Relief swept over Max. Images of Zachary injured or dead at the foot of a waterfall and gut-wrenching regret for their years of alienation vanished. There was still time! Back at the office, Max had prayed for Zachary’s safety, and he, like his son, wondered if God, whom he had pretty much ignored, would hear him.

“Should we continue up?” Max could hardly think straight.

“They know what they’re doing. They’ll find him and bring him down. Let’s start back. I bet they’ll have him at the office before we get there,” Bob said.

When the search team reached Zachary, they checked him over and medicated him, then placed him on a stretcher dropped by the helicopter and fastened the straps, securing him inside the frame. At that moment, the wind picked up, and fears of the stretcher slapping into a tree and further injuring Zachary or the man traveling up with him precluded an air rescue.

“We gotta take him down on foot,” the medic informed the pilot. “Keep the flares coming.”

It was an arduous task conveying Zachary down the mountain over steep, rocky ground and around thickets of thorny branches, and when, an hour later, they cleared the forest and started across the meadow, Max, Bob, and the others were waiting.

Max watched in silence as the medics and their patient emerged from the woods. To him they represented a band of angels, and he scrambled from the rock on which he had been sitting and staggered toward them. “Zachary, my son.”

“He can’t hear you,” the medic said. “His ankle’s broken in several places and badly swollen. He was in a lot of pain, and we sedated him.”

“Is it only his ankle? Is that what you said?” Max asked. “No internal injuries? No head injuries?”

“Not that we can tell, but they’ll check him over at the hospital once we get him to Asheville.”

“Thank God you found him. Thank God he’s alive. How can I ever thank you?” Max moved from man to man, blocking their way, shaking any available hand, patting the men on their backs. Tears lined his face. And then his legs trembled and gave way, and Max sank to the earth.

Minutes later, he lay on the stretcher Jose had brought and was being carried downhill at a precipitous angle. A younger, macho Max would have protested. Instead, acknowledging that he, too, had a breaking point, and grateful for their help, he closed his eyes. Here we are, father and son, helpless as babes.

The news that her husband was missing on the mountain reached Sarina when Anna began to weep and Jose gathered up equipment preparing to hurry off to Bella’s Park. Sarina collapsed in a chair in the kitchen. Zachary was lost, maybe dead, and they had been fighting before he started out, arguing about their life together and his restlessness.