The Distance Between Lost and Found (7 page)

A
RUMBLE IN THE DISTANCE
.

In spite of the birds calling to each other, in spite of the wind rustling leaves overhead, in spite of the cracking of branches and the buzzing of insects, it's the rumble that wakes her. It rolls, builds, and fades away. A few seconds later, it rolls again.

Hallelujah flips over, wondering why her bed is so hard, why her neck is so stiff. Then she remembers. No bed; only dirt and rock. No pillow; only leaves. And that rumbling, the sound that pulled her out of her dreams—thunder.

It sounds again.

She sits up, rubbing her eyes, returning to reality. The sky overhead is gray-blue, but to her right, beyond the peak of the mountain, it's nearly black. And she can see the dark clouds racing toward her, riding the wind.

It's going to rain.

It's going to rain soon.

“Jonah,” she says. “Rachel.”

They stir. Rachel groans. Jonah mumbles something.

She says their names again: “Rachel. Jonah.”

Jonah sits up. Yawns. “What?”

Thunder rolls again. It's closer. Louder. More a clap than a rumble.

Jonah says, simply, “Oh.” But he stands quickly, studying the sky.

Rachel sits up, looking groggy. Her ponytail is matted off to one side of her head. She has a leaf stuck to her face. “What's going on?” she asks, wiping it away with a grimace.

“Storm,” Hallelujah says. She glances at Jonah.

“Looks bad,” Jonah says. “We should get moving.”

The wind picks up. Hallelujah has goosebumps, even under her jeans and jacket and long-sleeved shirt.

The three of them pull their backpacks down from the tree, sling them onto their backs, and start walking. They move quietly and quickly, scrambling over roots, ducking under branches, heading back to the trail they left last night.

The blackness is almost overhead. The sun has vanished. The birds are silent.

There's a bolt of lightning over a nearby mountaintop. Another clap of thunder.

And then Hallelujah can hear drops falling. Can't feel them yet, but can hear them pattering on leaves, on ground. It's a beautiful sound, a soft sound, a peaceful sound.

The air smells clean. Fresh. Like water.

They've reached the trail. They stand for a second, looking right and left. No one wants to make a mistake again. But then Jonah says, “Left,” and there's absolutely no doubt in his voice, and so they move.

The drops are louder. Closer.

And then lightning splits the sky apart, directly overhead. The resulting thunder is deafening. It feels like the ground trembles in response. The trees tremble. Hallelujah trembles.

The first drop lands on Hallelujah's arm. More drops spatter her face, blown in on the wind. Soon she can no longer tell one drop from the next. It's just waves of water.

For a second, she can't see trees or leaves or ground or sky or Jonah or Rachel. Just rain, and the pink of Rachel's jacket and the blue of Jonah's jacket, bright against the gray-green landscape. The rain pounds her. Punishes her. It slams into her and pushes her forward and knocks her back. When she breathes, she's breathing water.

She ducks her head and moves, feet sliding on the wet ground. She trips and falls, knees first. She lands in mud. She stands, takes a few steps, falls again. Grabs a branch to pull herself up. Digs the toes of her boots into the mucky hillside.

She follows the curve of the trail. Where the path twists back on itself, there's an overlook. The ground seems to fall away. Hallelujah steps toward the edge, daring herself to look. The mountainside is quickly becoming a waterfall, a stream of rain and mud and leaves pouring into a ravine. It's a long way down, and seeing it makes Hallelujah dizzy.

Thunder roars overhead, sounding like the voice of an angry God. A vengeful, grudge-holding Old Testament God. The kind of God who would let her suffer while Luke got away with everything.

A scream cuts the air. Rachel. She's lost her footing. She tumbles past Hallelujah. Hallelujah reaches out to grab her, but misses, and the effort throws her off the trail and down the mountainside as well. They both roll down, down, clutching at everything in sight. It all slips out of their grasp. The world is green and brown and wet and spinning.

Grass and mud become slick rock. Rock becomes air. Hallelujah is floating, just for a second, and then she lands on her back, hard, gasping and tasting mud and water. Rachel is lying a foot away. Their eyes meet. Neither of them moves.

The ravine rises up around them. Where they fell: a tall cliff face, slick gray rock. On the other side: a gentler slope, moving away from the trail they were on. Rainwater is pouring in from both directions, from ground and sky.

What happens next comes in flashes.

Lightning, bright and blinding.

A crack, terrifyingly close.

A splitting sound. Groaning. Leaves on leaves. Air moving.

Above Hallelujah's head, the leaves are getting closer.

She realizes, and she screams, “Rachel!” Her voice is swallowed by the storm, and so she rolls away, pulling Rachel with her.

The lightning-struck limb crashes to the ground, not far from where they'd been lying. Rachel's backpack is pinned down.

Hallelujah can't take her eyes off of the limb. There's a nest in one crook. Two broken eggs, their contents already washed away by the rain.

“Hallie!” Her name is barely there over the storm, carried downhill on the wind. Hallelujah rolls over to see Jonah skidding down the mountainside. “Hallie!” he calls again. “Rachel!” He's almost there. Hallelujah struggles to sit up. Helps Rachel to sit, too. Jonah jumps down from the high rocks and lands on his feet, staggers, falls to his knees. “I heard the lightning and I saw—”

Thunder drowns him out. Lightning takes out another tree, not far away. The crack is the same. And the groaning, like a dying breath.

“We're okay,” Hallelujah says. And it's true. She's soaked, and bruised, and still a little out of breath, but she is not broken. “Right, Rachel?”

Rachel is staring, wide-eyed, at the limb next to her. It's easily as big around as she is. “That almost . . .” she says, her voice wavering and low. “We almost . . .”

“But it didn't. We weren't.” Hallelujah says it more firmly than she feels it. Because if she stops to think about how similar she is to those eggshells, how easily she herself could be cracked in half and washed away, she's done for.

J
ONAH PACES BACK AND FORTH IN FRONT OF THE ROCK
wall that rises up between where they landed and the trail above. He runs his fingers over the slick rocks like he's looking for handholds. He takes a few steps back, and then runs at the cliff, jumping high. His fingertips don't quite reach the top.

After a few more attempts, he shakes his head. He turns and yells, to be heard over the wind and the rain, “We'll have to find another way back up!” He starts walking, keeping the rocks on his left. Hallelujah and Rachel follow.

Where the rocks end, there's a wall of rhododendron—almost as intimidating. Jonah stops. He stares at the thick shrubs. Then he looks back at Hallelujah and Rachel. “Through?” he shouts. “The trail's up there.” He points beyond the rhododendron, up the steep mountainside.

Hallelujah hesitates. The thicket is dark with leaves and twisting branches, but it's not so tangled that they can't force their way through. And it might be their only way back to the trail. She nods, and seeing her nod, Rachel nods. They move forward.

It's slow going. They have to drop to hands and knees just a few feet in. They push branches aside, climb over, slither under. The long, thick leaves protect them from the pounding of the rain, but they also block most of the light. As they crawl, Hallelujah feels the branches closing in like a loss of air.

Just when she's sure they're going in circles, the leaves part. She pushes aside the one branch still in her way and then she's out of the thicket. Jonah holds out a hand to help her to her feet.

They move, staying much closer together, treading much more carefully, up and up and up against the rain pounding down. Hallelujah climbs on all fours, hand grabbing this rock, toes wedging under that exposed root. She's determined not to fall again. And the hill is maybe a forty-five-degree incline. She slides on wet grass and leaves, on surface mud. But she climbs.

They have one plan. Find the trail, hike, hope.

Hope that the storm will pass. That the rain will stop.

Hope that miraculously, there will be an abandoned shack or a lean-to around the next bend. Somewhere to rest. Somewhere to wait.

Hope that even more miraculously, they're only steps from civilization. A warm, dry cabin. A parking lot filled with cars. People.

But Hallelujah doesn't believe in that kind of miracle. They got themselves into this mess, and they're going to have to find their own way out. That's what she tells herself as the thunder and lightning move on, away from them, but the rain continues pouring from the gray sky.

She is wet through. Jacket, long-sleeved shirt, tank top, jeans, socks, shoes, underwear, and bra. Her hair sticks to her neck. She feels heavy. Her backpack is heavy. Her feet are heavy. Even her heart feels waterlogged.

They climb. They try, fail, to wipe the rain from their eyes. Scrape their hands on rocks and branches. Land knees-down in the mud. Face-plant. Again and again.

Hallelujah's vision narrows. She sees the ground in front of her feet. She sees her feet searching for firmness and safety on that ground. And when she falls, she sees it in slow motion: the sliding of her foot, the streak of the ground changing, the shift of her sightline from ground to trees to sky, a sideways panorama.

But she gets up again. Follows Jonah's blue and Rachel's pink and keeps going. Pushes forward.

Her legs burn. Her lungs burn.

And still the rain falls.

W
HEN
H
ALLELUJAH WAS LITTLE, ONE OF HER
S
UNDAY
school teachers said that a big storm like this was God watering his garden. And Hallelujah had asked, “What about the desert? What about plants that don't need any more water? What about when people get wet? Are we God's garden?” She'd really wanted to know. The teacher had laughed and moved on.

Now, Hallelujah thinks, the storm feels more like neglect. If God knows they're out here, knows what this rain is doing to them, then he's not the friendly caretaker she was told about in Sunday school. He's inattentive. Careless. Left the hose on, went inside for a glass of sweet tea, and ended up watching SEC football on TV.

They've been climbing for an hour. Maybe longer. Through sheets of rain. And it has occurred to Hallelujah, which means it has probably also occurred to Rachel and Jonah, that they should have found the trail by now. Did they cross right over it, a thin, washed-out dirt stripe in the sea of green? Did they fall farther than they thought?

Or did they climb the wrong hill entirely?

It's a chilling thought. A slice of icy rain, down to the bone.

Because that means that while before, they were just off-course, now, they are lost.

Lost.

Hallelujah has felt lost for the past six months. Since Luke. But now she almost wants to laugh, because clearly, she had no idea what lost was.

“We're lost,” she says aloud. Trying out the words.

Jonah turns to look at her. He cocks his head, like he didn't hear what she said.

“We're lost,” Hallelujah says again. Louder. She enunciates. “Lost.”

And Jonah visibly deflates. Exhales. “I think so, yeah.”

“What do you mean?” Rachel is on Hallelujah's other side. She gets right up in Jonah's face. “I thought you knew where we were going! I thought you knew where the trail was! You said—” Her voice is rising. “You said left!”

“That was before you two fell down the mountain.” Jonah's voice is calm, but his eyes are worried. “Before we cut through those bushes. I think we got turned around. Maybe the trail is over there.” He points to another hillside. It looks incredibly far away.

“No!” Rachel starts climbing. “It's up here. It has to be!”

Jonah reaches out with one long arm to grab her leg. “We messed up,” he says.

Hallelujah, frozen in position, still feeling the icy pellets of perspective raining down on her, repeats, “We're lost.”

Rachel curses. And curses again. And again. Screams at the sky. Rips up a wad of grass with one hand and throws it. Curses a few more times. And then sags back against the ground, eyes closed.

That knocks Hallelujah out of her trance. She and Jonah stare. Hallelujah feels a smile in one corner of her mouth. It feels wrong there, like there's a crazy laugh inside that's trying to climb out. She bites her lip. This isn't funny. But the laugh keeps tickling. Maybe Rachel isn't the only one who's a little hysterical.