The Mountain Can Wait Read Online Free PDF Page A

you, but you have to breathe.”
    Her eyes were on him, black as the water. Her small mouth stretched back in a grimace as she raked and gulped for air. He moved closer but could feel the surface of the pond bowing under his weight. Freezing water seeped onto his chest and he knew he wouldn’t be able to get any closer.
    “Breathe slowly, Erin, calm down. Good girl. Get yourself to the edge where you fell in. That ice held you before; it’ll hold now. Get your arms up over the edge.”
    Curtis was behind him with the toboggan. “You’ll be okay, Erin,” he yelled, the words scared, tight.
    She dog-paddled to the far edge of the hole and grabbed at it. Jags of ice fell away and bobbed and slushed in the water and the hole grew bigger. She screamed and coughed and cried.
    “No, Erin. Turn around and come to this edge. The ice is stronger here, towards me. Hurry.”
    She turned and paddled and got her arms up over the edge of the hole and it held her.
    Tom pushed the curled end of the toboggan toward her. “Wrap your arms around it.”
    She was calmer now, blue-lipped. She wrapped her wet arms around the toboggan and he pulled. He moved her a few inches out of the water but then she let go, slipping back into the hole.
    “I can’t,” she said, her voice slurred.
    “You can.”
    “Too hard.”
    “It’s not. You try harder, now. Get both arms right around it and hold your hands together.”
    “I can’t.”
    “There’s no time. Come on, now, both arms right around it.”
    She tried again and slipped once more, this time up to her neck. She got her arms back over the edge and laid her head on them.
    Tom started to shiver, was wearing only his cotton shirt. He closed his eyes. Okay, he thought, okay. He breathed in deeply as if to make himself lighter and spread his legs to distribute his weight, and shuffled closer and closer until his face was inches from hers. The ice moaned under him. She’d been in the water for at least three minutes and now she had no strength; all her blood had rushed to the middle of her body, leaving her limbs heavy and numb.
    “Get her out,” Curtis yelled, his voice wet.
    “Shut the hell up.”
    “I can’t feel my body,” Erin said, her voice small, the words without beginning or end, one long word.
    Without thinking too much more about it, he plunged his hands into the water and grabbed her under her arms, heaving her out and rolling away from the hole in one swift movement. Sliding in his boots, he carried her to the other end of the pond.
    He took off her clothes and also his shirt, pulled her against his skin, and wrapped his coat over them both. He held her like that until her lips turned pink and then dressed her in his own and Curtis’s dry clothes and bundled her onto the toboggan. They covered the distance back to the house in an hour, and while Curtis loaded the fireplace, Tom again undressed himself and Erin and wrapped their bodies together in blankets. He lay with her close to the fire, her cold skin pressed into his, and imagined his body heat radiating through her. She shivered for more than an hour, and when that subsided she was mostly still, shaking periodically as if her body, now warm, moved with nightmares of a remembered cold. Curtis was asleep on the couch and Erin slept too; Tom rocked with the rhythm of her breathing, unsure of how to move away. He wasn’t in the habit of holding his children.

5
    Heading down the road with his camp trailer hitched securely to his truck, Tom glanced out the window toward his mother’s house. Samantha had waited in the driveway while he packed the last of his things into the truck, but after a loose-fingered wave, Erin had gone into the house. Now they were both gone and the front door was shut. Samantha would be offering Erin coffee, or something to eat, and then would help her unpack her clothes in his old bedroom, where she always stayed when he went north for the planting season.
    He turned onto the Hart Highway and