The Mountain Story (29 page)

One detail that Frankie left out when he told the story is that my mother wore a special dress that day, purchased from a second-hand shop in Mount Clemens—which I know because I was there, hiding in the rack of scratchy wool blazers, and I’d watched her find it—long and white with sheer flowing batwing sleeves. It’s the dress from my memory. The one she wore when she twirled me in the dressing room mirrors.

That morning Garvin—hungry, haunted Garvin—pulled up to the curb in his fine automobile. If I close my eyes I can smell my mother’s lemon hair and feel her pink lips whisper, “Always,” when she nuzzles my cheek. I cried when she let me go. Before Glory climbed inside the sports car she smiled at me and placed her pretty hand over her heart, as she did each morning. I wanted to punch Frankie in the nose when he touched his hand to his heart in kind. That farewell was meant for me.

Frankie said that, later that afternoon, he felt something shift in the air. My father claimed that I started complaining about a stomach ache. Soon I was feverish, vomiting, crying. Frankie couldn’t comfort me and Glory was late. Glory was never late. My father called the school office but got no answer. He called Garvin Lister’s house but got no answer.

Frankie never responded when people asked where his four-year-old son was during what happened next. He seemed not
to remember that the feverish child with the stomach ache followed him, stumbling some distance behind as he strode up the street, looking for Garvin Lister’s car.

I wanted to find my mother too, but I couldn’t see Mr. Lister’s shiny sports car in the road or in the driveway of any of the houses on New Dewey or Old. The sun was falling when Frankie turned back in the direction of home and he must have caught the glint of red metal through the slats in a fence. I followed him through the walkway and tried to peer through the open back gate where the red Corvette was parked in the alley.

Two oily black crows tearing at a trash bag started making a racket to warn Frankie off their stash. “Go to hell,” Frankie cawed back at the birds, laughing at first, then seeming confused when Garvin Lister looked up to see him and didn’t crack a smile.

“What’s up, Garve?” Frankie called. “You all right?”

Mr. Lister was sitting alone in the front seat of his car, ashes from the priest’s sign of the cross still on his forehead. He took a long swig from a silver flask. My father had a flask exactly like it—a gift from my mother.

“Garve?” my father called, drawing closer. “That my flask?”

“Stop there, Frankie!” Garvin Lister warned.

The crows took our attention briefly, flapping away like they knew what was coming.

“You seen Glory, Garve?” my father called.

Then, rising from beneath the dashboard, was my mother’s face; mascara smeared, eyes bleary, lips raw, the shadow of the ash cross on her forehead. She found me where I was hiding by the trash cans and stared at me blankly through the car window, then she turned to look at my father, and I did too.

“What the hell?” Frankie said, nearly hysterical at what he saw or thought he saw. “What the
hell
?”

My mother pulled the arms of her white dress up over her shoulders and I could see her mouthing my father’s name before turning to say something to Mr. Lister in the front seat. I remember the blue and grey snapping sounds the locks made as he pressed the button to lock the doors. I remember seeing the nose of the small black gun in his hand.

My mother was struggling to get out of the car. Mr. Lister’s fingers held Glory’s pretty blond curls in one fist and the shiny black gun in the other.

“Frankie! Frankie!” my mother screamed.

“Okay, Glory. Okay, baby. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Frankie made a move toward the car.

Garvin shouted, “No!”

My mother held my gaze briefly and mouthed
Wolf
.

No time to say goodbye.

“
Carpe diem!
” Mr. Lister shouted, then pressed the black gun to my mother’s head and pulled the trigger.

Carpe diem
. I chanted those words in my head to drown out my father’s howls, running down the narrow alley as fast and hard and far as my small legs had ever taken me.
Carpe diem. Carpe diem. Carpe diem
. The mantra carried me to my house, which I found by the green peace sign Frankie’d painted on the side of the purple garage. I busted through the back door and streaked for the safety of Glory’s bed, where I’d closed my eyes, breathing her lemon scent on the pillow, imagining her whispering voice and petting hand.
Just a dream, little Wolf. Not really my face. Carpe diem. Carpe diem carpe diem
.

The next morning I woke in my mother’s bed, which usually
meant I’d had a nightmare. Beneath the covers, I searched for Glory’s warm skin, awash in relief when I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hall.

When she pulled back the covers I blinked against the light, disturbed to find that my mother’s eyes were bruised and blackened, a sloping white splint mending her broken nose. “You awake?”

“Mama?” I said, hoping that my mother wouldn’t have to wear the ugly white splint on her nose for long. “Mama?” I did not understand why my mother had different eyes. And darker hair.

“An awful thing happened, Wolf.” The voice belonged to Pam Govay. “I’m going to tell you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You have to be a big boy now. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Something happened to your mama.”

“Mama?”

“There was an accident, okay?” Pam Govay said from behind the white splint.

I must have remembered what happened in the alley then because I stopped calling for my mother.

“She’s gone,” Pam Govay said. “And Frankie’s gonna need someone around to help him through this and that’s gonna be me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Mistaken identity—a case of mistaken identity—that was the only explanation that my child’s mind could faintly grasp. In that white dress, my mother had looked too much like an angel.

The story of what happened in the alley made the national news but I never found a clipping about it in the blue house on Old Dewey and I doubt that Garvin Lister’s last words would have made it in anyway. In fourth grade I’d read the microfiche at the Mercury Public Library and discovered that Mr. Lister had killed himself and his passenger, Glory Elizabeth Truly, with a small-calibre handgun registered to his wife, Rayanne. It was speculated that stress over the school board investigation into his misuse of funds and the discovery of his prescription drug abuse contributed to the murder/suicide.

The newspaper didn’t say anything about Frankie being a witness. And no one seemed to know that the victim’s little boy, feverish and confused, would never forget the look on his mother’s face, or the words the man shouted before everything went red.

I was very young when I first told Frankie about my memory of Glory in the alley and about Garvin Lister shouting “
carpe diem
.” He’d blanched, and I knew that it was a true memory because no one had ever told me that my mother was wearing a white, flowing dress on that Ash Wednesday she was killed. One day I asked Frankie what
carpe diem
means. “Buyer be aware,” Frankie said solemnly. “Buyer be-a-motherfucking-ware.”

When I was a child I wondered what Garvin Lister had meant when he shouted
Buyer be aware
in the seconds before he left the planet. Who was the buyer? What was he buying? What should he be aware of? I’d accepted that what Mr. Lister did was the desperate act of a desperate man but I wanted to find sense in his final words. (There’s a recipe for crazy.) Later I learned that
carpe diem
actually means “seize the day.” I couldn’t understand what Garvin Lister intended by that either, since he was not seizing the day but relinquishing it fully.

My mother has come to me over the years, a lemon-scented draft through an open window. “Wolf,” she whispers.

Glory. Always.

There we were, the Devines and me, on the morning of our third lost day. It was shortly after I’d unwittingly told them the whole story about what had happened to my friend.

We were quiet, watching the sun wash over the ragged terrain, the serrated green pines, the grey rock and the brittle brush, praying for our rescue, wondering why they hadn’t found us yet.
They
had grown large in all of our imaginations, to be sure. “
They’ll
be coming soon,” Bridget said, for the twentieth time. “
They
must have dozens out looking for us by now.”

“They’ll be able to track our prints,” Nola said. “Won’t they, Wolf?”

“Okay,” I said. I was remembering something from my dream—my mother telling me that
no one
was looking for us. And something else, something important. Something about a tree.

“Wolf?”

I sat there, paralyzed, trying to remember what it was. Something about a pine tree. A tree trunk.

“You all right, Wolf?” Vonn asked.

“We gotta get back to the wall.” I tried to stand but my stomach was in turmoil from hunger and dehydration, and maybe a little, from my story about Byrd.

“Last night you said something about making a climbing rope,” Vonn said.

Nola passed the remnants of the knapsack to her granddaughter. “You’re handy, Vonn. Maybe you could braid what’s left of it together.”

“I could try,” Vonn said. “It’s pretty ripped up though.”

“Maybe there’s something else we could use. Vines or something?” Nola turned to me. “Do you think?”

“We could look for some plant or vine. It’s a good idea, Nola,” I said.

“I’ll go,” Vonn volunteered.

“Okay,” I said. “You two rest, right, Nola? Bridget?”

“I’m fine,” Nola said.

“You’re not fine, Mim,” Bridget said. “I’m having terrible stomach spasms. You must be too.”

“A little.”

“Am I starving? Are we starving, Wolf?”

“You can go three weeks without food. Remember?” I said. “What you’re feeling now are just hunger pains.”

“I used to get those between the appetizer and the entree,” Bridget said and we all managed a laugh.

“My stomach hurts too,” Vonn admitted.

“It hurt before we left,” Bridget pointed out.

“You were sick last week too,” Nola said. “We thought it was the rotisserie chicken.”

“Maybe I caught a bug,” Vonn said.

Vonn and I searched high and low for a fibrous plant that I could make a corded rope with. “We’re too high up for yucca,” I said to myself, then to Vonn, “Where’s that mesh bag?”

“Maybe she left it up there,” Vonn said, gesturing at the ridge. “Maybe she took it off to push the log and all this searching has been for nothing.”

Maybe she was right. “We should go back. I can’t waste time looking for something to make a rope.”

“Wait, I have to …” Vonn said shyly.

“You do?”

“I just … need some privacy.”

“I’ll stay right here,” I said. I knew she couldn’t need to urinate and blushed at the thought that the girl might be menstruating.

Vonn went to a spot behind some juniper bushes, near a massive fallen log, and squatted down.

Seeing Vonn’s head drop behind the fallen tree trunk, I called, “You okay?”