Next thing I knew, Fawn was in the helicopter. She was sobbing again and rubbing Flip’s arm. I handed her a tissue from my pack. She wiped her face.
“Thanks, Riley.” Then she looked up at me. “Are you doing okay? Some personal assistant I am.”
“I’m fine . . . well, no, that’s a lie. I’m sick to my stomach, and I hate that all this happened.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“But now I know why you guys fight.”
“Huh?”
I smiled. “You and Flip. You fight because you’re brother and sister. Just like me and Brady. Now it all makes sense.”
“Oh.”
“Riley, I don’t think Fawn really wants to talk about that right now.” Dad sat on a seat, wiping his face with a damp towel.
“No, it’s okay, Mr. Hart. Yes, Flip’s my brother, and we do fight — but we’re mostly kidding. I really love him a lot.”
That made me think about my brother and how mean I am to him in a non-kidding way. All of a sudden I felt really bad.
One of the medics came over to hook an IV up to Flip.
“Gotta get him some fluids,” he said. “What happened up there, anyway? This guy looks like he’s in good enough shape to handle that hike.”
Dad explained. “Someone up above us lost their backpack, and it hit him. He fell probably seventy-five feet. We don’t know how he landed, but I’m glad he didn’t go off the side.”
“What happened to the person who lost the backpack? Did they fall too?”
We all looked at each other.
“Did you guys ever find the person who lost the backpack?” Fawn asked.
Dad sat up straighter. “No, I was so shocked at what was happening to Flip that I didn’t even think to look for that person.”
“Well, that just doesn’t make sense,” the medic said. “You’d think that if they fell too, someone would have seen something. And if someone just dropped a pack, they’d meet you all down at the bottom to find out if everyone was okay, or apologize, or something.”
“Maybe they were too scared and just ran away,” I said.
“That would be cowardly,” Fawn said. “How could they live with themselves?”
The medic got up and looked out the window. “Looks like we’ll be touching down in about five minutes. We’ll have some paramedics meeting us out on the helipad with a gurney for our friend here. We’ll need to clear him out, so just stay put until I tell you to move.”