by Blake Crouch
Now only moans and soft bellows disturbed the silence, the whimpers of those waiting to die, wanting it more than a drink of water, worse than air.
She looked up at Rosalyn. “Hey,” she whispered.
Rosalyn’s eyes were open, but the old whore made no answer. She had died while Gloria slept, her mouth inflated by the gigantic tongue, eyelids cracked, blood rolling out of them and down her cheeks. Even while she’d been alive, the absence of water had allowed the mummification of her body to begin, the skin on her face shrinking, lips shriveling, gums blackened, nose withered by half, flesh leathered into the color of ashen purple, with livid streaks where the blood had pooled.
Gloria felt a glimmer of release that her friend had passed.
Again, she obsessed on water, imagined bending down on the shore of Emerald Lake, splashing her face on a bright summer day. She kept replaying the last drink she’d ever taken—snow melted in an iron pot over the fire in their cabin. She could still picture Zeke filling her cup on Christmas morning, remembered how the water had chilled the tin, how when she touched it, her fingerprints had appeared as ghostly, fading condensation on the metal.
The sound of weeping drew her attention. She could barely raise her head from Rosalyn’s lap, but when she did, she saw a woman lying ten feet away against the wall of the cavern, touching the blond hair of a boy perhaps two or three years old. The woman had managed to pull him into her body and she kissed his eyebrows and his parched little lips and cried tearlessly. Her husband had died several hours ago and his body lay sprawled nearby on the floor.
The woman rolled her son across the rock toward his father and lay down between them. She held their hands and stared up at the ceiling, her lips moving, and she would not get up again.
Gloria closed her eyes. She thought about her husband and her son, wondered if they could see her dying in this cave.
Then she sensed him, opened her eyes, and across the cavern stood Ezekiel, dapper in that four-button sack coat, his Sunday best, and shining as if illumined by footlights.
Though his lips did not move, she heard his voice perfectly.
He said he was sorry she’d suffered, but that it was almost over, that he’d glimpsed the place where they were going, and there were no words for pain or loss there, and no past.
Our boy’s there, he said, and I’m told he’s been askin for us. There’s some kind a beautiful place waitin on our souls, Gloria.
What’s he look like, Zeke?
Like Gus, I suppose.
He ain’t grown?
I don’t know.
Will he always be a little boy, or will he grow up into a man?
I don’t know the answer to that.
You go on to him.
I wanna wait for you, Glori.
You won’t be waitin long.
June 2010
A
ll right, we’re back on the record oh nine CR one sixty-four, the People versus Abigail Foster. Let’s go ahead and bring in the jury.”
The woman occupied a table near the street, shaded by an umbrella, a copy of the Times spread out across her lap.
At the sound of approaching footsteps, she looked up.
“Would the defendant please rise?”
Abigail and her attorney stood.
“Madam Forelady, have you arrived upon a verdict?”
“We have, Your Honor.”
It was all happening faster than Abigail had imagined. She felt dizzy, her knees trembling under her skirt, had to put a hand on the table to steady herself.
“Is the verdict to be returned a unanimous one?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“How do you find as to count one of the indictment charging the defendant with murder in the second degree?”
Midday, mid-June on the steps of the San Juan County court house, and the sky shone spring blue, the scant deciduous trees of Silverton just beginning to leaf out, baby greens and yellows smudging this high valley where mounds of snow lingered under the eaves of Victorian houses. It had been the hardest winter in a de cade, the snowpack still four feet deep above timberline on the north aspects.
Walter Palmer ended his cell-phone call with a curt “No” and looked at his client. “Wanna grab lunch, Abigail? Brown Bear Café, and I’m buying.”
“I’ve got a flight to catch to New York.” Abigail embraced him, this fifty-six-year-old, balding, pudgy lawyer with halitosis and no sense of humor who’d fought for her freedom as if it were his own, put a soft kiss on his cheek, and said, “Thank you, Walt. For everything. Best seventy-five grand I ever spent.”
Twenty-four hours later at Alexandra, a café three blocks from her studio apartment, Abigail bent to kiss a woman with short silver hair who was wearing a cotton summer dress that showed off the constellation of freckles on her browned shoulders.
“You look cute.”
She sat across from her mother, their table bordering the sidewalk of Hudson Street, a hot day in the city, the rectangle of sky between the buildings a washed-out summer white and the stench of the river draped like a dirty wet blanket over the West Village.
Sarah Foster said, “I ordered a bottle of wine. Best they had.”
Abigail dropped on the table the stack of mail she’d collected from the post office.
“Mom, you didn’t have to—”
“I know I didn’t, but I did. Excuse me for wanting to celebrate that my daughter isn’t going into the clink for thirty years. And you wouldn’t even let me be there.”
Abigail set her sunglasses on the wrought-iron table. “If the verdict had gone the other way, I couldn’t have watched what that did to you.”
Sarah took hold of her daughter’s hand. “Always the protector. Well, it’s all behind you now, Abby.”
“Yeah, but you know the full story. For everyone else, not guilty by reason of mental defect doesn’t mean you didn’t do it.”
“It’s nobody’s business.”
“People wonder. They’ll talk. Snow madness is what my attorney argued, what I said happened. That I went nuts for a little while ’cause of being stranded in the storm. Temporary psychosis and—”
“You know the truth. That’s all that matters.”
“Doesn’t make it easy.”
The waiter came, presented the bottle of chardonnay, filled their wineglasses.
When he’d left, Abigail pulled down into her lap the pile of mail rubber-banded together. As she perused the month’s accumulation of magazines and past-due bills, she noticed the package from the mail-order film-processing company, and her face must have darkened, because her mother said, “What is it, Abby?”
Abigail tore open the envelope, withdrew a sheaf of photographs.
“Emmett Tozer shot a roll of film on the hike in, and his wife gave it to me our first night in Abandon. I guess I sent these in to be developed before I flew out to Colorado for the trial.”
“Sure you wanna see those right now?”
The photos had been shot in black-and-white, and the first picture wrecked Abigail’s stomach—a long downhill shot of the llamas, Scott and Jerrod, June and Lawrence, with Abigail bringing up the rear, every head hung as the party climbed a steep wooded section of the trail.
“This was the first day,” Abigail said, handing the picture to her mother.
They worked their way through the bottle of wine, Abigail providing captions for each photograph until she came to a picture that closed her throat and sheeted her eyes over with tears.
Sarah said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”
The ominous skyline of Abandon was a blur behind them, the low cloud deck expressed in a few dark strokes of gray, but their faces stood out in perfect focus—Lawrence smiling, not at the camera, but at Abigail, who was pulling away.
Abigail shook her head, laid the photograph on the table so her mother could see. Whispered, “I’ve never seen a picture of us together.” She recognized herself in the way his eyes had gone to slits with his smile, saw
Lawrence in the shape of her mouth. “I know you were angry that I went to see him.”
“No, honey—”
“It wasn’t a betrayal. I needed to see him, and it’s strange to say, but all this shit I went through . . . meant I at least got to know him.”
“And I’m glad you did, Abby.”
“He was a broken man, Mom. What he did to us, it wasn’t right, but he was so young.”
Sarah was nodding now, and Abigail watched her mother push back the emotion.
“And he tried, Mom, you know? Asking me to come to Colorado, that was him trying. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Sarah lifted the photograph, stared at it for a moment, and when she looked up at Abigail, she was smiling through tears.
“He’s looking at you here like you’re someone he loves.”
Abigail wiped her eyes, watched a man walk out of the watch-repair shop across the street. “Mom, I tried to find him. Three times we flew into that box canyon, but—”
“I know.”
“—the snow was so deep, it had blocked—”
“Abby, you have to let all that go now.”
“He died doing what he wanted, I guess. What he loved.”
Sarah tilted the wine bottle, topped off her glass. “Where do you stand financially?”
“The lawyer wiped me out.”
“If I had the funds to—”
“I know.”
“Abby, I’ve been thinking.” Sarah scooted her chair over and leaned in close, speaking just above a whisper. “It’s summer now. Snow’s melted in the high country, right?”
“In a month or so. Why?”
“What if you went back to that mine, took a few bricks—”
“No, Mom.”
“Just enough to get you out of—”
“No.”
“Darling, you’re broke. Could you find the mine entrance?”
“Probably.”
“So why suffer when you don’t have to?”
Abigail leaned back in her chair.
“For hundreds of years, Mom, that gold’s done nothing—nothing—but bring out the worst in people. Make misery and death. There isn’t even the smallest part of me that’s tempted to go back to that wilderness, into that mine, to get it.
“You know I’m not a superstitious person, but if anything in this world is cursed, that gold is. I couldn’t be broke enough to resort to that. Now you’re the only other person I’ve told about the gold and the bones. Not even my lawyer knew, and I expect the secrets of Abandon to die with both of us, so the awful history of that town can stay shut away.”
Sarah had been biting her bottom lip. “Honey, that’s noble of you, but it’s gonna take you years to replenish your savings, get back on your feet.”
“So be it.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you’ve really decided this?”
Abigail finished her wine. “I jogged to Brooklyn this morning. Halfway across the bridge, I stopped and threw the key to that mine into the East River. So yeah, Mom, I’m sure.”
They’d nearly killed the bottle of wine. Abigail was feeling pleasantly buzzed now, working up a good sheen of sweat just sitting in the city heat, no relief but when the buses roared by, and she thought about that snowy night in the boardinghouse with Lawrence and the vision he’d shared of spending a Colorado summer with her, with grandchildren he would never have. There was still anger. God, plenty of that. She didn’t know how she’d ever be fully rid of it, but maybe there was space now for other things. Things that didn’t keep you up nights, that didn’t push good people away.
And she wondered where in that vast cave system her father had finally eased down to die, hoped he hadn’t been scared, and that when he’d finally broken free of all that freezing dark, he’d found his way to that Colorado summer and the man he might have been.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
—T. S. ELIOT, “BURNT NORTON”
T
hrough the grottoes and tunnels of this cold and silent underworld, he returns, impossibly, to Abandon’s crypt.
The beam of his dying headlamp sweeps across the battered iron door—still closed, still locked.
She hasn’t come.
The disappointment cuts deeper than he imagined it would, despite having warned himself she wouldn’t anticipate his actually making it back to the cavern. He hadn’t figured on it, assuming instead he’d run out of light and die of thirst, lost in the granitic entrails of the mountain.
He turns away from the barred exit and walks back into the cavern among the bones, fearing his light will expire at any second, wanting at least to see and choose his final resting place.
Lawrence doesn’t procrastinate with the decision. He picks a spot along the wall beside a blond-haired skeleton wrapped in a deteriorated woolen jacket and slumped over on the rocky floor, the browned skull resting on the humerus of her left arm, Gloria watching the last flame of the last lantern sputtering in the middle of the cavern.
She wonders, Am I the only one alive? No one else has made a sound in hours.
The coal oil is nearly used up, the batteries almost dead, and they wait for the light to go away, each passing moment charged with the possibility they are seeing the last they will ever see of this world.
The flame recedes into the wick and the headlamp dims.
Lawrence pulls off his lamp, looks into the bulb, the light fading before his eyes.
Soon there is only the molten glow of the tungsten filaments, the lantern’s wick, then nothing.
He breathes in slowly, out slowly, trying to soothe himself with the proposition that this is where he belongs, a certain justice inherent with being locked in the mountain to die alongside the objects of his obsession, but finding little comfort in anything but the knowledge that his daughter is safe, thinking it must be a sad testament that saying those hard truths to Abby before she climbed out of the cave was the single decent moment of his life.
Time limps by in the black.
They tremble with helpless terror, thinking it’s death they crave, but they long only to be spared sitting alone with their fracturing minds, listening to death creep toward them.
Lawrence slides his arms out of the shoulder straps and unzips his daughter’s pack, lifting out the water bottles he filled at the subterranean lake and standing them up.
He takes one, unscrews the cap, and turns the bottle upside down. When he’s emptied them both, he throws the bottles out into the cavern, the plastic banging invisibly against the rock.
And Gloria and Lawrence gaze into the dark, thinking of a son, a daughter they will not see again, the images swarming and vivid, inlaid at once with such beauty and unbearable regret.
Chasing her little boy through an alpine meadow, sunlight caught up in his rusty hair, his high, small laughter resounding off the mountains as she tickles his ribs.
His little girl in his lap, turning the pages of some long-forgotten book whose words would crush him if he could remember.
Both, in their own way, thinking, This is hell—the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished.
In true dark, there is no gauging of time.
It moseys along and dawdles and hints at the horror of eternity.
At length, Lawrence folds the backpack into a pillow and settles down beside the bones of Gloria, whose shattered heart quits beating.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
T
he following books were indispensable in helping me to understand and create the world of Abandon: Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps by Sandra Dallas (photography by Kendal Atchison), The Mining Camps Speak by Beth and Bill Sagstetter, Images of the San Juans by P. David Smith, Tomboy Bride by Harriet Fish Backus, Mountains of Silver: Life in Colorado’s Red Mountain Mining District by P. David Smith, Silverton—A Quick History by Duane A. Smith, Colorado Mining Stories: Hazards, Heroics, and Humor by Caroline Arle
n (editor), Dictionary of the American West by Winfred Blevins, Rocky Mountain Medicine—Doctors, Drugs, and Disease in Early Colorado by Robert H. Shikes, M.D., and Doctors of the Old West—A Pictorial History of Medicine on the Frontier by Robert F. Karolevitz.