“Okay,” Ash says. They fall into line a few feet behind yet another group of college-aged kids, who are wearing good hiking boots and moving at what she feels is an appropriate pace.
Hands on the chains, feet on the stone, they make their way along. The ridge is only wide enough for them to walk single file, and so when they get to a slightly wider spot, they step aside and squeeze against the cliff to let the people coming down pass them by.
Ash feels out of body.
The men coming toward them seem familiar. The way they’re moving, their strides, their shoulders and arms. Pressed up against the side of the cliff, Ash realizes the absolute trust you have to have in your fellow hikers, in complete strangers.
But the man coming down toward her along the cliff—close enough to touch, close enough topush—isn’t a stranger.
It’s her husband.
48
ASH
“WHAT ARE THE ODDS?”Wade says cheerfully. He moves aside so that he’s standing next to Ash against the cliff. He’sso close. “I wonder if you left something up on the computer when you were planning your trip and I subliminally absorbed it.” Derek, standing behind him, waves over Wade’s shoulder at Ash. He’s wearing sunglasses, and she can’t see his eyes. Or Wade’s, for that matter.
Ash is shaking. She glances at Caro, who looks as shocked as Ash feels. “Did you and the girls get my postcards?” Ash asks.Maybe that’s how he found her. The postcards. Someone else’s fault, not hers.
Ash does not like anything about this conversation. Not the setting—why is he here?—not the timing of it, not the way Wade is giving her that smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. It reminds her of when he cleaned out the closet, when he bought the car. He’s daring her to call him on what he’s done so he can act like she’s unreasonable, crazy.
Daring her to cry.
“Postcards?” Wade shakes his head. “I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the girls, though.” He takes off his hat and runs his hand through his hair, a gesture that was more effective back when he had a full head of it. Now it serves only to make the strands stick together, the overall effect one of scarcity. She wonders what Caro thinks, seeing him inperson. Perversely, impossibly, Ash hopes that Caro’s impressed, that she likes him.
When Wade puts his hat back on, he doesn’t pull it down as far as it must have been before, because now she sees a strip of red on his forehead. He’s always sunburned easily. These are the things that, when you love someone, can bring out the deepest tenderness: these signs of their mortality showing through, the way you can lose them when they are so precious to you. And when you don’t love them, or they look at you with no light in their eyes, the tenderness gives way to what is actually in front of you. Wade’s burned face and scalp, his changed eyes, bring to mind a condor, a vulture, a bird of prey. “But it wouldn’t matter if we got them or not, right?” He glances over her shoulder at Caro. “I mean, you called the first night and told me where you were.”
Caro inhales sharply. Ash feels as if she’s been punched in the gut. She stares at Wade. “I didn’t tell you,” she says.
“You may as well have.” Wade laughs. “You told me you were glamping and staying in a tent. And maybe youdidleave something up on the computer, or your phone, and I saw it.” They’re causing a traffic jam. People are building up behind Derek, impatient, craning their necks around him to see what’s going on.
Someone’s going to slip, Ash thinks.Someone’s going to fall.
“Okay,” Ash says. They need to get moving. “Do you want me to come back with you? Do you want to come stay with me?” There’s an eagerness in her voice, a hopeful note, that she can’t seem to keep out. “I’ve got a whole Airstream to myself; it’s so pretty there…” Her voice trails off.
“I wouldn’t want to interrupt your girls trip,” Wade says, and he’s still not quite looking into her eyes.If I had to describe him right now,Ash thinks,I’d say he looks like a mean bird.He’s not ugly, exactly, but he does not look like the young dad in the family photo Ash keeps as the screensaver on her phone. His shoulders are hunched; there’s a curling-in of posture even though he’s not that old, a coldness in his eyes that she can see even when he’s looking past her.
“I’ll see you when we get home,” Wade says. And it’s not a threat, so much, but Ash is still chilled. It’s dismissiveness, and disdain, and she takes a step backward. Now Caro is there to put her hand on Ash’s back, to steady her.
“Oh,” Ash says. “Okay.”
And then he and Derek are gone, past them, down the trail. She and Wade were close enough to touch, but they didn’t. Others come down after the men, annoyed at having had to wait, and it takes a moment before Ash and Caro are climbing again, their hands on the chains.
“Ash,” Caro says from behind her. “Why did you do that? Why did you call him?”
“I wanted him not to be mad at me.” Ash keeps her eyes on her feet and where to place them so she doesn’t fall.Don’t cry, she tells herself.That’s not how you survive.
“I have to ask,” Caro says. “Do you think he sent the text? The one to get us up here?”
“No,” Ash says. “No, why would he?”
“Because he’shere,” Caro says.
They climb in silence.
They get to the top.
There is no Hope.
