Page 10

"Nora," he says, against my mouth.

Then he kisses me.

It's slow. It isn't the kiss I've been imagining through a wall and a radio and a week of cold. It's softer. It's a man who hasn't been touched in four years, learning how, and I let him. I open my hands on his chest and feel his heart slamming under my palms. He tastes like coffee and woodsmoke and salt, and I realize the salt is mine. I'm crying. He kisses it off the corner of my mouth, and then he finds my mouth again, and I make a sound I'd be embarrassed by in any other life.

When he pulls back, his forehead drops to mine. We stand there breathing.

"The first of the month is coming," I say, when I can.

His eyes close.

"I'll sit next to you while you call. I won't say a word. I'll be there."

For a long time he doesn't answer. His thumb moves once across my cheek.

"Okay," he says.

The same word he gave a stranger on a mountain at the end of two hours. Low, and steady, and meant.

I hold on to him, and I don't let go.

That night he's on the radio for two hours.

I lie in his bed with the quilt pulled to my chin and listen through the wall. The cabin is small. There's no keeping a thing like this out.

The man on the other end is a hiker, lost on a scree slope somewhere above the Glacier highway. His headlamp is dying. His wrist is broken. His voice keeps climbing, higher and higher, until it cracks in half.

And under it, the whole time, there's Cole.

"What can you see?"

A sob. Static. Something about rocks.

"Okay. Where's the wind coming from?"

"I don't know. I don't know. Left. I think it's left."

"Good. That's good. Put your good hand flat on the rock. Tell me what it feels like."

I've heard Cole talk. He gives me four words when I'm lucky. A grunt when I'm not. I've gotten used to a man who rations language like firewood.

This isn't that man.

This voice is low and slow and endless. It asks the same small questions again and again, patient as water on stone. What can you see. Where's the wind. Are your feet dry. Stay on the line with me. When the hiker's breath goes ragged, Cole's voice drops lower, and the man's breathing drops with it. Like a hand on a spooked horse.

I'm right here, he says. Not once. Maybe forty times. Every time, like the first.

An hour in, my face is wet and I don't remember when it started.

The headlamp dies at the ninety-minute mark. I know because the hiker screams, one raw, animal sound, and my whole body goes rigid under the quilt. I'm on my elbows, staring at the wall. Ready to do what, I have no idea. Run in there. Grab the mic. Tell the stranger to hold on, like I could.

"Hey," Cole says. "Hey. Listen to me. You don't need the light. You've got me. Count your breaths. In for four. I'll count with you."

And he does. Out loud, in that rough, steady voice, for ten full minutes. One. Two. Three. Four. The hiker's breathing slows. Matches him. Follows him down.

I stop being a woman eavesdropping and become one more person on the mountain in the dark, holding on to that voice.

At two hours, someone else cuts in, a woman, clipped and calm. Crew's got eyes on him. We've got him, Cole. The scree-slope man starts to cry. Real crying, the kind that comes after fear has nothing left to hold up. Thank you, he says. Thank you, thank you, oh God, thank you.