Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [126]
The boy happily perches on my right shoulder, holding my arms in his little hands while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully as we twirl together. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I’m back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind, creating a subconscious reassurance that somehow I will survive this entrapment. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.
That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.
Twelve
Firestorm
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
BY NINE A.M. on Wednesday, April 30, my twenty-four hours were up. Brion After walked across the sales floor at the Ute Mountaineer, brooding: “Where the hell is he?” He paced among the racks of skiwear, snowshoes, and camping supplies, his concern mounting. My shift had started at nine o’clock, and for the second day in a row, I hadn’t shown up or called. At nine-fifteen A.M., Brion looked at his watch and decided he had waited long enough. He went upstairs to the office. First he called the house on Spruce Street to check if I’d come home yet, but no one answered. Brion knew what he needed to do next, but he was interrupted by Leona’s phone call from Boulder.
“Did he come in?” Leona’s directness barely disguised her fear. Despite her effort to keep herself collected, her voice wavered. She was taking an emotional brunt from my disappearance, and it had worn on her through her first night back in the Front Range.
“No, he’s not here. He was supposed to start twenty minutes ago, at nine.” Brion’s anxiety over my whereabouts was straining his voice. “He’s so diligent, I know something’s really going on.”
Leona was also certain something was wrong. “This has gone on long enough. We need to get his parents involved.”
“I was just thinking about that. There’s an outside chance that he called them to tell them what’s going on. Would you mind calling them? I need to get the shop ready to open here in the next half hour.”
It was more than Brion’s sense of duty to the Ute that motivated him to ask for Leona’s assistance. Neither he nor Leona wanted to be the person to tell my mother and father that their son had gone missing and was most likely in a lot of trouble. Leona found a way to avoid the messenger’s job. “I don’t have their number. But you do, Brion.”
“I do? Where?”
“In his paperwork. I bet you he put his parents as his emergency contact on his application. Do you have his file?”
“Oh. Yeah, just a second…it’s in my drawer…here.” Brion pulled my manila employment folder from his file drawer and flipped the cover open. There, on top of the thin stack, was my employment application, with my parents’ names and phone number, as Leona had predicted.
At nine-thirty A.M., Brion called my parents’ house in Denver. My dad was in New York, leading a group on the fourth day of their tour of the city. My mom was just back from an errand to the post office and was sitting in her upstairs office, in the room I’d used as my bedroom until I went to college and my parents converted it for my mom’s management consulting business. She answered the home line with a smiling greeting: “Hello, this is Donna.”
“Donna, hi. This is Brion After calling from the Ute Mountaineer in Aspen. I’m Aron’s manager.”
“Oh, yes, good morning, Brion. How are you?” My mom had met Brion the week before on her trip to Aspen to visit me.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Brion replied. Knowing that he was about to unload a tremendous bomb on my mom, he hesitated, then let the words drop. “I was calling to find out if you know where Aron is.” After pausing, Brion continued, “He hasn’t come in for work in two days. He hasn’t called, and no one has seen him in almost a week.”
Brion’s words left my mom shell-shocked. She sat in her swivel chair silently