The bridge snapped back as she watched. Empty.
Alexa couldn’t believe her eyes. She grabbed the handrail, climbed the first step, and leaned forward. Charlie was gone. The fact was too horrifying to register. “Charlieee!”
Then the bridge jerked like a phantom was crossing. Alexa twisted so she could see underneath it. Charlie was hanging from the sagging center of the bridge. His boots, twelve feet above the rushing river, dangled like rearview mirror charms. Then they kicked to life. He was there, alive.
Don’t just stand here.
The stair platform looked stable. She climbed the final two steps, but the bridge, listing to the right, obscured her view of Charlie. She jumped off the platform and rushed to the edge. Her heart dropped like a stone. Charlie was monkeying closer. If he let go, he would be swept away by rapids.
She dropped to her knees, lay flat, and popped her head over the bank. Straight down, in gray dusk, she made out a lip of rock, coated with mist. Large enough to stand on. Closer to Charlie.
“You’re almost here,” she cried, her voice swallowed. “Keep going.”
He swung his hips and moved his right hand along a thick cable. His left hand followed until his hands were inches apart. Then he swung his hips and shimmied his right hand along the cable again.
Alexa lowered three feet down onto the rock overhang, got to her feet, and pressed her back to the rock wall. The ledge was more spacious than she’d thought. The bridge platform was above her now. If she stretched right, she could touch Charlie’s lifeline cable.
“You’ve got this,” she screamed.
Charlie’s eyes were panicked-horse big. His mouth opened, but his words were stolen by the roaring torrent. There’s no way he would have been able to hang on if he’d been wearing his backpack, Alexa realized. Thrusting his body forward—he was eight feet away—took more effort as the cable sloped upward. The tonnage of water below leaped and roiled.
“Hang on!”
He slid his left hand close to the right, swung his hips again, and moved his right hand along the coiled wire. Five more feet. If he could kick his feet to the rock ledge, she’d grab his waist and pull for all she was worth. For all her trespasses.
She braced and peeked down at another rock lip, just large enough to stand on. If Charlie could get his feet to it, and lean into her, she could grab him by the shoulders and pull him up.
Charlie must have thought likewise, because he thrust his legs like a gymnast. His boots nicked the ledge, dislodging a flurry of stones, and swung back over the water. The momentum caused him to lose his grip, and now he hung one-armed. Alexa covered her mouth. In slow motion, his remaining fingers began relinquishing one digit at a time. In a Herculean effort as his pinkie and ring finger lost traction, he thrust his body through space and landed with a grunt on the lower shelf, chest level to her ledge, one hand wrapped around her ankle, the other clutching rock.
Alexa tumbled backward, landing on her butt. Charlie still gripped her ankle. She leaned forward until she could grab his free wrist with one hand and his collar with the other. “Let go. I have you.” He relinquished her ankle, and she snaked her arms through his armpits. They met each other’s eyes as Alexa pulled with all her might, straining, leaning back, inching him onto the ledge. When his head and torso were secure, and only his legs hung over, she let go and rolled sideways, her heart sprinting, her arms trembling, her ankle throbbing.
She now understood how a mother could lift a car off her child.
Charlie wormed forward and dragged his legs up. He curled in a ball. The thin strip of skin between the back of his hair and collar made Alexa cry for the fragility of life. She thought of how Benny and Noah had almost lost their daddy. She patted his back, felt his tremors come and go in waves. “You did it. You did it.”
Charlie shuddered. She remembered him as a toddler. That duck on wheels he pulled after Mom died. Around and around the den. His way of mourning. His toddler labyrinth.
She wiped her nose and was about to say she loved him when he lifted his head, his eyes wide. “I saw her.”
“What? Who?”
“The missing woman.” He gulped air. “I think it’s her.”
His words skipped off her brain like a stone. All she could fathom was the miracle of her brother, panting beside her. “You’re safe.”
“Lexi!” He raised up, sat back on his haunches, rubbed his upper arms. “We’ve got to help her. Maybe she’s alive.”
His words snagged in her cerebrum this time. “What did you see?”
“When I was hanging over the river, I saw a body.” His voice was thick. “At the shore, squished between big boulders. I could see legs and a head. It’s got to be that woman..” He wiped his eyes and left a smear of blood.
“You’re bleeding.”
Charlie looked at his right palm. Blood trickled toward his wrist. He checked his left, and saw it was bleeding, too. Sliced by cable. He wiped them on his pants and got shakily to his feet. “Remember what that Māori man said to you? About grave danger? Guess he was right.”
Alexa rose as well, keeping a hand on the rock wall to steady herself. “That’s stupid.” But is it? This whole experience is a curse. Her words evaporated as she looked up at the riverbank, and then at the sky. Between trees she spotted one star, and it gave her hope. She found a foothold, clutched the cliff edge, and boosted herself up. Charlie followed with a grunt. “Good thing this is granite and not limestone.”
When they were back to the beginning, at the foot of the listing swing bridge, where she watched her only sibling fly into the air, she asked why.
“A limestone ledge might have crumbled from our weight. You can count on granite.”
She remembered something whizzing by her face. “What happened to the bridge?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with the quake. I’m lucky the whole thing didn’t collapse.”
She took his arm. “I’m sorry, Charlie. For all the times I wouldn’t play with you when we were little. For not building LEGO forts.”
He met her eyes in the almost-dark. “Where did that come from?”
“I was a crappy sister. I never read to you or played with you.” Her throat swelled. She couldn’t go on.
“You weren’t responsible for me.” His voice quavered, too. “You were just a kid. A little kid who lost her mother. Benny wouldn’t suddenly take care of Noah if something happened to me or Mel.” He went quiet, probably aware that what he said had almost come true.
She stayed quiet, too, amid the symphony of nature, wondering if her guilt would lift.
“Come on.” Charlie broke the silence. “We’ve got to take a look. See if we can help her.”
She recoiled. “I’m not going down there. It’s too dangerous. You nearly died.”
But she knew he was right and followed him as he glided along the cliff above the river, fifteen or twenty feet past the crippled swing bridge. He leaned over, moved down a few more feet, and leaned again. “Look.”
She looked, following his finger downward. In the waning light she spotted a log—twenty or twenty-five feet below—wedged between two shoreline boulders. She fumbled in her jacket pocket, past a balled sock, for her Maglite and turned it on. The powerful beam, designed for first responders, turned the log into a human form. She swept the light back and forth, and made out legs, one bent backward. This was definitely a body. She directed the beam past the boulder hiding the torso, and made out a face—pallid and still. She looked for movement while Charlie screamed, “Diana.”
The figure was not responsive to light or voice. Charlie screamed again.
“I think it’s the woman we heard talking with her sister yesterday,” Alexa told him. “When we were behind the rocks.”
“Damn,” Charlie said. “She must have fallen off the bridge.”
“How in the world did you see her?”
“I don’t know. The mist cleared and there she was.”
Alexa wondered if Diana could have survived. Falls are the second-most common cause of injury-related death after traffic accidents. Height of fall and type of ground were the main mortality factors. Twenty or so feet from here to there, Alexa guessed, with a crash landing on boulders. Her blood went icy. “We need a helicopter to lift her out. Use the radio.”
Charlie patted his pockets. “Crap. The radio is gone. I was holding it on the bridge. I dropped it.”
Alexa didn’t know what to do.
“I’ll stay,” Charlie said. “You go back to the lodge and get someone.”
The track was separating them again. “Are you sure?”
“It’s the right thing to do. I don’t want her to be alone.”
I don’t want to be alone either.