Half Way Home

• 31 • More Dead

I could see the huddled forms of Mica and Peter on the small rise before we reached the fire pits. They were right where we had left them: close by one of the shaft walls. One body was bent over the other and a mournful moan—barely audible—emanated from one of them.

We forgot our exhaustion from the long jog up the mine and broke out in a run, the light from my flashlight bouncing with my gait but increasingly unneeded as we approached the wan reach of daylight.

As I got closer, I could see that it was Peter draped across Mica’s body, his shoulders shivering in time with the sobs. Leila and Tarsi reached him right before Kelvin and I got there. Their hands went to his back, trying to comfort him for his loss.

Both of them pulled their arms away as if burned by the touch. Leila yelped, and Tarsi covered her mouth. I came to a stop as Mica’s arms moved across Peter’s back.

She was alive.

The shivering and sobs were coming from her.

Jorge began cursing as I tried to help the girls tend to Mica. As weak as she’d been an hour before, we had a difficult time prying her arms off Peter. She probably would’ve chosen to stay there until the weight of him on her ribs finished her off.

We finally got Peter’s body free, and two of the boys laid it by the black stain of an old fire. Mica’s moans turned to wails. She sat up, the front of her soaked in Peter’s blood. It looked like her bruises and injuries had leaked right through her clothes, but I had a glimpse of the damage on Peter’s chest—it looked like something had erupted through him and out his back.

Tarsi and Leila tried to calm Mica down, and I moved in to help, but Vincent stepped in front of me, blocking me off. He knelt beside Mica, leaned forward, and wrapped her up in his arms. He began sobbing along with her. Mica’s hands went from fighting the girls to clutching Vincent’s back; her fingers squeezed the folds of his shirt into frantic clumps.

The two of them shook from the hard cry, and I could hear Vincent whispering something to Mica between the sobs.

I stood there, completely ineffectual. Someone thought to cover Peter’s body with a scrap of tarp, but I continued to remain rooted in place, my arms at my side as I watched two of my friends grieve together.

I wanted to join them. I wanted to beat my fists against the mountain. I wanted to pound the image of Oliver’s death out of my memory. Part of me wanted to unleash pain on myself for failing my friend. For failing my profession. All the words and advice, all the grief tactics I’d tried to use with Vincent over the past few days as I attempted to chip away at his sullen silence—the very same things I had been about to employ with Mica—they all crumbled away like loose rock.

Replacing them was the knowledge that even though such things were useful, the first thing Vincent had needed—and what I needed right then—was someone to feel his pain. An honest outlet for his heart-rending torture. He needed something the rest of us had worked as a group to protect him from, maybe because we were scared of it ourselves. He needed to feel it. To be allowed.

There were times when I wanted to grieve with him, to share just such an outpouring of sadness, but I had walled it off. I had hid it away with that secret me I had become ashamed of. Maybe I was wrong to have done so. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard. Maybe it was the death of my former friend on top of so many other gruesome ordeals that finally had me realizing that maybe—

Maybe I wasn’t broken after all. Maybe the things I was scared of could be part of some solution, rather than a problem.

Tarsi and Kelvin sought me out, the numb confusion I felt reflected in their faces. And that’s when I saw that I wasn’t alone, that I didn’t have to suffer by myself. I reached for them.

And I cried.