Last Safe Place, The (21 page)

She races around a boulder so big she can’t see over it and finds something lying on the ground ahead of her on a bare spot encircled by stubby bristlecone pines. She has no idea what it might be. It is black and little trails of smoke rise off it into the damp air. But she doesn’t have time to gawk at weird things right now. She has to get back to the chalet. If Grant has been calling her, that means her parents have returned early from rock hunting! Which means she and Garrett are in big, big trouble.

As she gets closer, she catches a whiff of the black thing. It smells like burned hair. And it looks burned, too. Blackened like a hot dog. That’s what it looks like, a blackened hot—

The world slows as Gabriella slows. The black thing isn’t a hot dog. It’s a giant doll. A doll bigger than she is! A burned-up doll. Now she can see the form of legs and body and … the clothes are stretched tight on it, like the doll’s a balloon that’s been blown up too big.

She stumbles over a shoe on the ground. Blackened and smoldering. It’s an Air Jordan like Grant’s.

She stops running there, at the shoe. And her eyes are dragged to the doll’s bare feet, so puffed up they’re round on the bottom and she thinks, “Why did they make a doll’s feet like that? You’d never be able to get it to stand up on round feet.” Her eyes travel from the round feet up the too-tight, burned jeans—split open they’re so tight. And so’s the shirt and jacket. A red jacket like—

The doll’s face is a ruin. The skin is charred black. Not skin! It’s just a doll. Dolls don’t have skin.

Gabriella starts to scream, to shriek. She puts her hands over her ears so she can’t hear. And screams and screams.

There’s the sudden smell of vomit. She didn’t hear it happen because her hands are over her ears and because she’s screaming, but she feels Garrett next to her and knows he’s throwing up.

Then she sees her mother come running down the trail on the other side of the burned doll. She stops so abruptly when she sees it that Gabriella’s father runs into her from behind. She stands totally still, staring, her eyes so huge you can see white all the way around. And then she shrieks, but it’s not a wail like Gabriella’s. It’s a word. It’s the word Gabriella doesn’t want to hear. That’s why she put her hands over her ears, so she couldn’t hear her own mind screaming it. But she can’t not hear her mother. Her mother’s voice is too loud and the word gets into Gabriella’s head in between her fingers.

“Grant!”

The rest of it was only fragments of memories. The world shattered into a million shiny pieces when she saw him lying there. Every time she tried to pick one up to remember it, the sharp edges cut her hands. So she stopped trying a long time ago.

Gabriella turned and looked at Pedro. Tears were welled in his chocolate-brown eyes and the sight of his response to her pain lessoned it
somehow. She dropped her gaze again, stared at a spot on the ground where a lone Indian paintbrush grew, the petals blood red dangling from a green stem. Then she pushed ahead. For some reason, it had become terribly important that she finish it. That the first time she had ever spoken about what happened on this mountain almost three decades ago she would tell it
all.

As Smokey used to say about playing football, she would leave nothing on the field.

She knew—without understanding how she knew—that her words would land in the same place in Pedro’s heart that they’d come from in hers.

“I screamed until my mother slapped me. It didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel it at all. It just knocked me sideways and bloodied my nose or my lip. I don’t remember which, just that the blood spots were bright red … the color of an Indian paintbrush on my clean white shirt. And I shut up.”

“And I remember Dad came over and tried to pull Mom away, but she wouldn’t let him, fought him. Clawed him with her fingernails.”

She gathered a breath and said it, out loud. It was the truth.

“Mostly, I remember that my mother wailed and my father didn’t make a sound. He didn’t say anything to Garrett or me, never even looked at us. It was like we didn’t exist.”

She waited for Pedro to offer some platitude about how upset her father must have been, both her parents must have been. How they’d just lost their son, they’d been in shock, didn’t know what they were doing. Those were the things she always said to herself. But she didn’t believe them. Apparently, neither did Pedro because he didn’t say them.

What he did say was, “Tell me the rest of it.”

How did he know there was a “rest of it”?

Gabriella couldn’t sit still. She stood abruptly, took two steps down the porch stairs, then stopped and leaned against the railing. Her eyes were pointed at the mountain beyond the meadow, but she saw no further than her own heart.

“There are holes in my memories about that day. I’ve told you all the actual memories I have of when Grant was killed—everything before I found him and after is gone, blocked out, I guess. Garrett remembered more than I did. But it wasn’t until we were older that we realized neither one of us remembered it all. We didn’t have the complete picture until each of us put our pieces out there and we fit them together.”

“Garrett is …?”

“My twin brother.” She almost said, “And he’s dead, too.” But she didn’t. If she went there …

“He remembered Dad didn’t speak to us, too, but he also remembered that Mom did. She shrieked at us. He said she didn’t slap me because I was hysterical. She slapped me because
she
was hysterical.”

They’d been twelve years old when Garrett told her about it, but by then he really didn’t have to. He was merely painting words on a reality they both understood intuitively.

She and Garrett had been loading up boxes for one of their many moves. After Grant’s death, they moved around like nomads. Moved out of the only home the two of them had ever known because her mother said she couldn’t live there, too many memories. They moved again because the second house they picked looked too much like the first. So it went. Eventually, her father lost his job. It was a family law firm; they understood. But after a few years, they had to fill his position. She was sure her father was glad to stay home where he didn’t have to put a pretty face on his shattered life.

Garrett bobbles a box full of books and the contents spill out on the floor. Something falls out of one of the books where it had been slipped between the pages. It is a faded snapshot of Grant. Their parents took hundreds of pictures of Grant—the first on the day he was born and the last two days before he died. She and Garrett have stared at all of them, looked longingly into the depths of them again and again over the years until they can see each one with their eyes closed. In fact, sometimes it seems that Gabriella can’t really remember Grant at all anymore, only the pictures of him, like his face has been erased from her memory and all that remains are the replicas of him—faded images she looks into, searches, looking for … something, but she doesn’t know what.

But this is a photo they’ve never seen. Nothing other than that is remarkable about the picture—just Grant, probably the summer he died, holding a rock and grinning into the camera. What’s unique is that it is a new image, so it’s like opening a tiny window into the past and there stands Grant. And in that first instant, he’s alive. Like you’ve looked up and he’s standing in the room. Gabriella hasn’t stared at this picture so often that repetition has scrubbed Grant’s soul out of the face.

In unspoken unison, she and Garrett sink down on the floor together. They sit silent for a while, taking it in.

“While you were screaming that day, did you hear what Mom said?” Garrett asks.

“Just to shut up. She yelled at me to shut up.”

“She yelled a lot more than that.” Garrett’s face fills with so much pain Gabriella is instantly frightened. She knows that whatever is eating away at his heart is about to be unleashed to attack her heart as well.

Over the years since their older brother died, she and Garrett have come to share an intimacy beyond that special bond only achieved by twins. Each is all the other has. Ships adrift in the sea of their parents’ indifference, the two of them are set apart from the world by their incredible gifts and knit to each other by their common pain. Whatever hurts Garrett will do the same damage to her, too.

“She screamed that she wished the two of us were dead instead of Grant.”

When the storm came up that day, their parents had been much higher on the mountain than Grant. They’d dodged into a protected crevice in the rocks and motioned for Grant to run back to the chalet. When he got there, his little brother and little sister were gone and he went looking for them.

If they hadn’t disobeyed, if they’d done what they were supposed to do and hadn’t gone off to play in the bristlecone pine forest, Grant would still be alive. They have never spoken of that until now.

But Garrett isn’t finished.

“She said she tried to get rid of us, that she would have, but she waited too long and when she went in they wouldn’t do it.” Garrett pauses. “At the time, I didn’t know what an abortion was.” He does now. They both do. And now they both also know that if their mother had gotten what she wanted, they would be dead now. And Grant would be alive.

By that point in the telling, Gabriella was crying, though she didn’t remember when she started to cry or when Pedro had come to her and put his hand gently on her shoulder.

“Our parents vanished after Grant was killed, were never a part of our lives, mine and Garrett’s.” Her voice was thick and tear-clotted, her throat tight. “They weren’t abusive … just absent. They ignored us. Without ever
saying it out loud they let us know in a hundred different ways that they’d ended up with two kids they didn’t want and lost the one they did.”

The knot of barbed wire in her throat began to shrink.

“Nothing we ever did mattered.” She let out a sardonic
humph
sound. “We were
prodigies,
both of us, and that didn’t mean a thing. Everyone else in our lives was amazed by us, astonished—aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers … but our parents never cared. My mother and father died on this mountain with Grant. Garrett and I raised ourselves.”

It was done. She’d said it all. Tacked words onto thoughts and feelings she’d never given voice before. It was both freeing and heartbreaking.

As soon as she no longer had to keep them in check so she could speak, the tears ramped up into great, heaving sobs that wracked her whole body like small, rhythmic seizures.

Pedro turned her and took her into his arms and held her tight against his broad chest. He smelled clean—his neck like soap, his chambray shirt like starch. It felt good there in his arms. Safe. It seemed to take a long time to cry herself out. When the tears finally dissolved into something like the hitched breathing of a little kid after a tantrum, she pulled away from him, stepped back, instantly embarrassed. And for a moment, she felt empty and alone without his arms around her.

She sniffled and reached up to wipe the tears off her cheeks. As soon as her hand touched the scar, she turned it away from him. But Pedro reached out and gently took her chin, turned her face back toward him and wiped the tears off her cheeks with a handkerchief that had appeared in his hand out of nowhere.

That kind of tenderness from such a strong, rugged man left Gabriella breathless.

Gratefully, Ty skidded to a stop in the dirt in front of the porch, panting, before the moment could turn really awkward. But he saw the tears.

“What’s wrong?”

“I would tell you,” Pedro said, his accent thick, “but theen I would have to shoot choo.”

Gabriella burst out laughing. Incipient hysteria.

Ty grinned while she laughed, a little confused, but didn’t join in.

“One of Mom’s brothers could laugh and it’d make other people laugh, too, even if they didn’t know what was funny,” he told Pedro. “I don’t know
which one. But it was Uncle Garrett who caught a green snake down at the creek.”

How did Ty know that?

The boy sighed, disappointed. “I tried, but couldn’t find it.”

“Have you seen the trout in that creek?” Pedro asked. “They are easier to catch than a green snake. They taste better, too. Jim keeps his fishing gear in the closet in the mud room. I could show you how to use it.”

“Really!”

The boy started up the steps toward the back door.

“I do not have time to go fishing today,” Pedro said.

Gabriella watched Ty’s face fall. Smokey was always telling Ty he’d do something with him as soon as he “had time.” Pedro picked up on Ty’s reaction, too.

“And I do not have my gear with me. I did not come up here today prepared to go fishing. I came to invite your family to a party.”

“A party—where?” Ty asked.

“How about I deal with our social calendar and you go inside and wash the creature slime off your hands,” Gabriella said. Ty started up the steps and only paused at her final shot. “And no salamanders-under-the-bed-inshoeboxes, okay? When they die they stink so bad you need a Hazmat suit and a blowtorch to clean the room.”

“Ty,” Pedro said. Ty turned around.

“I
will
teach you how to fish.” Ty smiled, but it was lifeless. Either he didn’t believe Pedro, or the promise sparked unpleasant memories.

“I think a body surfaced,” she told Pedro when Ty was inside.

Then she explained that Garrett had rented a houseboat on Lake Tionesta one weekend when they were in college. A water patrol boat came by the first night and an officer told them to be on the lookout—that a man had drowned in the lake earlier in the week and his body had not been recovered. The officer explained that it took time for a dead body to bloat and float to the surface.

“Then the officer said, ‘he’s due up today.’”

Pedro wrinkled his nose.

“The phrase ‘a body surfaced’ became code between Garrett and me to describe when something caused one of the rotting memories in our storehouse of dead bodies to float up into our minds.”