His voice trails off and he gazes, unfocused, into his hands. Then he looks up at me again. “Did you miss me very much? You, your mother?”
I gasp. “Well, yeah! What do you think?”
To my surprise, he actually shakes his head, smiling. “I think you’re managing pretty well without me.”
I’m speechless. He continues. “To find the codex, to get all the way here, really, it’s amazing. That you don’t see it only shows me how normal this has become for you. What high expectations you have of yourself. Someone taught you to believe in yourself like that. It would be wonderful to think I had anything to do with that.”
“But … of course you did,” I whisper. “You’re my dad!”
We stare at each other. “Well, your old man’s got a dangerous streak too, Josh. I seem to be drawn to trouble.”
“No—it’s not that. It’s the adventure you like. You always have.”
“Oh,” he says. “That must have been rough on you and your mom. Did you mind?”
“Dad! Of course not. That’s … that’s what’s so great about you. I wanted—I want—to be just like you.”
He ruffles my hair. “You’re already better. When I was your age I was just wasting my time, hitting on girls and …” Abruptly, he stops talking, becomes deadly serious. I watch his eyes, hold my breath.
“Dad … do you remember? Try!”
“There was a girl. God! I wasn’t much older than you. We had a baby!”
He stares at me, astonishment mixed with delight. He grabs hold of my arms. “Josh! I remember something! You have a sister!”
There’s a rush of excitement as I realize what this means. His memories are coming back to him. Maybe eventually, they all will. But what a thing to remember first. I feel sick with nerves when I think about it.
I’ll have to tell him that my sister, Camila, is dead—murdered.
Outside, the wind whips around the hut, louder by the second. Powdery snow slaps hard against the single window. There’s another sound then, one that I can’t quite place. It sounds like a low rumble.
The effect on Dad is like an electric shock. He leaps to his feet. “Turn off the gas! Turn it off, quick!”
He dashes to an apparatus next to the sink. He picks it up, and staring at it in horror, he crosses the room to where a bulky, granite-colored North Face ski jacket hangs on a hook by the door. From one of the pockets he takes a walkie-talkie. He barks questions in Spanish, spitting each word. “What readings are you getting? I’ve got 5.5. Right. How many people are on the way to the summit? How many rescue crew can you spare? Okay. Okay. I’ve got two with me. Okay.”
The second he gets off the radio, he starts to put on his jacket. “Get your jackets back on,” he instructs. Now that he’s in mountain-rescue mode, a change sweeps through his personality. He’s become confident, methodical, precise. “Ropes too. And your backpacks. Get your crampons in place. We’re leaving. There’s seismic activity.”
Ixchel and I reel with alarm. “The volcano … is going to explode … ?”
He hesitates. “No … but … there’s a lot of fresh powder near the summit.”
“And … ?”
Through tensed lips he says, “Avalanche.”
42
My father, Andres, has to lean hard against the door of the hut to push it open—the wind pressure is so high. Outside, I feel a surge of fear. Occasional gusts blow hard enough to throw me off balance. Yards away, on the glacier, it will be almost impossible to stay upright when those gales blow.
Dad shouts some incomprehensible words into his walkie-talkie and then listens, nodding. The second he finishes talking, he turns to us.
“We’re going to go down as fast as possible, okay? Roped together. If you feel yourself slipping, lean back hard, all right? Dig your crampons into the ice. We’ll be zigzagging down. Step exactly where I step, okay? There are some crevasses, but I know where they are.”
There’s another rumble. This time I feel it beneath my feet. Terror pours through me like hot water through ice. I can see it in Ixchel’s face too.
“Shouldn’t we stay in the hut?” I yell above the wind. How is my leg going to hold up?
Dad shouts back, “It’s in the path of the avalanche. We need to move.”
He leads us out onto the lip of the glacier. We scramble up the two feet of ice, then start walking—first Dad, then me, then Ixchel. We zigzag across, taking tiny steps. One second the air is still; the next, there’s a roar of freezing snow.
Another deep rumble. It’s strong enough to shake us off our feet. We’re thrown back against the mountain. We lean against the slope, dig our boots into the ice. When the tremor passes, Dad shouts, “That was good. Keep doing that when it quakes.”