by Troy Howell
“Thank you. I love your show.”
“Thanks. Where’s Rockbridge?”
“Near Lexington.”
“Go ahead.”
“I wanted to ask your guest about the footprint on the Appalachian Trail.”
“Footprint!”
“Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A hiker found it, you know, identical to the kind they found in Cripple Creek.”
“Kat?”
“I mean, why would you go to the trouble of planting another track?”
“Kat?”
“It’s fresh. Either it’s a hoax, or there really is some kind of beast.”
“Kat? Katlin? Katlin Graham. People, you’ve been listening to Say-So. I’m Miranda Bates.”
I WAS OUT OF MY CHAIR, HEADPHONES flying—I’d forgot I had them on—and out the studio door. Behind me the producer was puffing, “Miss Graham! You can’t do that, Miss Graham! Are you crazy?” And behind her, my interviewer, Miranda Bates, was pitching fits in a shockingly un-audiogenic voice, and behind her the recording crew were cursing me up and down. Somewhere in the mix, weaving and worrying, was Dad.
I made it out to the street and to the limousine. Yes, limousine—the kind of white sleekness that slides in and out of traffic for people with slinky limbs and smooth skin and sunglasses, whose lives are like a dream.
Only I wasn’t that kind of person.
And my life was not a dream.
Despite the fame, there had been no fortune.
After Rex had got Dillon off, Dillon and Dad had driven home, and now they lived by turns out of the workhorse or the storage unit where our belongings were kept. They washed at the local Y. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In the unit, they had the sleeper sofa, a card table and chairs, a camp stove, an ice chest, and other small comforts. They hardly spent time in there anyway. Dad had got a job selling mattresses, though it barely covered the storage rental. Dillon was back in school.
So was I, but I stayed in the Home where Mom lay, which was under better management. I was allowed some space in an unoccupied room until a new patient would be admitted.
Mom had taken a turn for worse. Actually, she was worse because she had not been turned. Since the Home was short-staffed, her support had not been constant, which meant she’d been turned too seldom. When someone’s in bed for long periods of time, their bony points—heels, elbows, shoulders, hips—push into their skin. When these pressure sores show up, it’s almost too late, because the bruising comes from the inside.
At least I was close to Mom. In exchange for my temporary lodging, I helped out with the new nurse assigned to her.
• • •
I hopped into the limousine and left the door open for Dad, who was ahead of the others. The others had either dropped out or quit. The producer stood at the top of the steps, gazing at me as if I was a world away, and I suppose I was. My world still revolved around Ye, and no one else was in it.
“Driver!” I said. “Take me to the Blue Ridge Mountains!”
IT DIDN’T WORK.
Between Dad saying no and the producer calling the chauffeur to say go straight to the Hotel Dupont, I didn’t have a chance. The limo was hired to get me from the hotel to the interview and back—that was it. Interview over, so were the amenities. We packed our bags, which were the same ol’ same ol’, and left D.C. behind.
I begged and begged Dad to take a small detour along the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was kind of on the way back to Richmond, but he would not.
“A hoax, Kat,” he said curtly. “The whole thing’s been a hoax.”
“Dad, how can you say that?”
“You made a few suggestions and the madhouse world ran with it.”
“But you heard the caller! A footprint! That’s a real piece of evidence!”
“It’s a real piece of you know what.”
“Dad, please! Just a small detour? It wouldn’t hurt a thing!”
He gave me the kind of look lots of people were giving me those days. “Remember the last time you asked me to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Take a detour.”
That ended the discussion.
When the first flakes fell, I opened the window and leaned on the sill. I listened to the silence. Flake after flake touched my skin, my hands, only to vanish.
Whenever I see my hands, I’m reminded of the ring. Whenever I sit with Mom, I keep my right hand out of sight, in case she has an intuition, a feeling that the ring is gone.
The snowflakes fell.
I thought of Ye. I imagined him lying under some rocky outcrop, curled and warm within himself. Maybe the flight had done him good. Maybe his wound had healed.
Maybe he had swallowed the pearl. He must have, surely. After finding it still on his claw, why would he not?
It was late. The staff had made their bedtime rounds, and I’d seen that Mom was OK. Her breathing was uneven, her sores were slow to heal, but her color looked good. I can always tell when she’s good or not by her color.
I turned off my light and lay gazing at the phantomblue night. I thought of Dillon and Dad bedding down in the car. They did that now and then to avoid suspicion by the storage management, because the terms of agreement prohibited occupancy.
During the first few weeks after our return, I’d kept a scrapbook with clippings and interviews I’d had, until I got tired of reading about “Calamity Cat.” I didn’t mind the name so much, but I was trying my hardest to be uncalamitous, and I think I was making progress. I got tired of the gold-rushing mania. I saw it all as a massive game—a jumble of tug-of-war and Wheel of Fortune, pickup sticks and Snakes and Ladders. The few who won lost something in the process, and those who lost numbered in the millions. Even Sterling Blair, the lawyer who’d hounded us at Rex’s—he’d been charged with fraud. The Mollie Kathleen is a family-owned business, all good people, and had not been out to sue us. Blair had once represented the mine, but not this time—he’d used them to cover his own scheme in trying to get the gold.
If I’d been selling something, like a book, I would have made a killing off my interviews. As it turned out, they were only slices of the high life when I was queen for a day. They were momentary thrills. I knew that money didn’t bring happiness, but the low life was getting old.
Would things ever change?
• • •
Sometime in the predawn, I awoke. I’d heard a sound through my sleep. I could sleep through the care home sounds, the hiss of humidifiers, the creaking of a bed, a toilet flush, but this sound was unusual enough to wake me.
It was familiar enough to hold me.
I sat upright, listening.
Mom’s wind chimes shivered in a sudden brisk wind.
I heard the sound again.
It was not a car or truck. It had a sky-high echo, but it was not a plane. My heart skipped a beat. I could not breathe. Deep in the tunnels of the Mollie Kathleen, when I hadn’t known which way to go, I had heard such a sound.
I bounded from my cot.
The night was swirling like a Christmas paperweight. The snow was sticking. On a building across the yard the bare twigs of a bush scribbled secrets on a wall.
I clambered out the window and stepped into the snow.
White bees stung my face as I peered up. They spiraled and spun, gathered in the hollow of my throat, shimmered along my lashes, swaddled my socks. I stood crystallized, listening, looking.
I dared not tremble, but trembled.
I dared not speak his name, but spoke his name.
The sound did not come again.
There was nothing.
There was only the ghost of Ye, falling all around me.
HOW LONG DID I STAND THERE?
At some point, I crawled inside to get my quilt, the only one Grandma Chance had ever made. It was her own design, with a golden sunburst on a midnight sky and midnight stars along a golden border. I shoved my frozen feet into my shoes and scrambled back outside.
I
wrapped up in the quilt and shuffled to the flat stone on the lawn where a birdbath used to be. A reporter who had staked out the Home had broken it while roosting there, as he spied my coming and going. There I stood, swaying and napping from time to time, snapping awake, my thoughts spinning like the snow, napping again.
For a false sleepy moment, I stood on my path. My unfinished stone path. The path that had led us down this strange, fantastic journey, so long ago.
• • •
“Kat?”
I opened my eyes. Morning. The world was under a white-magic trance. The snow was damp and clingy, bending branches low and conjuring up shapes where shapes hadn’t been.
I was still standing.
“Kat!” One of the care assistants was walking up the sidewalk, arriving for her work shift. “What’re you doing? You’ll be sick!”
Despite my numbness, I managed a smile. I managed to move my feet.
“You dropped something.”
“Huh?”
“There.” She nodded toward the ground.
I looked down. Where I had stood, where the quilt had stamped dreams in the snow, lay a small brown object. It glinted once as I picked it up.
My lost tobacco tin.
YE WAS HERE, I SAID TO MYSELF OVER AND over again. I don’t know how many times I said it. He was here. He flew by. He dropped the tin at my feet!
Turning around and around and wandering across the lawn, I looked for any tracks in the snow, any signs in the sky.
“He’s alive.”
Nothing else mattered. Catching the school bus wasn’t even a thought.
I held the tin as close as a promise. I had lost it way back in Cripple Creek, and Ye had picked it up. Had it been his keepsake? Owned by one of his Chinese friends?
What was inside?
I tried to pry it open and had trouble as before. I stopped trying. I could be looking for Ye instead. Wrapping the quilt tighter around me, I clutched the tin as I went.
I had to go somewhere, start searching, start calling. The Home was in the suburbs. Not wanting to be seen or questioned, I headed for the outskirts.
I wandered with my head down, watching for his tracks. When that brought only blankness, I wandered with my head up, watching the falling flakes. My glasses kept fogging.
Houses were in a stupor. Smoke rose from chimneys into the fluttering dove-gray sky. I walked into a cul-de-sac and out again. Little kids were laughing and making snow angels while their mom sat smoking on the steps.
I passed some wooded acreage that a sign said would soon be stripped for lots. Perched on the sign was a blue jay with a beetle in its beak. Squirrels played hello goodbye with me. Cardinals spattered the snowscape with bright red surprises.
The tin was in my quilt-bound hand, a desperate mystery.
Walking down the middle of the street—so far untouched by tire treads—I heard a snowplow coming. I ran from its path, slid into the snow-slick curb and sprawled, belly down, embarrassed.
The plow went by.
I no longer held the tin.
It lay open in the snow, and lead-gray rocks spilled out.
To my shame, I was disappointed. I had expected gold. I couldn’t tell what type of rocks they were. They seemed heavier than gold and felt flaky. I wished I had one of those little 10x glasses they used in science. Not that I knew rocks. First chance I’d get, I’d find a field guide on minerals.
They must have been tightly packed, fitting like a puzzle, for as I tried to replace them, there was not enough room.
But more puzzling, was why. Why had Ye dropped the tin? I had wanted it back, but how would he have known that? He hadn’t known I had it in the first place. That is, I didn’t think he had known.
And if he was going to do that—return an old tobacco tin—why hadn’t he stopped to see me?
Why gray rocks?
As I sat staring at the words Lucky Strike, trying to make sense of it all, a car came sliding against the curb, just as I had done. Two doors opened, and instead of gray rocks, two men spilled out.
Dillon and Dad.
“What are you way out here for?” yelled Dad.
“What’s that in your hand?” asked Dillon.
“This,” I said proudly, holding up the answer to both their questions.
“WHEN MOST PEOPLE GO FOR A WALK,” Dillon said, after I’d asked how he and Dad had found me, “they usually don’t wear quilts.” They had made inquiries along the way, he explained, and people said some girl in a blanket went that direction. School had been canceled, and Dad had called the Home to be sure I’d heard.
“They said they last saw you on the lawn, wrapped in the quilt,” said Dad.
“So we knew it’d be easy to spot you,” said Dillon, and flipped his thumb at me. “Your turn.”
I was kneeling behind the front seats; the backseats were down and their bedding was wall-to-wall. Dad had the engine running and the heater on high, so I could thaw out.
I fitted the last rock in place and held out the tin. “Ye was here.”
“Let me see,” said Dillon, and I gave it to him.
Dad fired off the usual protests and ridicule while Dillon went through the same series of motions as I had.
He gave the tin back. “Let’s look around in the snow. There must be some kind of message.”
“Let’s not,” said Dad, in his speakerphone voice. “Time for me to work.”
“You told me they were closed for the day,” Dillon said.
“I can still go in,” Dad piped. “I’ve got to do something! Better than sitting here listening to the finest children a man could ever want go completely out of their wits! Enough is enough!” He turned the heater fan off, then turned it full blast again. “Somebody’s got to stay sane!”
Dillon was out the door and in the snow, searching on hands and knees.
Dad whipped around and stuck out his hand. “Let me see that!”
My eyes went wide. My knee decided to hurt. Dad’s face had gone hard, and I knew his rage was reaching the danger zone.
I had just got the tin back—how could I let it go now? Would he pitch it out into the snow? Call Dillon inside and speed away?
Delicately, I asked, “Why?”
“Give it.”
I looked out at Dillon. He was pawing the snow like a puppy after a bone. I looked back at Dad. His face was made of iron.
But then the iron spoke. It spoke the softest words. “For your mother’s sake.”
My hand went limp. I bowed my head. I gave him the tin.
With a rush of winter, Dillon was back in the car. “Not a thing!” he said.
I kept my head bowed, expecting some kind of explosion, some horrible calamity.
Everything was quiet.
I raised my head.
Dad seemed oblivious to Dillon and me. He had the rocks in one hand, the rocks I’d so tediously arranged, and the tin in the other.
The sprint of a smile appeared on the left side of Dillon’s face, which meant something smart was going on. “Kat—that’s it. The rocks give it weight.”
I frowned.
“Picture it. The tin needed weight so it would land where he wanted it to.”
Dad was sniffing the rocks. He tasted them.
I closed my eyes and pictured Ye swooping from high above, releasing the tin from his grasp, the tin turning through the falling snow. I pictured him veering away, back into the heights.
“How did he know where to find me?”
“Well, for one, I told him”—Dillon’s voice cracked—“when I met him in the tunnel.”
“You gave him our street address?”
“Just the general neighborhood.”
“What else did you tell him?”
He looked a little guilty. “I mentioned, you know … what happened at the quarry … our troubles”—he shrugged—“it was part of the picture.”
Dad ran his finger inside the tin.
All I could think of was why. Why had Y
e dropped it? Was it his way of saying he was alive?
Or just the opposite—that he was dying?
Dad blew out the gritty dust.
Then he held up the tin and asked, “Did you do this?”
“ONE REASON I’M GOING THERE IS TO PROVE you wrong. You need help. Ever since you fell down that mine, you haven’t been right. You’ve been obsessed. Possessed! Some weird notion has taken hold of your thoughts and yanked you around like a dog with a rag. You’ve seen a dog with a rag, haven’t you? Or with a doll?”
Dillon said, “Turn right at the next road.”
I said nothing. I saw snow fall heavily from a branch and the branch spring into the sky.
“They tear it to pieces. Then they leave it lying under the couch or a bush and forget about it.” Dad shuddered to himself as he gripped the steering wheel. “I should have done something a long time ago.” He made a sizzling sound. “You and your make-believe dragon. Dragon this and dragon that. Ye, Ye, Ye!”
He went a little too fast around the curve and fought the wheel to pull us out of a slide.
It didn’t stop his tongue. “I should have taken you to a doctor! Put you on therapy! They have all kinds of medications now to treat your emotions.”
“Yeah,” said Dillon. “Like eradicate them.”
“Stay out of this, son! I know what I’m talking about!”
Leaning forward, I whispered to Dillon, ”What’s eradicate?”
He whispered back, “Erase.”
I lay on the bedding with the tin in my hands. The rocks no longer mattered. They were probably being ground underneath Dad’s brake pedal foot.
When he had first held up the tin, my glasses were too blurred to see. I had wiped them clean while he waited. As I put them back on, Dillon’s face was lit up as if the sun had come through. Dad’s face was deadpan.
“Did you do this,” he asked me again, stressing every word.
“I—” I could hardly comprehend the sight.
Scratched bright into the metal at the bottom of the tin, where the rocks had lain, was an unmistakable design: a heart with a circle around it.
“Do you know what this is?” asked Dad, his face on the verge of despair. “Do you?”