Thinking’s deadly

Leah’s boots crunched against the trail as it curved through aspens torched by autumn. She tilted her face to the sun’s needling heat, closed her eyes, and heard Galen die again. She saw his sprawled body fall past the frozen waterfall. From his red harness, cinched across his parka and pants, trailed slack, purple ropes. His metal-clawed boots kicked the air, and the wind rolled his hair round his helmet’s edge. She turned away, just as she had that day. She’d not thought to cover her ears before he hit the frosty boulders.

It was mid-morning, the busiest time in the coffee shop that she now owned alone. The Wired Bear was the hotspot for locals and tourists, famous for the bantering between its fearless athlete owners, and for Leah’s guffaw. A patchwork of photos from magazines like Powder, Rock and Ice, and Rapid papered the walls. Many of the pages were autographed by friends. Some featured Galen or Leah. It was the perfect business because afternoons, they’d closed shop and played. Friends ran the place now, had been running it for ten months.

After the shock wore off, Leah’s parents, even her kid brother, had said, “How could he be so irresponsible?”

But Leah didn’t regret Galen’s choice that day, or any day. The challenge of the ice when he ascended, the rapids when he kayaked, the chutes when he skied were what made Galen alive, and Leah had loved him alive. She adored his hair askew, his smile wide with his crooked front tooth bumping his lip, and his eyes leaking adrenaline, had loved that risky countenance since the first moment they’d met. They’d been kayaking in May’s snowmelt, had vied for the same standing wave, paddled to a shoal to have words, and fallen headlong in love.

He had always been a little better than her at every sport, and this pissed her off. He’d see her frustration and say, “You’re better looking and you’ve got more skill, babe, but thinking’s deadly.” Leah would swell with fury for hours, till she’d burst with a guffaw because he was right: when she took these risks, she needed to trust her body. Leah adored Galen so much she had not minded when she’d drifted into his shadow. She’d even stood in it as he fell, and then it had drawn tight beneath him, and there’d been that doughy thud.

What Leah regretted was that Galen had left behind so little of himself. Nothing but clothes, photos, his kayak, five pairs of skis, and two bikes. He’d given her no jewelry, only gear. Her wedding band was a tattoo round her ring finger. After seven years of marriage, when she was thirty-two, she’d spoken of children. He’d said, “We have all the time in the world, babe.” Did he realize his mistake as he fell? Did he think, There will be nothing left of me but stuff?

            What Leah had left was this trail behind their home. They’d hiked it together most days, and its cliffs, meadows, and creek were their sanctum. Her body clung to a narcotic sense of him as she moved along it now.

Leah smoothed back hair that had escaped her ponytail. She knew she’d go home tonight and numbly open a can of soup, or crack spaghetti over a steaming pot, and stir it as the newscaster droned on. Friends would drop by.

“You never laugh anymore,” they’d say. “When will you start kayaking again? Or climbing? Or skiing? Come to the Wired Bear tomorrow.”

“Soon,” she’d lie.

            “Galen,” she said now and cupped her face in her hands. She felt if she could just cry, she’d be freed from this margin. She hadn’t cried at the accident as their friends had said, “Ah, God! Ah, God! Don’t look, Leah!” They had dialed 911. Rescue workers had carried away his body.

Steps scuffed from down the trail. Leah moved into yellowed wheatgrass and scarlet-tinged Oregon grape and pretended to scan the cliffs. She hoped this wasn’t someone she knew. The hiker passed, she turned, and the spread of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips, the muscling in his calves, the gentle curl at the ends of his hair—stop! Yet the way he moved.

Leah reminded herself of Galen’s memorial, held at the top of the ski mountain, three-hundred people gathered to acknowledge his death. She had stared dry-eyed, arms rigid at her sides, turning from them as she forced back that sound.

            She started up the trail, keeping a discreet distance, and telling herself she was hiking up anyway. Her heart quickened because in the hiker’s stride, in the swing of his arms, was Galen. Her eyes blurred, and then he was Galen. She moved faster, got close enough to touch his back. He glanced over his shoulder, and he was not Galen.

Leah mashed her eyes with her fists. A squirrel darted to a pine, scampered up, and chattered at her. Ahead, the trail bisected an avalanche chute strewn with boulders and wild rose, and the hiker disappeared round a bend.

She squinted at the trees, the boulders, and the frost-singed asters, an addict clinging to reality. She inhaled moist dirt heated in the sun. “Take me with you, Galen, if you that’s what you want, but don’t drive me mad.” She spun and marched toward home.

#

After a week, Leah returned to the trail. The sky was gray with snow clouds, but the air was warm. She paused to appreciate a stand of glowing aspens. Their leaves would not endure the coming storm. Their beauty would vanish, to be stored in roots below ground. She wriggled her toes.

Leah ran. The rocks and ruts required small, quick steps, so she didn’t gaze down the curves or into the alcoves of trees but focused on navigation. She reveled in the airiness of her steps, in how each knee’s lift made her feel lighter. She hadn’t had the energy to run in so long, and she sensed this was healing.

She topped a rise and didn’t see the bear. The northern breeze clacked through the leaves. It carried her scent in the other direction and drowned out her steps, so the bear didn’t see Leah either. She tried to stop, reached out, and her fingers disappeared in fur. The bear wheeled, bounced twice on its front legs, and lunged. She felt the pads of its paws on her shoulders as she flew backward and landed against a wide stone. Its claws pierced her chest. So this is how it happens, she thought. She saw her ghostly reflection in the beast’s beady brown eyes.

They regarded one another for seconds, an eternity. The bear snorted, its head snapping down, its weight compressing her chest like resuscitation. It hopped off, hustled to the side, and studied her. Finally, it snorted again and sauntered away. It glanced over its shoulder three times.

Leah lay still and watched the bear, the backs of her fingers flattening cool grass, her palms still feeling its fur. She inhaled against the pain in her chest and smelled a feral scent she recognized as her own. She looked at the sky and barked one, bleak laugh.

#

Leah woke on the couch and still felt the bear looming over her. Her skin was slick with sweat, and she tasted fear. Each night since the encounter, her wispy reflection in the bear’s eyes had lured her toward a cold, rocky place.

She got up, peeked through the curtain, and saw snow falling in the pre-dawn light. She walked to her dresser and pulled out clothes to go slog through her soreness on the bike path. Each day, she’d forced herself to run, determined but failing to recapture that sense of healing she’d felt on the trail.

Leah paused and leaned toward her dresser’s mirror. She bumped her fingers along the punctures on her chest. They curved up from her shoulders to her clavicle, then down, meeting in a dip over her heart where the inside claws had been. At first, they’d been scab jewels in a bloom of purple, red, and yellow. As the bruises faded and the scabs scarred, they evolved into exquisite rose indentations. This scar necklace seemed a covenant, of what Leah did not know.

#

            The last scab fell away. In the stillest hours of that night, Leah woke and ambled, naked, to the chilly garage. They kept their truck outside because the garage was full of gear. Now, the kayaks, the skis, the bikes, the snowshoes, and the ice climbing equipment seemed to watch her.

She approached Galen’s kayak. It leaned against its rack. She caressed it, feeling each tiny bump of its rough plastic. Her fingers remembered Galen’s stubbly cheeks. She stroked each gouge made by the rocks he’d bashed, the rolls he’d survived. She studied her wedding band, and she felt her thirst for him spread to every pore. She imagined herself paddling into this spring’s churning runoff, maybe where they’d met, saw herself stab the water with her paddle and roll under. Her hair swirled in the current. She’d paddle, upside-down, so she’d never come up. She hugged Galen’s kayak, pressed her cheek against it but inhaled its sharp, plastic smell. Her embrace became a clawing, and then her fingers pulled to fists. She punched the kayak, three jabs that scraped her knuckles, so she pummeled it with the sides of her fists. Her blows sounded like drums. The kayak fell to the floor, rocked high along its arced side, and whunked onto its bottom. She kicked it, not caring that her bare toes screamed, but it screeched only a few feet across the concrete.

She gathered as much ice-climbing gear as would fit into her arms. The cold metal pressed against her breasts. She fumbled with the lid of the trashcan and dropped it in. I should sell this. This is wasteful, she thought, but she hefted all the gear, three loads, to the trash.

Her snowshoes hung on the wall beside the can. She lifted them down and brought them inside for the morning.

#

            One person had tracked out the trail, and on those footprints lay two inches of new snow. Vegetation lumped and poked through in reds, greens, and yellows. Leah tugged her hat low over her ears and relaxed into a jog, her steps wide to accommodate her snowshoes. She scanned the trunks of aspens and the shadowed pines for movement.

            As Leah approached the place where a month ago she’d met the bear, she slowed to a walk. She brushed off the stone and studied it. She matched the sore places in her back to its shape. As she imagined the scene, she brought her hand to her coat and traced her necklace of scars, feeling each memorized bump. Rose hip tipped branches reached over the stone, and she realized the bear must be hibernating. “Sweet dreams,” she said.

            Leah resumed jogging. She passed the bend where she’d seen the hiker who resembled Galen and continued to the spot where she’d let him go. The same squirrel chattered at her from the same tree. “Keep my secret,” she said. “You’re the only one who knows I’m crazy.” The word crazy seemed to float before her, and she swatted at it. She thought of how good it felt to punch Galen’s kayak, to throw away that gear. Galen was right: it was time to trust her body.

            She ran down, each step cushioned and sliding in the way she loved. She abandoned herself to it, motoring along, hopping over rocks and logs, and energized by resolve.

            Bear tracks crossed the trail.

            It took Leah five steps to stop. Veiled by fresh snow, their depressions led the direction her bear had gone when she’d watched it saunter away. She searched a sky so blue it made her squint and felt her violence against Galen’s kayak in her knuckles.

She stepped into the bear’s tracks and smelled her own acrid scent again. Her snowshoes sank awkwardly in the prints, and she worked to maintain her balance. Within a minute, she was breathing hard. She followed the tracks through a stand of spruce and down a gentle slope to an icy creek. She peered along its gurgling course, spied two downfallen logs, and navigated toward them through bowed sedges. The logs were narrow, but Leah inched her snowshoes along their bark to the watercress-lined bank.

On this side of the creek, the bear’s tracks were purposeful, straight, as they climbed the valley’s north wall. Their path curved around a majestic spruce, ascended to a ledge against a cliff, and disappeared into a cave. Leah stood, her breaths heavy from the ascent and her limbs numb with apprehension.

On the ledge, she gazed out over the valley, could make out one bend in her trail, and realized this bear had probably watched her and Galen hiking, had known them together. She knelt at the cave’s mouth and peered in. They’ll never find my body, she thought, and, I wish I knew more about bears, then, Don’t think! She crawled through.

The bear’s scent burned her nostrils, and she covered her nose. She kneeled and waited for her eyes to adjust. Leah made out a fur crescent against the cave’s wall, and she retreated toward the bright hole behind her but stopped. She discerned its ribs rising and falling, heard torpid breaths, and matched her breathing to them. The cave was almost warm. She pulled off her gloves and inched closer, lifting her toes, so her snowshoes wouldn’t scrape. She reached out and brushed her fingers along the tips of its fur like wind through a wheatfield. She inched closer and lightly rested her hand on its flank, thrilled by her audacity.

Galen would be proud, she thought as her hand rose on each inhalation. Even he wouldn’t have the guts for this. Beneath the bear’s fur was heat, and this was the first time she’d allowed herself to feel another being’s warmth since Galen. A buzzing surged through her. She saw Galen falling but felt herself within him, felt wind against her own face, felt her limbs sprawled on the air, felt loose ropes tug on the harness, and gravity’s horrible pull. She saw the boulder-strewn ground approaching. The bear stirred, yanking Leah back to herself. She saw Galen land as that thud concussed her chest.

All of her breath rushed out in one burning cough. She retreated, gulping panic and guilt at knowing that she did not want to die. On the cliff, she straightened, dizzy, blinded by whiteness. She fought a sob and stumbled. Her snowshoe screeched against stone.

A grunt seeped from the cave. Another, and the sound of movement.

Leah ran. Her snowshoes screeched and clanked. There was a bark like a surprised dog, and the rasp of claws. She sprinted around the spruce, cut the distance to her tracks by jumping off the cliff and sailed, arms windmilling. She somersaulted once, was up and sprinting.

She heard the bear’s huffs, and the whoosh of its paws through the snow grow closer, closer, closer. Her foot stopped, but she sprawled forward, felt her snowshoe hinge beneath a paw. She twisted as she landed so that she faced the attack. She screamed, more animal than human, “Stop!”

They were within an intimate boundary. The bear stepped back. It grunted, and then its mouth hung open, black lips flared to reveal fangs.

            “Stop!” She thrust her palm out like a traffic cop. “You know me.” She brought her hand to her chest and said, “You gave me some jewelry.”

The bear lowered its head and swung it from side to side. It stepped from foot to foot as if dancing. Leah thrust her palm out again, and it plopped on its rear. It dropped its head low but forward, and Leah tittered.

She twisted her foot back beneath her and unwound. “It’s over,” she said, this time to herself. She brushed off her torso, and her hand traced her scars. “Thank you,” she said and longed to reach out, to touch the flare of fur below its ear. Instead, she found her tracks. She glanced back three times, hoping to remember the bear’s texture.

            Three strides took her across the logs spanning the creek. She climbed the rise through the spruce. She ran down, a gentle gait, and felt how the trail’s contours seemed changed, seemed simply tinged by loss. She thought she must be radiating exhilaration. Tears, thickened by cold, blurred her vision. As she rubbed her eyes, she caught her toe on a root. She sailed and landed before she could get her arms in front of her. She bounced hard on her chest, plowing snow, two leaves, and a sparkling rock shard with her face till she skidded to a stop. It hurt like hell, and she had a bloody nose, but she was alive. Leah rolled, gasping, onto her back. She howled with laughter.