The video is complete shit.
And I can say that because I took it.
Grainy in quality and shaking erratically from my unsteady hands. It sparks to life in a flash of blinding white, dark shadows morphing slowly into jagged trees and jutting rocks. The heaping piles of snow keep the automatic focus busy and when his face finally graces the camera, he’s a blurried mess of color.
Pink cheeks and green eyes, tousled penny hair and a smile as bright as the snow.
The last image of him, untainted.
“Say hello, Edward.” My voice, disembodied and sounding girlishly happy tugs his smile into the corner of his mouth.
“Hello, Bella,” he says seriously and I remember how proud I was that I figured out the zoom button just then, panning out to film him amidst a heap of gear, suited up for the snow and strapping scary looking teeth onto his boots.
“Tell me what your doing.” Me again, voice high pitched from the cold, I think.
“These are crampons.” He lifts his leg into the air, sliver teeth flashing in the light. “You need a little more than a crash pad to climb ice.”
A yell echoes over the view and Edward looks up, a wild flash of camera pulling away to scan the top of a monumental waterfall, caught frozen and eerily still, dripping columns of pearly blue ice to the frozen stream below. Alice is waving from the top, her hand slicing the air in sparkled mittens and her face framed in the furry halo of her hat. I’d only managed to talk her out of the sparkle studded vest by giving her my furry knee high boots, which she was sporting with style.
She’d walked to the top of the waterfall with Jasper, the curving road that winds up Box Canyon crossing a bridge just above the towering deluge of frozen water. The camera catches them kissing solidly before Jasper trots back down to join us at the base. A short walk from the bridge was the touristy stop at the Falls, crowded with fat furry chipmunks overfed by the 50 cent bags of sunflower seeds for sale inside the visitor’s center. It would be easy enough to find her when this was all over.
To say that Alice had a weak spot for anything small and fuzzy would not do justice to her addiction.
“Are you two sure about this?” My voice asks, the camera bouncing between the boys in a dizzying flip-flop before wandering aimlessly off Jasper’s face and into the trees. I’m sure I was peering up at the looming wall of ice, forgetting the video. It was rather pretty, soft sea foam green amidst the blue and the shadows cast purple through it all. But I was scared. You can hear it in my voice.
“There are fixed anchors the whole way up and I’m on belay, he’s got nothing to worry about and neither do you.” Jasper gloats into the camera in that way he perfected, just sexy enough to forgive him for being a cocky bastard. In the two years we’ve been climbing together, he still treats me like a gumby. He reaches toward the camera and there’s another mad shuffle of light and dark, my squeals and then some snow on the lens.
Needless to say, he put enough snow down my hood to build an army of snowmen.
“Do not forget that I’m forever connected to your girlfriend. I know where you sleep.” I thought I sounded scary at the time, but hearing your voice recorded is a mind trip at the best of times and I really only sound like a two year old marking her territory. Jasper smiles at me around my finger using a tissue to wipe off the screen.
“I could say the exact same thing to you.” He leans in to give the cleaned camera wink before smirking off in the other direction and yelling toward Edward. “You ready for this or what, Doll Face?”
His voice echoes off the ice, catapulting around the icicles in a fading rhyme.
It’s hard to tell, the camera only just gets there in time, but Edward is flipping Jasper off when the lens lands on him. He drops the scary looking ice axes into the snow at his feet and holds his arms out to his sides.
“Come give me a kiss, sweet girl,” he calls, his breath frozen in the air and the camera falls, going dark and muffled. It doesn’t capture our last kiss, my slip-slide across the ice and snow toward him, or how he lofted me right off my feet to put his mouth down hot and wet on mine. Doesn’t catch him setting me down and landing a solid thump on my ass with his gloved hand, telling me to stand clear with that stern look on his face he only gets with me.
There is exactly four minutes and twelve seconds of off-air, radio silence.
That’s because I tossed the camera into the safety of my open bag, abandoning film for the sake of a kiss.
I pranced back over to our stuff and plucked the camera from its spot, the film getting the only glimpse of my face it would, a split-second smile cut off at the edges. I look cold and anxious, hair dark and wild around my face and cheeks gone apple red. I let Jasper take the camera on a visual tour of Edward’s planned route, his finger pointing out the caribeaners drilled into the ice. I had put up a fight over this point, feeling unsure until Edward showed me one of the bolts that was used to hold the caribeaners to the ice and sure enough, the thing was a little more than half the length of my forearm.
I tried to breath easier, listening to Jasper’s voice, but you can tell that it isn’t working.
The video is trembling.
“What’s it called? The route?” I ask and pan back to Jasper’s face, his cheeks stained pink with cold and his grey wool hat pushing his curls into his eyes.
“Shivers.” He smiles at me and tugs hard on the rope that attaches him to Edward.
The camera watches in silence as Edward slowly acsendes the wall of ice, viciously planting the sharpened blades of his axes and the steely teeth on his boots into the floe of frozen water. I was used to the smooth movements of rock climbing, untainted by gear, skin to stone in dancing patterns that often faltered and ended abruptly, but sometimes fulfilled themselves in smooth, graceful patterns. This was a completely different world, set away fro the heat and sun. Each movement was a measured amount of time spent hacking at the ice, kicking it solidly to sink the teeth of the crampons or the blades of the axes in solidly enough to trust. Tiny flecks of ice sheared away with each blow and Edward was breathing hard enough that you could hear him echoing softly through the speakers.
“He looks angry.” You can hear my whisper, but only barely.
“It only looks that way.” Jasper chuckles lowly and the next twelve minutes and thirty seven seconds are a silent omage to Edward, climbing steadily toward the top of the frozen waterfall, maneuvering between icicles and clipping himself firmly to each caribeaner as he edges toward the top. A delicate dance up the ice that seems to go on forever.
Twelve minutes and thirty seven seconds of forever.
And then it all goes to shit.
A sharp crack rips through the sound system, the speakers screaming through the sound as the camera whips to Jasper for a split second. His eyes meet the screen, lips gone pale and he mouths something that is lost amid the chaos.
The roaring crash of ice colliding with ice, splintering chandeliers of frozen water, rips through the incapable microphone of the video camera. The screen captures a tumultuous shower of pearly blue glass shattering in a millions directions when it hits the earth below. The sound echoes angrily up the canyon, rumbling aftershocks that set the remaining icicles singing, humming softly as they vibrate against one another. The camera fumbles wildly to focus on something, anything, and when it does, it’s Alice at the top of the waterfall.
Screaming.
My breath ragged in the background, beginning to break into sobs and Jasper’s far off yelling.
The view slides from Alice down the waterfall, across the ice in agonizingly slow precision, searching blindly until it focuses on him.
Edward, hanging limp from his rope, head thrown back and arms lip, ice pick tumbling to the base of the waterfall in an earthshaking roar of noise.
A single drop of blood splattering the screen.
I stabbed the button with its two upright lines repeatedly until technology finally caught up to my fear and the image stilled, sound gone unless you counted my breathing and in that case, it wasn’t quiet at all. I panted into my chest, gripping the edge of the couch to keep myself upright.
“Why in the world are you watching that?” His stubble scrapes my shoulder and I can feel the tension radiation through him as he stares at the screen. I had no explanation for my sudden urge to watch the video again. It was morbid and I knew he hated it, but it also tended to remind me of what I’d almost lost on more than one occassion.
A refresher course in fear wouldn’t go unwanted in the near future.
“Yeah, well you scared the fuck out of me that day.”
“I scared the fuck out of myself. If you had told me that morning, you know . . . I wouldn’t have gone.”
That’s when I turn to look at him, unable to help that my eyes land on the remnants of that video which still held in awful suspense before us. I put my hand on his cheek and let my thumb trace the ragged scar that dances a delicate path along his cheek bone, just below his eye. It edges close enough that we thought for sure that he was going to loose it all together, only a miracle saved his vision. The skin of the scar is still papery thin, pink and fragile even though it’s been almost two years. It lends his face a rakish air, rugged and unforgiving and maybe even a little scary.
“It wouldn’t have stopped you.”
“How can you say that? Of course it would have.” He glances into my lap and his face softens. “Though getting the news when I drugged up beyond belief in a hospital bed, about to go into surgery was quite memorable.”
“He’s just as bad as you, you know?. I caught him trying to launch himself off the fourth step today.” I smirk at Edward and that scar, remembering the weight of a heavy one year old landing in my arms, the tiny person in question sprawled fast asleep in my lap, undisturbed by the video or the conversation. He was a dead ringer for his father, and just as reckless. Edward cupped a giant hand around the tiny sleeping head, curls though his fingers and nodded in tempered appreciation.
“The fourth step, huh? Well last week it was the second, so the boy has lofty goals. Seems we’ve got a prodigy on our hands.”
