It has been raining steadily since Bronwyn left the station almost four hours ago. She was wide awake, disconcerted by the sound of her lids scraping across her dry eyeballs. Despite her exhaustion, she hasn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time. As soon as she got home she peeled off her dress, hurled her shoes toward the bedroom, and came out to the porch couch. She’s been here ever since, rattling around under a sheet. And now it’s almost 4:00 a.m. and she can already hear a few waking birds. The dark is alive and porous. Dawn is clawing up the horizon, fighting with the rain like a scene-stealing actor impatient to make an appearance.
She always believed in her future with Reed. But why? There was never any hard data. It was all hunch and hope, the kind of lazy thinking Diane used to deplore. Bronwyn thought she’d cured herself of such thinking. She likes to think her opinions are fact-based, scientifically verifiable.
What exactly did she do to lose Reed? Was there a single moment where one thing sent their relationship perilously off course? Or were there innumerable miniscule things that, done differently, might have changed the outcome? How could you possibly know what those things were? Crucial, but so unknowable. The Butterfly Effect, sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Maybe she is just congenitally bad at relationships and will end up alone like her mother. Maggie slept with Bronwyn’s father a couple of times and never saw him again. He was an older man, a history professor she met on a train. He was probably married. There was no point, Maggie said, in Bronwyn looking for him, as Maggie never learned his last name. Bert Somebody. Who even knew if the Bert was true.
Perhaps one initial condition was that she and Reed were never suited to each other in the first place. Who knows? Relationships seem like fractals for which Bronwyn has no equation, oddly like the weather that defies easy computing with its multitude of variables: air currents and mountain ranges and bodies of water and gravity and rotation and humidity and wind speed. On and on. Everything in flux. This is what draws Bronwyn to weather, the salmagundi of forces that are nearly impossible to parse with absolute accuracy. Maybe previously uncharted human factors are also involved. Human intention. Human will. Human desire. A measurable energy attached to thought. She knows too much to rule that out. And far too little. Sometimes the things she knows are stashed too deeply for her to even realize she knows them. Then suddenly she does know. The onion peeled, her vision clears.
Though now her vision is far from clear about anything. Snippets of yesterday have been scattered randomly in different parts of her brain. She lifts and examines them. Reed’s pitying look. The celestial look of the light on the beach. The heat in her brain and the pounding singularity of her focus. Stuart saying, We’re not scientists. So glib. So rude. She feels a footprint planted on her heart.
She can’t call Lanny until at least 9:00 a.m. Lanny is off from teaching for the summer and she likes to sleep, long and hard. Her husband, Tom, takes the bus to the city to work in insurance, or some such thing, and Lanny sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Often until ten or eleven or even noon. Once she confessed she didn’t even wake until 2:00 p.m. It is not in Bronwyn’s constitution to sleep that much. Perhaps her body could sleep that long, but her mind always wants to scold her body to attention.
She remembers it’s the solstice. Just her luck that she has to endure the longest day of the year when she feels so low. She makes herself stay put in hopes of more dozing. At 5:00 a.m. she glides along the uppermost surface of sleep, a state still hinged to waking consciousness that disallows the pleasure of oblivion. At 7:15 a.m. she finally concedes that the day has begun. The rain has stopped but the foliage is shedding droplets noisily and sunlight illuminates everything, spreading tiny rainbows and making every water-sheathed leaf and stem precious. The world is unusually active, as if it’s preparing itself for something. Her forecast was right after all, clearing by morning just as she predicted, but being correct doesn’t yield much satisfaction right now.
Despite the rain, the river looks unusually indolent today, almost sluggish. From where she lies she sees a hawk out on the water swooping low, intent on some prey. She will not succumb to the terrible inadequacy Reed has made her feel. She will climb out of this chasm into which she has fallen. She will pay close attention to the faulty functioning of her brain and try to repair it. She suspects that the antibiotic she took in late May might be responsible for her odd experiences yesterday. The doctor said it was a virus that was making her so tired. Then he prescribed an antibiotic. Didn’t he know antibiotics don’t cure viruses? Why do some doctors insist on doing that? Of course it is her fault for taking it, despite knowing better.
At 8:30 a.m. she can’t hold off calling any longer. Lanny grunts a greeting and adjusts herself in the sheets, waking reluctantly. But Bronwyn is out of the gate, already talking. As little as a grunt from Lanny can make Bronwyn feels she’s back in eighth grade, or even that she’s five or six years old again. She’s known Lanny that long; they could be sisters. Bronwyn doesn’t care how juvenile she sounds, how angry at Reed and his parents and his privilege. After ranting about Reed, she rants about Stuart, then whispers about her fear that she’s losing her mind, on the solstice no less. She pauses, on the cusp of crying, but not crying. Lanny has not said a thing. Bronwyn stops to listen. “Are you laughing?”
“No.”
“Yes, I heard you laughing.”
“I didn’t know who you were at first. You didn’t announce yourself. I thought you were some kind of weird recording. But I’m really not laughing at you.”
“Well, there’s no laughing with me because I’m not laughing. It isn’t funny.” But then, suddenly, it is funny, and Bronwyn begins to chuckle, a low sound fizzing up from her gut, involuntary, biological, unexpectedly delicious.
Lanny is fully awake now. “Call in sick,” she instructs Bronwyn. “We’re going away, you and I. I’m going crazy here anyway. It’s hot and everyone but me is working. I’ll come up there and we’ll go camping.”
“What about Tom?”
“He’s under a deadline. I’ve hardly seen him since school ended.”
“It’s been ages since I’ve camped. I have no idea if I still have any of my gear.”
“I’ve got everything. Find a sleeping bag and pull together some food and I’ll bring everything else. Junk food, comfort food, whatever you’re in the mood for, I don’t care. Oh—can you get us a campsite somewhere? I’ll pick you up in a few hours, as long as it takes to throw together my things and drive up there. I’m fast when I’m motivated.”
What a relief to have a plan and to be in the hands of someone she trusts. It was always this way in school, Lanny took the lead. She was the big brave one, the risk-taker. Bronwyn held back, formulating questions, calculating odds, not exactly the brains of their team, but certainly the thinker.
At 9:00 a.m. she calls the station and tells Nicole she expects to be out for two days. “Are you really sick?” Nicole asks. “Or is it more like mental health?”
Bronwyn clears her throat. “Of course I’m really sick.”
“You want to talk to Stuart?”
“God, no. Just tell him I sound bad. Chip will probably be happy to fill in for me.”
Chip, a reporter, has subbed for her a few times. He doesn’t have a deep understanding of weather, and Stuart doesn’t seem to like him much, but he can put together a passable report from the National Weather Service feed, and he has an acceptable, if somewhat boring, camera presence. Bronwyn likes having someone dull replace her occasionally so her contribution is more appreciated.
Once off the phone a little blip of glee comes over her, a feeling that she’s given Stuart the finger. Still not dressed, she wanders around the house in her underpants, a little aimless, making a pile on the living room floor of things she will take. She loves how bracing it is to sleep outside and wishes she camped more frequently, but the demands of school and work have made it hard in the last few years. She remembers her assignment to get them a campsite, and finds a place online, just off the Kancamagus Highway in the White Mountains, not far from Mount Washington. A surge comes over her—not well-being exactly, but the possibility of well-being awaiting her in the future. Outdoor living and some nights of solid sleep—surely they’ll begin to repair her bruised heart.
People often laugh upon meeting Lanny and Bronwyn together. What they see is a snapshot of an unlikely pair. Lanny, a high school gym teacher, is six feet tall and burly; she clips her hair short. Bronwyn is five-foot-two and slender, her long, wavy, dark-red hair a defining feature. Next, people notice their contrasting behavioral traits: Lanny’s boisterousness and lack of a verbal filter, Bronwyn’s public reserve. It is clear to everyone that theirs is a friendship born of complementarity. But what is not visible is the long history that holds the friendship together, their knowledge of each other’s families and of the private pains of the past. Bronwyn was there in early high school when Lanny’s parents went through an ugly divorce. Lanny knows how difficult it was for Bronwyn to grow up with a frightened and often bitter single mother. They both remember Lanny getting her first period in seventh-grade math class, blood pooling over the seat. They remember Bronwyn’s broken arm from a ninth-grade bicycle accident. Bronwyn attended most of Lanny’s high school basketball games, and Lanny came to Bronwyn’s science fairs. After Lanny got her license she would often borrow her father’s car and take Bronwyn on road trips to the shore, or the Delaware River. Sometimes they took the bus into the city and wandered around the West Village. Lanny liked shocking people. She was the first among their classmates to get a tattoo, not a delicate one, but a dragon breathing fire that spiraled around her left arm. For almost an entire year in high school she wore the same pair of neon-orange cargo pants and a red paisley shirt. But in certain arenas Bronwyn and Lanny’s tastes have always been identical. They have always liked the same junk food (nachos above all else), and they are both hooked on the same old movies (Gone with the Wind) and old TV shows (“Seinfeld” and “The X Files”). Though tough on the outside, they are both closet romantics. Bronwyn has no idea how she would get through life without a friend like Lanny, even though they sometimes go through long periods when they’re out of touch.
Now they sit in low camp chairs at their campsite overlooking the Swift River, sipping bottles of beer, mesmerized by the river’s pell-mell rush over the rocks, bathing them in its negative ions. Chipmunks and nuthatches dash here and there. The light is a delicate damask; the air gloves their skin, a temperate seventy degrees. Nature could not have engineered a more perfect situation for soothing a human being.
The sun slips behind the trees, dimming the air, imparting a contemplative mood to the landscape. Lanny wants to climb Mount Washington tomorrow. Bronwyn is game as long as she gets a solid sleep. She hopes she’s in good-enough shape for such a climb. They prepare a dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce and salad and are in their sleeping bags by 9:00 p.m., the tent flaps open to the last embers of light. Night critters are venturing out. A bat circles overhead. An owl hoots. Tree frogs bleat. She and Lanny breathe in unison, as if entrained.
When the birds awaken her before 5:00 a.m., Bronwyn takes measure of herself. A good sleep has swept away apprehension. She feels surprisingly rested, ready for adventure, and eager to kick the Reed chapter of her life into history. She stares at Lanny, still slack-jawed in sleep, and slathers her friend with love as if spreading her with a thick layer of honey. Lanny knows her better than anyone in the world and will always be her best friend.
It’s cold—high thirties, maybe forties—and geodes of frost still linger in the patches of shade. But it’s mostly clear, a few high clouds to the west that Bronwyn deems unthreatening. Once the temperature rises a little it will be a perfect day for hiking. She nudges Lanny awake, pulls on some clothes, and begins scrambling eggs. Within forty-five minutes they’re packing small backpacks with sandwiches and nuts and chocolate and two full quarts of water for each of them. They have rain gear, extra clothes, a first aid kit, compass, flashlight, and map. Though it’s been a while since Bronwyn has made an expedition like this, she knows the protocol: be prepared for all eventualities, and know, above all, that the weather can change.
“I won’t be able to keep up with you,” Bronwyn says. “You’re in much better shape than I am.”
“I’m not as fit as I look.”
“Last night I dreamed you were wearing those orange cargo pants and that paisley shirt.”
“Oh god, what was I thinking back then? I should have kept those pants as a souvenir of my youthful stupidity.”
Sunlight bristles over the picnic table and the day charges forward, calling them to action. At 6:03 a.m. they’re on the road in Lanny’s Subaru. The eastern sky is clear. A few stringy cirrus clouds, not of particular concern, laze high to the west. Temperatures are in the low fifties now and rising. Spectacular weather for the White Mountains, spectacular weather by any standards. Climbing a mountain seems like such a pure and uncomplicated thing to do, and it gives Bronwyn a satisfying sense of purpose.
Bronwyn squints through the windshield and holds her hand out the open window.
“What’re you doing?” Lanny asks.
“Sizing up the day.”
“Highly scientific, I see.”
“Actually, it is scientific. Observation is where science begins. You establish norms and departures from norms. But it all begins with looking and noticing.”
Lanny laughs. “Always calculating, aren’t you?”
They set out on the Jewell Trail at 7:20a.m., Lanny in the lead taking long, aggressive strides. The trail, ascending along Mount Washington’s western ridge, is the longest but most gradual trail to the summit. It will take them four to five hours to reach the top and another three or four hours to descend. Allowing an hour for lunch and rest breaks, they estimate they’ll be done by six p.m., safely back at the campsite before nightfall.
The first part of the trail slopes gently uphill through a deciduous forest, underfoot a soft bed of leaves and earth, moist from spring rain, muddy in some places. The air is still cool, but sunlight, yellow and sweet as butterscotch, speckles the forest floor.
Lanny swings her arms and sings “I’m Happy When I’m Hiking” with child-like abandon. She has a talent for sinking into the moment and plumbing it fully. Bronwyn herself speculates too much about the future, effacing the present. When you situate your mind in the future you do not feel the soft loam giving way as each boot hits the ground. You do not hear your knees creak, or feel the sweat slithering down the back of your neck, or see the garter snake making his quick getaway. You do not hear the birdcalls or revel in the sunrise. You scarcely hear yourself breathe.
When the trail crosses a brook they stop for a break and sit on rocks, snacking on walnuts and raisins, sipping their water. They do not speak, and the silence seals their bond.
“It feels like it’s going to rain.” Lanny peers up through the canopy to the few chips of visible sky.
“It won’t rain,” Bronwyn says.
“If you say so. You’d know, I guess.”
“I’m paid to know.” But in fact she hasn’t checked the National Weather Service. She has consulted only her own instinct today, reports from her pores.
They allow a foursome of twenty-something men to pass them, and Bronwyn feels a twinge of envy for their youth and fitness. Thirty isn’t old, but it’s getting there, and something about the springy, sinewy calves of those men brings this home acutely.
A series of switchbacks takes them up the side of the ridge, and by mid-morning they emerge above the tree-line. The air is noticeably cooler and windy, and though blue sky still predominates, a posse of dark-bellied nimbus clouds rolls in from the west. After so much time under the trees, the massive stretch of sky is disquieting. Light but dark. At once revealing and undisclosing. They’ve lost their protection. Lanny was right, rain is all but certain now. Bronwyn should have known better than to think they could reach the summit without some weather to contend with. Nevertheless, the clouds are still high enough to permit an impressive view of the Presidential Range: Mount Jefferson, Mount Adams, and Mount Madison preside like a receiving line to the north. We’re here, we’re always reliably here, they seem to be saying. Ahead, along a ridge directly in front of them, stands the peak of Mount Washington, still a fair hike away. A sudden gust of wind kicks up from the west-northwest and careens into Lanny so she teeters, almost falls.
“Jeez, that was rude!”
“You should put on your rain gear to break the wind,” Bronwyn says.
“Yes, Mom.”
“I know, I’m sorry—” Bronwyn can’t stand this cautionary role of hers, but she plays it well, as she always has. They both take out their jackets and put them on without speaking.
“Good to go,” Lanny shouts over the wind.
The trail now requires extra caution as it ascends over boulders. Ahead of them hikers dot the mountainside like a herd of colorfully jacketed goats. Bronwyn is highly alert, highly focused, shifting her attention between monitoring Lanny’s uncertain progress over the rocks and scrutinizing the advancing front which is clotted with black pannus clouds, a sure sign of precipitation to come. She tries to estimate the speed of the front’s approach and surmise what it will deliver. The winds are gusting at thirty to forty miles per hour, she guesses, which makes talking almost impossible. Worse, it makes the mountain unfriendly, even sinister. She hates this job of trying to forecast with incomplete data. There is so much about which she cannot be sure. Ahead of her Lanny marches on, apparently unperturbed. Is Bronwyn crazy to think they should quit? Yes, the summit is in sight, but it will take them at least another hour to get there.
“Maybe we should turn around,” Bronwyn suggests, yelling over the wind.
“You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not giving up now. Not when we’re so close to the top.”
“It’s farther than it looks.”
Lanny makes a face. Bronwyn vacillates. It isn’t clear who’s in charge. But Bronwyn feels Lanny’s intransigence, and it would be foolish to separate. Bronwyn gives a slight nod and they continue.
Because Bronwyn is who she is—because her body is earth-sentient and she has spent her life thinking about weather—she feels the up-draft before it manifests, warm air rising, smashing into the cooler air above. She pictures the fracas of colliding molecules overhead, imagines she hears them.
“I don’t like this,” she says.
Lanny either doesn’t hear, or chooses not to respond.
The clouds have assumed the steely look of military tanks; they knock against the sky’s boundaries. The cog railway, chugging uphill, emits noxious black smoke that rises like a feisty runt to test itself against the storm clouds. Sheet lightning explodes, whitening the sky, as if to erase all memories, making a clean palette for itself. It pixelates everything, illuminating Lanny and making of her a hallucination. One one-thousand, two one-thousand. Thunder detonates. They both jump. Rain follows, sudden, hard, cold, slicing the air at a sharp angle, obscuring everything.
“Stay there,” Bronwyn shouts to Lanny, leaning into the wind, bent at the waist, eyes slitted. She reaches Lanny, grabs her arm, tugs. Lanny, taller than Bronwyn and much heavier, resists. Then, without warning she yields, allowing herself to be guided to the nearest boulder where they both crouch under a ledge. Lanny says something made unintelligible by the tumult. She leans closer. “We’re going to die,” she says directly into Bronwyn’s ear.
Bronwyn shakes her head, an emphatic no. They aren’t safe here, but it’s better than venturing into the open in such low visibility to make grounding rods of themselves. She thinks briefly of Reed, how he would react to hearing she had died in an electrical storm on Mount Washington. Would he feel remorse? Would he think his rejection drove her to recklessness?
Rain is everywhere, petulant, soaking her waterproof jacket, running in full-blown rivers down her torso. Lanny, famously al ways-warm Lanny, shivers. Bronwyn pulls her close to help them both preserve heat. What fools they are. Bronwyn should have steered them away from this mountain whose weather lore she knows so well. There are plenty of other mountains they could have climbed with far less fickle weather. They should have turned back at the first sighting of storm clouds. She shouldn’t have relied on her own instinct, should have investigated the weather reports before they set out.
An aura surrounds them, cool and merciless, the beckoning arm of Death. It is so senseless to die this way, accidentally, beneath nature’s fist. She is overcome with fury, with a wish for things to be different than they are, furious for all the things she cannot change, beginning with this moment and bleeding back into everything else: Reed’s disinterest, Stuart’s stupidity, her mother’s negativity. Another flash blanches the sky, stealing all dimensions but two. Scarcely a second passes before thunder cracks.
Rain turns to hail, vitriolic and personal, each pellet big as a Barbie head. Her rage spikes. Her brain seems to pucker and roll inside her skull. Her head is on fire. Her vision wavers. She sloughs her backpack and pushes herself to standing.
“What’re you doing?” Lanny shouts.
Entangled in something, Bronwyn can hardly speak. “Stay there,” she croaks.
Gripped by the storm, enshrined in its clamor, she turns west to its source and folds herself into the symphonic chaos. Her chest throbs. She strains to keep her eyelids apart. Hail batters her cheeks. Red fills her vision. Clouds swirl around her, malevolent evaporating tongues. She summons all her will, heaving with the effort, with rage and need. She hurls forth the volcanic heat in her brain, her eyes like rapiers jousting with the crazed molecules. She slides through a portal and is sundered from any sense of self she has known, wholly devoted to some other entity, hearing only her own strained breath, life at its limit.
The mountaintop is still. Hailstones litter the rocks. The sun glistens. The sky is blue, the air gilded. There isn’t a breath of wind. Bronwyn scans the Presidentials, etched in perfect clarity against the guileless, cloudless blue. Where exactly is she? Who is she? A warm presence at her side. A human body. A woman. Her old friend Lanny, churning out sound that could be laughter.
“My god. What just happened?”
Bronwyn pants. The laughter comes at her like a raucous Greenland piteraq. She shakes her head, sits on a rock, cradles her head, sniffs the post-rain ozone and petrichor.
“Bronwyn, talk to me. That was wild. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you did something to call off that storm.”
Bronwyn reaches for words, but they’re sealed in a remote part of her body. Even if she could find them, they could not touch or express her experience of what has happened.
More laughter rolls from Lanny, then stops abruptly. “I do know better and I still think you did something. You made that storm go away. I watched you. I swear to god you cast some spell.”
Bronwyn remains motionless, depleted, baffled.