The Color of Love (The Color of Heaven Series) (4 page)

“Sounds simple enough,” Aaron said.

I wish I could say it was, but we barely made it fifty feet before I had to make a radical change to our plan.

Chapter Ten

At first, when I spotted the wide clearing just ahead, beyond a cluster of snow-covered balsam firs, I thought we’d finally gotten a lucky break.

I should have known it was never wise to make assumptions in the wild.

“Shit,” I said, lifting my snow goggles to look up the side of the mountain.

“What is it?” Aaron pushed through some snow-covered trees and caught up to me.

“This isn’t good,” I replied.

“Why?”

“
Be quiet
.” I held up a hand and listened to the silence of the forest. Then—
very gently
—I stomped my foot on the snow and took note of the sound it made.

How long had it been since the storm ended?

About eight hours.

“What’s going on?” Aaron whispered.

I continued to scan the area all around us, then pointed my gloved hand at the slopes to our left and to our right. In a low voice I explained, “We’re in a valley here, and we couldn’t be in a worse position because this isn’t just a clearing. It’s an avalanche debris field. Look, see?” I pointed at some broken trees and blocks of ice on both sides. “We can’t stay here.”

“Should we go back to the plane?” Aaron asked.

I turned in the direction we had come. “Just to get what we need. There was a ton of snow last night. If there’s a slide, the plane will get buried with us inside it. We have to find a safe route to move up the ridge. That might put us in a better location to be spotted by rescue planes anyway.”

Aaron looked up. “It looks pretty steep.”

“It’s not that bad,” I assured him. “Probably only a 40 degree slope. Come on. We’ll get all the food and supplies we can carry from the plane, but we should hurry.” I turned into the woods and quickly unfastened my backpack on the way, just in case we got caught in a slide. I wanted to be able to toss it, not have it weigh me down if I had to make a run for it.

Chapter Eleven

It took us over an hour to reach the top of the ridge. By the time we arrived, we were both exhausted and drenched in sweat. Aaron collapsed on his back and spread his arms out in the snow.

Standing over him, I took a moment to catch my breath. “You did all right,” I said.

Lowering my hood to look around, I took note of the fact that we’d emerged beyond the tree line onto a rocky clearing—a good place to set up camp and light a fire to dry out our layers.

It also provided a panoramic view of the valley below where the plane had crashed. Just as I’d suspected, there was a trail of destruction through the trees. Unfortunately, much of it was now obscured by snow that fell during the blizzard the night before.

“I wonder where we are,” Aaron said, sitting up. “Do we have any idea?”

I slid my pack off my shoulders and set it down on the ground. “None. But it’s a clear day so we should keep our eyes and ears open for planes or helicopters. We need to be ready to signal to them when they come. The first order of business is getting this tent set up. We’re in a good location here. No one could miss us.”

Aaron watched me open my pack and hunt around for my water bottle.

“You seem pretty confident they’re going to come,” he quietly said.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.” I found my water bottle, opened the cap, took a few sips and offered it to him.

We stared at each other for a few tense seconds. I kept my thoughts to myself.

At last, he took the bottle and guzzled.

“But you see,” he began to explain as he wiped his mouth, “I’m a clinical psychologist, so I’m pretty sure that what you’re doing here is trying to keep me busy and distracted so I don’t panic and start to freak out.”

He handed the water bottle back to me.

“If I was worried about you freaking out,” I replied, “I wouldn’t have told you that we were standing in an avalanche death zone.”

He stared at me for a long, steady moment—no doubt trying to read my expression, to get into my head.

“Just don’t worry about me, okay?” he said. “I may not know how to repel down a glacier, but I have good coping skills. I’m not going to start screaming or doing anything stupid.”

“I’m not worried about a thing,” I assured him as I unrolled the tent and handed him a mallet. “I just want to get this tent set up.

As we set to work, I wondered if he knew I was lying.

o0o

After setting up camp, it seemed all we did for the rest of the day was sit in silence and watch the sky, listening for the distant, coveted sound of an engine propeller or helicopter blades beating against the frigid air.

There were no such sounds. It remained eerily quiet on the hilltop, hour after hour.

Surprisingly windless, it was a perfect, fresh clean winter’s day. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had in fact died in that plane crash and this was my version of heaven.

But no, if this was heaven, I wouldn’t be sitting here with a city boy who didn’t know what a crampon was. I’d be sitting with fellow climbers—
good
climbers—who had passed on before me.

Eventually, thoughts of heaven steered me back to the terrifying moments when the plane was crashing.

Please God, just give me one more chance. If you let me live, I’ll do better… I won’t break any more promises.

Promises to whom?
Carla of course.

I couldn’t help but think about what I’d walked away from years ago when I was possessed by summit fever. When all I wanted was Everest.

Then I thought about the documentary in Iceland, and how badly I wanted to be there.

“Are you married?” Aaron asked.

I leaned back against a large rock and took another sip of water. “Yeah, are you?”

“No,” he replied, “but that’s all I thought about when we were going down.”

I’m not sure why exactly, but I was intrigued by this. I suppose I was still uncertain about what I truly wanted and what I believed was most important in life.

I didn’t enjoy disappointing people. Or God—if He even existed.

Yet my personal version of heaven spoke volumes, didn’t it? It certainly wasn’t a house with a white picket fence.

I sat forward. “What did you think about?”

“Regrets, mostly,” Aaron explained. “I wished I’d had the chance to have a family—I always wanted a son or daughter—but life didn’t work out that way. Though I did come close once.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“I lived with a woman for a while when I was in grad school, but she wasn’t ready for marriage. She cheated and took off. I ran into her a couple of years later. She was living with some guy with a drug problem. The last time I saw her she was a raging alcoholic. She had a kid and couldn’t hold down a job. I tried to talk her into getting help but she just asked me for money to pay her rent. I probably shouldn’t have, but I gave her some. Never heard from her again. I don’t know where she is now.”

“That sucks,” I said.

Aaron nodded and squinted up at the sun.

“I stayed away from women for a long time after that,” he finally said. “I always figured there was time to get my act together and then meet the right person, but you just never know when your number’s going to come up.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied, leaning back again. “It’s funny, I had similar thoughts when we were going down.”

Aaron waited patiently for me to elaborate. Maybe it was a learned skill—something they teach all psych majors in therapy 101—but for some reason I couldn’t help myself. His quiet penetrating stare persuaded me to confess everything.

I told him all about Carla and Kaleigh and confessed my feelings of guilt for not wanting to be a husband and father.

And my guilt about always breaking my promises—even to God, who kept giving me second chances when I probably didn’t deserve them.

Chapter Twelve

It was the rumble that woke us—a deafening sound like rolling thunder, uninterrupted. I’m still amazed that it was Aaron who was first to get up and lower the tent zipper.

I suppose I was overly comfortable in the frozen outdoors, while he was on edge every minute of every hour and unable to sleep.

“What
is
that?” he asked as he stepped out onto the moonlit snow.

I followed him out to see what we could see. The sky was clear and the moon was full, but the ground beneath us was shaking.

“An avalanche,” I told him. “Over there.”

I pointed at the mist rising up from the slope.

I was thankful we were safe on higher ground.

“The plane will be completely buried,” Aaron said. Then he turned and regarded me with awe. “You were right.”

I nodded and returned to the tent to go back to sleep.

o0o

“I have to ask,” Aaron said the next morning as he climbed sleepily from the tent. I was sitting before a fire, melting ice for water. “What does she look like?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Your wife.” He sat down across from me. “You said she was the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen.”

I chuckled and dug out my phone, which I’d powered up only twice since the crash—the second time to check for service up here on the ridge. Of course there hadn’t been any, otherwise our situation would have been vastly different in that moment.

I’d since turned off the mobile network to avoid draining the battery.

“Want to see her?” I shaded the screen with my glove to search through my gallery.

Aaron moved around the fire to sit beside me.

Most of the pictures had been taken during various climbs around the world which, naturally, was quite impressing Aaron, but then I found the three photos from the time I spent with Carla in Boston after we were married. That was almost eight years ago.

“This is her and Kaleigh.” I held the phone up for Aaron to see. “We took this picture at the Public Garden in Boston. See the swan boats in the background? We’d just gotten off a tour around the lagoon. Kaleigh loved watching the ducks paddle their little feet. She’s such a cutie.”

I scrolled to the picture of Carla standing on the bridge, posing like a supermodel, her long blond hair wavy and loose about her shoulders.

“Wow, you’re right,” Aaron said. “She is gorgeous.”

I searched for the video I’d taken of her that same day when we were lying on a blanket in the shade of a giant oak. Every time I got a new phone, I uploaded the video so I’d always have it with me, but I hadn’t looked at it in a while.

I clicked on the icon.

“
Hey baby
…” she said in a seductive voice. Lying on her belly, she leaned up on her elbows and looked into the camera. “
Someday I want you to buy me a house on a lake where I can plant purple flowers.
”

“
Why purple?”
I asked
.

“Because it’s my favorite color. Didn’t you know that
?”

I shook my head. “
What kind of house do you want
?” I asked, humoring her.

“
Something rustic.
” She spoke with a sexy, flirtatious glimmer in her eyes. “
With a screened in gazebo next to the lake so we can sleep outside on hot summer nights
.”

I reached out and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “
That sounds like a dream
.”

Carla inched closer to the camera lens. “
Dreams can come true, you know
.”

The video ended abruptly and I wished there was more.

“So that’s her,” I said to Aaron. I showed him a few pictures of my climbs and then powered down the phone and slipped it back into my jacket pocket.

He didn’t comment on the climbs but bowed his head and nodded. “I see why you want to get home to her.”

But did I really want that?
To be honest, I’d been thinking more about the documentary that morning, wondering if our crash had been on the news. It must have been. The jet was owned by a freaking billionaire.

“Yeah,” I said, not being entirely truthful. “And after all this, I think God must be trying to tell me something. It’s the second time I’ve stared death in the eye, and it’s the second time I’ve survived. It has to be some kind of miracle. How lucky can one man be?”

“You are definitely lucky,” he replied, gesturing toward the phone in my pocket.

Was he referring to Carla, I wondered, or all the amazing climbs I’d been on?

“I guess it’s time I faced up to my responsibilities,” I said.

Aaron looked at me strangely. I still don’t understand why.

Chapter Thirteen

“What’s that?” Aaron asked the next day when I emptied out my backpack onto the floor of the tent. He reached for the leather-bound book that I’d tossed aside on the sleeping bag.

“It’s a journal,” I told him. “I thought it would be a good idea to document what was happening in Iceland during the filming in case someone wanted to write a book about Atherton. He is a celebrity after all.”