Part 2
“Your mother had another baby?” Cal asked.
“Before me. I found letters after she died.”
Mara turned from the doorway, the radio still in her hand. “Daniel Shaw was on a search crew Sunday. He works for the land trust.”
Then a whistle sounded beyond the cabin. Luis stepped onto the porch, raised his own whistle, and answered. This time there were three thin notes, followed by a man’s voice calling through the trees.
Cal hurried after Luis. Nora followed with the cap pushed inside her jacket, leaving Mara to direct the approaching team. Whatever Cal wanted to ask about the letters would have to travel with them.
Beyond the cabin, the path skirted a slope thick with sword ferns. Luis kept them close until the trees opened onto a collapsed section of the old logging grade. Across the gap, a strip of gravel hung over empty air, roots dangling beneath it.
Luis stopped them beside a broad cedar. “From here. Nobody goes past this tree.”
Below, perhaps twenty feet down, a man sat on a shelf of earth beside the mouth of a rusted culvert. Its opening faced away from the road, almost hidden beneath an overhang of roots. Nora could see into it only from this side of the washout.
An orange rain jacket covered something against the man’s side, and then the something moved and Nora saw Owen’s face.
His lips were pale. Mud streaked one cheek, but he lifted his head at Cal’s voice and made an awkward little wave.
“Dad?”
Cal put his hand against the cedar. “Right here, buddy. Mom too.”
Owen tried to stand. The man caught him across the chest, and the boy cried out and folded sideways against him.
“Ankle,” the man called. “Don’t ask him to move.”
Nora had not asked him anything. She could hear herself making a small, breathless noise, and she pressed her lips together until she could stop.
Luis called down questions, keeping them short. The man answered without trying to raise his injured arm: Owen was awake, he had been drinking, his ankle would not take weight. The maintenance path had broken away after the man brought him out of the pipe.
“Water’s coming through behind us,” he added. “It wasn’t this high when I got here.”
“Can you move farther along the shelf?”
“No. It ends behind that root.”
Luis spoke into his radio. Then he turned to Nora and Cal and moved them a little farther uphill, where the ground was firmer. From there they could still see Owen, though the cedar blocked part of the ledge.
“Keep talking to him,” he said. “When the team gets here, stay clear of the ropes.”
Nora wanted to complain that she could not see enough. Before she could, Cal shifted to the other side of the trunk and gave her the better view.
“Hey, Owen,” she called. “It’s Mom.”
He pressed a fist against his mouth. At school he did that when he thought the other children might notice him crying; she had seen it through a classroom window and kept walking so he would not know she knew.
“I’m coming home,” he said, but he made it sound like a question.
“They’re getting ready to bring you up.”
“I can’t climb.”
“You won’t have to.”
The man adjusted the orange jacket around him. Even from above, Nora saw the effort it cost him to move. Owen leaned into the crook of his uninjured arm with the exhausted familiarity of a much smaller child.
“Daniel?” she called.
He looked up. The left side of his face was scraped, and wet gray hair lay flat against his forehead.
“Thank you,” Nora said. It was all she could get out.
“He’s got a pretty good whistle,” Daniel answered.
Owen took the orange plastic whistle from beneath the jacket and showed it to her. Cal bowed his head against the tree, just once, then straightened as Mara and the rope team came down the path.
The next few minutes were filled with work Nora could not hurry. Bags opened; people checked one another’s equipment. Luis spoke to the rescuer going down, then walked back along the line to the anchors set among trees well away from the broken ground.
Cal took Nora’s hand. His palm was cold and rough, and the tendons stood out at his wrist. She held on while a helmet appeared below the edge and descended toward their son.
Owen began saying no before the rescuer reached him. By the time she settled onto the ledge, he was pulling at Daniel’s jacket, trying to drag it over his face.
“I don’t want to go up there. I don’t want to.”
The rescuer stopped reaching for him. She spoke to Daniel, secured him to a line, then turned back to Owen with her hands where he could see them.
“He’s scared of the edge,” Nora called. “He thinks he’s going to fall again.”
“I hear him,” the woman said.
Nora shut her mouth.
At school she had told anxious parents those same three words, usually while wishing they would give her room to work.
Water darkened the earth beneath Daniel’s boots. The rescuer glanced at it and continued fitting the small harness around Owen, explaining each movement before she made it. He stopped pulling away, but his breath still came in short, high catches.
“Owen,” Nora said. “Can you find a snap on that jacket?”
He did not look up. His fingers searched the wet orange fabric until they closed around the fastening on a pocket.
“Keep your thumb on it. Tell me if it’s smooth.”
“It’s got a hole.”
“Okay. Feel around the hole.”
He was listening now, and the rescuer finished checking the harness. Daniel said something close to his ear. Owen shook his head, then slowly loosened his grip on the jacket.
Luis gave an instruction. The ropes tightened, and the rescuer rose with Owen close beside her, helping him keep his injured foot clear of the slope. Halfway up, he shut his eyes and began calling for Cal.
“I’m here,” Cal said. “Keep coming. I’m right here.”
Nora had to let go of Cal’s hand so the waiting team could bring Owen onto solid ground. Someone wrapped him in a blanket. Someone else said to leave space around his leg, and Cal knelt beside him, repeating his name in a voice Nora had never heard before.
She put her palm against Owen’s cheek.
His skin was cold and gritty, and he turned his mouth into her hand.
“I used all the water,” he told her.
“That’s okay.”
“I didn’t use it fast.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
The team went back for Daniel. Nora stayed on her knees beside Owen while ropes moved past her and the radio crackled. When they brought Daniel up, he was shaking too hard to answer the first question the medic asked him.
Cal looked from him to their son. “I’m going with Owen,” he told Nora. “You come down with the next group. We’ll see you at the ambulance.”
She nodded. He had already tucked the blanket around the boy’s feet, leaving room for the swollen ankle, and was helping the team settle him for the trip to the road.
Owen caught Nora’s sleeve. She bent close, expecting him to ask for water or tell her something hurt. “Mom,” he whispered. “We weren’t supposed to tell Dad about the food…”
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