by Tim Johnston
“Did you see that?” Sean said, pointing to the hand.
“I know, right? Like Dad’s.”
“What’s it doing up here?”
“I’m guessing it has something to do with those,” and she pointed to a cluster of stone tablets rising from the ground like teeth, thin and chalky and pitched every which way.
Next to the Virgin was a stone bench, and they sat down to drink water and eat waxy energy bars in the shade.
“Who do you think they were?” he said, and she shrugged and said, “Settlers.”
“Donner party,” he said.
“Wrong mountains. Look, there’s a plaque.” She pushed scrub growth aside at the base of the Virgin to expose a bronze plate and its verdigrised inscription:
Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,
Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,
In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace
For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods
And Praying before It,
1938.
“The right reverend,” said Caitlin. “I like that.”
“What’s forty days of grace?”
“I think it means you don’t have to pray again for forty days. Like a vacation.”
“Maybe it means you’re safe for forty days. Like nothing shitty can happen to you.”
“Maybe. Hand me my phone.”
He groped into the pack and handed her the red phone. She checked for messages, then aimed it and took a picture of the shrine.
A breeze came to stir the aspen leaves. The boy chewed on the energy bar and made a gagging sound and Caitlin told him not to eat it on her account.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Go ahead. I don’t care.”
He hesitated. Then he tossed the energy bar into the pack and fished into the cargo pocket of his shorts and fetched up the big Snickers and began to peel back the wrapper.
“Want some?” he said, and she took the candybar and opened her mouth as if to jam the whole thing in but then only clipped a little off with her front teeth. He ate the remainder in three great bites, mouth open, chewing and gasping. He took a long drink of water and caught his breath. He drummed his fingers on the backpack and stared at the Virgin’s fingers. Their mother believed in God but their father said they had to make up their own minds.
“Caitlin,” he said.
“What.”
“Do you think Dad’s screwing around?”
She leaned away from him, twisted at the waist, and beheld him from this new vantage.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t you think he’s been kind of weird lately?”
“Dudley, he’s always weird. How do you go from that to screwing around?”
Sean looked off into the woods. “I saw something. A while ago,” he said. It was at their father’s office, the steel building behind the house out of which he ran his contractor’s business. Sean had been there earning his allowance—cleaning, sweeping, putting away tools. But one of the chests had been locked and he’d gone back to get the key and the office door was open and . . .
“And what?” said Caitlin.
“And he was sitting there. And there was a girl.”
“A girl?”
“A woman. Sitting on his desk. And she was wearing a skirt.”
Caitlin waited. “And what else?”
“Nothing else.”
“That’s all she was wearing?”
“No—that’s all I saw.”
“Jesus Christ, Sean.” She crossed an ankle over her knee and snatched at shoelaces and swept the shoe from her foot and shook it as if it were full of beetles, and then she fit her hand into the humid cavity and felt around. She pulled the shoe back on and retied the laces. “Then what happened?”
“Nothing. The girl—the woman—got off the desk and shook my hand and went away. He told me she was a client.”
“So what gave you this screwing around idea?”
“I don’t know. Shit.” He rezipped the pack with a violent yank and sat staring at it. “Forget it, all right? Let’s just get outta here.”
Caitlin stood and looked down on him. “Don’t bite your fingernail. It’s gross.” She brushed at her bottom and walked toward the graves.
Sean looked at the Virgin, and then got up and followed.
She stood at the edge of the little graveyard with her arms crossed, an elbow cupped in each palm. Her body was cooling. She needed to get running again. The boy stood next to her.
“It wasn’t anything,” he said. “Forget it.”
She rubbed her arms. She remembered a line from a poem she’d read the night before, I cease, I turn pale.
Then she told him about the time their father had stopped living with them—three, maybe four months in all, though it had seemed much longer. Sean had been very young and wouldn’t remember. Their mother said it was nothing to worry about but Caitlin had heard the way she spoke to him on the phone, and she remembered her mother’s face—this new face she’d never seen before. She remembered the words her mother said into the phone too but she didn’t repeat them now.
She was silent, and Sean stared at the old tombstones. At the base of one, in the grass, lay a small black bowl, or saucer. After a moment it became what it was: a plastic coffee lid with a sippy hole. A piece of trash, the only piece, come to rest here, at this stone, way up here, and nowhere else.
“When he finally came back home,” Caitlin said, “his fingers were missing. I always thought that’s why he came back—because wherever he’d been was a place where you lost your fingers.” She shivered, remembering. She hadn’t cared about the fingers, all she needed was his arms, the sandpaper of his jaw, the thrill that rolled through her each time he said Caitydid, my Caitydid.
“He used to tell me—” Sean gave a strange snort of laughter. “He used to say they fell off from smoking.”
“Did you believe him?”
He didn’t answer. In an instant everything was changed, each one of them.
“What do you think will happen this time?” he said, and Caitlin released a breath that seemed to stir the spangle leaves of the aspens into their dull chiming, a sound like rain.
“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said.
THE DRAPES WERE DRAWN and sunlight leached from them along the wall and upward in a bright coronation. Naked under the bedsheet, Grant stared at this. He’d dozed a few minutes and then popped awake with his heart kicking. What bed was this? Whose arm across his stomach?
Now there was a gasp, a spasm, and Angela said, “No,” and he said, “It’s all right,” and touched her shoulder. Long ago, she’d described a dream she’d had longer ago still, in which a voice told her she needed to be with her sister. Which one? she’d asked the voice, which sister? but there was no answer.
“—What?” She lifted her head, her brown eyes.
“You said no.”
She drew the hair from her face, unsticking it from her lips. “I did?”
“Yes.”
She shifted, resettled her head on his chest. She breathed. Somewhere a door slammed and a joyful stampede shuddered the hallway, many small bare feet racing for the pool. The high summer voices.
“It’s going to be weird, isn’t it,” she said. She was looking beyond him to the other bed. The scrambled heap of bedding, the illusory suggestion of a body within it. She spread her hand on his chest.
“What is?”
“You know what.”
Grant regarded the empty bed. “It went fast,” he said.
“That’s what everyone tells you: You won’t believe how fast it goes. In a few years, Seanie too.” She sighed.
She tapped a finger twice on his chest, like a soft knock. She did it again.
“Don’t even think it, Angela.”
“We’re not too old. I’m not.”
“I am,” he said, and she said, “No, it keeps you young.”
In the room next door a woman began a violent hacking. A TV came to life
, an anchorman’s voice, some urgent new development in the world.
“They saved some money on these walls,” Grant said.
“Was I loud, earlier?”
“I don’t give a damn.”
He swung out his legs and sat with a scrap of bedsheet over his lap. His right leg took up a restless dandling.
“There’s nothing to do, Grant,” she said to his back. “You are far away in a magical land where nobody works.”
He was silent. Then he said: “What?”
She reached for the water bottle on the nightstand and he handed it to her. “They’ll be back soon, though,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want them to catch us in bed”—handing back the water bottle—“would we.”
He took a drink, his heart skipping. On the nightstand was a book—small, hardbound, tented on its pages. He lifted it, trapping his thumb in the crease, and read the cover.
“Are you reading this?”
“It’s Caitlin’s.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Someone gave it to her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s D. H. Lawrence. Did you know that?”
“Yes. So?”
“So I didn’t know she read this kind of stuff.” He opened the book and silently read the lines to the left of his thumb:
When the wind blows her veil
And uncovers her laughter
I cease, I turn pale,
And with a deep shift in his chest he remembered when she was small. Small and warm under his arm, clean girl-smell of her filling his heart as he read, Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, hi-dee-ho, here I go, lookin’ for my missin’ piece. The total absorption of a child, no matter how many times. Her little hand on his forearm, rising to hang hair behind an ear, to scratch her nose—the abandoned, the bereft place on his arm until the hand returned.
He replaced the book carefully, facedown, on the nightstand.
“What kind of stuff?” Angela said.
“Poetry,” he said.
He turned to look at his wife. “Is something funny about that?”
Angela shrugged. She shook her head. They’d lain in the lamplight and Caitlin had read one of the poems in nearly a whisper, a poem full of kisses and touches. Angela wanted to stroke her hair, crawl into bed with her like a sister. She almost could have. The way it often went with mothers and daughters—the screaming, door-slamming days of adolescence, the terrible old warfare of the home—was not how it had gone with Caitlin. The girl had run her way through all of that. They knew how lucky they were.
“Should we call them?” Angela said.
“In a minute.”
“We’d better call them,” she said.
“I’m going to open up these drapes.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m ready.”
SHE LAY THERE A while longer getting used to the light, watching the shape of him, a naked dark sculpture of himself before the sun and the world. There was something about being in a strange place that made everything, even the most familiar things, strange. At last she went to him and put her arms around his hips and pressed herself to him. To skin that no longer smelled of smoke, or alcohol, but only of him.
“Someone will see,” she said, but there was no one to see them, just the sky and the mountains, heaped and stacked in diminishing brilliances of green. The great distant peaks higher than anything ought to be that still stood on the earth.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it,” she said. “You can imagine how it was, two hundred years ago. No roads, no rest stops. Just this vast, wild . . . unknown. Like another planet. No wonder men wanted it so badly.”
“Men,” he said absently, “not women?” He had her phone in his hand, scrolling through the menu.
“Oh yes, your eighteen hundreds woman couldn’t wait to load her nine kids into a wooden wagon and haul them across the Rocky Mountains.” She released him and gave him a spank on her way to the bathroom. “Press fifteen. Or eighteen,” she said, and he turned and said, “Still doing that?”
“I’ll stop when she’s twenty. That will just make me feel old.”
He hesitated before entering the code, glancing around the floor, Put some goddam shorts on at least before you talk to her, he thought, and an image of his daughter flashed in his mind, pale and long-legged on the black cinder—
that stride of hers, so light, an illusion of weightlessness, of never quite landing, but with something terrible in it too when she came up on a girl from behind—and in the next moment another phone began vibrating on a hard top somewhere and Angela said from the bathroom, “That’s them,” and then hurried into the other room. Grant followed but she’d already picked it up. He stood at the threshold watching. The missing tips of his fingers began to jump with heartbeat.
She was frowning at the number. The phone buzzed again in her grip.
“Angela,” he said.
She raised the phone and said, “Hello?” Staring blankly at him. “Hello? . . .
Yes, this is his phone—who is this, please?”
She lowered the phone slowly, watching it, and Grant could see it happening. Every second of it. The unbelievable, the irreversible moment.
“She hung up,” she said. Looking at him. Her eyes already changed.
He reached toward her. “Let me see the—” But she stepped away, turned from him, and began punching at the keypad. He pursued her in a thick warp of movement. He had won her back, little by little. Like bringing someone back from the dead. Years of truthfulness, years of love, all undone by a simple switch, an unthinking exchange of phones. He could not even see the woman’s face, her body. She seemed a creation they’d pieced together out of nothing, out of old materials, right here in these rooms.
He looked at his wife, standing with her back to him. Somehow they would need to get through this hour, this day, this vacation. The long drive home.
“Angela—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Just—” She was trembling. “Answer it, will you?”
The phone in his hand was ringing. For how long? He read the screen with illogical dread.
“It’s Sean,” he said, and his wife said nothing.
THEY’D LEFT THE ASPENS and stepped into a high, intense sunlight, their shadows thrown back on the blacktop. The morning had burned away. The air was sere and smelled of weeping sap and of the brown, desiccated needles. They’d unfolded the map and tried to get their bearings. In a moment, and for the first time that day, they heard an engine, and then a gaining thumpbeat of music, and above them at the curve there banked into view a truck, or a jeep, or something in between, some mountain breed they didn’t know, and it was coming and Caitlin said, “Get over here,” and Sean crabwalked himself and the bike into the scrub growth and wildflowers while the strange vehicle, all sunlight and bass, veered wide of them. In the window was a face, a man’s jaw, yellow lenses fixing on them for a long moment before the jeep-thing passed on and, reaching the crest of the road, dropped away body and engine and music and all.
They’d set off again then, and when they came around the bend there was another road, unpaved, intersecting the blacktop at an oblique angle like an X, and without hesitating and without consulting him, Caitlin simply took it. And although the road was unmarked, and although it appeared as though it would take them higher up rather than down, he said nothing. Later, he would think about that. He would remember the shrine of the woods. The graves. He would see the Virgin’s face and her mutilated blessing and he would remember thinking they should pray before her just the same, like the right reverend said, just in case. Forty days was forty days. But Caitlin had already been on the path, moving toward the road. She was wearing a white sleeveless top, white shorts with the word BADGERS bannered in cherry red across her bottom, pink and white Adidas, and for a moment, in that place, she had looked not like herself but like some blanched and passing spirit. A col
d wanderer around whom the air chilled and the birds shuddered and the leaves of the aspens yellowed and fell.
HE RAISED THE PHONE and said, “Hello, Sean,” and a man’s voice said, “Is this Mr. Courtland?” and Grant’s head jerked as if struck.
“Yes. Who is this?”
At these words, the change in his body, Angela came around to see his face. He met her eyes and looked away, out the window. The man on the phone identified himself in some detail, but all Grant heard was the word sheriff.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “Where’s Sean?” There was a pain in his forearm and he looked to see the white claw fastened there. He pried at it gently.
“He’s here at the medical center in Granby, Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “He’s a tad banged up, but the doctor says he’ll be fine. I found his wallet and this phone in his—”
“What do you mean a tad—” He glanced at Angela and stopped himself. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean it looks like he got himself in some kind of accident up there on the mountain, Mr. Courtland. I ain’t had a chance to talk to him yet, they doped him up pretty good for the . . . Well, you can talk to the doctor in a second here. But first—”
“But he’s all right,” Grant said.
“Oh, his leg’s banged up pretty good. But he was wearing that helmet. He’ll be all right. He had some good luck up there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he could of laid there a lot longer, but it happened some folks come by on their bikes.”
Grant’s heart was hammering in his skull. He couldn’t think—his son lying there, up there, on the mountain, hurt—
“Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “Where are you all at?”
There was something in the man’s tone. Grant shook his head. “What do you mean?”