With her mind she lifted the remaining three bottles out of the box. Even after her little displays over the past few hours, Elijah was amazed at the bottles shedding their tops in concert and pouring forth their pills of their own accord. Hundreds of golden pills united in a single stream and raced toward Holly’s head, where they formed a moving, shining halo over her hair.
“But you know what?” she said. “Even if this were all an illusion, I don’t think I could go back.” She would rather die than go back, she thought as she leaned over the edge and looked down into the gorge, the halo of pills still shimmering above her.
Elijah wasn’t sure he was reading her right. He moved even closer to her, trying to decipher her racing thoughts into one coherent line. She didn’t just mean she couldn’t go back to taking Mentafixol. She couldn’t go back to Vegas. Her parents had lied to her. Her friendship with Kaylee was a farce. The home she’d known was gone.
She focused on the chasm in front of them. With her mind she measured the distance to the bottom. Calculated her weight—Elijah sensed that she held herself in her own hand, like measuring the heft of a rock before she threw it.
“Don’t,” he murmured. He’d seen her manipulate small pills and bottles and a box in midair. That didn’t mean she was strong enough yet to levitate her own body.
She stood.
“Holly, don’t,” he said.
She moved to the edge.
“Don’t!”
One second she was there, pointing her toes as if readying herself for her dismount from some Olympic gymnastics event, and then she stepped out, and then she was gone.
“Holly!”
His voice echoed around the rocks. He didn’t even realize he’d moved, but gradually he understood he must have rushed forward and tried to grab her in that last moment. His belly was hot on a sun-washed boulder. His arms stung from scrapes against the rocks. He still reached out for her, grasping at any chance he could still save her—never mind how he would avoid going over the cliff with her. She was gone. He couldn’t even see her in the deep, dry chasm. Oh, God, she couldn’t be gone?
“Holly!” he shouted once more. Then he held his breath, wishing his God damned heart would stop beating in his ears so he could listen for her. He didn’t hear her scream or cry or thud below. She’d simply vanished.
Lithe wisps of trees hung from the walls of the cliff. He imagined her catching a branch as she went down, saving herself. He could cling to hope. Even if she was still alive, she was too far away for him to read her mind. But he could run to Shane’s car and drive around the lip of the canyon until he found a road downward. He could make his way back to the place where she must have landed. He would call the police or whatever they had up here in the wilderness—Mounties—to help him.
As he pulled back to run for the phone in his car, he realized just how precarious his position was. To follow the trajectory of her fall, he’d scrabbled way out on a precipice and down the gentle slope it made before its sheer drop. He was clinging to the cliff face, and one false move would send him plunging after her. She would never get help then, if she was still alive to need it. He clung tighter to the rocks under his hands, sliding carefully backward.
Holly hovered inches above the sandy bottom of the canyon. Each grain of sand was a different color—red, orange, pink, white, yellow, even green and blue and purple—dislodged in the last million years from different strata in the vast mountains. The grains gleamed like jewels in the evening sun. A black ant clambered among them, oblivious to their beauty, headed somewhere important.
And so Holly was glad she’d stopped herself at the last moment from hitting the canyon floor. Her parents had betrayed her, her best friend Kaylee had betrayed her, she’d been lied to and deprived of her real life for the past seven years. But here was this ant, navigating his own mountains on a gorgeous summer day, the longest day of the year. The world went on without Holly, and when she stepped outside her own personal hell and looked around, she knew the world was worth staying for, even if she was alone.
She took a cleansing breath and assumed a tree position she’d learned in the college yoga class she’d signed up for on her own, to calm herself before the stress of the ballet class her mom insisted on. She placed her hands to her heart’s center, one leg folded up, the other pointed down. Even as she hovered in midair, she could just brush the surface of the sand with the toe of her shoe. She unfurled her hair in a semicircle around her head.
She rose slowly through the canyon as if riding in a glass elevator, enjoying the view. The mountain changed from white to purple to pink as she lifted herself. The foliage clinging desperately to the rock walls changed species with the elevation. An eagle soared next to her, perhaps alarmed or confused by her presence but more likely going about her own business of being an eagle. That too was worth living for.
And then she saw Elijah peering anxiously over the edge of the canyon where she’d jumped. His fingers were white with pressure on the red rocks.
Her heart went out to him. “Oh, God, Elijah, I’m sorry.” She landed next to him on the tilted rock, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back from the edge to safety with her, onto the boulders where they’d sat before. “I didn’t even think about how it would look to you. I was thinking about myself.”
He sat with his head in his hands, breathing hard. The light brown waves of his hair caught the sunlight and split it into a million colors, like the grains of sand on the canyon floor.
“Hey.” She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder.
Finally he jerked his head up. His face was stark white. “I called to you!” A tear escaped the corner of his eye. He brushed it away angrily.
“I’m sorry, really. I didn’t hear you.”
He put his hands on his knees as if he still needed support. He took a long, shuddering breath. “I can’t believe you’d scare me like that after everything we’ve been through together.” A cool breeze, whispering of evening, blew a wavy lock of hair across his forehead.
And in that moment, she realized he valued her as much as she valued him. He’d never come out and said it. His biggest show of friendship had been to kidnap her, which, though she knew he’d meant well, was kind of twisted. He could read her mind. He sensed how far she’d fallen for him. But she’d assumed her crush was one-sided. He must have forgotten that she couldn’t sense whether he felt the same way about her.