He had sat up and was working his way away from the edge. “Some poor guy fell down in this crevasse and couldn’t get out.”
She sank down next to Orion. Maybe she didn’t even realize she reached out to grab his hand. But he clenched it tight.
“He died here.” Her voice shook.
He jerked her, and she looked at him, her eyes wide.
“But we won’t,” he said, and his words found his bones, his cells. “We won’t, Jenny. Because we have a rope. And ice screws. And . . . we’ll have a pack. If you can get up there to get it. Whatchya say, champ?”
Her mouth lifted into a beautiful smile.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JENNY WAS GOING TO GET THEM OUT of this mess. And save Orion while she was at it.
Maybe then when she finally told him what she’d done so long ago . . . well, maybe his anger might not be quite as terrible.
Maybe he’d forgive her.
Especially after her tedious but triumphant climb up to the ice bridge. One that he made her rope in for, retrieving the one screw she’d dug into the ledge, then belaying her down to get the other ice screws. He’d belayed her again as she climbed up to the dead climber.
She didn’t want to look at the corpse, frozen in time, and averted her gaze as best she could as she chipped away the pack. He was encased in ice and snow, but she anchored in and slowly he came free. She didn’t know what to do with his body, so she left him embedded in the ice, used her Leatherman to cut his webbing and straps from him, then lowered the pack down to Orion.
It contained a bivouac tent, a sleeping bag, freeze-dried soup, a stove, more webbing and biners, a water bottle, tea—enough for a night or two out in the open. As if he’d been summiting and fell.
She set up the bivouac tent, used a ski pole to re-splint Orion’s leg, tucked him into the sleeping bag, and made tea.
All the while, trying not to let it all sift into her heart—the fact that now God had miraculously saved them twice. Maybe three times, if she counted Orion finding her just as she, Aria, and Sasha were all about to tumble into a crevasse. She wanted to take back her words—“I have reasons to think he’s probably not interested in helping us.”
Maybe she was just looking at herself and assigning her own responses to God. She wouldn’t rescue herself . . . but maybe God didn’t base his actions—or his love—on what she thought of herself.
At least that’s what Garrett Marshall, her foster dad, had told her.
Orion sat in the bivouac sack, drinking the reconstituted chicken soup. She’d staked down the sack to the ice. Overhead, the snow continued to blow. As soon as it cleared, she’d climb out and go for help.
She sat down beside Orion. He looked over at her and grinned. She hadn’t a clue what time of day it might be, but the hours had added a thickness to his dark beard, turned him devastatingly rugged. He’d stripped off his jacket, but it hung around his shoulders, which looked impossibly large in his fleece jacket. He wore just his polar booties, his boots tied into an ice screw near his head.
He looked half invalid, half mountain man, and suddenly, she couldn’t get that kiss out of her head.
Good thing it was only a one-man bivy sack. “What are you grinning about?”
“Nothing,” he said, and continued to look at her. “Except I think my dad would have liked you. You’re his kind of people.”
She didn’t know why that warmed her core. “I had a foster dad that was . . . he was great. They lived in this small town in Minnesota. The Marshall family. They ran a winery, of all things, but they were Christians. And they believed that God was for them, even when bad things happened. The dad, Garrett, used to tell stories at the dinner table. One of his favorites was this Bible story about how the Israelites were escaping Egypt, and God told them to stand aside while he saved them. Then he parted the Red Sea. Or something like that. It was the first time I’d ever heard that God could protect me.” She finished off her tea. “I really wanted to believe it.”
Orion had also finished off his soup. She poured tea into his empty sierra cup.
“My parents were God-fearing people,” he said. “But they never really talked about God. My grandmother, however, was a strong believer. She and my grandpa worked at a missionary camp every summer. She’d say things like, ‘If God is for us, who can be against us,’ and ‘When we are weak, he makes us strong.’ She had this song she loved . . .” He hummed it. The sound found her bones, a deep tenor that matched his voice. “‘In Christ alone, my hope is found . . . He is my light, my strength, my song’ . . . I don’t know the rest. And I guess, well, after Dad died, I didn’t really want to. I sorta felt like God betrayed me.”
“And then you felt like he did again when you were ambushed.” Oh, she didn’t mean to bring that up, but—
“Actually, not until I woke up alone in Germany.”
Oh.
“I realized that everything I’d worked so hard for was over. And . . . that’s when the anger started to live inside me. I expected . . . well, I guess I’d expected to not get hurt. I’m not sure why I expected that—I was in a war zone. But . . .” He lifted a shoulder.
“Do you think God does that? Betrays us?”
Her words sifted between them and fell into the silence. For some reason, she needed to know, because . . .
Because she’d started to believe that maybe she could turn around and face all the wreckage behind her. That if God could forgive her . . . maybe Orion could too. And she couldn’t face it if God was the kind to make her believe, only to turn on her.
“I want to think that he is on our side,” he said. “But it’s hard, you know? Sometimes it feels like all the evidence says that he doesn’t care. That no matter what we do, we’re in this alone.”
Oh.
He met her eyes then, something sparking in them. “But Ham is this strong believer in God’s goodness. He says that even when we can’t see it, God is at work. He thinks he brought me up on this mountain because he has a plan for me. To make me deal with my anger at life . . .” He looked away. “At God, I guess, because he didn’t do things my way.”
“And?”
He stared at his cup. “I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to find peace. Not without answers.”
Oh. But because she had to know, for sure, “Answers to . . .”
He met her eyes, pain in his, and shoot, she shouldn’t have asked. “I guess . . . why? Why my dad had to die? Why the CIA sent us into an ambush? Why we’re sitting down here in a crevasse?”
Maybe it was the psychologist in her, but she couldn’t help but ask, “And what does the answer do for you? Will it make it easier to live with it? To grieve? To have peace?”
He stared at her. “I don’t know.”
“There’s a difference between understanding and acceptance. Do you have to understand to accept?”
“I . . . I guess I don’t know. Maybe not. I mean—it doesn’t change anything, right?”
“No. It doesn’t. I tried for a long time to understand why Billy killed my mother. He was a narcissist. Maybe even a sociopath. And in the end, it didn’t change anything. But sometimes it helps to have someone to direct your anger at.”