Fourteeners

by Sarah Latchaw

  He and S climb open-air stairs, wobbly and uneven. His breath catches. His sister lives here. He’s only seen her three times in his life, but he loves her. Or maybe he loves the idea of her. He’ll bring her to Bear Creek, where he and Aspen can lease their apartment to her once the new house is finished. It all begins with a knock on a flimsy plywood door.

  No answer. He knocks again, runs a hand through his hair while S takes a turn, as if Caulfield’s knocks aren’t sufficient. Then he bangs his fist against the door and curses.

  “Does she have a night job?” Uncle C asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What next?”

  “I don’t know.” He doesn’t know anything about her, does he? Nothing, except the fairytales he’s woven in his head.

  A door down the hall creaks open and a woman peers at the three strange men. “Who are you?”

  “I’m her brother.”

  Faded flowers paint her apron, washed and rewashed. Her posture leaves little room for luxury. She isn’t one to soften words. The woman takes in the look of him, S, Uncle C. Her eyes rest on the gun bulge beneath Uncle C’s shirt. “How do I know you aren’t one of them? A Zacatón?”

  “I guess you don’t.”

  She nods. “Either way, she’s gone.”

  “When will she return?”

  “She’s gone, as in moved. Don’t know where.”

  Just like that, hope morphs to alarm, hard and porous as the volcanic rock below. “Please. I need to find her.”

  “If she wants you, she’ll find you.”

  “But what if she’s in trouble?”

  The woman’s eyes glisten, just slightly, and Caulfield suspects she may be the migrant’s wife. “I believe I spoke to your husband. Is he a farmhand in Colorado?”

  Her shoulders ease. “Do you want to see inside the place?”

  She slides by him and the smell of herbs tickles his nose, causes him to sneeze. She jiggles a key into doorknob. The plywood creaks.

  The room is indeed empty of life. A bit of furniture, a mattress thinner than the ones in the various jail cells he’s inhabited. A table with two chairs. An empty hamper, pink plastic hangers dangling from a clothesline running the length of the tiny room. No clothes, no toiletries, nothing that indicates she was abducted or in a flight for her life, which is comforting. A trace of orange and lye lingers in the air.

  A massive thud echoes behind him and a small object flies across the floor. He jumps, turns around. S is flat on his back, groaning. “Tripped,” he mutters as Caulfield gives him a hand up. He finds the small object in the corner of the kitchenette, cocooned in dust bunnies, and smiles—how unexpected.

  “What is it?” asks S.

  “A matchbox car. See?” He plops the yellow corvette in S’s palm.

  “I had a thousand of these things when I was a kid.”

  “Me too, though most of them ended up buried in the creek clay behind our house. Aspen flushed one down the toilet, once. Mom had to call a plumber.”

  S holds the toy out to the woman. “Your son’s?”

  Her face is a blank slate. She takes the car and tucks it into the pocket of her apron.

  Caulfield puffs his cheeks, exhales. “Not much for us to do.”

  Uncle C grunts. “At least she’s safe.”

  “Yeah,” he says, though he honestly has no idea. Some dark thing clouds inside of him, call it sibling intuition or a gut feeling. But what else can he do, aside from wait for her to reach out?

  Once they are in the hallway, the woman closes the door behind them and locks it, click.

  Locks away all traces of his sister.

  Locks away the clues to where she’s gone.

  They stand outside the apartment and watch the sun release one last encore of gold before it bows and a curtain of darkness falls.

  Now what? He turns to S and Uncle C. “Let me be the one to tell my parents.”

  S frowns. “Do it quick, man.”

  He would, as soon as he figures out what to say. Right now, he just needs to sink into a mattress and sleep for a thousand years.

  Later, in a hotel room flooded with city lights, as S snores in the bed across the room, and as Caulfield wavers in that place between awareness and nothingness, he quietly laughs at the neighbor woman’s parting words…

  “I like your Nixies.”

  Whatever

  S—I’m sorry you didn’t find her, but you tried. I know you’re drained and discouraged.—

  K

  Mount of the Holy Cross

  July

  “Any panicky feelings?” Molly asked.

  “Not yet. You?”

  “No. Give it another thousand feet and we’ll see.” This was Molly’s first climb since the avalanche, and she was as rigid as the stick her Black Lab, Tito, chomped between drooly jaws.

  We took the North Ridge approach up the Mount of the Holy Cross because it was only a Class Two and she was out-of-practice. Hector and Luca, showboats that they were, ditched us for the Cross Couloir ascent and would ‘wait for us’ at the summit. Ha. Not if we got there first.

  “Kaye, you’re killing me. If you don’t ease up, any time advantage we gain will be lost when I pass out in the tundra zone.”

  I slowed my short, zippy strides to match Molly. Tito darted between us, vibrating with unspent energy. It was hard to imagine an avalanche tumbling through this thick forest, hoisting and heaving our bodies over a trail that was more of a giant rock pile. Once we broke the tree line and met nothing but rock, moss, and thin air, how would she fare?

  “When does Samuel get back from his book signing?” she puffed.

  “Wednesday.” Molly had assumed he was in Mexico City for a book signing, and I hadn’t corrected her. Lying by omission didn’t sit well with me. Neither did worrying whether my husband had been kidnapped and crammed in a box.

  “And you’re dropping us off at the airport tomorrow, don’t forget. Argh, I’m going to die. My calves are cramping!”

  Break time. I scooted my rear onto a flat rock and unhooked my water bottle. Molly patted the ground for Tito to settle at her feet.

  The trees on this side of the mountain were old, more than a hundred years, untouched by disease or fire. “Samuel said something interesting last week. Our lives aren’t remembered beyond two or three generations.” I breathed in cool, crisp air. “Think about it. Do you know much about your great-grandparents? How they spent their afternoons, their hobbies, their beliefs? Do you know what they worried about?”

  “Mine worried about whether grasshoppers would get their corn crop. For the first eight years of my life, I actually believed grasshoppers were called ‘Long-Legged Beelzebubs.”

  “Gran said her dad griped about how the Irish were stealing all the jobs because they worked for pennies. Then Gran would remind him that he was Irish, and he’d laugh and say, ‘You just proved my point.’

  “But it’s a speck in time, swept away when our parents die. Once we’re gone, most people won’t even know they existed. One day, our descendants won’t know anything about us, other than public records and a small branch in their family tree.”

  “When we get back to Boulder, we’re going to see about Prozac for you, sweetums. That’s the most godawfully depressing thing you’ve said in months. Cripes, I think I’ll just lay down right here on this mountain and call it quits.” She sprawled across the rock.

  “Well, he also said it’s one reason he has faith in God. Who else is going to remember us forever? Why would we be so complex, love so deeply, if in the end, no one is left to acknowledge our existence?”

  “I guess that’s comforting if you believe in God.”

  “And naively optimistic if you don’t.”

  Molly dug through her hiking bag and tossed a dog treat to Tito. “Look on the bright side. Samuel will be remembered for a couple of centuries, at least. Do you think his books will be considered classics a hundred years from now?”

  “Hated b
y high school students far and wide: the dreaded mandatory reading list.” I sighed and unwrapped a bar. “Sometimes I wonder if anyone will remember me beyond this generation. Danita’s children, I suppose. A dead-end branch on a great grand-nephew’s tree.”

  Molly frowned. “Oh Kaye, don’t think like that. Is it really certain that you and Samuel won’t have children?”

  “He doesn’t want them, and I can’t force fatherhood on him. It would be unfair.” I scratched the top of Tito’s head and he panted happily as I swallowed back tears.

  “But what about you? I can’t believe you’d have such a strong desire to be a mom if you weren’t meant to have kids.”

  “I’ve turned it over a thousand times in my head, believe me. I’ve tried to make sense of it. I’ve begged God to show me the big plan. I mean, does he think it’s hilarious to place this love in my heart for Samuel and then to make me want children so badly, I can feel them in my arms?”

  Tears gathered behind Molly’s glasses. “I can’t answer that. All I know is there’s a lot of cruddy things in life that can’t be explained. Remember what happened to my sister Holly several years ago? How horrible her post-partum depression was? But now she’s come through to the other side and has a lot more gratitude because of it. It shifted her entire worldview.”

  “Sofia told me that a person’s suffering is a horrible, temporary window. But once we’ve stared into that window, we’re able to see sunlight shining through, feel it on our skin, allow it to illuminate dark corners of our lives and expose the bad things that lurk there.”

  “Sofia is, like, the wisest person I know.”

  “Sometimes. I don’t agree with everything she says and does, but she knows how to love people.”

  “So do you. And so does Samuel, because of her and Alonso.” She snapped her fingers. “You know, our descendants won’t remember a thing about us one day, but I bet they’ll know how to love. They may not realize that, four generations back, a special aunt loved their Great-Great Grandpa Gabriel, but the love itself will be ingrained in them. That’s what you pass down. Not worries or hobbies, or what you ate for lunch.”

  We sat in silence, tossed a stick into a creek much too cold for our feet, but perfect for Molly’s slobbering dog.

  “I miss you, Molly.”

  She nudged my shoulder. “You have a standing invite to dig up clams with me on the beach.”

  As we heaved ourselves onto the summit of Holy Cross, we found our friends collapsed across the ground in pure exhaustion.

  “Really guys? You’re that competitive?” Molly tapped Hector with her boot and he simply flopped over.

  “How long have you been up here?” I asked.

  “At least an hour,” Luca groaned. It was possible we’d have to roll them down the mountain.

  We rested and pointed out a herd of mountain goats, mere dots on the purple slope of the neighboring mountain.

  I thought about what Molly had said. Whatever choices Samuel made—both good and bad—were driven by love. It was his guide through a field of sinkholes that could have swallowed him up if not for the rope he clung to. When he didn’t know which direction to go, he pulled out his compass and asked: which is the most compassionate path to take?

  This was why he’d gone to Mexico City to search for his sister, despite my strong objections. He’d been driven by love and, in the end, that’s why I gave him my blessing.

  I’d wondered which way this latest episode would go before he left for Mexico City. Given his spiraling mood swing, not to mention his brawl with Santiago at the mental health benefit concert (oh, the irony), I’d have placed money on mania. But when I collected the boys from the airport, depression rang loud and clear. Dejection. Mexico hadn’t gone well but he was sealed up tighter than one of Sofia’s Tupperware bowls.

  “Did you find her?” I glanced at Samuel in the rearview mirror, feeling very much his chauffer.

  “We were too late. She was gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  He closed his eyes and I felt the sting of his dismissal. He probably just needed sleep. In five hours’ time, after he rested and ate, he’d open up.

  But five hours turned into fifteen and an uneaten plate of food.

  Early the next morning, my fingers fumbled with the zipper of my pencil skirt as I quietly got ready for work, trying not to wake him. Startling me, he brushed my fingers away and finished the job.

  “Feel better?” He didn’t look better. Purple circles rimmed his eyes, skin was paler than normal, and I suspected he’d return to bed after I left.

  He rested his chin on my head. “I found her apartment, spoke to whom I assume was Javier’s wife. She’s a spindly thing. No Marieta. Nothing.” His tone grew angry. “I don’t understand. I gave her more than enough money not only to live comfortably in the U.S., but to have a place in Paris if she so chose. Why did she return to Mexico, only to scrape by in that decrepit place? Where did the money go?”

  “Drugs?”

  “How else could she blow so much money so fast?” He thumped a fist on the wall. “I’d hoped she would stay clean. I should have brought her home to Colorado.”

  I ran my fingers through his hair, eased his mood. “Perhaps she sent some of it to her family in Tamaulipas.”

  “I’m the only family she has.”

  “What about her friends in Mexico City? It sounds as though Javier and his wife could use a bit of help.”

  “He never mentioned it.”

  “Maybe she had a lot of debt that needed to be repaid. Or someone she paid off under the table?”

  “Possibly.”

  We lapsed into uncomfortable silence as I struggled to tame my mane and he brushed his teeth. He followed me into the living room and dropped onto the couch with his laptop. I grabbed my briefcase and gestured to the coffee table.

  “Can you please pay the water bill online today? Otherwise I’ll have to drop it over at the waterworks.”

  “Mmhm.” His eyes didn’t deviate from his laptop.

  I nearly walked out the door, but I remembered a mistake I’d made, so long ago. I turned back and sat next to him on the couch.

  “Hey. I love you, Samuel.”

  He glanced up, a soft smile on his mouth. “I love you too, Aspen Kaye.”

  As I jogged down the flight of stairs and into my business, beautiful hope unfurled in my chest, the kind of blindness that made everything in the world shine. As long as I had his soft smiles and an ‘I love you’ every morning, this marriage would work. He’d be okay, I’d be okay, we’d be okay, nothing would rip us apart, whether it was the most fundamental of disagreements like money and kids, or the havoc wreaked by mental illness.

  But as I unlocked the door and slipped out of my heels just after six p.m., that roller coaster high bottomed out. Samuel was still on the couch, asleep. Still unshowered. The unopened bill still rested on the coffee table. His laptop word processor had only several paragraphs of writing about his visit to Mexico, which ended in a single word: “Whatever.”

  The cycle began. ‘Whatever.’ Really? Was he a teenager? Of course, before long, I just knew he’d be holed up like a hermit playing the Xbox. (Never mind that he’d never owned an Xbox.) Oh, I was irritated. Dirty bowls on the counter, mostly filled with uneaten cereal. My cereal, because he didn’t eat that ‘toxic stuff’ anymore, right? Unwashed clothes tossed on the floor next to the hamper. Was this some passive-aggressive message he wanted to send? ‘I am perfectly capable of putting this stinky tee shirt in the hamper, but I’m going to leave it on the floor right beside the hamper.’ I snagged his clothes off the floor and stuffed them in the hamper, then the clothes he’d draped across the footboard of our bed, then tackled the clean clothes in the laundry basket that hadn’t been folded for a week and, because I was really in a tizzy, his deodorant, toothbrush, mouthwash, and shaving gel that cluttered our counter. He had three empty drawers next to his sink! ‘Normal’ Samuel was fastidious, organized. ‘Normal
’ Samuel would never leave clothes on the floor, hygiene things all over the counter, dirty dishes in the kitchen. If he was typically messy, it wouldn’t have bothered me one whit. (Okay, it would have bothered me, but for completely different reasons.) Why was I so worked up about it now?

  “Damned bipolar disorder,” I gritted through clenched teeth. “Why can’t you leave him alone for just one month?” I grabbed a half-empty bottle of fabric softener and slammed it onto the top of the dryer. The metallic thud rang through the hallway. “Give him one!” Slam.

  “Single!” Slam. “Month!” Slam.

  Like an idiot, I stood in the hallway, waiting for ‘bipolar disorder’ to answer.

  It didn’t. Neither did Samuel.

  For two weeks I secretly monitored his meds. He took them.

  I monitored his moods. Apathetic. Anxious. Angry, all the ‘A’s.

  I monitored his physical symptoms. Back aches, no appetite, and definitely no sex.

  I dragged him out, hoping to draw a genuine smile. The Twiggies played a rip-roaring gig at the Boulder Theater. Samuel leaned against the wall next to his stool, false smile plastered on his lips, standing with the rest of the crowd in a show of appreciation. But it was just that—a show.

  We saw his doctor, which came to nothing. “I don’t think a meds adjustment is what’s needed. I can give you a dose of Depakote and additional psychotherapy.”

  But the thing that pushed me from concern to panic was the evening I returned from work to find an open bottle of port wine on the counter. The thing had been a thank you gift from a client and I’d stuffed it high above the cabinets, intending to send it home with our IT guy. I’d forgotten and, being inches shy of elf status, I couldn’t see it. But Samuel could, and had, and decided to break out the brandy-heavy beverage today after how many years of sobriety?

  Oh my God, his meds. I burst into our room, spilling light behind me. Samuel jerked a hand up to his eyes.