thousand feet above the lake which shone like a diamond in the valley’s hand.