For a second that took forever she watched the snow above them break into massive, bricklike slabs accelerating at different speeds down the mountain. They were right in the middle of the face, traveling down with it, with nowhere to go. She saw Jim take off, racing for the side of the mountain.
They changed direction and began traversing frantically, trying to sidestep it somehow.
Below, she saw Bob on his snowboard.
He sees it, she thought, because he was racing for the side of the mountain, racing for the trees at the edge of the slide.
Jim knew all about snow, she thought. The air around her darkened with snow crystals. Her hair whipped around her face. Something hit her in the back. They were moving faster! She threw herself at Collier, held him desperately, braced herself.
No sound. No air. She was knocked forward by a wall of snow. She went somersaulting down the mountain, wiping out in a tidal wave.
She slammed into something, a rock or tree, slid past it and continued her free fall, completely out of control, struck over and over by rocks, conscious in spite of the pain. Just like in the ocean, she tried to swim up, get her head up so she could breathe . . . but the snow was as deep as the sky, and she was drowning. . . .
27
SHE AWOKE TO blackness and a dark so smothering, not a glimmer of light penetrated. She remembered blows to her head—something hitting her over and over, until, dazed but relieved, she had slipped into unconsciousness.
So something had hit her. Good. That was a start. The damage to her head must account for this strange confusion of mind. She did not know where she was. A crushing weight pressed down on her chest.
Pressed on all sides, enclosed and immobilized, she did not know where she was or why she was there.
But—why was she so cold? She tried to reach for the covers, but she was not in bed. She knew that. She was crouching, suspended somehow in this icy blackness. Her body was inert, a lump of ice in a frosty cave.
She tried to breathe. Freezing air sliced into her throat, stale and moist at the same time. Her hands were cupped a few inches from her face, and a pocket of air made it possible for her to take in breaths in slow gasps, which she tried to warm in her mouth before taking into her lungs.
Because her lungs hurt.
That was good, wasn’t it, that she could feel her lungs? Somehow, this reality check slowed the rising of her panic. She tried to move, but she could not move. Wedged, she had only the pocket of space in front of her face that contained her air and was formed by her own cupped hands. She licked her lips, tried to shout. Her own voice came back to her, soft, muffled, distant.
She opened her eyes to the blackness again, but ice drizzled in, so she covered them again like a blanket over her cold pupils. She tried to get a better sense of her body. She wiggled her toes. They were somewhere below her, encased in something, stiffening.
Snow, not white but black.
Snow surrounded her. Snow melted in the cracks of her clothing. Snow oozed over and froze on her lips as she breathed in the air that seemed so thin and used up.
She knew where she was. She remembered her free fall under a great wall of snow, and the surge of fear when she realized they all might die.
But she wasn’t dead yet. Instead, she seemed to be slowly suffocating.
Frantic, she began to push with her hands. If she could enlarge her breathing space, get more oxygen. If she could think . . .
Nothing budged.
Weakly, feeling tears freezing on her cheeks, she yelled. Again her soft mewing voice surrounded her. ‘‘Help!’’ She took a deep breath to call louder, but the pressure on her chest made her cough.
‘‘Help!’’ she cried as loudly as she could.
No use. She could hear nothing from above, no birds, no rescuers, no voices.
No wind or soft sliding sound of skis. Only her ragged breaths, and the thumping of her own heart.
Underneath her eyelids, inside her mind, her vision returned. Above her, she watched a man cartwheel down the mountain, and below, a snowboard as fragile as a matchstick making a frenzied rush for the trees.
She had been struggling mindlessly for some time when the thought came that she was using up all her oxygen. She stopped instantly. Yet the panting didn’t stop, but continued and continued, because her heart was overcome with fear. All she could think about was running out of air. Her chest moved up and down.
After a while she remembered the trick she used to go to sleep on stress-ridden nights, to count her breath down into slowness.
One two three four five six one two three four five six . . . one . . . two . . . threefourfivesix . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . fourfive . . . six . . .
She could feel her legs tangled together, immovable in snow. Her right elbow had a couple of inches, and her right hand over her head gave her face four inches or so. The fingers of her left arm could twitch, but the arm itself seemed encased in ice. The air wasn’t clean, it was full of ice crystals. She was coughing intermittently. But she had air.
She opened her ice-encrusted eyelashes, her eyes, to the terrifying darkness.
Buried alive.
She counted to six over and over, thought only of the numbers. And she thought of the Elephant Celebes, the figure of the woman in the painting running panic-stricken from the monster . . .
Directly above, it seemed to her, the blackness became less black.
She called again, conserving her energy and her voice. If Bob or Collier had made it, they would get help. ‘‘Hey-y-y! Hey-y-y!’’ It was more of a moaning or keening sound she made, trying to be sharp and high and clear.
While she called, she thought about her own death. It wouldn’t matter to her. She would be gone. The dying part would hurt, but it would be over at some point, and she would know while it was happening that she would be relieved soon. She thought of how quiet Hitchcock became when his muzzle was wrapped at the vet’s, of how the gazelle caught in the jaws of the tiger quiets and endures. She, too, was quieting in the face of the much stronger thing that had her in its jaws.
She kept calling, thinking, Bob would be all right with Matt. She had given him enough love over the years to manage. He would not be destroyed by losing her. Collier—was he buried somewhere near, calling? She stopped and listened.
A faint voice, calling from far away. Had she really heard it?
‘‘Collier . . . Collier . . .’’ she called. Louder voices. The snow above her shifted slightly. Terrified, she screamed, ‘‘No!’’ The movement was causing the snow to press down harder. Ice crystals filled her mouth. Now she couldn’t call, or breathe.
Voices.
The snow came down and now she was truly buried and she knew the complete quietness of impending death as her nose and mouth filled with snow.
A shovel struck her foot. She was sliding down. It wasn’t so bad. She could endure it.
But now there was pain as desperate hands yanked her by the hair, the shoulders, trying to get a purchase while she suffocated, not caring.
She was being pulled from her burial place, so roughly, choking and coughing . . .
Breathing. Someone was holding her in a crouch, beating on her back and making her cough it up, her icy hair clinging to the ground.
She breathed, mouth open. She turned her head, still crouching, blind in the sunlight.
Bob was crouched in front of her. She grabbed him and pulled him to her.
‘‘Mom,’’ he said. She held him hard enough to break his ribs.
‘‘Collier?’’ she said, her voice gritty. She turned to face Floyd Drummond and two other men she had never seen before. Bob was brushing snow off her.
‘‘Bob. Where’s Collier?’’
‘‘They’re looking for him, Mom.’’
‘‘Oh, no! No!’’
‘‘Can you stand up?’’ said one of the men. He and Bob each took an arm. Slowly, she got up.
‘‘Incredible,’’ said one of the men. ‘‘She’s just banged up a little.’’
‘‘My husband,’’ she whispered, leaning on Bob. The snowshoes were long gone. The smooth soft snow had been replaced by a field of blocks of snow, many taller than she was. She had fallen almost to the valley floor.
‘‘I can see the rescue squad coming across the valley,’’ one of the men said. ‘‘They’ll find him.’’
‘‘There was a snowmobile. A man set it off,’’ Nina said clumsily through frozen lips.
‘‘I told them,’’ Floyd said.
‘‘He’s long gone,’’ said the man. ‘‘I saw him move off to the side. I don’t know where he went. I saw the whole thing from the other side of the valley. You were down there less than ten minutes.’’
She shook her head dumbly. ‘‘Bob? Did you see where Collier fell?’’ He stroked her hair.
‘‘No. I couldn’t see him.’’ The snow on her hair was melting, soaking her. Bob helped her take off her jacket and gave her his to wear.
A few minutes later, many people came. She was wrapped in a blanket. The mountain crawled with people.
Two hours later they found Collier about two hundred yards away from where she had been buried. Floyd called from the mountain to the Bronco, where she was still sitting, refusing to go anywhere.
‘‘I’m so sorry,’’ he said. ‘‘I blame myself.’’
‘‘Don’t let him die! Work on him! Do something!’’
‘‘They are. But—’’
‘‘No! No!’’ She clutched at Bob. ‘‘Work on him!’’
He was frozen, ice-coated, broken and hurt. She refused to believe he was gone.
They tried to revive him long past the time they should have quit, and then they brought him down and rushed him to Boulder Hospital.
She waited in the hall, disbelieving, huddled in the blanket, shaking her head and protesting that he couldn’t be dead, he could come back. She kept ordering them to do something, until an ER doctor came out and gave her a shot.
Later, she would be told that he had died long before he came to rest.
Soon after that, Andrea and Matt took her away from Collier, and put her to bed in the room with the yellow spread where she had spent her first night at Tahoe.
When they had all gone to bed, when she was lying there with her eyes open looking at the ceiling, a wind came into her room, to the bed, and entered through the top of her head and traveled down her spine so that she shivered deeply. She felt that he had come, that he was still with her.
She began talking to him, asking again, how could you leave me? How could you go? Am I responsible? It seemed to her that he was above her, looking down. Her center of gravity moved up, uncertainly, toward him. Now it seemed to her that he was there with her mother.
Grief shook her. She spread her arms wide on the bed, and begged them to take her. She wanted to be drawn up to them and be reunited with them.
She was aware of the solemnity of her decision. She was asking to die. She meant it. She gave up and lay there.
But death did not take her. Her heart did not stop as she had thought it would. Collier and her mother faded away. She was left alone.
No one ever to love her again. No one to call her my darling. No one beside her when she woke up.
One tear came after another then, stately, slow tears, tears of surrender.
She slept.
The next day, leaden, she told the police about Jim. Not everything, just the part about the threats and the distinctive parka. They said that Jim had definitely left the lake, driven to Reno and flown to New York City, where his track, so far, had evaporated.
Time passed. Andrea helped her make funeral arrangements. Collier’s mother would be flying up to take his body back to the family plot in San Diego. Collier’s ring would stay on his finger forever, just like hers.
She would never remember much of the funeral service. Her heart had frozen. She moved like a zombie.
After the service, many people came to Collier’s apartment. Floyd Drummond cried, and everyone from the police department and the D.A.’s office came. Barb looked drawn, as if she’d been crying too. She came up to Nina and said, ‘‘I wish he’d never met you.’’ Henry McFarland, beside her, said quickly, ‘‘She doesn’t mean it, Nina. No one blames you.’’ He led Barbara away.
Her father came up from Monterey, and Collier’s law school friends from San Diego. Paul flew back again for the funeral, but he only talked to her briefly, his face like stone.
People seemed to need to touch her. She suffered that because it gave them comfort. Collier had so many friends she’d never met. He had been loved and appreciated by many.
Philip Strong came up to her as she was saying good-bye to Floyd.
He had lost a lot of weight and looked emaciated, every year of his age now weighing heavily on him. It was hard to believe that this was the man who had stolen his son’s wife and precipitated so much terror.
‘‘May I speak to you?’’ he said humbly. She let him take her aside.
‘‘I came to tell you that I recognize my fault in what happened. I am deeply sorry. I’ll never be able to make up for any of it, or—or show you how much I regret it.’’
‘‘I don’t blame you, Mr. Strong.’’
‘‘I won’t rest until Jim is stopped. If he ever comes back to Paradise, I will turn him in. But he’ll never dare come here again. He’s gone forever, and I pity the world with him roaming in it. But still—forgive me— I’m still his father—I can’t help but pity him too. He must be suffering like a wolf in a spring trap wherever he is. He can’t be so far gone that he doesn’t realize he’s failed completely, that there’s no hope left. Please don’t be angry. I know—it must seem incredible to you that I can say I pity him. You hate him, of course.’’
When she didn’t answer, or turn her back on him, Strong seemed to take courage. ‘‘It struck me that between Jim’s lies and my silence, you might not really understand some of the things that happened. I’d like to explain.’’
She sighed.
‘‘Or perhaps I’m wrong. I would understand it if you never wanted to hear Jim’s name again.’’
‘‘Go ahead. I want to hear what you have to say.’’
Looking at his shoes, Strong said quietly, ‘‘He was an aberration, even as a young child, so different from my other children. An aberration—that’s a cruel word, and I’ve never used it until now, but that’s what he was, even as a baby in diapers, with those blue eyes that had some frightening light in them.
‘‘He was always aggressive, pushing things out of the way, smashing things—my wife tried to talk to me about the things he did, but I found an excuse for everything—his cruelties, his lying, his truancies. Alex was the only person Jim could tolerate, I suppose because Alex looked up to him. Alex was happy. Jim was angry from the start.
‘‘When he entered his teens, my wife became very alarmed and took Jim to several psychologists. Jim hated them and complained to me. I took his side. I was his champion in the family, you might say.
‘‘Then our dog died. Alex told my wife that Jim had boasted that he ran him over. I chose to believe Jim’s denials. I just felt that he would come out of it someday, if we could just hold on.’’ Strong looked at Nina. ‘‘He was my son. I wanted to protect him.
‘‘Then something very frightening happened. Kelly, who loved to ski more than any of us, had an accident on the mountain. She was seriously injured. And she said that Jim had come up behind her and pushed her into a tree.’’