Rules of Deception

6

Darkness pressed in from all sides. Jonathan blinked. His eyes were open, but the black remained absolute. He tried to raise his head, but found it locked into place. His legs and arms were likewise pinned down. Snow encased his body as if he lay in a concrete bath. He could not lift a hand, not a finger. All the while, a steady voice told him to remain calm. It mused that it was not as cold as he’d expected. But, yes, it was dark. No one had ever mentioned the dark. His breathing grew labored. The air was going fast. He realized that he was buried deep below the surface, and that no one could possibly find him in time. Fear rose from deep inside him, crawling upward through his stomach, gathering speed and strength, gutting his discipline and strangling the calm, reasonable voice. The dark. The pressure. The failing air. He was overcome by a full-throated terror. He opened his mouth to scream and sucked down a torrent of snow and ice.

He bolted upright in bed.

“Emma,” he gasped, his hands searching the mattress beside him.

He’d had the dream again. He needed to hear her voice. To feel her hand on his shoulder. He turned on the light. Emma’s side of the bed was unbothered. The crisp white duvet remained neatly folded down. A corner of her nightshirt extended from beneath her pillow.

She’s gone.

It came over him slowly, like an approaching storm. His breath quickened. His fingertips began to tingle. Something sharp and cold tore into his stomach and forced him to bend double at the waist. He sobbed.

She’s gone.

The words played over in his mind as images of her body lying alone and abandoned in the frozen darkness tormented him.

Finally, a measure of calm returned. His breathing slowed. The terror passed, but he knew it wasn’t gone for good. He could feel it lurking nearby, waiting.

He stood and walked to the window. Snow continued to fall heavily, and the faint light of dawn cast the low, stately clouds with a funereal hue. The view gave out over rolling hills dotted with chalets. A half mile farther on, a forest climbed the flank of the imposing peaks that cradled the town.

Opening the balcony door, he stepped outside. Cold scrubbed the air clean of scent, and his first breaths burned his throat and lungs. He stood at the railing, studying yesterday’s route. His eyes followed the path deep into the mountains, through cloud and mist to the hooded peak of the Furga. And beyond it, to Roman’s.

I know this mountain and I didn’t do anything to protect you from it.

I know this mountain and I left you alone on it.

I know this mountain and I let it kill you.

When his shivering grew uncontrollable, Jonathan stepped back inside. He was struck by how neat the room appeared. He knew that it was foolish to think it should look different now that she was gone. Yet he couldn’t help feeling betrayed by its normalcy, when nothing was normal at all.

He sat down at the desk and opened the drawer. Sunscreen, pocketknife, maps, lip balm, bandana, beacon, and the two-way radio lay scattered inside. He picked up the radio and flicked it on and off. It was dead.

A wire…a detached wire.

After coming off the mountain, Jonathan had been taken to the police station where he’d been examined by a doctor, then made to answer a fusillade of questions. Full name: Jonathan Hobart Ransom. Birthplace: Annapolis, Maryland. Occupation: board certified surgeon. Employer: Doctors Without Borders. Nationality: American. Residence: Geneva.

And then the questions about Emma. Birthplace: Penzance, England. Parents: deceased. Siblings: one sister, Beatrice. Occupation: Nurse. Administrator. Human being with an oversized conscience and a “duty to interfere.” Wife. Best friend. Anchor.

There were other questions. About his experience as a mountaineer. About how he’d failed to monitor the weather. About Emma’s fall and whether or not she was bleeding when he’d left her, and his failure to spot the radio’s defect prior to climbing. And finally, about his decision to continue climbing when he’d realized the storm was intensifying.

It wasn’t his decision, he wanted to say. It was hers. Emma never turned back.

Setting the unit on the desk, he let his eyes wander to the mountains. Jonathan could trace the beginning of his love affair with climbing to a trip to California the Ransom family had taken when he was nine years old. Their goal was to ascend Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower forty-eight states. The plan was for his older brothers to set out from Whitney Portal, altitude 8,500 feet, at five in the morning, and make the twenty-two-mile round trip to Whitney’s 14,500-foot summit in one day. Jonathan and his father would accompany them the first few miles, then stop to enjoy a picnic lunch and do some fishing until the boys returned.

But even then Jonathan was showing signs of an independent streak. Like all boys who idolize their older brothers, he had no intention of being left behind. His father, who was forty years old and never missed a chance to have a meal with his cocktail, might stop. But not him. And so, when Ned Ransom pulled up after four miles and suggested they break for an early lunch, Jonathan sprinted ahead, defying all calls for him to come back. He didn’t stop until he reached the peak almost eight miles later. One hundred yards ahead of his brothers.

The die was cast.

By the time Jonathan was sixteen, all he cared about was climbing. An equivalency test freed him from high school. College wasn’t a consideration. Summers were spent guiding up Mount McKinley, winters combing the slopes as a ski patrolman. Every penny saved was put toward the next expedition. He bagged his share of big names: Eiger Nordwand, Aconcagua, K2 by the Magic Line without a lick of bottled oxygen. It was all about the rush. Hanging it out there as far as you dared, then pulling it back at the last second.

It was at this time that he became aware of a flaw in his character. The flaw derived from his almost unnatural strength and his (all too natural) rebellious spirit, and it involved a growing and pronounced inclination for fistfighting. The bars of mountain resorts were as full of braggarts and louses as any others. He was choosy and made it a point to single out the loudest of the bunch. Someone deserving of comeuppance. Someone who looked like they might make a match of it. He would order a shot of bourbon to get his nerves just right. Then it was just a matter of making the proper comments. With any luck, he’d find himself in a back alley within five minutes.

The fights were brutish and short. He was a canny fighter, quick to pick up on an opponent’s weaknesses. He would circle for a minute or two, avoiding the sweaty clenches and ungainly wrestling that were the hallmarks of amateur brawls. Then he would move in. A jab to the jaw, a punch to the gut, and a roundhouse to the side of the head. It rarely lasted longer than that. He prided himself on his economy.

He knew that the trait was dangerous and, worse, self-destructive. He also knew that it involved his addiction to risk. He found himself challenging bigger men, venturing into openly dangerous establishments. He began to lose, but even then he was unable to cure himself of this flaw. During his climbs, he sought out uncharted routes. He hungered for the impossible face. He yearned to go higher, farther, and faster.

Then one day, it went away. The fighting. The desire to master a stretch of vertical granite. The need to endanger his life to feel alive. Gone like that. He hung up his gear and decided that that part of his life was finished.

People whispered that it was because of the avalanche. They said he’d lost his nerve. They were wrong. He hadn’t quit. He’d just found a bigger rush. And it was on a concrete highway, not on a vertical face.

He was twenty-one. It was a Sunday night and he was coming back to Aspen after a weekend doing free ascents up Angels Landing, a two-thousand-foot slab of red rock in Zion National Park. As usual, the traffic through the mountains was a nightmare. A Ford Bronco in front of him tried to pass the eighteen-wheeler a few vehicles up. The Bronco was old and consumptive, hopelessly slow, and it collided with an even bigger juggernaut coming the other way. The driver died instantly. The passenger was alive when Jonathan reached her. She was a girl, fourteen at most. Jonathan got her out of the car and laid her on the ground. The gearshift had pierced her chest and blood was spurting from the wound like a ruptured hydrant. With only his patrolman’s training to rely on-knowing only vaguely what to do-he’d rammed his fist into the perforation, keeping pressure on the ruptured artery and arresting the loss of blood. The girl was conscious the entire time. She never said a word. She just stared up at him with his hand buried inside her ribs until the ambulance arrived.

All that time, he could feel her heart beating…actually feel the organ itself, pumping against his hand.

The ultimate rush.

He quit his job the next week and enrolled in college to study medicine.

Jonathan’s thoughts came back to the here and now. Turning away from the window, his eyes fell on Emma’s night table. It stood as she’d left it. An open bottle of mineral water. Reading glasses balanced on a stack of romance novels. “You don’t understand,” she’d said once, trying to explain why she was so slavishly devoted to stories about strapping Scotsmen and time-traveling buccaneers who rescued damsels in distress and lived in castles on the Firth of Forever. She liked them because they were predictable. Happy ending guaranteed. It was an antidote to her job where hardly anything ended happily, or, at the very least, not predictably.

Finally, his eyes landed back on the corner of angel’s-blue fabric extending from the pillow. Sitting down on the bed, he freed Emma’s nightshirt and brought it to his face. The wool was worn and soft and smelled of vanilla and sandalwood. A wave of sensations washed over him. The feel of the firm, rounded muscles that ran the length of her spine. The warmth that radiated from the base of her neck. The desire sparked by her coy smile peeking up at him from beneath the spray of hair.

“Yes?” Emma would say, drawing out the word like a dare.

Jonathan lowered the nightshirt to his lap. All that was gone. A current of longing seized him. A current so powerful that it threatened to grow into a panic. Panic at his permanent, inconsolable loss.

He looked at Emma’s nightshirt and breathed easier. He was not ready to say goodbye. He folded it up and replaced it under the pillow. For a while yet, he wanted to keep her with him.