For several seconds, there was only silence.
The creek roaring somewhere below. The wind in the pines.
Then I heard my son.
“If she’s breathing,” Michael said, “we can’t risk it.”
I stopped breathing.
I didn’t decide to. My body just did it. I lay there with my face in the pine needles and my lungs locked and my heart pounding so hard I was sure they’d hear it.
“She has nobody left,” Emily said. “She’ll ask questions. Especially about the money. You heard her on the phone last night with that bank man.”
“I know.”
“This way is cleaner, Michael.”
Cleaner.
My mouth went dry.
I lay completely still, trying to understand what I was hearing. Whatever had happened on that trail, my son wasn’t talking like a man trying to rescue his injured mother.
Then a faint moan came from somewhere nearby. To my right. Close.
Aiden.
My grandson was alive.
Every cell in my body screamed to call out to him. To crawl to him. To tell him, Gramma’s here, baby, Gramma’s here.
But before I could make a sound, I heard something heavy shifting above us. A scraping. A grunt. Michael’s breath, hard and fast.
Then something huge came rolling down the slope.
It hit the ground a few feet from my head. I felt it through the dirt, through my whole body. A shower of pebbles rained down on my back. I heard it keep going, crashing through brush, past me, down toward the creek.
I didn’t move.
I don’t know how. Every muscle in my body wanted to flinch. To curl up. To scream.
I didn’t move.
“Michael,” Emily said sharply. “Stop. That’s enough. If anyone finds rocks on top of them—”
Silence.
“We say they slipped,” Emily said. “Both of them. The edge gave way. We tried to get down to them. We couldn’t. We ran for help. Tragic accident.”
“Aiden,” Michael said. His voice cracked. Just a little. “Em. Aiden’s still—”
“Aiden fell thirty feet,” said Emily. “Look at him. Even if he’s breathing now, he won’t be by the time anyone gets here. And if he is—” She stopped. “If he is, he’s four. He won’t remember anything. He hit his head.”
I heard Michael make a sound. Like someone had hit him in the stomach.
“Michael,” Emily said. “Look at me. You know what the trust says. Your father made sure you got nothing. Nothing, unless they’re both gone. You’re going to lose the house. We’re going to lose everything. This is the only way.”
A long silence.
Then Michael said, very quietly, “Okay.”
That was all.
Okay.
Their footsteps went back up the slope. Slowly at first. Then faster. Then they faded into the sound of the creek and the wind.
That was when I understood.
They weren’t looking for us.
They were deciding what story they’d tell after they left us there.
I stayed face-down in the pine needles for a long time.
I don’t know how long. Long enough for the light to change. Long enough for the blood in my eye to dry. I barely let myself blink, because I couldn’t know whether they were really gone or waiting up on the ridge to see if I moved.
I had no idea how badly I was hurt. At that moment, it didn’t matter.
The only thing keeping me alive was their belief that I was already dead.
So I stayed perfectly still.
I played dead.
And I listened as my own son walked away.
When I finally moved, it was because of Aiden.
He moaned again. A small, broken sound. Then he said, very faintly, “Mama?”
He was calling for Hannah. His real mother. Who’d been dead for three years.
I lifted my head.
The pain in my arm was so bad I almost passed out again. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, and I turned my head to the right.
He was lying about ten feet away, in a tangle of roots at the base of a big ponderosa pine. On his back. His little light-up sneakers were pointed at the sky. One of them was still blinking, red and blue.
His face was covered in dirt. His left arm was lying at a wrong angle across his chest.
But his eyes were open.
“Aiden,” I whispered. “Aiden, baby. It’s Gramma.”
He turned his head and looked at me.
“Gramma,” he said. “I fell down.”
“I know, sweetheart. Me too.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
I didn’t answer that.
I started to crawl.
I don’t know how I did it. I crawled ten feet with one arm and my knees, dragging my broken arm against my chest, over rocks and roots and pine needles, toward my grandson.
When I got to him, I lay down beside him and put my good hand on his chest.
He was breathing. Fast and shallow, but steady.
“Does anything hurt, baby?”
“My arm,” he said. And then he started to cry.
“I know. I know. Mine too. We’re going to be okay.”
“Are we going home?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Not yet, baby. We need to be very quiet for a little while. Can you be quiet with me? Like a game?”
“Like hide-and-seek?”
“Exactly like hide-and-seek.”
He nodded. His lip was shaking.
I put my good arm around him and held him against me, and I looked up the slope toward the ridge where my son had stood.
There was nobody there.
That night was the longest night of my life.
The sun went down behind the canyon walls around seven. The temperature dropped fast. Mountain cold. The kind that gets into your bones.
I’d heard helicopters around five. Far off, toward the trailhead. Search and rescue, I thought. Michael must have called 911 by then, with his story. The edge gave way. We couldn’t get down to them.
I didn’t wave. I didn’t call out.
I don’t know if that was the right decision. I still don’t.
But I kept thinking: If they find us now, and Michael’s there, with the rescuers, and he sees we’re alive, what happens next?
Aiden would go to the hospital. And then home. With his father. And with Emily. Who’d said, If he is, he’s four. He won’t remember anything.
And I’d be in a hospital bed, with a head injury, telling the police that my son had tried to kill me. And Michael would cry, and say I’d hit my head, I was confused, I’d been grieving since Dad died, I hadn’t been myself.
I’ve watched enough television. I know how that goes.
So I waited.
I pulled Aiden as close as I could. I took off my fleece jacket, one arm at a time, crying from the pain, and wrapped it around him. I sang him every song I knew. Hymns from church. You Are My Sunshine. The theme song from his truck cartoon, which he corrected me on, twice.
Sometime after midnight, he fell asleep against my chest.
I didn’t sleep at all.
I lay there in the dark and listened to the creek, and every time a branch cracked in the woods, I held my breath.
At first light, I made a decision.
The helicopters had gone up the canyon, toward the overlook. The search would be there. Near the slide. Near where they’d say we fell.
So we’d go the other way.
I couldn’t carry him. My left arm was useless and my ribs felt like they were full of broken glass. But Aiden could walk, a little, if I held his good hand. His left arm was broken, I was sure of it. I made a sling for it out of the sleeve of my fleece, tied around his neck.
We followed the creek downstream. Away from the overlook. Away from the search.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. We walked for hours. We stopped every few minutes. Aiden cried. I cried. We drank from the creek with our hands, which I knew we shouldn’t do, but we had no choice. We ate the last half of a squished granola bar I found in my pocket.
Around noon, Aiden sat down in the middle of the trail and wouldn’t get up.
“I’m too tired, Gramma. I can’t.”
I sat down next to him. I couldn’t either.
I looked up at the trees and I thought, Richard. If you’re anywhere, now would be a good time.
And then I smelled wood smoke.
Her name was June Coulter.
She was seventy-one years old. She lived alone in a log cabin at the end of a dirt road, half a mile from Fourmile Creek, with two old dogs and a garden full of rhubarb. She’d been an emergency room nurse at Boulder Community Hospital for thirty-four years before she retired to the mountains.
She found us sitting in the middle of her dirt road.
She was walking her dogs. She saw us, dropped the leashes, and ran.
She knelt down in the dirt in front of us. She looked at my arm. At my head. At Aiden’s sling.
“Oh, dear God,” she said. “You’re the two from the slide on Fourmile. Your faces are all over the news. They’ve been searching since yesterday afternoon.”
“Please,” I said. My voice was a croak. “Please don’t call anyone. Not yet.”
She looked at me sharply.
“Ma’am, you’ve got a compound fracture in that arm and a head wound and that little boy needs an X-ray.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. But please. Listen to me first. Five minutes. Then you can do whatever you think is right.”
June Coulter looked at me for a long moment. She was a small, tough woman with short white hair, tanned skin, and eyes that had seen thirty-four years of emergency rooms.
“Five minutes,” she said. “Inside. Where it’s warm.”
I told her everything, sitting at her kitchen table with a towel full of ice on my arm, while Aiden lay on her couch under a quilt with one of her dogs pressed against his side.
The trust. The phone call from Gene. Emily in the doorway with the towels. The overlook. The voices above me in the ravine. Are you sure she’s dead. If she’s breathing, we can’t risk it. This way is cleaner.
The rock.
June didn’t interrupt once.
When I was done, she sat back in her chair. She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “My nephew is a detective. With the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. Ray Salas. I’m going to call him. Not 911. Him. And I’m going to tell him to come up here himself, alone, and to come quietly.”
“Will he believe me?”
“Ray’s believed stranger things than this,” said June. “And I believe you. That’s a start.”
Lieutenant Ray Salas arrived at June’s cabin an hour later.
He was about forty-five, broad-shouldered, with a gray beard and tired eyes and a voice so calm it made you want to tell him everything. He came alone, in his own truck. He brought a paramedic friend of his, a woman named Teresa, who set my arm with a splint and put butterfly bandages on my scalp and examined Aiden from head to toe while he slept.
“His collarbone’s broken, not his arm,” she said. “And probably a mild concussion. He needs an X-ray. Today. But he’s going to be okay.”
I started crying then. Finally. Ugly, shaking sobs, at June’s kitchen table.
Ray Salas sat down across from me.
“Mrs. Hartwell,” he said. “Take your time. Tell me what happened. From the beginning.”
I told him.
He took notes on a small pad. He didn’t say anything until I was done.
Then he said, “Your son called 911 at 3:42 p.m. yesterday. He said the edge of the overlook collapsed under you and his son. He said he tried to climb down to you but the slope was too unstable. He said he heard nothing. No voices. No movement. He said he believed you were both gone.”
