Sleeping Beauty (62 page)

Leo forced himself higher to look past Anne. The entire back of their car was gone. “My God,” he groaned. His eyes closed. He was drowning in pain.

“I can't move,” Robin whimpered. “Aunt Anne, I can't move!”

“They got here!” Ned cried excitedly.

Again Leo looked through the open back of the car. Farther down the cable, skiers in another car were pointing at the gaping hole in Leo's car. Their mouths were open in shouts that could not be heard. “They got here!” Ned cried again, and Leo looked down, at the slope, and saw the fallen
gondola car. No! he thought; it can't be . . . we have so many protections . . . it couldn't fall. . . . But it lay on the snow like a bright red Christmas ornament, and then Leo saw the ski patrol moving around it, prying open the doors. In the clear air, their voices carried to Leo and Anne.

“Get it open at the top!” “Okay, but the bottom . . .” “Careful; she's lying against the door!” “Hold her away from it!” “Got it open, but this guy's wedged against it . . .” A patroller in a snowmobile drove up, his small car like a beetle on the white snow; others were behind him, the roar of their engines filling the air.

“Leo!” The patroller in the first snowmobile was standing below them, his head back, shouting. “Anybody hurt in there?”

“Not bad,” Leo said, but the words came feebly.

“Leo's hurt,” Anne called down. “And we have two children who may have broken legs. How soon can you get to us?”

“We're working on it,” the patroller shouted. “It might be a while. Use Leo's radio while you're waiting; you can talk to the patrol or the gondola office; they've got a doctor there.”

“Leo,” Anne said over her shoulder, “can you hand me your radio?”

There was no answer.

“Your radio, Leo!” Anne said.

He opened his eyes. “What?” he asked.

“Your radio! I need it.”

He nodded, and gasped as the pain tore through him. “Have to find it.” He looked around but could not see it, then reached down to feel on the floor. In a moment his hand touched it, jammed beneath the seat, crushed by the steel that had folded back on itself in the impact. “God damn it,” he whispered. “No good,” he said to Anne. “Smashed. Damn it,” he added, sick with helplessness.

“We gotta have a doc check these people,” a patroller said, standing beside the fallen car. “Can't move 'em until we know—”

“He's on his way. We radioed.”

There was a long silence, then voices came again. “Okay, this one can be moved. Take it easy! Lift her out this way!”

“Ted,” another voice said. “Can you check out this guy?”

“In a minute; hold on . . .”

Leo heard the voices and pictured the dazed or unconscious passengers being taken from the fallen car. Not dead, he thought; please God, not dead. He tried to raise his head. I hurt, I hurt, he thought. He felt like a child and wished he were being held by Anne, as Ned and Robin were. He was sleepy. He was so hot he felt he was burning up, and wanted to take off his ski jacket, but it was too hard; it was too hard to do anything. It was almost too hard to breathe. “Anne,” he whispered. She did not hear him. He forced his head up and pushed his voice through the throbbing in his head. “Anne.”

“Yes,” she said. She turned as much as she could while still holding the children, but she could not turn far enough to see him.

“We'll be okay.”

“I know,” she said. Leo marveled at the coolness of her voice. “Stay quiet, Leo; I wish I could help you.”

“No. The kids. More important. I'll just wait. They'll come.”

“I know,” Anne said again. “We'll be fine. Just don't move, and don't worry about us; we're all right.” Leo let out a long breath. Anne would take care of everything; she was strong enough for all of them. He heard the voices of the doctor and the ski patrollers on the slope below, confident, terse, working together. They knew what to do. He knew them all, he'd hired the best team in the world for Tamarack Mountain. Everybody was helping; they didn't need him. His head fell forward and his breathing slowed.

“Dad?” Ned called. “They're getting the people out of that car. One guy looks dead.”

“Or knocked out,” Anne said firmly. “That's all we can tell from up here.”

“I guess,” Ned said doubtfully. “Dad? Doesn't he look dead?” He looked over the seat. “Dad! Dad!”

“I think he's asleep.” Anne said. “Let's not wake him up; I'll bet his head hurts and he's a lot better off sleeping until we're rescued.”

“Hey, up there!” the patroller called. “What's with the radio?”

“Ned, why don't you talk to him?” Anne asked. “You've got a great pair of lungs.”

“Yeah.” Ned leaned forward. “Ouch!” he cried. “Oh, damn, it hurts, Aunt Anne—”

“It's all right, Ned, I'll talk to him—”

“No! I want to do it!” With Anne's arm around him, and his hand reaching back to grip the center pole, he took a deep breath and hung over the edge. He looked through the ripped wall, seventy-five feet down, and felt a moment of absolute joy in the danger of it. Wow, he thought, this is unreal. The sun was warm on his head; the air on his face was cold. Below, patrollers were skiing down to the fallen car, pulling long sleds with supporting sides. They laid people in them and strapped them in, and skied down the mountain, their skis in a V-shape to slow them down, pulling the sleds behind them while other patrollers skied alongside to keep an eye on the injured skiers. Other patrollers were bringing ropes and pulleys up the mountain on snowmobiles, getting ready to evacuate the gondola. It was the most exciting thing in Ned's whole life, and he drank in the scene, forgetting his leg and his father and the swaying tilt of their car as it dangled from its cable, high above the world.

“Me, too,” said Robin, and gripping the center pole, she leaned forward with him. Their weight pulled against Anne's arms, and she loosened them slightly, flexing her wrists and forearms and breathing deeply, trying to relax. Her terror was gone; in its place was a steady fear—for Leo, for their safety in the car until they could be rescued, for the people in the fallen car and those in all the other cars, for Tamarack, for her family. She flexed her arms again; they were sore after keeping a grip on the children for . . . how long? she wondered. She stretched her arm to see her watch, and peered at it in disbelief. It had to be wrong. It had been
only twenty minutes since they stepped into the gondola, only fifteen minutes since the car first slipped on the cable. Surely it had been at least an hour; everything seemed so agonizingly slow.

“Hey, guys!” the patroller called from below. “You okay?”

“I think my leg's broke,” Ned shouted cheerfully. He'd be telling people about this forever. “My sister's, too, maybe. And my Dad's asleep.” He remembered the blood, and his voice began to shake. “His head's all bloody; he looks awful.”

“Who else is with you?” the patroller asked.

“My aunt. She's okay.”

“Where's your radio?”

“It's broke.”

“Damn. Well, we'll get there as fast as we can; we just can't talk to you while we're doing it. You know the drill, though, right?”

“Sure, my dad told me. But we're kinda loose up here; do they know that?”

“Loose? What do you mean?”

“Loose.
Like we could
fall
. The gripper thing—you know, the J-grip? That hooks us onto the cable?—it's hardly doing anything, it's not holding like it ought to, or whatever . . . anyway, it's real shaky up here.”

“I'll tell them,” the patroller said. “They know what to do. Take it easy, Ned, you'll be out of there in no time.”

“Yeah. Hey, who's going to get us?”

“I don't know. Pete, maybe. That okay?”

“Oh, yeah; he's great; he taught me to ski.”

“Ned, I've gotta go. You guys hang in there. It won't be too long.”

“Sure,” Ned muttered. He hung over the edge for another minute, his exhilaration fading. Most of the patrollers were gone, and most of the snowmobiles. In all directions, the long runs winding through the forests were empty, glistening in the sun or dark in the shadows, silent and waiting, like an empty house or an abandoned, ghostly mountain.

“No one came up on the Number One Lift,” Anne said.

“They probably closed the mountain,” Ned said knowledgeably. “They don't want a bunch of people all over the place when there's an accident. They're a real pain in the butt. Especially if somebody . . . dies.” As if he could not stop himself, he glanced at Leo. His eyes filled with tears. It was awfully quiet, he thought; it was like everybody'd gone home and they were left hanging there and nobody cared.

“Everybody still okay up there?” a patroller called from below. He was sitting on the slope, the only one left behind to make sure they were not alone.

“Great!” Ned yelled angrily. “When are they coming for us?”

“Anytime, Ned; hold your horses; it takes a while to get set up.”

“Sure, sure,” he muttered. Even with that guy down there, they were really alone. He and Robin and Aunt Anne and their dad were up here alone, and nobody knew for how long, and they could fall any minute. . . . He felt the tears sting his eyes and he fought them back. He couldn't cry; his dad was out if it and that left him the only man awake in the car. He settled back into the circle of Anne's arms. “I guess we're okay,” he said, trying to be casual. “I mean, we haven't fallen or anything.”

“And it isn't snowing,” Robin said. “It'd be awful if it was snowing.”

“And anyway they'll be here pretty soon. Like five or ten minutes.”

“Or an hour,” Robin said.

Anne heard the hollowness in their voices that came with fear and a sense of loss and the effort to pretend that everything would be all right. She knew that feeling. She knew what it was to be a child, and to feel that everything familiar and trusted was in jeopardy. “Well,” she said thoughtfully in a story-telling kind of voice that Ned and Robin recognized, “if they held a big net below us, I could drop you down to them. You'd bounce a few times, you might even do a somersault or two, but then you'd bounce right out and somebody would give you a ride on a
snowmobile, and I'll bet your mother is in the gondola building right now, waiting for you.”

“That's pretty dumb,” Ned muttered. “They don't even have a net.”

“Well, maybe your friends at school would help us out,” Anne said, her voice very quiet and soothing. “How about your football team, Ned? They could throw a rope ladder up to us and we could use it to climb down.”

“It'd be too big,” Ned said. “It'd be huge, and it'd weigh a ton, all folded up; nobody could throw that, not even somebody from the Broncos.”

“We could tie our clothes together,” Robin said, “like when people escape from jail, and slide down.”

“That's stupider than the net,” Ned grumbled, but the fear had left his voice. Anne led them on, talking about rescue techniques, weaving stories in a steady, soothing murmur, while she kept her eyes on the slope below. The car swayed gently beneath the intense blue sky. Birds flew from tree to tree below them, yellow mountain canaries, gray jays, iridescent blue jays, brown and white chickadees. Far above, a hawk wheeled in great circles, its huge, outstretched wings motionless except for a slight quiver now and then as it adjusted its position. Tamarack, snow covered and sunlit, lay nestled in its valley. Leo slept; Anne heard his slow breathing. Robin and Ned lay heavily against her arms, staring blankly into space, waiting. She sat quietly in the little car listening to the silence. How strange, she thought, that we can be sitting in the midst of such beauty, and such danger, and perhaps, death. That's probably true all the time, whatever we're doing: danger and even death may be close by. But we can't see them or even sense them until something happens and we look up. . . .

She saw herself lying in the forest, struggling.
You want it. You want to. Don't lie to me. I know what you want!

She shrank into herself, her arms tightening fiercely in defense. “That hurts!” cried Robin, and Ned said, “Hey!”

Oh, God, oh God, it never ends.
Anne relaxed her arms. “I'm sorry; I didn't mean to do that.”

“What were you
doing?”
Ned demanded.

“I was thinking about somebody I don't like, and I guess I got carried away.”

“Boy, I wouldn't like to be him,” said Ned.

“You must really hate him,” Robin said, looking at Anne as if seeing her in a new light. “I didn't know you had people you hated.”

Ned looked below, at the patroller sitting stoically on the slope. He had found a piece of wood lying on the snow and was tapping out a jazz beat with it on his ski boot. “Nothing's happening,” he said. “Nobody's coming.” His hand brushed his leg and he gave a yelp and jerked his hand back. “It's all swelled up.” He looked wide-eyed at Anne. “Maybe I'll be a cripple. I won't ever ski again, or ride my bike or play baseball—”

“You'll do everything,” Anne said briskly. “So will Robin. I'm absolutely sure of it.”

“Hey, Ned, they're on their way!” the patroller called.

“Where?” Ned swung around, craning to see up the mountain. The car shook wildly. “Aunt Anne!” He clung to her. “I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to make us fall!”

“We won't,” Anne said, but fear clutched her as the car shook. Robin was whimpering softly. Anne held them to her. Don't let them be hurt, she prayed. Don't let Leo be hurt; take care of them; let them be fine and on the ground and at home. And let no one be dead; let everything be all right; please let everything be all right.