Fear settled into my bones…there was a reason Samuel was scarce today, and it wasn’t just because of his flood recovery efforts. But my body was tired and demanded sleep, and my brain obeyed. The aftermath would hit, soon enough.
Days’ worth of scruff coated my husband’s face and scraped my cheeks as he bent to embrace me the following morning. His eyes were rimmed in dark circles. His limbs moved with the exhaustion of a ninety-year-old man, and I wondered at the things he’d seen in the ‘outside world.’
I sighed into his warm, stubbly neck. “Good news. Doctor said I can leave in a couple of hours. Why don’t you pull around the Subaru and we’ll bust out of this joint like Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Ah, problem with that. No Subaru.”
“What happened? Where is it?”
“Somewhere in Left Hand Canyon. I tried to go after you when I returned from Mexico, despite Angel telling me there was no way to get through. I ended up ditching it after nearly being impaled by a road sign and hiked back to Olde Stage.”
I gasped. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “I am now.”
“So, no Jeep and no Subaru.”
“I’ve got Angel’s truck on loan, but Dani also needs it. Everyone else’s vehicles are stuck in Lyons.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s make some calls, see if we can borrow a car.”
But twenty minutes later, after countless voicemails and dead ends, we had nothing.
“We could buy one,” I suggested.
“Not a single dealership is open within a fifty-mile radius. Even if there was, gas lines are two hours long at the few stations still operating.”
“Good lord, it’s like a post-apocalyptic movie.”
“I’ve got a car,” Ash chimed in.
Sunlight poured from my intern’s face as she realized it was her turn to play the heroine in a Samuel Caulfield Cabral story.
‘Car’ was a loose term for Ash’s land-boat. It was a box of lime sherbet on wheels. Bright green, sharp angles, her ancient Chevy Impala was the height of luxury…in the seventies. It was longer than Longs Peak and more solid, too. She passed Samuel the keys over her painfully-tractioned leg, brimming with excitement and flushed with embarrassment, a curious meld. “I’m so, so sorry it’s an ugly rust-bucket. I know you’re used to cars that are, well, awesome and...and beautiful. Just like you.”
Samuel held out his arms for a hug, the smooth-operator. “The car is a classic! You are one generous young lady, and I am completely indebted to you.”
She loosed a nervous giggle. “Oh, no way! I am, just, totally happy I could help you out. Not like I’ll be driving it anytime soon. Can I just...Do you mind?” She pulled out her camera phone.
“Not at all.”
As Samuel posed for selfies, I took in the sad state of Boulder one last time, from my hospital window. God help the souls who’d landed in the river’s merciless flow.
Samuel grabbed my overnight bag. “Ready to go?”
I wrapped my arms around my middle and nodded.
My birthday was a quiet affair; no one was in the mood to celebrate, though Samuel tried to make Sofia’s Mexican Chocolate Cake, the sweet man. I watched from the couch as he and Danita shuffled around each other in the kitchen and threw together a red pork posole with the dried chilis we’d stashed in the cupboard. Soon the comforting smells of the Cabral home filled our apartment and my heart calmed, until I remembered that the Cabral home was scattered across the base of Steamboat Mountain.
Baby Christina slept against my shoulder and el changuito was tucked into my side, wide-eyed and jumpy from the chaos of the past few days. Still he made a big show of being brave and tough, the Valdez machismo in his genes shining through… Angel, the soldier.
Santiago, the playboy.
Hector, the adventurer.
A century ago, they would have been the stuff of old west legends, those untamable cowboys. My thoughts turned to Hector. Pendejo, out there kayaking those treacherous rivers as the whole world crumbled, whitewater turned brown with trees and mud, the mountains it had toppled in its wake…
“Can you believe Hector wanted to go kayaking, once the rain broke? I bet Tricia’s hopping mad, what with all the E.coli and chemicals swimming in that water.”
No answer. Dani and Samuel exchanged a look. Not on her birthday, he mouthed, but I saw the words—fearful, devastating words—and then I knew.
No. No, I didn’t know anything. Breath escaped my body. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink.
I tried to force that metal door back into place, but it wouldn’t budge.
Samuel stepped forward, slow, hesitant. My body began to quake. Danita slipped the baby from my arms, pulled el changuito into her lap. I shook my head, slapped Samuel’s hands away as he tried to hold me. I leaped up.
“You know how Hector is! How he goes off on these trips and sometimes doesn’t call because of crappy service. We used to do that all the time! Dani, remember, before Samuel came back, how you always used to get on my case about not calling?”
“Kaye. He’s missing.”
I pushed past Samuel as he again tried to embrace me and fled to our bedroom. I slammed the door but Samuel caught it, gently closed it. I backed into a corner.
“Of course he isn’t missing! I just told you, he’ll surface in a day or two when he’s done playing. I mean, look at those rivers! He’ll never have a chance to tackle rapids like that in Colorado ever again!”
“They found his gear, his kayak. They just haven’t found his—”
“Shut up!” I pressed my hands to my ears, begging for the roaring to return, to drown out Samuel’s words. I struggled in his arms, but he was persistent, firm, brought me to my knees and then to the ground.
“Listen, firecracker, I’m not going to hide the truth from you. They’re searching for his body. Not him.”
“Hector wouldn’t drown. He can’t drown!”
“He can! He’s human, just like you’re human, so fragile and breakable. Don’t you see?”
“Of course I do, I nearly got flattened by that avalanche on Longs Peak, but Hector didn’t!” I pushed him away and crawled over to the closet, dug out my hiking gear. “They might be searching for a body, but I’m going to find my friend. Where are my waders?”
“The back of our Jeep, long gone in Left Hand Canyon.”
“My Tevas?”
“Ruined beyond saving. I threw them out.”
“Good thing I have backups.” I hauled out a pair of worn boots with frayed laces and jerked them on as best as I could with a sprained wrist.
Samuel started digging out his boots, clothes. I shook my head. “Don’t try and stop me, Samuel.”
“I’m not. I’m coming with you.”
All night we sloshed through the swamps of the St. Vrain greenspace, flashlights darting against felled tree trunks, house siding, interior debris of lives swallowed by the river. My mending ribs creaked and ached. The painkillers I’d downed had worn off hours ago and my barely-healed body was giving out under me, each time I pulled a water-logged boot out of the muck. One of my frayed laces broke, and Samuel wordlessly knotted it as best as he could. He plodded behind me, silent, until the moment I burned through my reserved energy and collapsed in a squishy heap.
“It’s time to go home. Your body can’t take any more.”
I shook my head, even as a slick film of exhaustion coated my brain.
“This area has already been searched. Angel, Santiago, my parents, Molly…we’ve all been out here. We did what we could.”
“If he disappeared at Left Hand Creek, it could take days for him to reach this part of the watershed. We have to search again.”
He hauled me into his arms and tromped on. Vaguely, it registered that for the past hour, he’d guided us back to Ash’s boat-of-a-car. Sweaty and filthy, I sank into the seat. But first, one more time…
I opened the wood-trimmed glove box and took out Sam’s phone. He sighed as I called T
ricia for the third time. No answer. Frustrated, I shoved it back into the compartment.
“I told you, she’s gone to her parents’ home in Greeley.”
“Why isn’t she looking for her husband?”
Samuel shot me a warning. “She did, for forty-eight hours straight, until they found his gear.”
“And she’s just going to give up?”
“Don’t you dare judge her, Aspen Kaye. Not until you’ve walked in her shoes, and I pray you’ll never have to do so. You don’t know what’s in her heart. But I bet she feels he’s gone, deep inside.” He turned back to the windshield, his face grim as he took in the devastation. “People know.”
My stomach churned, weak thing that it was. I crammed a fist into my mouth, and Sam pulled over to the side of the road. Nearby, the St. Vrain still swirled over its bank, monstrous, angry. I opened the door and hit my knees. For long minutes I heaved, choked, until nothing more came up. And still, my body jerked. Samuel smoothed gnarled hair behind my ears. When I was finished, he handed me a bottle of water. I rinsed my mouth and leaned against a car tire.
“You’re right. People know.” Angel. Santiago. His parents and little sister. His wife.
“That’s why I kept looking for you hours after I saw the footprint of our new home, the flooded mine entrance. Angel thought you were gone. I hoped you weren’t.” Tears mixed with the sweat on my cheeks, dripped from my chin. “You know Hector. He may be reckless, but he’s not heartless.”
I sniffed. “He’d never chase rapids for days on end, while his friends and family dug through the ruins of their homes. He’d be right there beside them, helping. Stupid…cocky…” I slapped the dashboard once, twice, three times with my injured hand, anger burning bright, until Samuel caught the grimy thing.
“You’re going to do real damage.”
“The damage is already done. The idiot would have gotten both of us killed! He wanted to drag me along with him. He goaded me, told me I was losing my sense of adventure. I said terrible things. But I should have gone just to keep him out of that poisoned water.” Guilt chased the blood through my veins. Why hadn’t I tried to stop him?
“Shhh, sweetheart, no. This is not your fault.”
“He never would have let me go alone! You always have a partner, just in case.”
“Luca was with him. He couldn’t save him.”
“Luca’s a newbie!”
“Kaye, you couldn’t have saved him.”
“You don’t know that, Samuel.”
“Kaye. You couldn’t have saved him.”
“I bet he didn’t even have on his life vest, and Luca’s too sweet to speak up. Once the hydraulic catches you, you spin and spin, and something needs to guide you up to the surface. Angel, Santiago, we’re always reminding him he has to wear the thing, but he never listens!”
Samuel’s eyes were flinty in the dim console light. “Listen to me, Aspen Kaye Cabral. I am damned glad you weren’t on that river. If you’d gone with him like you would have a few years ago, I’d be planning your funeral right now. You couldn’t have stopped him. No one could. Hector Valdez was a man so lost in his addictions, only he could claw his way out. But he didn’t want to. He went down exactly the way he lived—all cajones and no consideration, and that’s the naked, unadorned, ugly truth.”
Truth grabbed me by the throat.
Here’s the thing about cold, hard truth: it’s as comforting as strong arms when it connects what you know in your head to what you feel in your heart.
I couldn’t have saved Hector. I’d tried, he hadn’t listened. If I’d been there on that river with him, I would be dead. I studied our joined hands, the soft, dark hair of Sam’s forearms, let it tickle my fingertips.
“Do you ever wonder if God brought you back here to save my life?” I whispered.
“If he did, I’m grateful. I know you’ve saved mine.”
I buried my face in Samuel’s sweat-stained shirt, breathed in years and years of summers, mornings wrapped in sheets. If I’d saved his life, it certainly hadn’t been at my expense.
“Take me home, please.”
“Oh Kaye, you are home.”
Chapter 20
Ground Up
Climbers begin a route at rock bottom and work their way up. They may lose a hold and fall, begin again, fall, begin again.
“Have they found his body yet?”
Three days later, I sat on the floor of Luca’s home beside Jaime’s legs. Luca was beside her on the couch, his face littered by small cuts from river debris. Somewhere behind us, the same bluegrass song looped on a speaker, twanging banjos unsuitable for the somber mood. I asked Jaime about her phone, but she absently gestured to the couch cushions so I let it play on.
“We were over in Spruce Gulch yesterday, or what’s left of it,” I said. “Nothing. We couldn’t get close to Left Hand Creek because the roads are out. Maybe if we hiked in…” She focused upon some invisible speck on the wall.
“I knew he was dead.” She turned to his brother. “I knew it before you told me how his kayak was swamped by that hydraulic, how the water sucked him under and never kicked him out. The moment my phone rang and I heard your voice, I already knew.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks. I saw Hector, his strong tattooed arms gripping his paddle as he pushed his yellow kayak like a warrior and battled rapids too powerful for even him. I heard his cries of excitement grow panicked the moment he knew he wouldn’t make it out of the river alive. “Oh Jaime, I don’t know what to say. I promise we’ll find him…”
Her face hardened. “That’s the trouble with you, Kewpie. You never know when to shut up. There’s nothing to say. You can’t tell me he loved me because that would be cruel to his wife. You can’t tell me he missed me, he was thinking of having an affair with me, because people don’t say that about someone who’s deceased. What good does it do now? What good did it ever do? The truth is, Hector Valdez loved too much, and he didn’t love anyone. Loving him was like a kick in the ribs to a stray dog after a warm bed and a full food dish.” She buried her face in her brother’s shoulder. Luca tightened his grip.
Long minutes passed. Her shudders slowed, and then she pierced me with reddened eyes.
“Let’s shoot some stuff in Luca’s backyard.”
“We can’t. This is a residential neighborhood.”
“Well, let’s visit the Labs. I have them in Luca’s sports shed.”
He frowned. “You should see what they did to my snow shoes.”
I followed her out the door and grabbed a rubber ball from the toy crate. Her dogs swarmed our legs, tongues lolling and tails waggling, their fur crusted with dried mud from a backyard that now resembled the Florida Everglades.
I chucked the ball and three of the Labradors scurried across the grass, kicking up waterlogged clumps. Jaime let slip a tender smile as she watched her babies play. “Bastard reminded me of a Labrador, you know? Big and boisterous, smart until you wave a stick in its face. They want that thing so bad, they’d chase it into hot lava.” The smile hardened.
“Do you want to talk about something else?” I hedged.
“God yes.” Air burst from her lungs and she was all lawyer. “Before the flood and…everything…I did some digging into Marieta Sanchez’s home village, La Vereda? The young men aren’t the only ones vanishing. They have an abnormally high number of missing women and children. The whole mountain region does.”
That’s right, Samuel’s sister is still lost. I struggled to board a train of thought from what seemed a lifetime ago.
I tugged the drool-glazed ball from a dog’s jaws and threw it again. “You think it’s related to the cartel’s drug operations?” A dream hovered at the periphery, a woman in the nursery. La montaña. Mi casa…
“The Zacatóns’ criminal activities aren’t limited to drugs and weapons, you know.”
I’d read the reports of women, men, children who had vanished into the rush hour congestion that was human trafficki
ng. I couldn’t help but put the faces I loved on those of the victims, and I closed my eyes at the horror of it.
“Here’s what you need to find out. What’s the uncle’s role in all of this? Good guy or bad guy?”
“Well, Marieta rented the apartment next to him and this Camila woman in the Mexico City slum. But then she ran. Years ago, he threw Marieta’s mom out of the house when he found out she was pregnant.”
“Nice dude. Not much respect for women.”
“An old woman in La Vereda said they hate him in the village because he was recruiting young people to run drugs for the Zacatón Cartel.”
“What if he was doing more than recruiting young people? What if he was harvesting them?”
Evil hung between us, the idea that one human being could do such a thing to another…
“Here’s a scenario,” Jaime continued. “Six years ago, Samuel helps Marieta get away from the Zacatón Cartel, but she’s deported back to Mexico. A repentant Uncle Javier tells her he wants to get out too, and because he’s family she has compassion for him. So, they hide together in Mexico City and start a new life.”
I jumped aboard. “Javier hooks up with Camila Flores, also from La Vereda. Every now and then, Daniel travels from Ciudad Victoria to see Marieta. What happens to ruin it all? Daniel could have uncovered something about Javier when he hacked the cartel’s files.”
“Possibly. Marieta was once a drug runner herself, but I bet she drew the line at selling kids to pedophiles. There’s a family brawl.”
“Do you think Javier sold out Daniel and Marieta?”
“I don’t know, Kewpie. For all I know, he’s a decent guy who just wants to help. But you’ve got to admit, there’s stinky shit piled all over this."
“Exactly. Why lie to Samuel about his identity?”
“Maybe because he was here on a false ID and didn’t want to get deported. Or maybe because he wants Samuel’s money. Either is plausible.”
“What do we do?”
“You stay out of this and live nice long lives in Colorado. Or you try to find Marieta before the Zacatón Cartel does, if they haven’t already. You smuggle her out of Mexico, maybe get her a job at that nice Tex-Mex restaurant down the street.”
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