by Margo Catts
She nodded but didn’t speak. Kevin had worked himself down the tree until he was beside the girls, then jumped to the ground from there. They shrieked, and he promptly went back to the trunk and started climbing again.
“I need to start making some plans,” I said. “No matter what I do, it’ll be a while before I can afford my own place.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t want you to feel like I’m taking advantage and wonder whether I’m ever going to get out on my own. I’m asking if I can stay here for now, but I want you to know that I intend to support myself.”
“Elena, you don’t ever need to go.”
I looked back at her, not speaking.
“I’ve been alone a long time. And not because I prefer it that way. You staying with me—well, now, that’d be a gift.”
I swallowed hard. Looked at the tree. Mac, bored with the inaccessible children, had flopped in the shade and lay with his head up and his eyes half closed, smiling and panting.
“Well, it’d sure be helpful to have you there, with the baby, if that’s what I decide to …” The sentence had come out of me before I knew where it would end. I bit my lip. “But that’s asking a lot.”
She shook her head. “No. No, it isn’t.”
“I could help with stuff around the house and I could start paying rent. Soon.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“And maybe it’d be good to have me at the house whenever you’re ready to go back to Hat Creek.”
Tuah laid her hands in her lap. “I meant what I said earlier. I don’t think I’ll be going back,” she said. “For the funeral. That’s all.”
“I just can’t imagine that.”
“I was thinking all night. That town I thought I knew, where we all took care of each other …” She shook her head. “There was evil. Why wouldn’t there be? It’s everywhere. I was a fool.”
“No— Tuah—”
“There was no hunting accident. Somebody was watching Benencia, planning it. The police will work on it for a while, but no one will ever solve it, no one will ever get what they deserve.” She stopped, straightening slightly as if correcting herself. “Well, no one ever does, really. You know that. And if I go back up there, I’ll just walk around looking at those houses, suspecting everyone I ever knew. It would poison everything—the life I had, the life I have now. I won’t do it. I just can’t. I have to believe better than that.”
I looked up at her. “But you told me about the way it holds your memories. Your family. Olive. It’s your home. And it looks so beautiful now.”
Tuah smiled at me. “Olive is here, now. Not there. And so is my family.”
I looked down at my lap. Tuah leaned forward over her folded hands. I looked up into her face, shadowed in the strong sunlight. She wore a denim work shirt, and the points of the collar were frayed.
“Elena, this is my home. The past is past. This is where my family starts over.”
Epilogue
The position of physical science teacher at Lake County High School was cursed, it seemed, which served to my benefit. My competition to replace the poaching, marijuana-growing teacher from last year developed his own problems with the law when his wife was discovered to have embezzled somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars from her employer and he was the one who had bought a truck, a motorcycle, and a snowmobile with some of the proceeds.
By comparison, an illegitimate pregnancy was a minor inconvenience, and the job was mine. Of course, I would need a substitute after Christmas break, but the principal identified that as a small problem, considering. An actual teaching certificate, as well, could follow later, and he had every expectation of offering me a permanent position when the various loose ends were tied off.
I was with Leo on a Saturday afternoon at the end of the summer, sitting on a bench outside the malt shop with a strawberry shake in one hand, the first time I knew I felt the baby move. I froze in place, staring at my abdomen, my empty hand suspended over my lap, astonished at what had just happened, afraid to miss it if it happened again.
“Elena?” he said. “The cookout. Were you listening?”
I shook my head, afraid to speak.
“Are you okay?”
Another touch. Tiny, like a nerve twitching, but unmistakable. Another human, inside of me, alive and doing something I couldn’t see. I looked up at Leo.
“The baby moved,” I whispered.
“Really?” His eyes widened. “Wow!”
An understatement of mythic proportions. I looked back down at my belly, waiting.
He tapped the side of my cup with one knuckle. “Staring isn’t going to feed anybody,” he said. “Finish your shake. Baby wants some berries.”
The Koffords adopted one of Poppy’s puppies, which helped mitigate some of the tears as the others left for their own homes. Paul had gone to work at the mine by then, and I made a habit of stopping by the house on my way home after school, purportedly to check on the puppy, but mostly to spend an hour or so with Kevin and Sarah.
Late in October, as snow brought the last of the aspen leaves to the ground, Poppy threw a baby shower for me, her already overcrowded front room becoming chaotic as it filled with people and pattern and movement and noise. Mindy and Joan came, along with Kim and Lizzie and Leslie, as well as other friends of theirs who had become mine as well over the past few months. Fellow teachers and a few parents came, too, plus a couple of neighbors I’d never seen before. Mama Ruth had combed her hair and dressed in polyester slacks and a blouse, and sat by herself in the corner eating potato chips from a soup bowl.
Tuah was there, of course, pointing at items on Poppy’s walls and discussing something with one of Poppy’s neighbors with great animation. One of the other women came up to her and gave her a hug. Two others laughed near the kitchen. Sarah slipped in and out between their hips, offering carrot sticks and crackers from a plate. Gifts, garish in yellow and white and green and in frilled ribbons—plus one from the Koffords in Christmas paper—leaned against the wall by the door.
I sat in the corner, hardly knowing where to look in this room so full of people and warmth and life. Finally Tuah seated herself beside me and put her hand on my knee, patted it, and gave a squeeze. I looked back at her and she nodded, then looked away and squeezed again, blinking. My own eyes filled, as they did too easily these days, and I put the heels of my hands against them before anyone would be able to ask why I was crying.
The fullness in my chest was almost more than I could bear. I had been given so much. These people, this child, and most of all, a future, however criss-crossed with joy or trouble it might be. I was the recipient of gifts I had almost failed to recognize, and had done nothing to deserve. But which I now knew I should keep anyway.
I had been blessed, indeed.
Acknowledgments
No story idea makes it to the printed and published page without being touched by many hands along the way. One name appears on the cover; the others get squeezed onto a page or two at the back. So I want to make sure those names get their due here.
Overwhelming gratitude goes to my agent, Sandra Bond, who first believed in this book when it was just a few chapters old and rode with it through family upheavals and tragedies on both sides, waited for it to go with me to Saudi Arabia and back, and knew the importance of finding just the right home for it. She’s been my guide and my cheerleader and an unerringly clear-eyed business counselor. Really, everybody should have one of her.
Sandra’s top target, early on, was my editor, Chelsey Emmelhainz. At the time she first saw this book, she was with another publisher, and made it her first order of business to ask for it as soon as she arrived at Skyhorse Publishing. I am beyond grateful for Chelsey’s vision of what this book could and should be, her enthusiasm and advocacy for it, and her extraordinary talent as an editor.
I’ve been around the publishing business long enough to know that Chelsey serves as the capta
in of a boat that has a large crew. As I write, I am only peripherally acquainted with the rest of the team at Skyhorse Publishing who will put their skills to work in copyediting, proofreading, graphics, design, marketing, publicity, and more, who think what they do is totally normal. It is beyond me. And I’m deeply grateful.
The original set pieces for this book included a lost child and a girl who started a fire. They did not include molybdenum, mine rescue, Colorado mining history, gold mining practices, or the specific town of Leadville and its history. While the ghost town of Hat Creek and its setting are fictional, Leadville is not, and I am indebted to experts and historians there that I hope will say I got things right enough. At the Lake County Public Library, resident local historian Janice Fox took me to 1970s Leadville. Bill Nelson and Vince Matthews at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, also in Leadville, answered my questions about mining practices. Eventually, all roads led to Joe Nachtrieb at Colorado Mountain College, an extraordinary teacher with a long career in mining and mine rescue, whose expertise in chemistry, physics, geology, history, and humanity left me in awe. Plus he was irrationally generous with his time. You should check out America’s highest incorporated city yourself. As Joe told me, “For nine months of the year, the skiing is great. For the other three, it’s pretty good.”
For the writing itself, I am indebted to all those who read and gave input along the way. Michelle Crystal, my critique partner, brainstormed with me and kept me on schedule. Marcy Gardner, Bonnie Wetherbee, Terry Young, Cheryl Glasset, and Ann Stanz, my longtime friends in books and ideas, were able to step in at the final stages and comb through the manuscript for inconsistencies, discrepancies, and unanswered questions. My goal all along has been to write a book folks like you would want to read.
My gratitude in writing and in life goes above all to my family. I have one of those moms who thinks I can do absolutely anything, and that whatever I do is brilliant. Any screwups built on a foundation like that are purely my own. My children, Cheryl, Jill, and Danny, with their respective spouses Benjamin, Kory, and Michelle, have read and reread, kept tabs on everything going on, and supported me with laughter, encouragement, and the best company I know.
Finally, my husband, Stephen, is the one who made it all possible. When the ideas and characters that had been circling each other in my head for years finally decided they were ready to step onto the page, we were grinding through a phase of unemployment and could ill afford for me to write. But he insisted that I must. Without his determination, faith, support, and refusal to let me off the hook, there wouldn’t be any pages, least of all the one that gets his name on it. Of all the intertwined threads of my life, the ones that run through his hands have turned out the best, no matter what they looked like when they started.