The Promise

They met at the trailhead on a Tuesday in March when the lot was still empty. David signed the log at 6:42. It was a remote trail David had never trekked before. Three minutes later a man stepped beside him and smiled like he had decided to be spontaneous.

“Solo?” the man asked, studying the sun-faded map.

“Yeah,” David said.

“Same. Mind if I tag along for a bit? I’m Craig.”

David hesitated, then nodded. “David.”

They fell into an easy cadence. Work they did not love. Places they meant to visit. Divorce. They traded the kinds of facts strangers hand each other to prove they are still in the world. Craig had an easy laugh. He wore a frayed blue paracord bracelet, the kind scout leaders tie for kids.

He knew the trail. He pointed where the view opened, where the gravel rolled if you put weight on it wrong.

At the ridge they stopped for water. The valley lay there, green and indifferent.

“Beautiful,” Craig said.

“Yeah,” David said, and thought of how Tara had stopped using that word around him.

“Lake’s two miles more,” Craig said. “Quiet up there.”

“Sure,” David said.

That was the last easy decision he made.

The path narrowed after the ridge. Drop on the right, scrub pine holding the slope. David led. The ground gave under his boot.

Weightless, then not. Brush, rock, a crack that rang his skull. He fell twelve feet into a slot between two boulders. Air left him. Breathing took practice.

“Jesus, are you okay?” Craig’s voice floated down, thin and high.

David moved what he could. Arms answered. Ribs hurt but held. He tried his legs. His left foot would not move. The boot had funneled into the rock and jammed firm.

“I’m stuck,” he said. “Foot is wedged.”

Craig’s face appeared above, pale against the sky. “Can you shift it?”

David tried. Pain kicked bright up his leg. “No.”

Craig scanned the walls. “It’s too steep. No rope. If I try to climb down then we might both be stuck.” He looked at the trail, then back at David. “I will get help. The station is maybe five miles. Two hours if I run.”

Relief loosened David’s chest. “Okay.”

Craig held his eyes. Concern, and something like apology. “Stay calm. Don’t move more than you have to.” He swallowed and added, quiet, “I will take care of this.”

He broke into a trot and vanished.

Wind. Birds. The scrape of loose grit settling. David checked his watch. 9:17.

Three or four hours, he told himself. The rangers would bring gear and calm voices. This was their job.

He had water on his belt. Two granola bars in his jacket. The sun was kind. He had been in worse spots, he decided, which was a lie he could sit inside for a while.

He tested the boot. It did not move. Each tug sent a spike straight into his gut. The knot in his laces was damp and tight. He left it alone.

Time wandered. The light shifted. He checked his watch once more, around midday, and told himself not to check again. He failed, then made a rule: once at noon, once at dusk, and then never again until morning. He let the rule hold.

He drank small sips. He ate half a bar and almost kept it down. The rock pressed his spine. The trapped foot deepened from ache to a steady pulse. He waited for the sound of feet.

By afternoon, waiting turned to building stories. Craig had said I will take care of this, not I will get help. The phrase turned in his head until it caught light at odd angles. Take care of what. The situation. The problem. Me.

It was nonsense, and still it grew.

He argued with himself and lost. He tried to picture Craig’s face and could not keep it still. In one version the smile was kind. In another it was practiced. He touched the paracord bracelet in memory, the way strands feather when they wear, and tried to make that proof of something human.

Late light came. He checked his watch at dusk. No one on the ridge. No voices. His foot throbbed in time with his pulse. He tucked into his jacket and counted breaths until counting failed.

Night was a long piece of barb wire. Rain came for an hour toward morning. He put a pebble under his tongue to trick his thirst. He knew it was stupid and did it anyway.

Day came gray. He finished the water by mistake, a string of small sips that added up. The ache in his foot thinned to tingling. Later it went quiet, which felt wrong in a way he did not want to name.

He found himself building the other story. Maybe Craig fell. Maybe he had been running like he said and caught a root or a bad rock and went down. Maybe both of them were out here, stuck inside their separate holes, waiting for a sound that did not come.

He shouted until the ravine pressed his voice back into him. He slept in fevered stitches and woke to the smell of wet stone and something sweet and wrong.

He removed his knife from his jacket pocket. It was a SpyderCo, Paramilitary model. A birthday gift from his brother-in-law. He studied the blade. Triangular, with a keen edge. He looked at his boot.

Boot. Sock. Skin. Tendon. Bone. Like trimming a pork butt before going on the smoker. He pictured the line. He told himself to count to three. He said three and did nothing. He said three again and still nothing.

He had quit before. Work. Marriage. Pieces of himself. He felt the old shape of surrender and wanted to cut it out of him as much as he wanted to cut the foot. He could not make his arm obey.

Breathing calmed in jerks. That was when he noticed the laces. He pressed the knife edge to the laces and they split apart as if they were never really real. He opened the boot, loosened the tongue, and coaxed the foot free. It slid out with a soft film, as if the mountain let go.

The sock had gone black. The toes were purple and gray and a wrong yellow. The smell rose and he gagged. He laughed once, a sound that was not like laughter.

The climb took most of a day. He crawled and dragged and rested until he forgot the names of the motions. Twice he saw Craig at the lip of the slot, offering a hand he could not reach. Once he saw Craig beside him on the trail, speaking in a voice that described a memorial fund as if it had already been set. He pushed the visions away like flies and they came back.

Anger took him halfway out. It arrived clean and hot. It said Craig left. It said everyone leaves. It kept him moving because it felt like a kind of food.

He rolled over the lip and lay on the path while the sky flickered around the edges. Five miles to the station. He could crawl them if he had to.

He made a quarter mile.

The body lay just off the trail under brush that had already started to lean back over it. He knew the jacket before he knew the shape.

He went still. Then he sat, because standing was gone now. The back of the head was wrong. A rock with a dark stain waited beside it as if for a photograph. One hand was bare bone at the tips where animals had taught the forest what the body was.

“Oh,” he said. The word came from far away. “Oh no.”

The smell arrived after the sight, the way smells do when your mind lets them. The same rot he had carried on his foot, but larger, like a chord struck in a bigger room.

He understood. Craig had gone for help. He had tried to run. This trail punished that. He had fallen.

David crawled close. Up close was worse. The face was mostly gone. The jacket was the jacket. The build was the build. The bracelet was not on the wrist. It should have been, and it was not, and David told himself bracelets come off.

He reached for a pulse because a part of him still lived inside a world where that mattered. His fingers came back slick. He put his jacket over what was left of the body, a small ceremony for a person who no longer needed covering. He sat until the light grew thin.

Then he walked.

The station appeared through trees that felt like a set. He climbed the steps and left a dark line where his foot dragged.

The ranger stood. His face changed.

“Need to report a body,” David said. “Quarter mile up the Ridgeline. Craig. I do not know his last name.”

“Sir, you need to sit—”

“He went for help and fell,” David said. “I fell first. Three days ago. Maybe four.”

The rest came in pieces. EMT hands. A helicopter. A bright room where legs went and one did not. Someone said infection and someone said if we had waited one more day and someone asked when he last felt his toes and he could not answer in a way that satisfied anyone.

They amputated below the knee. The surgeon said it cleanly. The anesthesiologist counted him down in a calm voice. He woke to absence and a pain his mind tried to place on something that was not there.

His sister came. She cried and told him she was sorry. He nodded and let that sentence pass through him for all the good it did.

They identified Craig Morrison. Forty-three. A wife. Two kids. A service. He turned his face to the wall and practiced breathing until the breath did not sound like a sob.

At night he searched Craig’s name. Ironically the obituary showed a photo at a trailhead. Craig grinning with an arm around a woman who must have been his wife, two kids making faces. No bracelet in the photo. He told himself photos do not prove what is not shown.

He read the line people use when they need a line. Beloved husband died doing what he loved.

He cried then in a way that made nurses want to help. One offered a sedative. He took it and woke hours later with the same ache.

Six weeks brought him home with crutches. A shower chair that made him feel old. A prosthetic fitting on a calendar he checked and checked. His sister brought groceries and a short list of jokes that did not land but still helped.

He found the memorial page. A fund for trail equipment. He sent more money than he could spare. It felt like a tithe you pay because the church in question once held your life.

There was a comment section. People said Craig coached. People said Craig helped at the soup kitchen. People said Craig would give you his last dollar if you needed it more. David believed every word and hated that he had ever tried on the opposite story.

He typed: I am sorry I doubted you. He posted it. He deleted it. He posted it again. Over months he posted some version of it many times.

Therapy tasted like aluminum at first. His therapist said survivor’s guilt and trauma response and the mind protects itself by making patterns where none exist. He nodded. He added a list on his phone called Things I Was Certain About That Might Not Be True. He wrote down five items and then added a sixth, the one that hurt most: I can trust my judgment about people.

A year after the fall, he returned to the trailhead. Not to hike. Just to stand where the day had seemed normal.

The log stood sun-warped on its post. He flipped pages until he found March. His name at 6:42, neat and ordinary. Below it, blank space. He turned more pages. Back. Forward. Craig’s name was not there.

He felt the old vertigo come back, the kind that lives behind your eyes and leans you toward a cliff without touching you. People skip the log, he told himself. He knew that. The mind still went to work.

He called the station. The ranger on duty was kind but puzzled. We had his body, sir. His vehicle in the lot. We do not run sign-in compliance. He thanked the man, hung up, and stared at the empty line again.

Two stories grew at once. Craig forgot the log. Simple. Common. Or Craig was never there and David’s head filled the gap with a companion because being alone in a hole under stone and sky was the one thing he could not bear.

He drove home and opened the memorial page. He matched the obituary face to the man on the ridge with the practice of a year spent forcing puzzle pieces together. Did the smile fit. Did the eyes fit. Did the worn paracord he remembered exist anywhere in pixels. He could not find it in any photo, which proved nothing and still hummed.

He wrote Craig’s wife a message he did not send. Was he headed to Ridgeline that morning. Did he say so at breakfast. He deleted the draft. He posted the old apology instead.

Months later his sister found him awake at three, notebooks open, browser tabs full of articles about confabulation and stress and the ways brains make a bridge and then forget they built it.

What if I was alone, he asked. What if I found him later and made a grief out of a coincidence. She closed his laptop with gentle hands. You are spiraling, she said. Sometimes there are no clean edges. He nodded and tried to rest inside that.

Time moved. The prosthetic became something he did not hate. He learned to set it without thinking while coffee bloomed in the kitchen. He trained the phantom pain to be background hum. He updated his list and did not decide if that was progress.

Two years after the fall he posted the apology again.

I am sorry I doubted you.

A reply arrived the next morning.

This is Susan Morrison. I have seen your messages. I did not know what to say. Our daughter is graduating this month and I keep thinking about her father. I want you to know Craig told me that morning he was going to Ridgeline. He said he needed to clear his head. He kept his word when he could. You did not imagine him.

He read the message until the words went soft at the edges. He set the phone down and listened to his pulse climb down the stairs of his body.

The room held still. Outside, a truck hissed and clanked at the curb. A citrus cleaner lived in mop streaks by the door. In the spot where his foot used to be a small spark rose and faded.

He opened his list.

Craig abandoned me

He pressed and held until the line trembled, then let it be. He did not delete it. He typed one more line beneath.

Sometimes a promise is true.

He closed the list. He did not post again. He walked to the sink, slow and careful on the prosthetic, and let the tap run until the water came cold. He cupped both hands. He drank.