Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,80
She was out of ICU now, in a private room. Slowly, like I was walking into a cathedral or something, I stepped into her room and stood by her bed. She looked so little in that hospital bed, with one leg and foot molded by the sheets. The other side was flat from the thigh down. Nothing there.
“Rosie,” I whispered.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at me, my blond sister with pink cheeks and blue eyes like a little china doll. She smiled. I couldn’t believe it. She actually smiled at me. “Danny,” she said. Her voice was all sleepy and dreamy, and I’m sure they’d been giving her a ton of drugs, so she wasn’t fully aware of her situation. Or whose fault it was.
“I’m so sorry, Rosie,” I said. And in that moment, I wanted so badly for her to say something typically Rosie-ish like, hey Danny, bet you didn’t know that the magnolia is both the state flower and the state tree of Mississippi, did you? But she was asleep.
I left the hospital with my gym bag slung over my shoulder and caught the train in downtown Naperville that took me to Chicago. From Chicago, all the way to New York City.
My head was pounding the whole way on the train. Not fully recovered from the accident, the concussion, the shock of everything, I slept most of the way, sometimes not even remembering where I was or why I was there. It was dark when I got off the train in New York and sometime within the first few hours of my arrival, I got mugged. All I remember is tripping in a mud puddle as some guy on the street hit me, stole my gym bag and all my money except for a ten dollar bill stuffed in my front pocket. The blow, plus the concussion, added to the trauma of the accident. It all worked together to shut off access to my past. It was self-preservation, guarded by a snarling beast that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For a while, anyway.
After about an hour, the path becomes steeper, and it’s harder to catch my breath. My thigh muscles burn and the backpack, stuffed with my gear, feels heavier with every step. Sitting on a rock, I pull sweaty arms out of the pack and stretch my muscles. The wind is picking up, so I pull out a windbreaker and slip it over my head. There’s no way I’m going to be able to carry the pack to the summit. So I pull out a few things and stuff them into my pockets: water bottle, trail mix, flashlight. My book. Then I find a nook under a ledge of granite, and stuff the pack into it, camouflaging it with leaves and pine branches. To make sure I remember where I left it, I tie a white sock on a branch near the path.
It’s around noon when a park ranger heading downhill meets me on the trail. I register a gray-beige shirt and brown shorts, a straw-colored hat. “The wind is getting fierce up there,” he tells me. “We haven’t closed down the summit yet, but we probably will. You might want to turn around and try this another day.”
He’s a nondescript looking guy. Hair the color of his shirt. Eyes the color of his shorts. It all blends together into a gray-brown blur. “Thanks,” I say, “for letting me know.”
The ranger considers this, taking in the fact that I’m still standing there and have made no move to retreat. But there’s not much he can do. “Just…respect the mountain,” he says.
“I will,” I tell him. “I do.”
He nods at me and continues down the mountain. His job is done. The burden of risk is on me. And that’s exactly how I want it.
As I climb higher, the wind moans like a live thing in the pine and oak trees, throws my hair in my eyes. The landscape changes from trees, bushes, and other leafy plants to thin tufts of grass and carpets of moss. The only trees now are small and stumpy, holding on to the windswept ground for dear life.
Every few feet I stop to take in the view, feeling like I’m climbing up into the sky. Far below, trees, lakes, and streams spread out below me like a topographical map from geography class. But the higher I climb, the more the world I know falls away around me, along with