by Ann Gimpel
“There, there, sweetie. I’m sure she’s fine,” Rosa cooed at me. “But I’ll let the Chief know, and we’ll keep an eye out for her car. Not more’n one like that in this town. Should be easy enough to find.”
“Will you call me back?” I cringed. I sounded like a whiny five-year-old, not an almost-high-school graduate.
“Of course.” The line went dead.
More hours ticked by. True to her word, Rosa, and then the woman who relieved Rosa after seven o’clock, called me every hour. I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sit still either. I had to stay near enough to the house to hear the phone, so I walked a circuit: upstairs, downstairs, out to the barn, over to the garden. While I was in the barn, I did manage to milk the goat, but if she hadn’t bleated at me, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to do that.
A police cruiser pulled into our front yard just before ten, and Chief Symons stepped out of it. As I watched his tall, slender figure, I knew it was bad news. Sensed it. I felt him girding himself as I came racing out the kitchen door.
My face crumpled before he even started talking. “What’s happened?” I cried out. “What’d you find?”
“Well, Marni, I’m not entirely certain. We haven’t found her yet. But I don’t have a good feeling about this.” His deep voice was laced with pain and compassion, and his dark eyes sought mine. “We located her car parked in front of Mavis Grandby’s. I talked to Mavis, and she allowed as to how she’d done a reading for your ma earlier today. Said your ma had left round about two. I tried to find out what they’d talked about, but Mavis can be pretty close-mouthed when she wants to be. Told me it was none of my business. She seemed surprised when we told her Bridget’s car was still in front of her place. Guess she hadn’t gone outside after your ma left. Anyway, Marni, have you looked around here? I mean really looked?”
I nodded, disconsolate. “Yeah, I’ve been through the house and the barn and the garden.”
“Did you look through the rest of the property?”
“No. Why would she be there? Nothing out there but woods.”
He frowned, then stood. “There was something in the Plymouth, her notebook. Here, let me get it.” Stooping, he reached into his car and drew out Mom’s lined spiral notepad. The same one she’d used to write the school excuse just that morning. Had it only been this morning? It felt as if she’d written that note hundreds of years ago.
Handing it to me, he said, “I paged through this, but I couldn’t find any clues.” Even though he didn’t say the words, I figured he meant he’d been hunting for a suicide note. “Why don’t you go into the house,” he went on. “I’ll follow you in and wait while you gather up a few things. You’ll be staying with me and the missus until we can figure out what’s happened to your ma.”
Still clutching the notebook, I staggered up the stairs and pulled an old duffel bag out of the hall closet intent on getting tomorrow’s school clothes together. As I flipped on the light in my room, a fresh wave of pain caught me off-balance, and I stifled keening pushing up from my throat. At first, I used the crook of my arm, then switched to a pillow when the whimpers escalated to hiccuppy sobs. I didn’t want Chief Symons to feel like he had to come up here to comfort me. He was already going far and away above what he needed to do.
Without meaning to, I opened the notebook. Or it fell open. When I tried to remember back to that moment, I was never truly sure which it was. There, on the last of the pages with writing, sat Momma’s fine, even hand
I re-thought talkin’ to Miz Grandby. She found Danny, but it nigh onto cost her dear. It took some doin’, but he finally agreed to what we offered. Live your life, baby girl. I love you with all my heart.
Knowledge slammed into me, stealing my breath. The tears I thought I had a handle on rose in a choking flood, and I snatched up the pillow again, burying wounded screams in its feathers.
Mavis Grandby’s place backed onto ours, the property lines meeting not far from the pond. Momma must have walked back here, maybe to buy herself time to think about what she was doing. If only I’d stopped by the school office to telephone her with the news, but maybe even that would have been too late. If she’d been with Mrs. Grandby at two, it would have been.
My late father, Daniel Boudinet, was still calling all the shots. “I hate you,” I snarled. “I’ll hate you forever.”
From deep within the bowels of the old house, I could have sworn I heard demented laughter as I threw things into that duffel bag and trod dully down the stairs to where Chief Symons waited in Mom’s kitchen. I didn’t know much then, but I knew where we’d find Momma. And I vowed I’d never spend another night in this house. My skin crawled as insane laughter, that apparently only I could hear, drove into my brain like heated nails.
“Ready?” the Chief asked, reaching out to take my duffel and my school bag.
I drew back, setting my things on the linoleum floor. “I didn’t look by the pond,” I mumbled. “We need to go there.”
He looked at me oddly, but then detached his big flashlight from his belt. “Show me where,” he said. After a hesitation, he asked, “Was there something in that notebook? I read it, but it didn’t make much sense to me. Bridget was talking about your dad as if he were still alive...” He stopped then, and I could see it in his face. The same expression everyone got when my father’s name came up. A combination of disbelief and terror.
“No. Nothing in the notebook,” I managed to croak, feeling hot and numb at the same time. Tears flooded my eyes and tracked down my face as I followed the Chief outside. In the uneven glow from the flashlight, I walked the familiar path through the garden and past the barn. Ahead of me, just at the periphery of my vision, I saw the wolf twitching his tail as if he were mocking us.
When we got closer to the pond, the Chief played his flashlight back and forth. It caught the scruffy wolf in its beams, but since the Chief didn’t say anything, he probably couldn’t see it.
Fury battling with fear, I walked toward what I was certain was an apparition of Daddy’s pet. Tasting blood, I knew I’d bitten into my tongue.
“Marni!” the Chief’s voice was sharp. “You wait here.”
I kept walking. Chief Symons ran up beside me, thrusting me behind him once he caught up. I heard his breath rattle as he inhaled. He might not have seen the wolf, but he was afraid too. The air vibrated with menace. Peering around the Chief’s body, I saw the wolf leering at us, but it grew less and less substantial until the only thing left was a glowing nimbus.
“Shit.” The Chief dropped to his knees.
I lurched from behind him and saw her too. Momma lay face down in the shallows, hair billowing around her. Sorrow choked me, annihilated me, but reason intruded. How could she have drowned in less than a foot of water?
“Stay there, Marni. I’ll get her.” The Chief walked into the water and grabbed Mom by the shoulders so he could pull her onto the grass that grew thick beside the little pond.
Hope flickered. Maybe, maybe...
I helped him drag Momma out, arranging her so we could press the water from her lungs. It spewed out easily, thick and viscous, but cold, so cold. When no more water came, the Chief rolled her over and started pressing on her chest and breathing into her mouth.
Between breaths he gasped, “Run! Use my radio. Tell them we need an ambulance.”
I ran, but I knew it was too late. That wonderful numinous transcendence that had always been a part of Momma was gone. Momma, my wonderful Momma, was...was what? Not dead exactly, since I could probably find her easily enough with my camera. If she wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t alive— I backed away from my thoughts, unable to face what they meant.
A long time later—well past midnight—Chief Symons and I were finally back in the kitchen, our wet clothes making squishing sounds. He hadn’t said much, but I knew he didn’t understand how Mom could have drowned in that shallow pond. He’d asked me, walking back, if she could swim.
Lying, I replied, “Not very we
ll.” By that time I’d figured out she’d given herself back to my father—to save me. It was the only explanation that made sense.
His shoulders slumped with defeat, the Chief bent to gather my duffel and school bags from the scarred kitchen floor. “You ready?” he asked.
Nodding numbly, I picked up my camera bag. “Yes.” I was snuffling. “I think so.”
“I called Gwen,” he said in that dry, sandpapery voice men have when they’re trying not to break down. “She’ll have the guest room made up for you by the time we get there.” He looked right at me then out of eyes that had seen too much in twenty years of police work. His close-cropped dark hair was streaky with sweat, and I could smell the fear in him. “Best if you don’t think too deeply right about now. Tomorrow’s time enough for most everything.”
Tomorrow.
I was careful not to dislodge the wellspring of grief sitting just beneath the surface, so I didn’t break down completely. Likely he was right. Tomorrow would be time enough to decide about a lot of things. For the first time in forever—there wasn’t much need to keep things locked up where we lived—I plucked the house key off its peg next to the kitchen door, setting the deadbolt once I was out on the porch. The front door had swollen shut years ago, and Mom and I never used it.
“That’s right, baby girl. You keep what’s in there locked up,” Momma’s voice echoed in my head. “And you get what you need away from here quick as you can. The goat and chickens too. Don’t you fret. Miz Grandby and me, we planned all this out. I know what I need to do.” Her voice faded, but she sent me an image of the fire that would rage uncontrollably through the old farmhouse, leaving nothing but a smoking ruin in its wake.
Pocketing the key, I climbed into the police cruiser, buried my head in my hands, and wept as full knowledge of what Momma traded for my freedom swept through me.
~~~~~~~~
An early version of this story was originally published as Daddy’s Girl in Title Goes Here, April 2011.
Through a Glass Darkly
“Damn!” Cara coughed as she pulled the moistened bandana up over her nose again. It didn’t help much, but she figured anything was better than nothing. Squinting against the ever-present smoke, she wriggled to make her position on the narrow ledge more comfortable and checked her single piece of protection.
Yup, seems secure. What happens when I run out of water? Will the smoke do me in before thirst drives me mad?
“Climbing!” John’s voice echoed off the canyon walls.
“Take your time. Be careful,” she yelled. “I’ve only got a single pin in. It’s okay for me, but...” As soon as the words were out, she knew what she needed to do and rapidly hammered another piton a few inches farther up, looping the rope through a second locking carabiner. The clatter of aluminum hanging off John’s gear rack told her he was getting closer. More to kill time than anything else, she examined the rock face. The crack she’d chosen to defeat the thousand-foot wall zigged upward as far as she could see, but she couldn’t see all the way to the top, not even close.
Fire raging through Kings Canyon National Park spread below them and made this route irreversible. They couldn’t retreat, so she crossed her fingers and breathed a silent prayer she’d chosen well.
Fires rampaged through the Sierra Nevada Mountains every summer, especially as run-off from the last season’s snow diminished to a trickle, but some idiot of a work crew boss must have brought in explosives to finish needed trail repairs. One of the fires had likely gotten too close, the dynamite detonated, and the autumn-dry forest went up like a torch.
Cara had been high on the eastern edge of Dragon Peak watching it happen. To escape, she’d lead her clients—there’d been three of them then—over an unknown, and as far as she knew previously unclimbed, route down toward Rae Lakes. They’d ended up miles from their camp on the wrong side of a thirteen thousand foot ridge. Wind had thwarted her, fanning the fire with breakneck speed, and narrowing her possibilities.
“Ah shit,” she muttered through clenched teeth. Her next route choice had been a mistake, forcing them high onto this rock wall. So many other mistakes peppered her slightly less than thirty-five years that she winced. Having kicked open the door-to-looking-back, she stood at the lintel, an unwilling witness to her travesty of a girlhood. About the only thing that hadn’t been wrong back then was running away from her drug-addled mother and Betty, her mom’s bitch of a partner, the second she finished high school.
She still remembered that afternoon, could see herself as a gangly seventeen-year-old, ratty valise clutched in one shaking hand trying to rouse her mother enough to tell her goodbye. She’d finally given up. It didn’t matter much one way or the other since her mother wouldn’t remember. Goodbyes were for the living, and drugs had killed her mother’s humanity. Betty’s words slammed against her as she headed out the door. “You’ll never amount to nothin’. Nothin’ but trouble from you. Your ma would be better off if you was dead.”
Cara shivered, swallowing around a lump that formed in her smoke-sore throat. Might as well let ‘em roll. Once the memories wakened, she’d found it was pointless to stem their tide. In rapid succession, she shuffled through her years of waitressing, a brief stint with a cruise line she left the minute it became clear other things were expected of their hostess staff, and then her years with Leif, crack climber, ace skier, mountain man to the core. He was also a drunk and nasty as all get out, but he had taught her about the mountains, and it had been Leif—nagging, pushing, and criticizing—who’d seen she got her certification as a guide. If it wouldn’t have been for the avalanche that obliterated the entire group he’d been leading up Annapurna, she supposed she’d still be with him. Miserable, but at least not alone. After Leif’s death, she pretty much shunned men. She snorted under her breath, and her face contorted into a scowl. No matter how far I run, I can’t get away from Ma and Betty.
Cara squeezed her eyes shut tight and forced herself to focus. Wallowing in the past was an indulgence. She tucked her raggedy black braids more firmly into her bright red windbreaker. Hair caught fire fast. Best keep it covered. Looking at the flames raging five hundred feet below, she felt an almost unbearable urge to just let go and finish things off. “Bad call, sister!” she hissed. “I have to stay in the moment. I lost the other two. I owe it to John to hold it together.” A flash of pain tugged at her attention and she realized she’d bitten through her lower lip. The jangle of John’s hardware got louder, and she felt movement on the rope.
“Easy, now,” she called down. “You’re close. Here, let me just scoot up to the next ledge.”
“Not yet,” he rasped. She heard fear in his voice, and he was panting. Not good. “I just have to—”
“It’s all right, John. Take all the time you need.” Cara tried to infuse confidence she wasn’t feeling into her voice. She was good at what she did, had been leading and training climbers for over ten years, but this was the worst situation she’d ever landed in.
If you’re so good, an inner voice—Betty’s voice—mocked, why aren’t Ruth and Christopher still here?
“Because,” Cara snarled, “they didn’t follow my instructions. They panicked and ran for the ranger station, right into the thick of the fire.”
You didn’t follow them. The voice was implacable. You were their guide. They paid you to take care of them.
“I may have been their guide, but I didn’t sign up to follow them into hell.” Her control fraying dangerously, Cara felt tears well. “What the fuck am I doing talking to myself?” she groaned, her grip on sanity slipping.
“Cara?” John’s sooty freckled face appeared out of nowhere at the level of her boots, his blue eyes red-rimmed from the smoke. He sounded even more frightened than he had earlier.
Of course he’s scared shitless. He just heard me talking to myself, sounding like a crazy person. “It’s okay, John. I’m okay.” She stretched out a hand and helped him onto the ledge. “Ready to settle in? I’ll ge
t us up the next pitch.”
“How...how many more do you think?” he choked on the words. His flame-colored hair, twisted into an approximation of dreadlocks fanned around his gaunt face.
“Pitches?”
He nodded, nervously licking his lips.
“Uh, maybe half a dozen. I can’t see the top from here.”
“Around the corner,” he jerked his thumb back behind him, “I thought I saw a way off here in, maybe, only a couple hundred feet.” He hesitated. “You probably didn’t see it because you were just looking at this crack.”
“There’s a different one?” she asked and wondered how she could possibly have missed it. She had looked. In fact she remembered looking. Leif had taught her to always look. It wasn’t that his lessons were wrong, but they turned brutal fast if she didn’t respond immediately to all his directives.
John nodded again and then croaked out, “Yes.”
“Did you see a way from this crack to that one?”
“Not exactly. But I don’t see things the way you might.” He sounded pathetic and wistful, like a small child watching a loved one dying and hoping someone will take care of everything, remove the illness, and bring the world back into kilter.
“Okay.” She blew out her breath. “Can’t hurt to take a look. Belay me. I’ll rap down a little and see if I can’t pendulum over to it.”
“What...what about me?” His fear had clearly morphed into full-blown panic.
“If I can get above where we are, I’ll swing my second rope over to you and top rope you up to me.” Struggling to keep irritation out of her voice, she added, “Look, John, we have to move fast here. I don’t know about you, but the smoke’s really getting to me. My eyes feel gritty and I’m nearly out of water. We’ve got at least a few hundred feet to go yet. If we can just get over the shoulder of Mount Rixford, there’s an easy way down the other side to the Kearsage Pass trail. We can get out from there.” Maybe. If Onion Valley’s not on fire too.