Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Rose walked slowly along the high mountain ridge, her thoughts turned inward. She had been wandering alone for ten days now, letting the quiet and solitude of the wilderness soothe her troubled heart.
In spite of the destruction wrought by the earthquake, the mountains that she had come to were peaceful, something she badly needed after the weeks of grief and pain. The solidness of the mountain heights provided a sense of security, one that she couldn’t find anywhere else. In spite of the cataclysm only a few weeks past, the unbroken masses of stone still stood, as they had for millions of years before. In this place, the damage had been minimal.
Aftershocks continued to rock the land, but Rose paid them no heed. Some rocks had been dislodged from their places, and the faces of the open ridges had been changed by the shaking earth, but this only served to increase her isolation in this place once she got past the barriers put up by nature. She was alone.
She stopped, leaning against a boulder overlooking the peaks and valleys beyond, the freshly broken rock giving mute evidence of the cataclysm that had occurred so recently. Looking out from her high vantage point, she looked down at the sprawling towns in the distant valleys, the distance hiding the damage wrought by the earthquake. Only blackened blocks of what had once been buildings clearly showed what had happened.
Setting down her pack, Rose perched on the cracked boulder, her mind once again turned inward. She was alone, in more ways than one. She had chosen to walk alone, to give herself a chance to heal, but her solitude wasn’t just physical. She was as alone inside as she was outside.
She was alone in the world now. She could never go back to Masline, not after what had happened. She was as good as dead to her mother and friends, and only Cal knew that she had survived the night of the cataclysm. He wouldn’t tell anyone, she was certain—his freedom, and perhaps his life, depended upon his silence, upon his keeping his side of the bargain that he had made with Rose.
No, she couldn’t go back, but she wasn’t sure whether she was going forward, either. She didn’t want to think about the future, about struggling to make her way alone in the world. It was enough, for now, to get through each day, to pass the next ridge, traverse the next canyon. She didn’t know where she was going, and she wasn’t ready to think about it, either.
Slowly but surely, she was beginning to heal from the traumas of the past month, though she cried herself to sleep every night, and Jack was never far from her mind. She was able to get through the day now, her attention focused on the world around her. When she felt the grief begin to overwhelm her, she pushed the thoughts aside, saving them for the night, when she had nothing to do but look inside herself.
The sun was growing low in the sky, and another night would soon be upon her, another night when she would make a sparse camp with a small fire that turned to ashes by morning, while she wept and then slept in exhaustion on the hard ground. But in spite of the discomfort, she wasn’t ready to go back to civilization yet, nor was she ready to face people. For now, she still needed to be alone, to have time to heal. When she felt stronger inside, she would return to the world of people. Until then, she would continue on as she was, letting the peace of solitude ease her troubled soul, and knowing with each sunrise that she had survived, and was keeping her promise.