Last Safe Place, The (29 page)

She giggles and he looks back and grins. Tomorrow is their birthday and last year Grant had given each of them a beautiful rock, the prettiest ones he’d found all year. Mother had almost cried because that was such a sweet thing for Grant to do. The gift was precious to Gabriella and Garrett because the family spent every summer rock hunting so their mother never got the twins birthday presents. “You can’t go shopping when you’re out in the middle of nowhere,” she always said.

“I’m going to ask anyway. You coming?”

“In a minute.”

She waits for Garrett to go into the cabin and shut the front door before she pulls the lumpy round rock out of her canvas rock sack. Somehow, she just
knows
this is a geode.

Today, it hadn’t been Garrett who almost got them caught in the bristlecone forest. Gabriella had been the one intent on finding a rock. Not just any rock, but the one she had tossed down into the place where they always sit and dangle their feet. They go to the place almost every day, sit on the edge and toss pebbles down into the opening. They’ve tossed in so many, in fact, that they’ve used up almost all the small pebbles near the edge.

Then Gabriella had felt the cool of a shadow on her arm. That was their clock. When the shadow of the overhang stretched out to touch them, it was eleven o’clock and they had to get back to the chalet. Garrett got up to leave.

“They might come back early today,” he said, and pointed to clouds that were already visible above the other side of the mountain.

Gabriella had picked up a round chunk of granite to put into her rock sack, but instead turned and chucked it into the opening. She watched it hit the ground and then saw it roll—just like a soccer ball—across the ground and disappear like a rabbit into a hole through an opening between the boulders she’d never noticed before. Garrett climbed down off the boulders and headed for the chalet. She climbed down, too, but then turned and went around to the other side of the boulder pile to see if maybe …

Garrett yelled at her, said she was going to get them into trouble, threatened to leave her there and go back without her. He’d already turned to head
back up the trail when she found it. Just as she suspected, the opening at the base of the boulders went all the way through to the outside. The rock she’d tossed in from the top was lying there where it had rolled out, and it looked like the opening might be big enough—

Garrett yelled in his “last chance” tone, so she picked the rock up, shoved it into her canvas rock-collecting bag and ran to catch up with him.

She stares at the rock now and feels a tingling sensation of excitement. She places it on the piece of granite and lifts the hammer. You have to be careful. Hit a geode too hard and it will shatter. She bangs the hammer down and the rock splits open like a watermelon hit with an ax.

It is a thunder egg! Gabriella stares at it dumbfounded. Inside the cavity are the most amazing crystals she has ever seen.

“They’re … bleeg,” she whispers in awe. That’s what she and Garrett call beautiful. You can see through the crystals like they were made of glass. The big one is clear; the smaller ones are colored—all different colors!

She leaps up to go show Garrett and then she stops because she knows what she must do with the rock. She will give half of it to Garrett as a birthday present tomorrow and save the other half to give to Grant for Christmas. She and Garrett don’t ever get each other gifts, but she’s a big girl now—almost eight!—old enough to start doing grown-up things. Then she pauses and a wide smile spreads across her face. Maybe Mother will be as proud of her for giving up her special rock as she was of Grant last year!

She shoves both pieces of the rock back into her rock bag. She’ll hide Grant’s rock in a really cool secret place she found until they’re ready to go back to Pittsburgh. And she’ll give Garrett his rock right after supper tomorrow night when there might be a “party.” Mother never makes a cake for the twins’ birthday like she does for Grant’s in October—for the same reason she never buys them presents. But last year, she put candles on matching Hostess Twinkies for her and Garrett and everybody sang Happy Birthday. Gabriella hopes they’ll do the same thing again this year, but even if they don’t, her rock will be a great birthday surprise.

Gabriella awoke with the image of the geode so clear in her head she could almost touch it. Not the half on top of the dresser but the other half, the
amazing
other half!

She got up and crossed the room to the geode sparkling in the morning sun, watched the refracted colors dance around the center crystal.

“Maybe this belongs to you, Garrett,” she whispered softly. “A birthday present you never got.”

Was it possible she really did find the geode here, somewhere on this mountain? That was utterly ridiculous, of course. Nobody’d ever found geodes up here.

Surely, she’d only imagined it, conjured up the scene in her head in a dream. But it seemed too real to be a dream, too … ordinary. Details like the feel of the rock in her hand—how it was warm even though it had been lying in the shade on top of the boulder until she threw it down into the hole. There was nothing odd or distorted about the scene, either, the way dreams are fuzzy around the edges. Could it have been … real? And if it was, that, of course, begged a more important question: Where was this “special place” of hers where she’d hidden the other half of the rock?

She thought about it for three days—didn’t mention it to Ty, of course, or he’d have dug up the whole mountain. There was a lot of Garrett in his nephew. She couldn’t wait for Friday so she could go down to the Mercantile for supplies and tell Pedro about the dream.

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason she was anxious to talk to Pedro. She was
always
anxious to talk to Pedro. His gentle voice and kind eyes made her feel … safe. In Gabriella World, that was a precious commodity, indeed.

P
EDRO HAD JUST
finished unloading a grocery truck and now ice picks of pain stabbed into his lower back. More irritating than the pain was the sense that he must be getting old. He was thinking about that, and other, more unpleasant thoughts, when he sat down on the porch of the Mercantile, took off his hat and wiped his brow on the back of his arm. He sat for a few minutes catching his breath, then replaced his hat and started to rise. That’s when he saw Gabriella driving into town.

Seeing her planted an instant smile on his face and he sank back down and waited for her. He looked forward to his trips up the mountain to deliver her supplies, found himself watching the clock on the days she was due to come down. In fact, if he was not careful, he thought about
her
a lot
—occasionally even considered making up an excuse to go up the mountain so he could see her, sit with her on the porch and talk. He knew he needed to put the brakes on, that his feelings had already edged out there past friendship. And he’d do that. He would. He wouldn’t let it get … out of hand.

There was no danger of that today, though. He was much too preoccupied to entertain fantasies about the golden-haired woman on the mountain with the sweet smile and sad hazel eyes. He listened to her account of the dream and the geode without comment. When he said nothing after she’d completed her tale, she prodded.

“Well …?”

“Like I told Ty—anything ees possible.”

“Don’t give me the anything’s possible line. What do you really think?”

“I think anything is possible.” Before she could protest, he continued. “I really do believe that we have a much too narrow view of what could happen in our lives—both good and bad. We cruise along on autopilot, assuming that the way things are today will last forever. Only it does not work out that way.”

When Gabriella said nothing, he realized how caustic he had sounded. He sighed. He needed to man up and tell her what was really bothering him. And it bothered him even more when he realized he
wanted
her to know, to understand, to … share what he was struggling with.

“I am sorry. I heard from my ex-wife last night and that is always … unpleasant.”

Just
unpleasant?

Once a Marine, always a Marine. His sergeant’s response to the sight of a recruit parachuting into a tree and bouncing off every branch of it until he hit the ground was a simple: “That’ll leave a mark.”

Talking to Adriana wasn’t unpleasant. It was … maddening, infuriating, galling and … He didn’t have the right words, at least not in English, to describe it. Talking to her was impossible.

“Adriana has remarried. I met her in San Diego when I was stationed at Camp Pendleton and after the divorce she moved back. She called today—again!—about Anza going to San Diego State in the fall, in their nursing program.”

He could feel his anger rising.

“You see, Adriana is the moral authority on everything in life. She knows what ees best for everybody. I bet she stops strangers on the street and tells them where they ought to go to school, who they ought to marry, what they ought to—”

He clamped down hard to shut himself up.

“Sorry. She pushes buttons I never knew I had.”

He ground his teeth and stared into the distance. Jim Benninger had once called that look a “thousand-mile stare” and up at St. Elmo’s Fire, you could almost believe you could see that far.

“What does Anza want to do?”

“Stay here and help me look after Angelina.” He paused, tried to drain all the emotion out of the words. “Her mother does not understand that. She thinks Angelina should be in some kind of facility. A nursing home.”

This was the wedge driven between them that had sent an ever-widening crack through the heart of their marriage. Nowhere inside himself could Pedro find a place that understood warehousing their precious daughter. Nowhere inside Adriana could she understand allowing the child’s condition to dominate the rest of their lives. Irresistible force meets immovable object.

He took a deep breath, tried to pull back from the darkness he’d edged too close to. He cleared his throat and looked at Gabriella.

“When Anza told her mother she did
not
want to leave St. Elmo, did
not
want to move to San Diego … well, that was gasoline on hot coals—and it
blew up in Anza’s face!”

Gabriella’s expression went flatline and her fingers reached up reflexively to cover her scar.

Pedro groaned. What an outrageously thoughtless thing to say.

“Gabriella, I deed not mean … I wass not talking about …” What could he say? “I am sorry. Forgive me, por favor.”

P
EDRO
’
S
S
PANISH ACCENT
was thick. She was right. It did become more pronounced when he was upset. And she didn’t want him to be. She wanted to find some way to get him off the hook for an offhand remark that meant no harm—and to shift the conversation to some subject that wasn’t covered in barbed wire and razor blades.

But she didn’t know how, wasn’t as adept at sliding effortlessly in and out of pain the way some people could. She wanted to show as much compassion to Pedro as he’d always shown to her, but that wasn’t a thing you could manufacture out of thin air. You couldn’t give away something you didn’t have.

“It wasn’t a fire, actually,” she found herself saying. “It was acid. My ex, too, although he wasn’t an
ex
-husband yet when he threw it in my face.”

Pedro actually gasped.

“He said he was going to make it all match—my outside and my inside, make my face as ugly as my soul.”

Did I say that out loud?

In the world she had inhabited her whole life, people used rehearsed lines so they could talk to each other and not really say anything. It wasn’t like that here. Gabriella had never told anybody—not the police, the prosecutor or the judge
—
what Smokey’d said to her the day he’d cornered her in the family room. He’d stood there with the acid in a jar, swaying because he was so drunk he could barely stand. And he’d yelled that at her. Those words were the last thing she heard before he punched her in the jaw and knocked her into the wall. She woke up in the hospital two days later with half of her face missing.

When Pedro touched her arm, his hand was shaking.

“Gabriella, please tell me you know that ees not true—what he said about choo.” Pedro’s accent was so pronounced he could have passed for an undocumented alien. “Please tell me you understand that the one whose soul ees hideous … ees a man who would beat up his wife.” How did Pedro know Smokey knocked her around? “And a man who would throw acid in his wife’s face …” Pedro ground his teeth; she could see the muscle clench in his jaw. He had gone from compassionate to a barely controlled fury. “… that man has no soul at all!”

His rage was almost more touching and comforting than his tenderness.

But Pedro didn’t know what she’d done. All the things she’d done, starting when she was seven years old.

“You don’t understand, Pedro. I—”

“No,
you
do not understand if you think you somehow …
deserved
thees.” He reached out and actually touched the scar. His hand was still shaking. “If all our outsides matched our insides, everybody—all of us—would
look hideous.” He stopped, then continued in a voice as devoid of emotion as a metronome. “My scars would be bigger and uglier than—” He paused again, seemed to struggle for words. “Gabriella, scars tell us where we have been, but they do not have to control where we are going.”

“
You
didn’t create a monster,” she said, her voice surprisingly level. “
I
did. And it takes a monster to create one.”

She stood up before he could say anything else and walked up the steps to the Mercantile without looking back. He might have called out for her to stop, to wait. She wasn’t sure because the only sound she could hear was a great heaving roar in her ears. She opened the door, heard the muted jingle of the bell and lost herself among a tour-bus-load of morning shoppers.