the bottom of the ravine. She felt her arm break and her lower calf smash.
Ali didn’t remember hitting the rock but he’d blacked out for a time.
“I got a new battery into my headlamp and found him,” she said. “There was a lot of blood, but he came around.”
Then it started to rain and our helicopter flew back over them.
“It went almost over our heads,” she said. “We were both yelling, but no one could hear anything.”
I wanted to say that I’d thought I’d heard Ali’s voice, which was impossible. I decided to keep that for later, between me and Ali.
Mrs. Jenkins said they had to keep moving or they’d die of hypothermia.
“Between us we had three legs,” she said.
“And one and a half heads,” Ali said, and he sniggered.
She laughed. “No, you were three-quarters of a head at least.”
They hobbled through the woods, relying on the headlamp until the rain stopped and dawn arrived.
“It got light,” she said. “And there was this rock wall, and on the other side of it, there was a path through the woods, and then the dirt road was just there.”
They hadn’t walked three hundred yards down that road when Dwight Rivers came driving by in his camper truck, heading to the hardware store to get new locks for his anthill.
“He stop right away?” I asked.
“He drove way past us, even when we were waving at him,”
Mrs. Jenkins said. “But then he hit the brakes hard and came fast in reverse.”
My son spoke up. “He said, ‘Are you Ali Cross?’ I said I was. And Mrs. Jenkins told him who she was and asked could we use his phone. He said he gave up cell phones in protest of something, I don’t know. Then he told us to get in the back of the camper, warm up, and sleep a little, and he’d drive us all the way home.”
“End of story,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “Your son is my hero, Dr. Cross.”
“Mine too, Mrs. J.,” I said.
Ali beamed. “When can the hero go home and have ice cream?”
“The doctor will decide about home, but I have a feeling Nana Mama might bring you two or three different kinds when she visits you later on.”
My son looked at Diane Jenkins in a way that spoke of the deep bond they’d formed in captivity. “Do you want to meet the real hashtag-crazy-good-stuff-my-great-grandma-says and eat ice cream?”
She laughed, glanced at me, then said, “I would, Ali. Very much.”
CHAPTER 110
Eleven weeks later
JANNIE LOOKED LIKE HER OLD SELF when she came bouncing out of the players’ tunnel and onto the track at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
We were all there, even my older son, Damon, who was out on summer break from college. We all jumped to our feet and clapped and whistled for her.
Ali still had a long, livid scar on his scalp, but other than a problem staying asleep and a few harsh mood swings, he seemed back to himself. The stands in the shade were crowded, but we didn’t care. We were all together and giving our girl love on the second day of a USATF invitational meet for high-schoolers.
Ted McDonald, the independent coach who’d first taken an interest in Jannie, described the series of four meets as similar to football combines, where scouts are looking for pros. In this case, the scouts were NCAA Division I coaches, at least fifteen of them, by my count.
Several of the coaches had visited our home already, and we’d heard from most of the rest by telephone or letter sometime in the past year. Though the coaches were there to watch all of the nearly two hundred athletes attending the meet, it was no secret there were lots of eyes on Jannie.
So far, she’d handled the pressure with relative ease. It helped that Coach McDonald had flown out from Texas for the event.
McDonald was there when she qualified for the finals in the four-hundred, her best event, and just missed a slot in the eight-hundred. She’d also competed in javelin for the first time and took eighteenth of twenty-five in the field, which was not bad, considering.
Jannie ignored the college coaches as she jogged past them, then blew kisses at us and grinned like she was having the most fun ever.
“It’s good to see her so relaxed again,” Nana Mama said. “And strong.”
“Thanks to sleep, vitamins, your good food, and the weight training.”
“And Coach McDonald,” I said, seeing him out on the infield, sandy hair, long and lean,