On
the day it happened, I was out for a hike with Jonathan. It was, we both knew,
the last hike we’d be taking together for a long time, possibly forever. We’d
graduated high school in the spring, and in less than a week, we were headed to
college—Jonathan to California, me to Maine. We hadn’t talked much about it, but
I, at least, was quietly realistic about the chances of our relationship
surviving the separation.
Since
it was an undeclared special occasion, we made the hour drive to Glen Wahnetah
to see the falls. If you’re familiar with the park, you know they now have
safety rails leading up the mountain to the falls. If you don’t know what
prompted the decision to install them, you’re about to find out.
As
we walked, I kept Jonathan to the outside, between me and the sheer
sixty-foot-or-more drop the trail skirted. I wasn’t a fan of heights, never
have been, and stepping within even three feet of the edge gave me the sort of
shiver that reminds you intensely of your bladder.
I’d
been here before, but never on a weekend, and I was shocked and a little
horrified to see there were people up here with strollers. Kids running amok, scampering over spray-slick rocks
where the path narrowed ahead and met the falls, screaming and chasing each
other with sticks mere feet away from the yawning chasm.
As
we came around a curve, a woman and man stood with their infant, safely
strapped into his stroller, and an unrestrained little girl in a white dress
with tiny strawberries printed all over it, her cornsilk hair in little red
plastic barrettes. She couldn’t have been more than three. While Mom and Dad
struggled to unwedge a bushy branch from the wheel of the stroller, Little Miss
Strawberry bolted toward the seductively forbidden cliff edge.
I
remember saying, “Whoops!” A high pitched, light-hearted warning, meant to stop
the girl, or slow her down. When she didn’t stop, I darted across Jonathan in a
few long strides, meaning to step between the baby and the ledge.
But
the grass tuft I stepped on was a lie; it curved out and over the edge of the
cliff with no solid ground beneath it. One minute I was walking on my own two
legs; the next, the cliff was gone, and my body was full of hollow, jolting
terror. The ground was so abruptly not
there, I didn’t even have time to try and catch myself.
I remember trying to force my body to go limp
as I curled into a loose ball, protecting my head and face as I bounced off the
rocks, down and down and down. Through the bump
and crack and rattle, I could faintly hear screaming.
I’m still not sure whether the screaming was my own, or if it belonged to the
people watching me fall.
When
I landed, spread-eagle on my back at the bottom, I had a broken leg and wrist,
a few cracked ribs. And I knew that. I remember looking up at the cliff, faint
with the knowledge I’d fallen all that way, and all I had was a few broken
bones and some bumps and bruises. For a moment, I was the luckiest girl in the
world.
Until
the basketball-sized boulder I’d dislodged in my fall dropped like a cannonball
onto my lower belly. The world flared red, and disappeared into black.
I
don’t remember much else: flashes of people yelling my name, telling me to hang
on, during the six hours it took a rescue crew to get me out. They had to bring
in climbers and one of those special basket-stretchers. I’m told I was awake,
but all I did was scream. Sometimes I wish I could still get away with that.
The
girl’s family wanted to visit me, once I’d been through surgery a few times and
been stabilized, but I refused to see them. Even if I managed to keep my mouth
solely to the words, “Thank you for coming,” and “Nice to meet you,”…I didn’t
think I could disguise the hatred in my eyes. For the parents, who decided to
bring their infant children to the top of a cliff and not keep an eye on them. And yes, for Little Miss Strawberry. I
probably would have given my life for her, if death was all I had to face. But
now I was trapped, and burning, and if I’d known at the moment Strawberry
bolted what I’d be forced to endure…I might have stayed put.
This
is the person I was now, all humanity and kindness and nobility stripped from
me. All that was left was pain, and the poisonous bile it produced.
Blurb:
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Monica Murphy is a native Californian who lives in the foothills below Yosemite. A wife and mother of three, she writes New Adult and contemporary romance for Bantam and Avon. She is the author of One Week Girlfriend and Second Chance Boyfriend.
