It hurt so much she puked, but kept going.
She heard her name being yelled.
She crawled onto the concave stone slab, looked up. Rain blinded her.
Way up above her, she saw the blurry red of Matthew’s jacket. “Le … nn … ii!”
“I’m here!” She tried to scream the words, but the pain in her chest made it impossible. She waved her good arm but knew he couldn’t see her. The opening in the crevice above her head was slim, no wider than a bathtub. Through it, rain fell hard, its percussive sound a roar of noise in the dark cave. “Go for help,” she yelled as best she could.
Matthew leaned over the sheer edge, trying to reach down for a tree that grew stubbornly from the rock.
He was going to come for her.
“No!” she shouted.
He eased one leg over the rock ledge, inched downward, looking for someplace to put his foot. He paused, maybe reassessing.
That’s right. Stop. It’s too dangerous. Leni wiped her eyes, trying to focus in the downpour.
He found a foothold and climbed over the ledge and hung there, suspended on the rock wall.
He stayed there a long time, a red and blue X on the gray stone wall. Finally he reached to his left for the tree, tugged on it, testing it. Holding it, he moved to another foothold a little lower.
Leni heard a clatter of stones and knew what was happening, saw it in a kind of stunned, horrified slow motion.
The tree pulled out of the rock side.
Matthew was still holding on to it when he fell.
Rock, shale, mud, rain, and Matthew crashed down, his scream lost in the avalanche of falling rock. He tumbled downward, his body cracking branches, thudding into stone, ricocheting.
She threw an arm across her face and turned her head as the debris landed on her, stones hit her; one cut her cheek. “Matthew. Matthew!”
She saw the final falling rock too late to duck.
*
LENI IS OUT in Tutka Bay with Mama, in the canoe Dad salvaged. Mama is talking about her favorite movie, Splendor in the Grass. The story of young love gone wrong. “Warren loves Natalie, you can tell, but it isn’t enough.”
Leni is hardly listening. The words aren’t what matter. It is the moment. She and Mama are playing hooky, living another life, ignoring the list of chores that awaits them at the cabin.
It is what Mama calls a bluebird day, except the bird Leni sees in the crystal-blue sky is a bald eagle with a six-foot wingspan gliding overhead. Not far away on a jagged outcropping of black rock, seals lie together, barking at the eagle. Shorebirds caw but keep away. A small pink dog collar glitters in the uppermost branches of a tree, near a huge eagle’s nest.
A boat chugs past the canoe, upsetting the calm water.
Tourists wave, cameras raised.
“You’d think they’d never seen a canoe before,” Mama says, then picks up her paddle. “Well, we’d best get home.”
“I don’t want this to end,” Leni whines.
Mama’s smile is unfamiliar. Something isn’t quite right. “You need to help him, baby girl. Help yourself.”
Suddenly the canoe tilts sideways so hard everything tumbles into the water—bottles, thermoses, a day pack.
Mama somersaults past Leni, screaming, and splashes into the water, disappears.
The canoe rights itself.
Leni scrambles to the side, peers over, yells, “Mama!”
A black fin, sharp as a knife blade, comes up from the water, rising, rising, until it is almost as tall as Leni. Killer whale.
The fin blots out the sun, darkens the sky all at once; everything goes black.
Leni hears the gliding of the orca, the splash as it emerges, the snort of air through its blowhole. She smells the decaying fish on its breath.
Leni opened her eyes, breathing hard. A headache pounded in her skull and the taste of blood filled her mouth.
The world was dark and fetid-smelling. Putrid.
She looked up. Matthew hung in the crevice above her, caught between the two rock walls, suspended, his feet hanging above her head, stuck in place by his backpack.
“Matthew? Matthew?”
He didn’t answer.
（Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was dead.）
Something dripped onto her face. She wiped it away, tasted blood.
She struggled to sit up. The pain was so violent, she vomited all over herself and passed out. When she came to, she almost puked again at the smell of her own vomit splattered across her chest.
Think. Help him. She was Alaskan. She could survive, damn it. It was the one thing she knew how to do. The one thing her father had taught her.
“It’s a crevice, Matthew. Not a bear cave. So that’s good.” No brown bear would be ambling in, looking for a place to sleep. She moved inch by inch around the entire interior, her hands feeling the slick rock walls. No exit.