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“You… I saw you after the reception.”
Julie, who had exchanged vows with her husband, James, a week prior, found herself perching along the margins of a fresh walking path snaking back down the mountain they’d just summited. Periodic gusts of wind had her feet firmly planting on the gravel and brush beneath them, and her hands tuck neatly beneath opposing arms. James, who ignored the chill crawling up his exposed forearms, opposes Julie with his hands on his hips. He makes a conscious note of how he should call her beautiful after they’ve stopped arguing.
Contrarily, shame, guilt, and sorrow settle in equal parts throughout Julie’s body. She feels it in the flesh beneath her fingertips, an itching sensation buzzing through her spine. She wants to vomit, or scream, or maybe try both at once, watching as James’ feigned innocence causes him to cock his head like the spaniel they’d left at home.
“How do you mean? I saw you too.” It was our reception. Of course I was there.
She presses her lips together in an odd sort of pity-grimace.
An especially notable aspect of their wedding was the presence of Greg, James’ colleague and friend of eight years. Julie, who tolerated the man at best, put up with her fiancé’s insistence to have Greg act as the best man. She allowed Greg to organize a bachelor party that, although lacking her set of eyes, had been outrageously expensive and inappropriate to their singular female attendee, who was paid her hourly dues in advance. She permitted Greg to overorder at the open bar, to intoxicate both himself and her husband. Julie had been putting up with Greg’s tomfoolery since he’d wormed his way into her second date with James, acting surprised that her new boyfriend had never brought him up: “oh, Julie, I know James better than I know myself.”
“With Greg. His hands were on you… And it… I mean, you…” she trails off, finding it hard to meet James’ eyes, who now fails to mask newfound horror.
Blips of the evening came back to James. Greg’s drunken laugh as he pulled him aside, insisting they needed to hop the next train to Maryland for a glass of artisanal whiskey. A compromise, then, camping out in the back of the emptied church and drinking watered down champagne. Greg’s lips were chapped, salted against his own. James swallows thickly, stepping forward and reaching for Julie’s hand, disregarding the uneven footing beneath him.
When hiking, a twisted ankle, statistically, is the most common injury you can acquire. This is a fact James was aware of before, during, and after purchasing a pair of boots lacking ankle support for a honeymoon that would be spent in rural Slovenia, hiking the Karawanks. It is a fact he now recognizes with sobriety, narrowly bracing the fall with his wrist.
“Are you alright? James?”
Julie’s voice is controlled and tentative. She scrambles to meet him at the ground, clutching his undamaged head in hands dusty enough to leave residue in his hair. James declines a glance down, where worries of blood and gore spawn with ease, electing instead to meet his wife’s gaze, taking idle note of the way that her ponytail cascades down her shoulder from this crouched position of hers. It’s a sort of chestnut, but he often makes an argument for ginger. James smiles weakly, wincing more than anything.
“Are you okay?” Julie asks again, and he almost tells her yes, because she’s here, and the sun is shining, and present conversation aside, they’ve just had a lovely lunch at an overlook that rivals every postcard he’s sent in his entire life. The sentiment dies in his throat.
James sighs, straightening the arch in his back, bringing tremoring hands to his poorly laced boot. He undoes it with as much care as he’d tied it to begin with, which is to say, very little, peeling off the sock with a grimace and looking at the bulbous, reddish mess formerly known as his right ankle.
“It’s broken, sweetheart.”
She frowns and shakes her head.
“Come on, how can you be sure?”
It’s a loaded question. She doesn’t mean please don’t be sure. Lie to me. She means you’re an oncologist, James. You can’t possibly diagnose a broken ankle, especially not after breaking it. Look again.
He looks again. It’s a mess, really, but there isn’t any blood. The thing is swelling around his cotton sock – it reminds Julie of her childhood poodle, a delightful little thing that her mother would insist upon dressing up in outfits that constricted its fur in a bulbous, overflowing kind of way. James gropes around the angry, red flesh, concluding his search with a downturned smile.
There’s more back and forth between the pair. Julies got a satellite phone but has presently been talked off the ledge of privately chartering a helicopter to pick them up. “Think of the cost!” In this condition, their half day climb would be extended to a full day return, if not more. Dread hangs heavy between them as the sun continues its descent, obscured in part by the westernmost range.
James gets to his feet – foot, to be more precise - stiffly, bracing on Julie’s shoulder. Their search for shelter takes long enough to chill skin through layers of polyester and nylon, and eventually they’ve settled along the curve of a boulder.
Julie smiles weakly. James, denying the urge to grit his teeth, returns the gesture. They both lean against the bolder. It’s an aphanitic basalt, having solidified too quickly to form larger crystals. Its looming, angular form has been transported a great distance from its source, some dozen kilometers away, which is lost on James, who’s feeling more nauseous in his life than he’s ever felt before.
---
James has begun to work on a fire. Simple tasks for nimble hands, he thinks, and wills his lack of expertise in something far more suited to Julie’s skillset to not hinder efforts at maintaining some use to his wife.
Julie is nearly concluded with assembling their red A-frame tent, which faces the now-obscured overlook that had demolished their vacation. James leans back onto the boulder with sooty fingers and no fire to show for it. He chews on his lip and watches Julie stake the rain cover to the ground.
In sickness and in health, they’d said, and James meant it with as much of himself as he could. His previous two marriages were a devastating affair. Bonnie was living in Boston now, he’d heard, and Sam was engaged to someone with James’ nose. Despite the alimonies, they would reunite over the occasional coffee, and several months prior, Bonnie had taken Greg to tour apartments upstate. Bitterness faded through the years. But Julie, she was different. They melded like acrylics in water, and for the first time since his high school sweetheart, James was being told that he fit with someone. He wouldn’t give up on that kind of connection, intoxicated mistakes be damned.
His wife, emerging from the cardinal tarp, clutches her head gently. “Have we got any painkillers left?”
James affirms and she begins rummaging around his pack, producing the comically small bottle of over-the-counter NSAIDs that he’d been taking over the last hour. She rattles it with a frown and twists off the cap, pouring the two remaining pills into her hand.
“Take them, Jules. I’ll be fine,” James brought his attention back to fire-building.
Julie funnels the pills back into the bottle and tosses it into his bag, looking positively furious. She’s weighing his actions, watching as he sits up against the boulder. At first, she wonders if she’s been overreacting, resentful of a man who’s sustained and must tend to a serious injury without due process, but as she maintains eye contact, his mournful, pleading expression sends another buzz through her nerves. Her face heats up as he smiles. The grimace that settles on her lips feels more at home than his sandpaper kisses had in recent weeks.
“I won’t stand here and take your weird, fucked up pity. Your leg is broken. Those pills need to last us till tomorrow afternoon if we rush.” Julie paused and watched as James furrowed his brows. “And you’re gay, James.”
He looks hurt, at first – Julie thinks he always looks a bit neglected – but matches her anger, using the boulder to prop himself into a weighted stand.
“I’m not… it was an accident. He was drunk, and I – “
“Don’t play games with me or so help me I will leave you on this mountain,” she threatens, and despite her history of devotion, James takes it sincerely. She looks like a catamount here, eyes narrowing in predatorial offense.
He tries to start again twice, opening his mouth and closing it like a fish out of water. Once he’s settled on words, Julie has begun to tap her foot nervously.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
The words hang heavy. Both of their eyes glaze over with tears, and Julie is sobbing before James can think of something clever to say. The idea of bloodletting crosses James’ mind, and somehow, the regret between them feels like the first stitch on a gash. Julie draws in a quick breath and stalks off into the thinly wooded forest along their campsite.
---
They’re sitting by a fire that took nearly an hour to breathe to life, fed by a steady tinder of twigs and dried spruce tips. James avoids eye contact with his soon-to-be third ex-wife. He’s gay. He’s gay, and he’s gone on a honeymoon with a woman, a woman who knows he’s gay, who will divorce him because of it, and on top of that, he’s gay.
It’s a joke, he thinks, some kink in the hose of his life that’ll straighten out and depressurize. The dull beating in his leg brings him back. He’s yet to down the painkillers.
“Julie, I wonder if we can’t just… talk this out.”
Julie contemplates withholding a response. More accurately, she wonders how long she could keep from speaking with James. She’d probably have to say something at the divorce proceedings… or annulment proceedings? If James had been incapable of loving her from the start, had they really gotten married? The thought makes Julie’s stomach turn.
“You cheated on me with Greg. What more is there to say?” We’re over. We can’t stay together, and you know that. Don’t drag me down there with you.
James sighs. “It won’t happen again. It can’t happen again. I love you, Jules. Greg doesn’t change that. I-I know what I did, and I can figure it out. I just… We can’t… I can’t lose you.”
“You don’t seriously think we ought to stay together, do you?” Julie held back a cold laugh.
“I want to try and work on us. We can do counseling. I can see Greg less. I’ll do what we need. You know I love you.”
Julie shakes her head. If she’d taken up smoking, she’d be half a pack deep after this day.
“You know I saw Bonnie at Wegmans in January when I was visiting my dad?”
There’s a pause. Space gathers between them, and the fire crackles with spite as Julie makes her best effort at a level tone. James looks nervous.
“We talked about you. Said she recognized my face from a photo Greg showed her when he was looking for a place. Did you know he never even rented from Bonnie? Said her commission was too high after she’d taken him to three different properties,” she scoffs. “Anyway, do you know what she told me to do?”
James waits for the punchline with unease.
“She told me to leave you with him. That you were both so deep in whatever repressed hell you’d dug yourselves into that changing you, trying with you… couldn’t work. She was right.” Her voice cracks on the final sentiment, watching James’ frustratingly sympathetic face fall.
“But you’re the one, Jules,” he says, and Julie remembers how it felt to put her poodle down in eleventh grade.
“James.”
“Yes?” He still looks hopeful. Julie feels crushed. This was the man who had cooked her meals before work, introduced her with such joy to his friends, his loved ones, that she vowed to never settle for less again. This was James, the man she’d pursued at a wine-tasting class and never let out of her sight since.
“It’s not fair to do this to yourself. I’m only here for you because of how you’ve been there for me before. Also, because I have to. Like, morally.” She spared a look at their surroundings. At least another day more of this, then the flight home, and then God knows what else. They’d be in physical proximity for some time.
“I really could do those things for you. I could try.” He thinks up every means of apologizing to her, from cutting Greg out to pouring funds into weekly sessions with a shrink and feels driven. Motivated.
“But I don’t want you to.”
Julie stands, feeling particularly stupid as she closes the distance between them, plopping down besides her husband.
“If I’d have known you were gay, I wouldn’t have tried so hard to get your number. Or practically forced you on that second date,” she scoffs at herself. It wasn’t her doing that caused Greg to turn up at the steakhouse she’d wrangled James into, but perhaps James could have processed the speed at which they moved if he’d had space to breath when they’d began seeing each other. “I actually think we could’ve been good friends.”
---
They’re up with the sunrise, and Julie has folded their tent back into James’ pack, which stretches taut against the week of freeze-dried camp food that will go neglected for weeks. Their descent is slow and clumsy, with James’ unbalanced gait supported on the oak branch he’d found near their campsite. Julie offers to be more help, but it’s best for her to walk beside him, conscious hands ready to grasp at any number of loose articles dangling from his figure.
James’ ankle, painted in hues that resembled the crocuses speckling the mountainside was unable to fit into anything beyond his cotton sock, and even that took a good chunk of their morning. His remaining shoe is hung off a fabric loop affixed to Julie’s netted pack, thumping with her stride.
“Thank you for… talking with me last night. You didn’t need to do that,” James says sheepishly.
Julie offers a close-mouthed smile, pressing her lips into a thin line.
“You didn’t deserve this. Or me. This has all been about me, and I… well, I hate to think you’ll live the rest of your life feeling like your,” he pauses for a moment, “ex-husband didn’t care about what you were feeling. What happened was unfair to you.”
There’s a palatable silence between them. A breeze is enough to bring James’ attention back to the dirt and gravel underfoot, which he cautiously navigates with furrowed brows. Julie walks alongside him and wonders if their campsite boulder will ever make its way back to where it formed.