Last Safe Place, The (27 page)

He hits her in the face with his cane. It is made of hand-carved ebony, a serpent whose head and forked tongue form the handle. He smashes it into the fake scar on her cheek, watches her fly backward in slow motion with blood squirting out of her nose and mouth. Then he takes two steps to where she lies crumpled like a broken doll, the black wig askew, pale blonde hair spread out in a halo in a growing pool of blood. He lifts his foot to slam it down on her face, again and again until every trace of his beloved Zara is gone. But he hears voices; someone’s coming. He turns, silently blends into the shadows and is gone.

Gabriella thought they should call the trout “star-spangled fish” since they were caught on the Fourth of July.

“Okay now, stand under the sign and hold that fish up high,” Pedro said.

When he was satisfied with Ty’s position, he pulled out his cell phone and captured several shots. He’d post the pictures of the boy and the trout he’d caught in Piddley Creek on the Wall of Honor in the Mercantile, in the “first catch” category.

Pedro had arrived early that morning with three days’ worth of supplies and his fly fishing gear—to try again. He and Ty had already spent two unsuccessful fishing excursions, traipsing up and down the creek, and today Ty finally landed a trout. Pedro caught two more—enough fish for supper. It was a shame Theo missed the excitement. The old man hadn’t gone to the creek with Ty before lunch like he usually did, said, “This thin air done give me a headache again,” and had spent the whole day stretched out on his bed.

As soon as Theo had adjusted to the altitude enough that he could walk more than ten yards without gasping, he began to accompany Ty and P.D. across the meadow to the waterfall. He’d come back weak, winded and hobbling painfully. Then he’d get up the next morning and do the same thing again.

Pedro slipped his phone back into his pocket, took the fish from Ty and laid it with the two he’d caught on the natural table formed by a large rock that stuck up out of the ground just beyond the front porch. From a leather scabbard at his waist, he produced a vicious-looking hunting knife, the kind that was no doubt used to field dress a deer, and chopped off the fish heads before he began to clean them.

“Your Uncle Garrett and I used to break rocks on that piece of granite, looking for thunder eggs,” Gabriella told Ty.

“What’s a thunder egg?”

“It is a rock that looks ordinary on the outside …” Pedro stopped. “No, actually they are particularly
ugly
rocks on the outside, round and kind of lumpy. But there’s beauty deep down inside that you can’t see.”

“Are you talking about a geode? Mom’s got the prettiest one you ever saw in your whole life! I’ll show you.”

Ty raced up the steps and into the cabin.

Pedro stopped cleaning the fish and looked questioningly at her. “You found a geode on Antero?”

“No, but we found them in other places our parents went rock hunting. When I was six, we went to Keokuk, Iowa, and it’s known as the geode capital of the world.”

“Anza used to stand with her nose pressed to the glass, staring at the geodes in the rock case in the store.”

“Oh, they’re the perfect kid rock, like Easter eggs you crack open and find candy inside.” Gabriella smiled at the memories. “Garrett and I’d sit here in the evening with a hammer, breaking up hunks of granite, certain we’d find a thunder egg if we looked hard enough.”

Ty burst out the front door with Gabriella’s geode and held it out to Pedro.

“Bet you’ve never seen anything like
this!”

Pedro looked at the rock—his hands were too fish slimed to touch it—and Gabriella watched the surprise on his face downshift through wonder into awe. That’s how she had always felt about the rock, too—wonder and awe.

The whole geode would have been bigger than a softball. This was only half, like a cantaloupe split down the middle. But instead of seeds in the hollow center, a lone three-inch crystal the size of Gabriella’s thumb rose up like the Washington Monument out of a shell carpeted with sparkling white crystalline quartz. The large crystal was as clear as a drop of pure water and its planes refracted the sunlight into colored beams that danced in the air around it. Surrounding the base of the crystal like the petals of some exotic flower were seven smaller crystals the size of two-inch pencils. The seven were identical, the same size and shape, except each was a different color—the colors that sparkled in the air around the clear crystal. The colors of the spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

“I … I’ve never seen a geode with …” Pedro stammered. “How can it be …?”

“It can’t,” Gabriella said. “This rock is a geologic anomaly. Unexplainable. Impossible.”

A pale memory formed in Gabriella’s mind, thin and transparent, gauzy with the collected dust of time.

She and Garrett are eleven. They live in the little house on Churchview Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Baldwin neighborhood, the one that has no rocks, no
crystals and no hope. Hard times. Her father doesn’t go to work; her mother waits tables.

That evening, her father has brought home an old friend he ran into in a deli, a geologist turned jeweler who appraised Phillip’s aquamarine and other gemstones years ago in another life. Natalie is polite to the man, fastens a smile on her face like a Halloween mask, serves him a soft drink, offers him cookies. But her eyes are as dead as they always are except when she is talking about Grant.

The house is small and cramped. Garrett is in the tiny bedroom they share playing Chopin on his keyboard. He has perfect pitch and says not a single key on it is in tune. Gabriella is on the floor beside the couch, playing with her rock collection. Though her parents got rid of all their minerals—the memories were too painful—she still has a small collection of rocks she found herself when her parents were out looking for more impressive specimens. Two shoe boxes full of granite chunks, petrified wood, one fossilized trilobite, some sparkling fool’s gold and half a dozen geodes—all different sizes, broken open to reveal the crystals inside.

The jeweler and her father are making small talk, forced and stilted. The man obviously knew about Grant’s death but didn’t realize until he got here that the wound was still raw and bleeding. Suddenly, the man stops in mid-sentence and stares at the geode Gabriella has in her hand. He is a tallish man, with a long, horse’s face, jowls and a large mole on his right cheek below his eye.

He reaches out his boney hand. “May I see that?”

Gabriella gives it to him. It is the largest of her geodes—the prettiest of all her rocks. The prettiest rock she has ever seen, in fact.

The man studies the rock. “Where did you find this geode?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

Her father chimes in then. “I’ve never seen this rock.”

Gabriella had been playing with it the night before, making colored sparkles on the wall as she sat on the floor beside her father’s chair. He had never looked down.

“We took the twins with us to Iowa and Georgia, but I imagine this is one she picked up in Kentucky.” Her father pulls his glasses down off the top of his head and settles them on his nose. When he focuses on the stone, really sees it, he gasps. He and the jeweler exchange a look.

“It’s plain quartz,” Gabriella says, looking from one to the other. “Right?” Even Gabriella knows quartz is the most common mineral in the world.

The jeweler nods. “But … the crystal—six-sided prisms terminating in six-sided pyramids. Flawless. Not milky—as transparent as window glass. Every one of them, all eight crystals, they’re perfect.”

“The colors,” her father stammers. “How did …? All those different colors are—”

“Utterly impossible,” the jeweler finishes for him and shakes his head in wonder. “There’s no way it could have happened … but there it is. It’s like—”

And then he says the odd thing that Gabriella never forgets.

“What does nomally mean?” Ty asked and pushed up his glasses. When it was hot, his glasses yo-yoed up and down his sweaty nose.

“Anomaly. Something not normal.”

“You mean it’s like … magic?”

“I don’t think scientists know for sure how a geode forms, at least they didn’t when I was a kid.” She looked a question at Pedro and he shrugged. “But the simplest explanation is that water seeps through a crack into the cavity of a rock and whatever mineral is dissolved in the water slowly turns into crystals there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that either; nobody does. But I do know the crystals are usually quartz.” Another glance at Pedro.

“I got some for the store once that had agate crystals and there were some that were way too expensive that I didn’t get with amethyst crystals. All the rest were quartz.”

“And I also know that no matter what mineral forms them, the crystals in a geode are
only one color.
Several shades of the same color, maybe, lighter and darker. And different colors in different geodes.” Gabriella shook her head. “But seven
different
colors in
one
geode. The colors of the spectrum—which is a refraction of
light.
It’d be hard to find a darker place than inside a rock! And arranged in order like a rainbow.
No. Possible. Way.”

“Must be some way,” Ty said, “’cause there it is.”

“An old jeweler who spotted it in my rock collection said there was only one explanation—it was ‘made by the hand of God Himself.’ He was so impressed with the rock my father gave it to him.”

“But it was yours,” Ty said. “You were the one who found it.”

“That didn’t matter,” she said quietly. “
I
didn’t matter.” She saw the dismay on Ty’s face and hurried on. “The jeweler mounted it on black velvet and set it on the counter of his jewelry store. Said it was more rare, more precious than a diamond. Kept it there for years. When my father died, the old man brought the rock to the funeral home and gave it back to me.”

“If you don’t remember where you found it, how do you know you didn’t find it here?” Ty asked.

“Well, I don’t. But—”

“It
could
have been here, couldn’t it?”

“Anything’s possible. But—”

“Me and P.D. are gonna find a thunder egg, too.” He leapt to his feet, bounded down the steps and started scouring the ground like someone looking for a lost contact lens.

“Try around the waterfall,” Pedro said. He picked up the cleaned fish and started up the steps to take them into the kitchen. “Water washes rocks down from the top of the mountain. That’s why the old prospectors used to pan for gold nuggets in creeks.”

Ty turned wordlessly and raced off toward the waterfall with P.D. one step behind.

“Why are you encouraging him? You know—”

“I know little boys love to look for buried treasure.” He went into the house, came back a few minutes later with his hands smelling like dish soap, and sat down beside Gabriella on the top step of the porch.

“You’re right about little boys and buried treasure,” she said. “If you’d told Garrett there was a treasure here, he’d have dug up the whole mountain!”

Pedro picked up the geode off the porch and watched the crystals refract light. “Where is your twin brother now?”

Gabriella felt like he had kicked her in the belly.

“He’s … dead. Suicide.”

Now it was Pedro who looked like he’d been kicked in the belly.

“Both of your brothers. Lightning, then suicide.” He set the rock back down on the porch. “It was not you, was it? Tell me you did not …”

“Find him? Yes, it was me.”

How did we get here?

She felt her cheeks flush, her eyes fill with tears. But Pedro didn’t respond like she expected. Didn’t get embarrassed, awkward that he’d
obviously opened up a painful wound, didn’t try to back pedal or change the subject. He sat quietly beside her, staring out into the valley, tossing the geode up and catching it unconsciously like a pitcher waiting for a sign from the catcher. When she looked over at him, there were tears in his eyes, too.

He felt her gaze. Didn’t turn, just continued to stare into the valley thousands of feet below.

“I used to question why God allows suffering,” he said. His Spanish accent was very pronounced and it struck her that perhaps he had to concentrate to keep it out of his speech, that it took an effort he didn’t, or couldn’t, apply when he was upset. “But I do not do that anymore.”

“Suffering makes sense to you?”

“No, I do not understand eet. But I do understand that ‘why me?’ ees not the right question.”

“What is the right question?”

“Why
not
me?” He caught the geode and set it down on the porch between them. “Things happen for a reason, but knowing the reason does not change anything.” He turned to face her. “It still hurts.”

She thought of the beautiful little girl lying as still as a china doll in his living room. She almost asked about the child, but didn’t. She wasn’t like Pedro. Her own pain hadn’t made her reach out to others with compassion. It had isolated her, built walls lined with razor wire that imprisoned her.

Pedro changed the subject then, flipped the switch and turned off the spotlight of painful introspection he must have seen shining out through the cracks in her soul.

“You said you and your twin brother were prodigies, right? What special gifts did God give you?”

She had never looked at it that way—that their talents had been gifts from God. If she’d ever considered it at all—which she couldn’t recall ever doing—she believed they were less “special gifts” than door prizes. She and Garrett had walked into the talent store and happened to be the one-millionth customers. During a two-for-the-price-of-one sale.

“Garrett was a musician. The first time he ever saw a piano, he sat down and played—not a song, but chords and harmonies—a little like jazz, with no discernible melody but obviously music.”

“How old was he?”

“He’d just turned eight. It was in a music store right after Grant was killed.”

“And you?”