The Distance Between Lost and Found (8 page)

“Feel better?” Jonah asks.

Rachel nods.

Hallelujah scrambles up to sit next to her. She looks down at Jonah.

Jonah is smiling for real. Shaking his head. “Rachel, you sure you came on the right hiking trip? I haven't heard words like that in church since—” He makes eye contact with Hallelujah, and they say it together: “George Hays.”

A beat. Then Rachel says, equal parts begrudging and curious, “And what happened to him?”

“Dropped a giant box of hymnals on his foot.”

Hallelujah picks up the story, the memory making the laugh she's been keeping in escape. “And then he was hopping around, holding his foot like a cartoon character, and he fell down the stairs in front of the pulpit.” She pauses, adding, “He was fine.”

“Cursed like a sailor,” Jonah says. “But not as good as you.” He eyes Rachel sidelong. “The church leaders made him apologize publicly to the congregation. What should we do to you?”

“Bite me,” Rachel says. But she's smiling now too.

“Not till we run out of energy bars,” Jonah answers, his voice softer. The gravity of the situation settles back in.

Hallelujah asks, “What do we do now?”

Jonah squints at the sky. It's nothing but rain clouds. “We find shelter,” he says. “We stay put, make a decision when it stops raining.”

“Shouldn't we keep moving?” Rachel argues. “Better chance of finding the trail?”

“Or of getting more lost. Or breaking our necks with another long fall.”

Rachel looks down the mountain. Down to the crashed limb. “Oh.”

“So we'll look for shelter,” Hallelujah says. “And we'll wait out the storm. Or maybe we should just stay put altogether? Let the rescuers come to us?”

Rachel pulls her eyes away from the ravine. “We'll get home faster if we find them first,” she says. She sounds sure, but Hallelujah doesn't trust Rachel's certainty as much as she did yesterday. She looks to Jonah.

He meets her eyes. “We'll decide once the rain stops.”

A
FTER ANOTHER TWENTY MINUTES OF CLIMBING, THEY
find a muddy overhang. An ancient tree's thick roots spread wide, but something has dug away the ground underneath. The burrow is only about two feet deep, but it's just wide enough that they can sit side by side. There's a carpet of green that looks soft and inviting. They wedge themselves and their backpacks inside, pulling their feet close.

When Hallelujah looks up, she sees a rare view: a living tree from beneath. The trunk is bigger than the three of them together. The roots, their canopy, dwindle away to nothing where the soil isn't there anymore, but the tree still seems strong. And it covers them almost entirely.

Hallelujah feels like a hobbit.

She looks at Jonah and Rachel. They look back at her. Their faces show a mix of shock and relief, and she's sure her own looks the same.

And then Rachel bursts out laughing. “This,” she manages between giggles, teeth chattering, “is ridiculous.” She picks at her soaked shorts, at her failure of a rain jacket. “I don't think there's an inch of me that's not wet.”

“Same.” Jonah pulls his sodden shirt away from his body and wrings it out. “Okay over there, Hallie?”

“Yeah.” She squeezes a stream of water from her ponytail and then unzips her backpack. Digs around. Pulls out the smashed, damp remains of what was once an energy bar. Now it's an energy lump. She holds it up. “Who's hungry?”

Rachel grabs it. “Me. I am.” She peels open the wrapper and tears off a piece. She pops it in her mouth and chews, making exaggerated “Mmm” noises. “Now if I only had some coffee . . .”

Hallelujah hands Jonah an energy bar and starts eating her own, trying to take small bites to make it last longer. She tries to imagine that instead of oats and dried fruit, she's eating the warm zucchini bread she made last week. With butter. And the coffee Rachel mentioned. Hallelujah wants the taste of coffee in her mouth, the scent in her nostrils, the feel of the warm mug between her hands.

Her stomach growls, and she forces coffee and oven-fresh bread out of her mind. At least they have the carton of orange juice. She gets it out, inserts the tiny straw, takes a small sip. Passes it around.

The rain falls.

“Tomorrow, we are totally going to laugh about this,” Rachel says. “After a good night's sleep and an awesome hot breakfast. Omelets. Biscuits. And bacon.”

“Bacon,” echoes Jonah reverently. Hallelujah is glad she wasn't the only one fantasizing about food.

“But do you think . . .” Rachel hesitates. “The search party—they'll be out in the rain, right?”

“Of course,” Jonah says immediately. “They're probably on their way now.”

Hallelujah watches the rain spatter on the ground. She watches, and she wonders. “Do you think this storm is washing away our trail?” she asks Jonah. “Not
the
trail, but ours—the evidence that we were there. Footprints. The fire.”

“They're on their way,” Jonah says. His voice is firm. “I've heard about things like this. There's a pattern to how they search. And they use dogs. Those guys can smell us through the rain.”

Hallelujah nods, trying to silence her doubts. She leans back into their tiny shelter, pulling her knees toward her chin until the only rain landing on her is ricocheting from the ground or dripping from the ceiling overhead.

She isn't dry, but she isn't getting any wetter, either.

The rain on the leaves and the ground is white noise, a continuous soft shushing. It's a comforting sound, a soothing sound, and with a soft wall to lean on and a warm body beside her and a few bites of food in her stomach, Hallelujah watches the drops fall until she drops off to sleep.

S
HE DREAMS OF RAIN, AND SHE WAKES, SHIVERING AND CHATTERING
, sitting in two inches of muddy water. Rachel is asleep with her head on Hallelujah's shoulder. Jonah has his chin on his knees, watching them.

“How long . . . ?” Hallelujah asks. Her voice is hoarse. Her mouth feels parched. She reaches for her water bottle.

“About an hour,” Jonah says.

“Did it stop at all?” She motions toward the rain. It looks the same out there as when she dozed off.

“Nope. I don't know where it's all coming from.”

“The sky,” Hallelujah says, smiling a little.

“Har, har.” It wasn't that funny, but Jonah grins anyway.

“You were keeping watch?”

“Yup. For wild animals. Or rescue. Or whatever.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Hallelujah takes a swig of water, belatedly realizing that the bottle, almost empty before, is now full. She looks at it, and then at Jonah.

“Rain,” he says. “I filled up our bottles while y'all were sleeping.”

“Oh.” She never would've thought of that. “Thanks,” she says again.

“Drink up. We'll refill.”

“Okay.” She drinks, feeling the coolness slide down her throat.

They fall silent. Thunder crashes over the mountains. Hallelujah thinks about how the problem with not talking a lot, with being out of practice, is that when you're with another quiet person, you both tend to just sit there. Then again, this silence with Jonah is something new—not the flowing conversation they used to share, but not the pointed not-talking of the past six months, either.

She doesn't know how to feel about it. She wonders if she should shake Rachel awake. Rachel doesn't seem to have a problem filling silence.

As if she heard Hallelujah thinking, Rachel snorts and sits upright so fast she bumps the lip of ceiling that's sheltering them. A few chunks of earth fall on their heads.

“Whoa there,” Jonah says, putting his hand on Rachel's shoulder.

Rachel looks around wildly, then her eyes seem to focus. “Oh,” she says. “I dreamed I was back at home.”

“Lucky,” Hallelujah says. “I dreamed about rain. And then I woke up and it was still raining.”

“So should we look for somewhere else to wait it out? Somewhere . . . drier?” Rachel asks.

“I think, in this rain, this might be as dry as we're gonna get,” Jonah says. Then his stomach growls, loud enough for everyone to hear. He actually blushes. “Sorry.”

“I know,” Hallelujah says. “But we have to save the food. Right?”

“What do we have left?” Rachel asks.

And so they take inventory again. As if, by magic, something will have appeared that wasn't there last night.

No such luck. They're down to one banana, eight energy bars, and a Diet Coke.

This time it's Hallelujah who goes a little nuts. She's looking at the Diet Coke, and suddenly it's the funniest thing she's ever seen. A Diet Coke! They're lost in the mountains, in the middle of a storm that won't end, and Rachel has a Diet Coke.

The laughter bursts out of her, the kind of laughter that hurts, that takes her breath, that's part sob. She clutches her stomach. Tears roll down her face. Jonah and Rachel stare at her, open-mouthed, but she can't stop laughing because,
We might never get home, but at least we have a Diet Coke!

Jonah moves around to face her. He grabs her shoulders. “Hallie. Calm down.”

“Can't,” she gasps. But the laughter is just a wheeze now. She feels like she pulled a stomach muscle.

“Breathe, Hallie.” He holds her shoulders, looks into her eyes. “We're gonna be fine. We'll stay here till the rain stops. Then we'll go out and see if we can find the search party. Or the trail. We'll be home soon.”

She nods. She gulps. Her eyes well up. He's looking at her with so much compassion. Like he knows what she's going through. Like he cares about her. This is what she wanted to see after everything happened with Luke. Instead, she saw Jonah's back, every time he turned and walked away from her.

She blurts, “Why are you being nice to me?”

She regrets it immediately. It's the vulnerability talking. The fear. The adrenaline. For a second, she forgot the aloof, thick-skinned Hallelujah she needs to be.

Jonah relaxes his grip. He looks away, out into the wet woods. He waits a long time before speaking. “Luke told me.”

Hallelujah is instantly tense. “Luke told you what?”

Another long pause. “That he lied. About what happened that night.”

“What happened?” Rachel cuts in. “What'd Luke lie about?”

Hallelujah ignores her. She stays focused on Jonah, even though he won't look at her. “What'd he tell you originally?”

Jonah flinches. “He made it . . . worse. Than what he told the adults. He said that that wasn't the first time. And he said that you—”

“Never mind,” Hallelujah cuts in. “I can guess.” She's heard the rumors. The persistent ones and the surprising, weird, creative ones. She bets there are a lot that she hasn't heard, too. “None of that happened,” she says softly but firmly, certain without even knowing exactly what Luke said. What Jonah heard. “None of it.”

“That's what he told me yesterday. I wanted to know why he was still—” He swallows, his Adam's apple moving up and down. “I'd heard him and Brad laughing about what they were gonna do to you this week, and I was like, enough is enough. Time to let it go. So I asked him what was up. Why he was still messing with you.”

“And?” Hallelujah asks.

“And he told me the truth: that he'd made most of it up. He said he had to keep you quiet. Plus, um. He said messing with you was fun.”

Hallelujah lets that sink in. “You really didn't know it was a lie? You believed him this whole time?”

Jonah suddenly looks right at her. His eyes plead. “I
saw
you, Hallie. And Luke was the only one of the two of you with a story to explain it.”

“So you stopped talking to me and started treating me like crap instead of asking me what happened?” She feels her voice getting higher. Hotter. “Because whatever he said just
seemed
like something I would do?”

“Hallie, it's more complicated than—”

“How? How is it more complicated? How is that any kind of excuse?”

“Hallie—”

“So now you're being nice to me because you feel bad.”

“What do you want me to say?” Jonah's voice rises to meet hers. “Yeah, I feel bad. I feel really awful. Okay?”

Hallelujah forges on: “Or is it some kind of penance thing? Keep me from dying in the mountains and you'll be forgiven for everything else?”

“That's not fair—”

“You know what? I don't want to hear it. I just want to go home. And if it takes us working together, we'll work together. But we aren't friends. We stay alive, we get home, and then you never talk to me again. My choice this time.”

Hallelujah slumps back against the dugout's dirt wall. The emotion of it, all of the fear and pain bursting to the surface—she's exhausted. Then she notices Rachel looking back and forth between the two of them. She was so focused on Jonah, she almost forgot Rachel was there.

“Hal?” Rachel says softly.

“Not now.” Hallelujah pulls her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around her legs, and drops her head. The tears come slowly at first, like the first raindrops this morning. And then her shoulders are shaking—by themselves, she can't help it—and the tears fall.

She hears Jonah say, “I'm going for a walk.” Then a rustling, his heavy steps moving away.

She hears Rachel cry out, scared, “Wait! Don't leave us—” and Jonah's answer, “I just have to—” and then it's just the rain.

The rain that won't stop, will probably never stop.

And the tears fall.

T
IME PASSES
. R
AIN
. R
AIN
. R
ACHEL PUTS HER HAND ON
Hallelujah's back.