by Rene Denfeld
From the hole blew a cold blast of fetid air.
What had the clerk said? Some came for gold, only to be shown for fools.
What had made the original settler decide this was the place to dig a gold mine? Was it magical thinking or wild hope? How hard it must have been, to hew the cold dirt out, melt it over the sluice box, searching with frozen hands for the telltale nuggets, only to find lumps of black soil.
There was no sign of recent human presence, but there could be another entrance to the mine. Madison could be inside.
She dug in her backpack for her flashlight. The cold white light probed into a vast black hole. There was no end in sight.
Naomi took a deep breath and went inside.
Ranger Dave was out checking the roads after the storm when he saw a car parked casually next to a pack of snow off the blacktop. He immediately recognized it from Naomi’s trips to the ranger station.
Irritation and admiration filled him. The woman didn’t give up. It reminded him of his dad saying of his mom, to whom he had been married for fifty-four years before she passed: Every day I don’t kill the woman, I admire her more.
Naomi’s car waited patiently for her, like a dog at the shoulder. The ranger pulled off a glove and touched the hood. It was cold. He noted the ice pitting on the underside: she had traveled to cities that used chemical ice. Other trips into deserts had faded the paint with heat. The empty interior seemed staged to discourage city thieves.
And in the backseat was the locator he had given her.
He straightened, his exasperation turning to worry. It was midafternoon. The child finder had headed out into a treacherous glacier district without her locator. Alone.
He weighed what to do. Wait for her, to make sure she came back safe? That would mean waiting for nightfall, and then he would have to wait for sunrise to search. In his world live rescue usually happened within hours, not days.
Ranger Dave examined the hard sky, so reticent, even now, to tell him its secrets. It was gray and full-bodied with clouds. Storms here blew in with little notice, as Naomi should know by now.
Dammit. He pulled open his truck door, grabbed his snowshoes off the passenger floor. His survival equipment was always in his pack, ready to go—climbing gear, rope, a small shovel in case he had to dig an ice cave in a storm, food, and flares.
He followed her snowshoe tracks, crossing the bank of snow to what he could tell was an abandoned road. He hadn’t even known this old road was there. But somehow Naomi had, and the flame of admiration beat a little stronger in his chest.
Ranger Dave hiked, holding his breath around the cliff face, until he finally reached the crude hole framed with wood. He had run into a few of these abandoned mines over the years—death traps for the curious.
Naomi’s tracks led right into it.
Naomi had hesitated only momentarily. Going back for help would take time. As she always did when hunting for a child—no matter how long they had been missing—she felt the rush.
There was something else, too: asking for help from others was more dangerous than doing something alone. Part of the tug of her forgotten past was the danger of those who acted nice. You never knew who was safe, her mind told her, and that conviction formed a hard wall inside her. Very few had ever made it past: Jerome, Mrs. Cottle, and her friend Diane. She felt safest going at it alone.
The mine shaft was barely large enough for her to stand, if she bent just a little. Her flashlight inspected the rocky interior. Obsidian black—old lava and rich soil turned dark with age. There was no glint of hope.
And yet the miner had continued. It was just like the male ego, she thought with some amusement. Heaven knows how many years he had spent digging this godforsaken hole.
The ground under her was slippery, and she had only gone a few feet when she noticed the mine shaft was at a decline. She was aware of the tons of earth and rock above her, a mountain’s worth of pressure.
The cold air increased, almost blowing up the shaft, and Naomi began to wonder about underground rivers—the kind of waters that flow through mountains, like hidden waterfalls—when suddenly her feet gave out beneath her, and she was sliding.
She could feel her backpack tear at her shoulders, rocks rolling underneath her, and then she was turning, falling through the air.
When she woke she realized she still had the flashlight—her hand had a death grip on it, as a matter of fact—and she was lying on her back on a pile of loose rocky dirt, fallen from the hole above her.
The flashlight had dimmed. She had been knocked out—for how long she didn’t know.
She loosened her fingers and played the dim light around. The miner had tunneled right into an underground cave. The black walls shined with water; the black water below her reflected the light. It was impossible to tell how deep it was. She shuddered a bit. She wondered how the miner had felt the moment his pick opened up not a heart of gold but a cold black cave.
At least she knew Madison was not here, she thought, playing the light into all the corners.
She was lucky to have landed on the dirt pile, and not to have tumbled into the water below her. She would be sore tomorrow, but that was about it—if she could get back up to the mine shaft. She stood up gingerly on the loose dirt. Her feet had fallen asleep. She shook them a little, feeling the tingles.
Naomi moved cautiously, looking up. She swallowed. The mine shaft was far above her—she had been lucky to fall on the dirt. Reaching it meant scaling the slippery black wall. One loose rock and she might take a worse tumble than before.
She felt slowly around the cliff face, touching the wet rocks. She took her time, examining every angle. It was too steep; the black wall actually protruded above her, making climbing impossible.
She sat back down, trying to not let fear creep around the edges of that hard place inside her she relied upon. She turned the light off, wanting to save the batteries. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that soon she would be hungry.
Naomi folded her arms around her legs and tried to stay calm. She slowed her breathing down. There was a way out, she reminded herself. There was always a way out. She would calm herself down until the idea came to her.
The sound of water dripping became her clock. Time was passing, and inside her internal panic began. She was trapped. She saw herself running across a dark field—and the anxiety that had been nibbling around the edges of her being began to blossom into real fear.
She stood up. She was going to find a way out.
“Need some help?”
A light fell around her. It was Ranger Dave. His face above the light was impossible to discern. Naomi looked up at him.
She deliberately made her voice steady. “If you don’t mind.”
Ranger Dave spent some time securing the ropes before bringing her up.
They hiked silently back up the mine shaft.
Outside it was late afternoon. Blinking in the sun, Naomi realized she had been knocked out for a few hours. She rubbed her forehead under her hat and felt a thin trickle of blood.
“Let me treat that cut,” Ranger Dave said, and there was a note of order in his voice.
She sat on a fallen log. He pulled a first aid kit from his pack, and quickly and neatly dressed the wound. He stopped to peer in her eyes, looking for signs of concussion. He saw her creamy skin, the shadow of exhaustion under her eyes, the wide, sweet mouth.
Her guileless eyes stared back.
“You were a fool to go in there,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked instead.
“I saw your car on the side of the road. I got worried.”
The look she gave him suggested she didn’t quite believe him. She stood, shaking life back into her legs, and then quickly laced back up the snowshoes.
“How did you even know this place was here?” he asked, completely rattled by her calm.
“I pulled the old claims,” she said.
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br /> “Nice. But there’s no way Madison could have wandered this far.”
“That’s true.”
He frowned. “You don’t think someone took her, do you? That family stopped at random. It’s not like Jack the Ripper was waiting in the trees.”
She pulled her cap back on, wincing slightly at the bandaged cut. “Didn’t you consider she could have made it back to the road and been picked up by someone?” she asked.
He flushed. “No, I didn’t.”
She adjusted her pack, ready to go. She looked indomitable.
“You left your locator in your car,” he said.
It was her turn to flush. “Sorry.”
“I don’t think you forgot it. I think you don’t trust me.”
“Does it matter?” He could see himself reflected in her eyes.
“I’m trying to help you—I’m curious about you,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know why,” she replied. “There is nothing to know about me.”
She said it in a way that put a shiver through him—as if she was as nameless as the trees, as formless as the wind, as empty as the cave she had fallen into. As if she could vanish as easily as the children she sought.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.
She smiled at him, that easy, generous smile, and now he could see the sadness in it. “I appreciate your saving me,” she said, as if saving people was everyday for her, and he suspected it was.
“You say that like you aren’t worth saving,” he blurted.
“I’m only worth the kids I find,” she said softly. “And now you’ve helped me so I can find Madison, so thank you.”
He stared at her, wanting to ask, Is that all? But he could see from her face it was.
She turned as she began to walk, her face framed in snow and trees, a silk sheet of brown hair across her shoulder, the motion of a round hip.
Ranger Dave followed her down the old road. The snowshoes were so much a part of his feet he no longer felt them. The pack on his back. The weight on his soul.
I already lost out, Naomi, he thought. Don’t make me lose again.
Ahead of him her form was silent, determined.
Growing up, he had wanted one thing, what his parents had: true love. Nothing had ever corrupted that vision. For a time he did have it. It was like lying in the softest place imaginable. Then it was lost, and part of him was lost with it.
No one ever told you what to do when love went away. It was always about capturing love, and keeping love. Not about watching it walk out the door to die alone rather than in your arms.
Naomi doesn’t want you, his head told him.
But he wasn’t about to give up. His heart told him so.
The first creature Naomi let close to her was not Mrs. Cottle. It was not even Jerome—though he came later.
No, the first creature she let close to her was the family cat.
His name was Conway Twitty the Kitty, and Naomi loved him.
She had never had a pet before, and this one came searching for her, purring louder than the devil with a bad case of gas, praise Jesus, Mrs. Cottle said. Every night Naomi would leave her too large bed—too much air between the floor and the quilt, too much space in the sheets, too little room to run—and find another place to sleep—the front hallway, bundled into a sleeping bag, most often the storage space under the stairs, with its own little locking door, where she felt safely hidden—and every night Conway came sauntering into whichever place she had found and crawled neatly on top of her legs to sleep. The feeling of weight was bliss.
Naomi recalled those early months now: the warm feeling of Conway between her legs and Jerome’s smile; splashing her face in the sink after running home from school, water in her lashes; sitting down for a supper the three of them, no one else.
Love wasn’t about numbers, Naomi realized then. It wasn’t about selling yourself or wanting anything in return. It wasn’t about hoping for safety. It was just—
That purr.
Her friend Diane explained to her later that, in the spectrum of hurt, it is better for a child to attach to an abuser than to experience the blind hole of neglect. Babies raised in orphanages without touch become like little monkeys, shrunken from inattention. Without a face to see, they can even become blind.
At least in abuse, Diane had explained, you have someone to fight against. Abuse starts with the premise that you exist, even to be mistreated. It’s a running start, she had said.
“You have a funny way of putting things,” Naomi had said.
“The key,” Diane had answered, ignoring that, “is to turn that unhealthy attachment into a good one.”
Letting Mrs. Cottle give her a bath—that was the big one. For months the neatly laundered pajamas sat stacked on the carpet-frosted toilet lid, the bath was drawn, the mirror misted, and Naomi would enter the bathroom alone, and close the door.
Mrs. Cottle always waited politely outside the door, asking periodically if all was okay. Naomi would shed her clothes, watching as always as her body unfolded from the cloth, seeing how over time her arms were darkening from the sun, wondering at the place between her legs. Even as she began to look at her own body without fear she would not let Mrs. Cottle in.
She washed herself, and rinsed, and played with the toys left at the side of the tub. Over time she became aware of what it was like to be a child. But still the door stayed closed. Not once did Mrs. Cottle complain, or suggest differently. She simply waited, cheerful and calm.
One day Naomi stopped in the middle of her splashing. She pulled the shower curtain to cover her nakedness and called, uncertain, “Mrs. Cottle?”
“Yes, dear?” from outside the door.
“Can you wash my back?”
“Of course, dear.”
Mrs. Cottle came in, and Mrs. Cottle washed her back, and for the life of her Naomi did not know why she sobbed and sobbed while her foster mom washed her back.
It took her a year for her to love back.
“You’ve been here a year now,” Mrs. Cottle had said. “I figure you are about ten.”
Her foster mother had said it matter-of-factly, like it was no shame. Mrs. Cottle was wise enough not to ask it in a question.
They had been shelling walnuts on the porch. Mrs. Cottle had said she had a powerful hankering for penuche. Naomi didn’t even know what that was, but she figured it must be delicious, because everything that came out of Mrs. Cottle’s kitchen was like honey in her throat.
Mrs. Cottle cracked another large nut with the nutcracker. She was so good at it the two halves popped out unblemished. A little rub with her fingers and the papery husk came right off. Naomi’s little pile of broken nuts looked like sawdust, as Jerome liked to tease her. He was inside, doing homework under a yellow spill of light. The bugs danced at the screen and everything was okay—except, Naomi noticed, a movement where the forest met the field. She had become instantly alert, lost in attention.
“What do you see out there, honey?” Mrs. Cottle asked.
“I’m looking for her,” Naomi said airily, unaware she was even speaking.
“Who are you looking for?” The soft voice came from afar, a nut held carefully in a creased palm. Even softer: “Is it your mother?”
Naomi shook her head. “She’s too small,” she said, still unaware she was speaking.
She abruptly shook herself awake, but not before Mrs. Cottle saw the look on her face. It was not terror, as she had expected, but beatific hope. Whoever it was that Naomi wanted to find was a person she had loved.
Naomi picked up another nut, gave it a try with the nutcracker—and demolished it into a dozen pieces. Mrs. Cottle laughed. “Look at your strength. I ought to set you to chopping the wood.”
They had sat together a bit longer, making the pile of nuts grow. Behind them they heard Jerome get up, tunelessly whistling, and heard the slam of the fridge door. That boy will eat me out of house and home, Mrs. Cottle often claimed, if Naomi doesn’t
do it first. The two of them were thick as thieves—and as hungry as hunters.
“I think I am ten now,” Naomi announced suddenly.
Mrs. Cottle’s eyes lit up. “Why, I bet you are. We should have a party.”
“What’s that?” Naomi had asked, and Mrs. Cottle had to turn away before Naomi saw her reaction. The child still often surprised her—one moment so wise, the other a vacant ignorance. Since she had come, Naomi had to be taught the simplest things: how to turn on a television, how to dial a phone. Mrs. Cottle had expected to find Naomi sleeping elsewhere at night, but she hadn’t expected to find Naomi curled in the oddest places during the day. One day she found her on the top of a bookshelf, lying like a serpent. I like it up here, the child had said. Mrs. Cottle didn’t chastise her. Naomi’s wildness of spirit would keep her safe.
“It’s something you have with cake, to celebrate.”
Naomi had nodded. “I love you, Mrs. Cottle,” she had said suddenly, destroying another walnut.
Mrs. Cottle held back tears.
“I love you, too.”
That night, after being rescued by Ranger Dave, Naomi was exhausted. She finished a bowl of split pea soup in the diner, and by the time she made it to her room her eyes were closing. She curled into the blankets and fell soundly asleep.
She dreamed the big dream again that night, her hands opening and closing in her sleep, feeling a terrible loss, and when she woke in the morning her face was as wet as if she had just been bathed in the waters of heaven itself.
The dream left a residue of regret. Why, she didn’t know.
Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.
Each and every time Naomi found a child she told them it would be okay. She encouraged them to be whole with themselves, to never forget and yet look forward.
She could not begin to imagine such peace for herself.