Once more, she was swaying at the end of her harness, her head spinning. She took the rope in her hands and began to climb again. All of the ice inside her snowsuit had cracked loose when she fell into the crevasse, and now, as she tried to lift herself free, she could feel the debris shifting around inside her clothing, two heavy bulges around her ankles and a third around her waist. They reminded her of the rings that formed around giant planets.
Which would make her the giant planet, she supposed. Saturn, maybe.
She had heard somewhere that if you lowered yourself into a well, most of the sunlight would be sapped from the circle of sky that lay between the stones, and the constellations would shine through like steel rivets, even in the middle of the day. If only the reverse were true, she thought. If only the sun could burn through the sky in the middle of the night. When she gazed out of the crevice, though, all she saw were the same stars she had seen the last time she looked, along with the trailing thread of the aurora.
There was no feeling at all in her hands. She knew she had taken hold of the rope only by the strain of the line against her bones and the dimmed-out evidence of her eyes. She made her way up inch by inch, refusing to let go. A great loop of rope went slack beneath her as she climbed. Once, halfway to the top, she made the mistake of placing her foot in the loop and trying to use it for leverage. The rope was yanked out of her grasp, and she slipped once more to the full length of the harness. She began climbing again. Every sound she made seemed to rattle around between the walls like a rock inside a tin can. She must have been on her fourth or fifth attempt when her foot grazed the pressure cleft she had noticed earlier. She worked at it until she could fit the toe of her boot inside.
It was a relief to feel something solid beneath her, no matter how precarious it might be. She paused there for a moment. Then she sank her weight onto her boot and gave the biggest leap she could manage.
The maneuver gained her almost a foot. The rope swung in a long curve that propelled her against the wall, and she almost lost her grip, but she held on as she waited for the line to fall still. The end of the climb was within reach. She lifted herself another few inches, took a deep breath, then lifted herself again. Five more handholds and she was at the lip of the crevasse, taking hold of the side. But before she could scramble onto level ground, the ice she was clutching calved off in her fingers. She dropped all the way back down into the fissure.
Again she lost her breath, and again she saw the white shapes meandering across the darkness, and she listened as the sledge sawed closer to the edge of the crevasse and then scraped to a stop.
She rested for a long time, slowly spinning in her harness. She didn't want to die there – she had decided not to die there – and so, limp and freezing and numb, she began making her way up the rope again.
Finally, after two more tries, and with the assistance of the pressure cleft, she was able to scale the rope and thrust herself onto the snow. She crawled away from the brink of the fissure before it could collapse again. Then she lay on her back and stared at the sky. She began to cry. The tears froze to her cheeks, but she couldn't stop herself. She was just so relieved to feel the ground beneath her. There was one particular star in the sky, fat and white, that burned like an electric bulb. She let her eyes trickle over its scores and bruises as she tried to catch her breath. She wasn't sure how long it took her to realize it was the moon.
She was about to pass out from exhaustion, which would have meant freezing to death. So she forced herself to stand up and stagger to the back of the sledge. She had trouble opening the storage hutch. The lining of her gloves had been shredded to ribbons in the climb. She bit a few of the scraps loose with her teeth. She didn't want to look at her hands, didn't want to know, but her eyes couldn't avoid them for long. The flesh of her palms had peeled and folded over on itself like the skin of a rotten peach, and the tips of her fingers – all ten of them – were black with frostbite. Jesus Christ. She fumbled at the latch and eventually managed to release it. The moon gave her just enough light to see by. She treated herself with the antiseptic cream and bandages she found in the first-aid kit, and then she slipped her mitts back over her hands and turned them over in the light, investigating the outline of each of her fingers to make sure they weren't crooked or doubled over at the knuckles. She couldn't feel a goddamned thing.
It took her longer than she would have expected to set the tent up. She staked it down, shut herself inside, and waited for the heat of the soft coil to fill the air.
After a few minutes, she felt the frost melting from her hair and eyebrows. Her pants and coat gradually softened and fell slack around her body. She knew that she should take them off before she got into her sleeping bag, but she didn't have the energy.
That night, the wind came howling down from the mountains, and by the time she woke up, the air outside was black with snow, a single surging mass of it that made it impossible for her to leave the tent, much less haul the sledge. She spent the next three days sleeping and eating, waiting out the storm. She listened to the gusting noise of the snow as it rode the wind. The blood slowly returned to her capillaries with a puncturing sensation that made her twist inside her skin, and her palms and fingers gradually began to heal.
On the third day, for reasons that were inexplicable to her, she began thinking about the small neighborhood park that was located just down the street from her apartment. In the center of the park was an area of red brick and iron benches, a gathering place carved out of the root-broken dirt where people liked to read books and walk their dogs and lobby one another to sign petitions. She had been through four winters in the neighborhood, but somehow she couldn't remember ever going to the park in the snow. It was a spring place – a summer place and an autumn place, too, perhaps, but mostly a spring place. The bricks and iron benches were constantly warmed by the sun, and the trees, a few dozen shadowy oaks and pines, always seemed to be leafing out.
The place was so different from this tent of hers in the middle of the ice storm, the only still spot for miles around. Maybe that was why she kept thinking about it: in the same way that the tent was a refuge from the weather, the park was a refuge from the present, a shelter she could rest inside while the cold and wind went rushing and swirling around her.
She remembered the rollerbladers she saw there, how they would weave so swiftly through the crowd, separating and coming back together again in that graceful, nimble, impulsive way they had that always reminded her of a flock of birds. There was a group of four elderly women who played mah-jongg around a small brick plateau near her bench, sitting on picnic chairs they carried into the park themselves. They always yelled at the rollerbladers when the kids passed too close to them, shaking their fists and cursing in a foreign language. One of the women sometimes brought her granddaughter along with her, a melonlike baby who would happily spend the entire day sucking on a blank mah-jongg tile. Once, when Laura was leaving the park, she had leaned over the baby to untangle her blanket for her, and the baby had grasped Laura's finger in a surprisingly firm fist, bringing it to her mouth and working it between her gums.
"A little help here?" Laura had said to the women at the mah-jongg table. "Hello?"
But they had ignored her, hunching protectively over their tiles. Eventually, she had managed to extract the finger herself, and when she turned to leave, she found a man waiting behind her. He was canted over on his bicycle, propping himself up with his left foot. He appeared to be laughing at her. She laughed, too, and the man handed her a bandanna to wipe the saliva from her finger – "Here you go" – and when he asked her if he could take her out for a drink sometime, she said yes.