Joy in His Heart (14 page)

“The stabilizers,” she said evenly, “are the horizontal little wings on the tail.”

“Okay. That’s some more plane jargon to file away.” He took a closer look now and saw the crack. The whole assembly was really just barely hanging there. And who knew how long it would stay there without help. “Okay. So first I’ll secure it. I’ll throw a rope around the…uh…” He made his hand go up and down. “Vertical…um…”

Joy looked sideways at him and grinned. “The vertical stabilizer.”

Brian raised an eyebrow and grinned back, holding her gaze. “Well, that follows, at least.”

She sobered. “You can’t fix the transponder, Bri.”

“No!” He wasn’t going to let her talk him into anything that included her climbing down there.

Annoyed, Joy turned her head and glanced down into the pool, then shot Brian an impatient look. Hadn’t she made it plain all along? This part was her job. She looked back to the plane, a plan formulating. “I can’t get down there alone, and climbing down to the tail section would be almost impossible, but if you could lower me, we could do it.”

She saw Brian clench his jaw. “What was it you said when you wanted me to bail out without you?” he demanded. “Oh, yes, I remember. ‘There is no we in this.’ Same here. You aren’t in any shape to rappel down a cliff or to scrabble all around in a precariously balanced hunk of torn-up metal that’s just barely clinging to the side of a mountain.”

Joy rolled to her back and pillowed her head on her good arm. She sighed. Maybe they really were slated to argue into eternity. “And how many transponders have you fixed?”

“None. How many cliffs have you rappelled down?”

“None. How many transponders have you even seen?” she countered with lightning speed. “I’m not excluding your help. We need to do this together.”

Brian groaned. “I’m not talking you out of this, am I?” He stared down at her, his dark eyes weary and grave. He was on one knee, his arm propping up the weight of his shoulders. And she knew there was a lot of weight on those shoulders right then. Like her, he was used to having lives depend on his capabilities but not, she thought, seven lives at a time. Sometimes she forgot how hard he’d had to work these last days because he’d made it look effortless. She looked down at his hand that was hanging loosely from the arm leaning on his knee. He’d torn open the blisters again. His beautiful, capable hands were a disaster.

Determined to do her part, Joy looked back up at his face and tried not to see the man she loved, but the man who would eventually have to turn away from her. It didn’t work. She couldn’t turn off her feelings, so she opted to hide them and do what she had for the last twelve years. It was a lesson she learned from Brian’s mother. “Put one foot in front of the other, trust in the Lord and get on with life,” Mrs. Peterson had told Joy’s mother when asked how she’d gotten through her son’s tragic death.

“Did you really think you could talk me out of doing what I have to do?” she asked rhetorically. “You should know me better than that at least. My knee’s getting much better. I can bend it now and it almost takes my weight. And my shoulder is a lot less stiff.”

“What about your ankle?” he demanded.

“Not as good,” she answered truthfully, but quickly extinguished the brightness in his eyes at her admission. “But then you’re going to be taking some of my weight off it with the rope. We can do this, Bri. But only if we do it together.”

Joy rolled back to her stomach and looked down at the plane again. If only life were as easy as climbing down a cliff and fixing a broken piece of electronics. If only they could go through life the same way.

Together.

J
oy watched for a while as Brian readied the ropes. It was the final step before she hooked up to the complicated apparatus he'd devised to get her down the cliff. Even though Brian was the one who knew how to rappel, and even though she was the one handicapped by injuries, her worry was for him. She had a terrible feeling of impending doom. It made no sense. No sense at all.

She looked out at the crisp, cerulean sky.
Watch out for us, Lord. I think with Your help I’ll be able to bear losing him to his regular life, but I have to know he’s still out there alive.

It should be fine, she knew. He’d explained how he would lower her using one of the nylon ropes and rings he’d harvested from one of the parachute harnesses as a crude intimation of a pulley system. Then he’d follow her and secure the tail section.

It sounded, if not easy, then at least not impossible. She smiled, her vision of the Swiss Family’s visit to the
Adirondacks was now complete. Brian’s “Don’t leave anything behind” credo for the preservation of the land had come in handy once again.

He’d stationed the children to watch from the cliff edge at the end of the meadow. Having been a terribly curious child herself, Joy worried about trying to keep them at a distance and Brian agreed. He thought it would be safer to position them to watch rather than risk them trying to approach the cliff later if curiosity got the better of them. It was interesting how often they agreed out there in the middle of nowhere, when the only thing that mattered was survival, especially when the welfare of the children was concerned.

“Ready?” he asked, drawing her back from her thoughts. He took her hands and checked the cloth-wrapping he’d done on her palms and his. She smiled when he looked into her face, remembering how she’d teased him that he was a bit late taping his own. He grinned back clearly remembering, too.

His gaze still locked with hers, he asked, “You’re sure you can’t talk me through it?”

She looked away and over the edge, wishing she could. Even with Brian’s help it was going to be painful, but together there was a better chance of success. She looked back and shook her head.

“You aren’t just doing this so I won’t think—”

She stopped his words with her fingertips on his lips then gripped his forearm. “I’m scared to death for both of us. Okay? But since I don’t know why the transponder isn’t sending, I don’t see how I could talk you through it. There’s no other way.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay then. Here’s how we’re going to start out.” Making a last-minute check, he yanked hard on the line he’d secured to the pine trees that grew from the upper cliff. It was either a lucky break or Divine Providence that the trees had sprung up in a direct line from where the plane had come to rest. She turned toward the high cliff above them and looked up at the trees. Both she and Brian were more comfortable with the idea that the trees were a sign of a heavenly blessing on their foray into mountain climbing.

Brian backed them toward the edge. “I’m going to take you over the edge. I just don’t think you can handle going over the edge with that ankle.”

There was no way she’d tell him how true that was. She’d been limping around without the crutch for all of ten minutes and her ankle was pretty unhappy.

“Your line will hang slack at first,” he explained in a measured tone, “then it’ll go taut. After that I’m going to leave you hanging there and go back up over the edge to lower you until you’re at the plane.” He wrapped his left arm around her from behind. “Got it?”

“Got it,” she assured him, trying to ignore his nearness and concentrate on the task at hand. So she continued reciting her part of the plan to focus her mind where it needed to be. “If the plane isn’t as far away from the cliff wall as it looks, you’ll lower me inside the cockpit through the broken windshield.”

“At which point you’ll have to be extra careful of broken glass,” he reminded her.

She nodded. “If there is room next to the fuselage,
though, you’ll lower me right to the ledge aft of the plane. However I get inside, I’ll grab the tool kit and get out either on my own steam or you help me back out. Then I wait while you lash the tail section to the trees to stabilize it.

“When you’ve done that, you’ll lower me from your position at the tail section and I’ll swing over to it. Once I’m there, I’ll slide down inside the tail and do my thing with the transponder.”

Brian’s arm tightened around her waist. He’d run his line over his shoulder, across his body and under his thigh. He’d be climbing back up without any help but his own strength. “Okay, get ready. Remember, take your weight on your left foot and only balance with your right. Here we go,” he said, then he pushed backward and sprang out and over the cliff edge.

The rope slipped between them with an audible zip as they dropped. It was dizzying. Thrilling. Scary as anything she’d ever done except sleep in shelters and caves. Joy grinned. This was nothin’ at all after that!

Her line went taut as he’d said it would and the cliff came rushing toward them. But Brian stopped them from crashing into it with his feet as a gust of wind brought with it a cool spray off the falls. “All right. Get ready. I’m going back up,” Brian told her as he let go of her and swung off to her side. Then he reached up and pulled himself upward, disappearing over the edge moments later.

Joy was on her own, staring at the cliff. “You know this is kind of cool,” she shouted up to him.

“That’s my Joyful,” he called back with a chuckle in
his voice. “Always the daredevil. Okay. Here we go. Let me know as soon as you can if there’s enough space between the cliff and the body of the plane.”

Her rope zipped over the edge and she floated downward. Joy looked down as another gust of wind misted her skin with spray from the falls. She shivered and waited anxiously for the moment when she’d have to commit to going in the cargo door entry or have him pull her back up so she could swing over and be lowered into the cockpit. Soon she was behind what was left of the fuselage of the plane, about eight feet off the ground.

“I think I can fit through there. Going in the cargo doorway is going to be a cakewalk,” she shouted to him. “Lower away.”

“Be careful, Joy,” he called to her. “Remember to keep your face to the wall and your rope free of the wreckage as you sidestep. And remember to stick close to the left inside the plane. You don’t want to throw the balance off and go over the side with it.”

“Not in my plan for the day, pal,” she yelled back and looked up as Brian dropped over the side and slid downward toward her.

She looked away, anxious to get this over with. It was the tire from the splintered landing gear that had kept the plane from hugging the wall, she saw now as she moved under the severed wing. Making sure her line didn’t get hung up on anything, Joy sidestepped until she reached the open cargo door.

Aft of the doorway, the plane was gone and the underbelly cargo section was crushed nearly flat. The de
struction almost took her breath away. She gritted her teeth and stepped inside, experiencing a moment of complete and total unreality. Joy looked through the gaping hole that used to be the rest of the plane just in time to see Brian drop past that level down to where the tail section had landed below the ledge. Wires hung and wavered in the breeze. They looked like the tentacles of a wounded beast seeking redress for its injuries.

Joy lectured herself to stop being fanciful. The Cessna was only a piece of machinery. But it didn’t work. Instead, a strange unnameable feeling settled on her. They’d left Agape Field and were supposed to be gone from home for hours, not days. Brian was supposed to have spent half the flight monitoring a patient and the return trip was to be relaxing. She’d seen that day as routine, though it hadn’t been in her original plans—a quick and dirty flight and a late dinner at her mom’s. Nothing to it.

Except that so much had gone wrong. Sometimes she felt the way Brian did—as if all of this was supposed to happen. She shook her head to clear her mind. She had work to do. It was time to go home and get back to real life.

She grimaced and stepped carefully toward the cockpit. And her foot skidded, sending a painful jolt up her bad leg. She looked down at an Air and Flight magazine she’d been reading as she’d waited in Ogdensburg for Brian to return from the hospital. She picked it up and stuffed it in the partially open backpack she wore. At least she’d have something to read while they waited for rescue and it wouldn’t be blowing around to catch her unaware again.

Her heart in her mouth, Joy started forward again and sidled carefully up the center aisle. The tools she needed were stowed in a pouch behind the copilot’s seat. She hadn’t told Brian they were on the right side of the plane, though. She knew if she had, he’d have insisted on doing this part himself. But she couldn’t let him. If the plane tipped and went over the cliff before the transponder was up and sending, the children would need him, not her, in this vast wilderness.

It wasn’t that she was being a hero. She’d thought this out. So when the plane rocked upward as the wind rushed up the cliff side and caught the wing, Joy bent over and plucked the case out of the pocket. Then she stood straight and waited for everything to settle down.

“You okay in there?” she heard Brian shout.

When the rocking stopped, she tucked the case into the backpack and turned. “Fine,” she yelled, but just then another gust rocked the crippled bird. The floor rose up and slammed into her foot. Pain shot through her ankle and knee. She yelped.

“You
sure
you’re okay?” Brian called out again.

“Fine and dandy,” she shouted but it sounded strained to even her. Hopefully the roar of the waterfall had muffled her distress. Another rock of the fuselage and she was ready to get out of Dodge.

Brian finished lashing the vertical stabilizer to the trees with the tied-together parachute line he’d salvaged. He gave it a tug, satisfied that everything seemed to be holding, then he climbed out from under it to ascend the cliff. Luckily, this section of the cliff wasn’t as vertical as the part above the ledge where the plane
rested. Just as he’d climbed back up to the top of the tail section, Joy called that she was in place and ready to be lowered from above.

She grinned as if she were having the time of her life. “You’re amazing,” he told her when they were right next to each other.

Joy didn’t even seem to hear him. She just stared into the tail. Wires and insulation hung from the torn skin and pieces of the stuff took wing every time the wind blew. She giggled, startling him.

“What?” he asked, hungry to understand how her mind worked.

She blinked and seemed to notice that he was next to her. “I was just thinking that I broke your wilderness credo big time. Before I ever set foot in the preserve, I’d already left a major mark on the landscape. This is littering on a grand scale.”

Brian let out a crack of laughter. “Are you ready?”

She nodded and turned to let him pull her tool kit out of the backpack as they’d planned. He smacked it against her upturned palm and she tucked it in the waistband of her khakis before stretching out flat on the floor of the tail section that had broken off and slid further down the incline, catching on some trees.

“I’m all set,” she said as he untied her rope from the branch he’d tied it to. “Be right back up,” Joy promised with a grin, as he let out the rope so she could slide inside the tail.

Brian crawled over. If the tail broke free he wanted to be close at hand to help her anyway he could. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he peered inside to watch her.
Joy had given the impression that she was having fun. He wasn’t sure if it was bravado or bravery, but he watched tensely as she picked her way past all sort of debris.

“Can you see it?” he called to her.

“No. The gurney ripped free. I need to move it off the hatch.”

“Push it up here to me. I can hold it out of the way.”

“No need, I’ve got it,” she told him as she shoved the gurney to the side and rolled over. Then, flipping open a hatch, she reached in with both hands and started fiddling with a bright orange box.

“It definitely wasn’t sending. I think the lightning shorted something.” She got her tools out and went to work on first one thing, then another, and another. Then she looked up and gave him a thumbs-up sign, smiling brightly. “We’re in business,” she said.

Joy put her tools in the backpack and shouldered it. He could see the strain on her face as she crawled up to him. He hated this! He’d known this part would hurt her.

“Brace yourself here,” he told her when she reached him and he helped her negotiate the jagged edge of the tail. “I’ll climb up now and pull you up as you climb.”

She nodded and he left her there. That she didn’t argue with him was a testament to how difficult the ascent out of the tail section had been for her. He made the climb easily enough. Then Joy fell right in with his rhythm, moving upward on each pull he made with the makeshift pulley system he’d jury-rigged. It was as if they instinctively were a perfect team.

It wasn’t long but felt like hours until he was able to
pull her up to join him on the ledge. Brian’s arms, so overworked yesterday, were already screaming from the climbing and pulling her up the fifty feet from the tail to the ledge. “Let’s rest here a few minutes,” he suggested, all but breathless and beginning to doubt that he’d be able to make the climb to the top at all. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. He couldn’t keep his hands from shaking.

“Suppose we pull up a hunk of ledge and take a load off our feet—or more specifically that ankle.”

She nodded and sat, still a bit awkwardly with her ankle and knee so sore. “So,” she said a little breathlessly herself, “that wasn’t so bad.” But she grinned, telling him she knew just how much the ascent had taken out of him already.

“What was wrong with the transponder?”

“In layman’s terms, the automatic relay didn’t trip.”

He snickered and dropped his head onto the rock wall at his back. “Could you go a bit more layman than that?”