The Kingdom of Ohio (20 page)

She wants to object, to force him to answer, but finds that she doesn't have the strength. Instead, she allows him to lead her to the corner and hail an omnibus; to help her up the steps when the vehicle draws to a halt, and drop coins into the fare box.

When they're seated on one of the wooden benches, he drapes his coat over her shoulders. She does not resist, grateful for its warmth and faintly comforted by the scent of his body. It seems impossible, she thinks distantly, that a week ago he was a stranger.

“Rest,” he says. Glancing up, she finds Peter watching her. For an instant their eyes meet, and during this time she sees a crowd of emotions cross his face—then he turns away, looking out the window, as the omnibus lurches into motion.

“Rest,” he says again. “Be there soon.”

 

 

 

 

SHE LOOKS AROUND the dingy space of the apartment, the visions she'd had of a warm, clean bed vanishing. A diseased armchair, a clothesline hung with socks and undergarments draped between the chimney of the stove and the wall, a battered washbasin half filled with some brownish liquid.

“Roommates won't be back until late,” Peter is explaining. “No guests allowed, but I'll think of something to tell them. Here, sit—” He ushers her toward the armchair. She falls into it, discovering that it's comfortable despite its tattered appearance. “You hungry? I'll get some tea.”

She shakes her head—the idea of eating now makes her faintly nauseated—but he disappears into the kitchen anyway, and a moment later she hears the clatter of dishes.

She leans back in the chair and closes her eyes, letting fatigue overtake her. Staring at the patterns on the inside of her eyelids, she feels she is floating, unmoored from the laws of gravity. She thinks of how she has nothing left anymore—not a family, not a home, not even a name; as if all the variables and cross-canceled equations of her life have been returned to some primordial zero. But where the prospect of relinquishing these things seemed terrifying before, now she feels strangely untroubled. Even though abandoning these memories is a kind of death, she thinks, at least it is also an end to this uncertainty. A kind of peace.

When she opens her eyes—she realizes that she must have dozed off—Peter is standing in front of her with a cup of tea and a plate of bread. She accepts these things, setting aside the food and cupping the hot drink in both hands to inhale the fragrant steam. He sits on the floor with his back against the wall, searching her face.

“What happened?” he asks at last.

“I tried to speak with Nikola.” She hears her own voice as if from a great distance.

“And then?”

“Then?” She draws a shaky breath. “He did not recognize me. And now, I wonder if I have not been mistaken.” She closes her eyes for a moment and sighs. “These things I recall seem real. But now . . .”

Peter nods slowly. Hearing her say this, he feels a jolt of excitement. This is what he has been hoping for: her admission that this story of hers is impossible and can simply be left behind. Maybe now, he thinks, they can even talk about being together, simply, in the future. Recognizing something near sorrow in her expression, though, he tries to keep his tone solemn. “And now?”

She looks out the window at the city beyond. In the comforting warmth of the little room, against the lingering strain of her frayed nerves, she feels a surge of gratitude for all the mechanic has done for her and for the simple, reassuring fact of his presence. And it's possible that this, she thinks, is what the beginning of a new life might feel like. She turns to him. “To be honest, Mr. Force—”

“Please, call me Peter.”

“Peter.” She tries to smile but abruptly, with this familiarity, the recollection of her upbringing and social station returns, a chorus of hissing admonition. Because however she might wish otherwise—she admits, taking in the decrepit furnishings, the dirty laundry, and rusty washbasin—she does not belong in this place.

“To be honest, I do not know what I shall do.” She looks at the floor. Through the flimsy walls comes the sound of a muffled oath from a neighboring apartment, the sound of glass breaking.

Watching the pained expression on her face, Peter thinks of what he has done to make this moment possible: a choice that seemed obvious at the time, but now makes him cringe inwardly. One more thing to outrun, he tells himself. Because, abruptly, more than anything, he finds himself wishing for an excuse to touch her.

“Don't worry,” he says. “Just rest.”

She nods faintly, chin sinking down to her chest.

“What about you?” she says.

“What about me?” Peter's heart starts to beat a little faster.

“How did you come to be here?” she asks, eyes still closed.

“In New York?”

“Mm.”

Peter hesitates. As she slips toward sleep, he sees her fingers loosen around the teacup. He climbs to his feet, approaches the armchair where she sits, and leans over her to take the cup before it falls.

She opens her eyes to see his face a few inches away from her own, and the curve of his neck disappearing into the rough weave of his shirt collar. And in a flickering moment it comes to her that perhaps all her reservations and sense of propriety are beside the point: that whatever she feels in Peter's presence is something that perhaps goes beyond any manners or social nicety. And without giving herself the chance to reconsider, she reaches out to touch his unshaven cheek.

He freezes as if shocked, and she can feel him trembling. Peter closes his eyes, motionless, while she traces the line of his jaw. Then abruptly he pulls away, jerking himself upright, a red flush of something like shame on his face.

She looks up at him, wondering at what she has just done and wounded by his reaction. Perhaps, she thinks, he feels the distance between us as well: the burden of his own lowly origins. She opens her mouth, searching for some words with which to tell him that none of these things matter.

“Something I need to tell you—” Peter starts but she interrupts.

“It does not matter.” She offers him a half-pleading smile. “Truly, it does not. After all that you have done for me—” She shakes her head and looks away, half shocked by this inner admission and unable to meet his eyes. “Thank you, Peter.”

He nods, seeming at this instant very young and very lost. After a moment he seats himself on the floor again. She struggles to compose herself and rein in the welling disappointment in her chest.

“So, you were telling me your story?” she asks finally, needing to break the silence.

“What?” Peter blinks at her.

“About how you came to New York?”

He doesn't answer.

“You came here from Idaho?” she prompts, feeling a kind of desperation at the sullen line of his jaw.

“From silver-mining country.” He takes a deep breath. Although it's a story he has avoided telling, and would rather leave unsaid, he guesses that—after everything that's happened—he can't exactly refuse to tell her. Peter's cheek still tingles from her touch as he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders, trying to frame these things he's never really explained before into words.

 

 

 

 

IN THE WAKE of the gold rush, the Idaho frontier had more men than jobs, and despite his experience in the New Mexico Territory, Peter's father was unable to find work as a surveyor. Instead, James Force became a prospector, working for the Hercules Mining Company, a conglomerate that owned rights to thousands of mountainous acres around the town of Kellogg.

For his eleventh birthday, Peter received a woolen blanket and a huntsman's knife in an oiled leather sheath. But the real gift was that for the first time he was allowed to go with his father on a prospecting expedition.

On that first trip, they had hiked ten miles out of town, over a ridge and down into the dry gorge where a river once ran. Peter remembers scrambling over boulders after his father, the smell of wild mint growing along the riverbed, the feel of the ravine wall rough against his hands. At a certain point, James Force had stopped and chipped a fragment of rock loose from an outcropping with his hand pick.

As his son watched, he unbuttoned his pants and peed on the shard. Kneeling down in the riverbed, he motioned for his son to do the same.

“There.” He pointed at the rock, where the urine foamed faintly green. “That's copper, you see? Antimony the same, except red.”

Peter nodded.

“You know how to add and subtract?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Know what right and wrong is?”

“The ten commandments?”

“Right's minding your own business and doing what you truly see as best. Wrong's telling somebody else what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here.” James Force removed a collapsible telescope from his pack and handed it to Peter. “With this you can figure distances. See that peak?” He pointed to a mountain in the distance. “Here's how you tell how far.”

That night they camped on the hillside above the gorge, unrolling their blankets on a carpet of pine needles. James Force boiled potatoes in a pot over the fire, sprinkling in salt from his pack and sage that Peter gathered. After they had eaten, the elder Force stood and carefully cut a series of notches into a tree trunk.

“Always blaze your trees.” He turned to face Peter. “You know why?”

“To claim the water rights?”

“Yes.” James Force nodded. “How they started that town, Kellogg.”

“Sir?”

“Man by the name of Wardner. They'd just found the mine, Noah Kellogg and his partner, and started digging. Wardner was a storekeeper in another town, and when he heard about the mine he came up the mountain with some barrels of whiskey. Gave the whiskey to Kellogg and his crew, and they all drank themselves to sleep. While they were out cold, Wardner took an ax and walked around the valley, blazing all the trees.”

“And then?” Peter had heard the story before, but it was one of his favorites.

“Well . . .” James Force spat on the ground. “When Kellogg and the others woke up, they asked Wardner what he'd been doing. He grins and says, ‘I just staked out squatter's rights for this whole valley.'”

Later, as the fire dwindled to ember ghosts, Peter lay awake in his bedroll, looking up at the stars as his father snored a few feet away. The arc of Ursa Major and Andromeda, lonely and bright in the vaulted sky. He pressed himself flat against the ground, feeling dirt and dead leaves through the rough blanket and, further down yet, rock at the center of the earth. And he felt a pulse coming back out of the earth, a great slow steady throb in time with his own heartbeat.

 

 

Now, sitting in the New York apartment, this is what Peter remembers. But this isn't the story that she asked for, he thinks, watching her sit with her eyes closed in the shabby armchair. Realizing that he has been silent for too long, Peter clears his throat and says: “When I was nine, I started work with my father.”

“In Idaho?” she asks sleepily.

“Idaho.” He nods. “We worked together for twelve years.”

“And then?”

“There was an accident.” And this is where the real story starts, Peter thinks, the one she's waiting for. “We were out riding, collecting rock samples for silver ore.”

 

 

They had been riding, in fact, some miles farther down the same riverbed where they'd walked during that first expedition, years ago. Peter realizes this, feeling a small sense of shock at not having registered the coincidence before. Closing his eyes, he pictures the ridgeline of the canyon above the river, the afternoon sunlight bright and golden against the evergreen forest of pine, manzanita, and laurel. The crunch of decomposed granite beneath the horses' hooves.

James Force had been riding ahead of Peter, the line of his back speaking of years spent in the saddle. At the crest of the hill where the ridgeline met the rock wall of the mountain proper, they had stopped. Around them the air was still except for the sound of distant running water and a woodpecker's drone echoing upward from the forest carpet below.

“Here,” James Force says.

Peter dismounts, removes a pickax from his saddlebag, and bends to the work.

Suddenly a blast of air knocks him forward, smashing his face against the rock. He hears a cracking scream somewhere nearby, behind him, an inhuman sound that begins like thunder and scales upward into inaudibility so quickly that it's over almost before it began.

He rolls onto his back, the ax raised weakly in self-defense. His ears are ringing, his vision blurred. Looming upward he sees the dark, threshing shape of a rearing horse, his father astride, clutching the animal's neck—

Somewhere overhead a flickering of white light in the air, disappearing into nothingness. The tang of ozone. The world goes black.

An instant later he seems to wake with a start, sits up groggily and blinks away the blood that is running down from a cut on his forehead. His looks around in a daze, unsteady on his feet. Hearing a thumping sound from somewhere in the ravine below, he staggers to its edge.

The first thing he sees is the horse lying on its side, twenty feet down the slope, eyes rolled back in its head, one hind leg kicking rhythmically. His father's horse. He sees his father as well, but somehow this will not register in his mind. He looks at the horse, cursing its loss—two months' wages to buy another that's not half dead. His father lying ten feet beyond the horse down the hill, motionless, neck bent against a rock.