Page 11

"Okay," Cole says.

That's all. Okay. Then the radio goes to static, and the static goes to silence.

I lie there with my heart going and my hands shaking, and I think about every hiker, climber, and ski patroller between Golden and Jasper. They all know the voice. The calm, faceless one that talks you down when everything has gone wrong. They tell stories about it in bars. Nobody knows his name.

He talks strangers home every week.

And he hasn't said one word to his mother in four years.

I know because I have her voice on a hard drive. Forty-three minutes of it, and a message on the first of every month. This is Marian, about my son. I'm still here. He has never heard a second of it.

The door opens. He crosses the dark room without a sound, and the mattress dips. He lies down on his side, facing the wall. Away from me.

I wait.

The quiet stretches. I know how to fill a quiet. It's my best trick, my worst habit. A joke, a question, a stupid remark about the quilt. I have a dozen ready.

I don't use any of them.

"Fort McMurray," he says, at two in the morning, to the wall.

My breath stops.

"The fire. I was running comms for the evacuation. Volunteer. Not even supposed to be on the console that day, but the guy who was had a kid at the school." A pause. His voice has gone flat, with the hard flatness of a man holding something heavy by the very edge. "There was a family on the road north. Four of them. Minivan. The highway was closing behind them and they didn't know."

"Cole."

"My relay went down. Twenty minutes. I didn't know it was down. I kept talking." His shoulders move. "I kept saying the turn-around order. Over and over. Into nothing."

I don't say it wasn't your fault. I've learned that much about grief from my own. Those words are a door people close in your face.

I don't say I'm sorry, either. It's too small. It would roll right off him.

I put my hand on his back instead, flat between his shoulder blades. His skin is hot. His muscles are locked so tight they feel carved. I leave my palm there. I don't stroke. I don't ask for anything. I only stay.

"I was the one on the radio," he says. "Afterwards I couldn't hear anybody's voice without hearing theirs. The kids. They had a little one. I'd hear it in the grocery store. In my own head." A breath, ragged at the bottom. "So I came somewhere nobody could reach me. And then I set up a radio."

Four years of silence, a mountain, and a console in a back room that he turns on every night anyway.

"To reach everybody else," I say, barely a whisper.

He doesn't answer.

His back rises under my hand. Falls. Rises again, uneven, like a man trying to count to four and losing his place.

So I count for him. Silently, against his spine, one finger tapping where he can feel it. In for four. Hold. Out.

Around the sixth breath, his hand comes back and finds mine. It holds on so tight it hurts.

I don't remember falling asleep. I remember his grip never loosening.

I wake to grey light in the window and his hand on my hip.

It rests there, heavy and warm. He's turned over in the night, and the whole length of him is against my back. I can feel exactly how awake he is.

"Morning," I say into the pillow. My voice is gravel.

"Nora."