“Well, could you call someone for me?”
She shrugged. “There’s no coverage out here. If there were, wouldn’t you have called by now?”
A fair question.
She gazed down the platform before she again fixed him with a lingering look. “Could you try again to let me in? It’s getting quite warm out here, and I’d like to wait inside.”
Lincoln shook his head. “I’ve tried the door.”
Her eyes softened. “Please, could you let me in?”
With a sharp shake of his head, Lincoln moved back to the door and gripped the handle that had refused to cooperate a dozen times already. It was warm, as if the morning sun had kissed it on its early rise. He turned hard, expecting nothing.
But he got something.
The handle eased, throwing him off balance, and he pulled open the door. The woman stood in front of him, a figure of exotic elegance, the handprint dress clinging to her all the way beyond her knees. A battered brown suitcase sat by her side. She held out her hand. “Thank you so much. I’m Alinta.”
Her skin was the softest he’d ever felt and smelled of sandalwood and rain. He held the handshake for a moment too long as he looked into eyes that carried both the wisdom of age and the beauty of youth. Somehow. “Lincoln.”
Alinta glided past him into the station building. Lincoln leaned out the door and glanced down the platform. No one was around, and in every direction beyond the platform was more of the same. Low-slung brush in a world where the early morning pink had gearshifted to reddish brown.
He ran down the platform into sunlight already burning the asphalt and threw himself on the chain-link fence at its end. Two thick steel tracks—partly buried under a fine red powder, thousands of years of the country’s heart ground into dust—perched on splintered ties that had succumbed to years of weather. The pockmarked steel, riveted to the ground by rusted iron bolts as thick as his fist, stretched into the distance in a wavy parallel, across flat land dotted by wispy dry grass and desperate shrubs. But twenty yards along the line, crisscrossed steel beams blocked the tracks—a buffer stop lashed to the line by thick steel cables.
Lincoln ran to the platform’s edge to see from where the rusted tracks had come. Nowhere. They shimmered away from him, took a right-hand bend, and then reached for the other horizon.
Behind the station was more of the same, and a dirt road free from tire tracks.
There was not a hint of where this woman had come from.
Eighteen
Bree’s muscles screamed as she reached for another handhold. She lifted a leg deadened with unfamiliar activity and resumed her slow climb. Foothold. Handhold. Foothold. Handhold. Fingers feeling for security. Toes searching for purchase. Arms screaming for rest.
She leaned into the wall, grateful for its gentle incline. The rock cut into her cheek and her legs quivered as she jammed her toes farther into the wall.
“Okay, Breezy, you have to do this.”
Her fingers found a handhold wider than others. Deeper. The ledge. Respite was now within arm’s reach. She patted the ledge, gripping it as she threw a leg up, pulling herself onto the thin strip of rock, her arms and legs sagging at the release from her weight. She lay back and stared at the gum tree, now only twenty feet above her.
Her stomach raged, forcing her thoughts back to home, drawing her to Jack’s Bar-B-Que on Broadway. What she would give to be in an upstairs booth—the windows open and music wafting up from the street. She could almost smell the ribs, the mac and cheese, and the cornbread; taste the crunch of the green beans and the tang of the coleslaw. And the laughter of Sam finishing the girls’ meals. Again.
Bree surveyed the ravine from her new vantage point. The rock in the middle of the lime-green water was now empty. She forced away the creeping image of the snake, replacing it with Emily and Imogen, their cowboy boots scuffing during their impromptu ballet. Beyond the boulders the ravine opened out to a land of nothing but dunes of red and knee-high shrubs. None of it was familiar. Once she got out of the ravine, she would need to find the campsite.
Fatigue settled into her limbs and her eyes grew heavy. The cast of cutting voices stormed back in a growing cacophony. Condemning. Labeling. Weakening. Then they stepped aside for their leader, who matter-of-factly poked at her flaws with precision. “Give it to me. There’s no point in you even trying. You will never be able to do this on your own.”
But Sam’s voice didn’t rise to her defense against her mother. Instead a thin voice emerged. Her own.
Yes I will.
“You never make the right choices.” Her mother’s voice wouldn’t be denied.
On the wall opposite, the smooth surface—without handholds—shone as the sun reached high over the ravine and flooded her with warmth. With self-confidence. I did this time.
The internal critic—the loudest of the voices who had cut away at her for years—offered a final pronouncement. “You always need me to finish things you start, Bree.”
No I don’t, Mom.
Bree forced a mental replay of her family’s video. They needed her. She rose on unsteady feet, filled with righteous indignation. She could do this. She breathed hard and reached for her water bottle, relishing the cold flood that rippled through her.
She slowly leaned over the ledge’s edge, a cautioned glance at the distance she’d come. It was farther than the distance left.
Bree slung the backpack and reached for another handhold, another toehold—her complete focus on the gum tree as it reared another foot closer. She reined in her rampant breathing and a singular thought stunned her in the absence of the usual dread over a taken risk. Am I enjoying this?
Bree smiled as she jammed her toes into a crack and pushed up. Her toes slipped out of a crack not as deep as it needed to be. She clung to the wall by her fingertips, her foot stabbing at the wall. Her arms screamed as her other foot lost its purchase and swung in the void. Her heart pounded as she peered down at the ledge, only a few feet below, but her hands held the rock in an iron grip.
The quiver in her arms graduated into an uncontrollable shake that threatened to vibrate her back to the ravine floor, a hundred feet below. The vertigo again tried to mug her and she battled for control. She couldn’t climb this far again.
She had to let go. She had to do this for Sam and the girls. She had to do this for herself.
Her clawed fingers refused to cooperate as acid burned through her arms. She pried one finger from the rock and eased her thumb away. The grip on her other hand relaxed and she gently let go, her heart in her throat, sliding back down to the ledge, her hands guiding her descent.
Three feet . . .
Two feet . . .
Bree reached for another handhold to steady the pace of her descent and the rock sliced into the soft pad of her palm at the base of a finger. With a soft pat her feet touched down on the ledge and she stood, wringing her stinging hand, the blood joining her sweat in drips on the ledge. Tears threatened to unleash as she held the sliced skin of her finger together.
Her mother was triumphant. “I told you so.” Bree snapped a look at the ravine wall opposite, convinced the voice was aiming at her from there.
A second voice seemed to join her in the ravine. Sam. “You can do this, Breezy.”
Bree stared up at the gum tree. “I can do this.”