Whisper Hollow (30 page)

Gabriel looked up at her and said, “I’ll come back.”

“I know you will, sweet boy.”

They gathered themselves and their things and set off down the path toward the stream. Without ado, Alta stopped and picked up the margarine container and tapped out the last bit of earth into the dirt. She lidded it and put it into the sack and then found Gabriel’s pole and gathered it as well.

Lidia led her silently to the blanket and basket and Alta lost no time in setting things to right. As she transferred the covered dishes from the sack to Lidia’s empty basket, she said, “This asparagus in here. I’ve been growing it now almost twenty years. It’s fresh cut so you just steam it and add some butter. You’ve never tasted anything so good. These cabbage rolls just need some reheating.”

Lidia turned to Alta in the falling light. “Thank you,” she said. And Alta, who hadn’t had a human embrace in longer than she cared to remember, brought her close and said, “You bring that gorgeous boy back to see me, hear?”

And Lidia nodded against Alta’s shoulder. “I will.”

Then she took Gabriel’s hand in one of hers and the full basket in the other and gave Alta a smile, bigger than any she’d managed all day, and turned down mountain toward the unbeaten path.

Lidia did return to Alta’s cabin with Gabriel, tentatively and with a fistful of wild onions and calico asters the first time, then again and again until their visits were frequent enough for Alta to pull down some of Abel’s childhood toys and keep them in the living room for Gabriel to play with.

On this cold day, Lidia bundled Gabriel into his warmest clothes and wrapped his head with a soft wool scarf that had belonged to her mother-in-law, until only his eyes and nose were uncovered. Then she walked him, hand in hand, down their street and across the tracks and up the hill toward Whisper Hollow, where Alta would welcome them with mugs of hot chocolate and tea.

“Oh, it’s a cold one!” Alta swung the door wide in spite of it, allowing a flurry of snow to enter along with Lidia and Gabriel. She bent at the waist and pushed Gabriel’s scarf back and pressed her cheek to his. “You’re like an icicle! Come get warm.” He wrapped his arms around her, mid-thigh.

“Hi, Mimi,” he said. He’d given her the name on their second visit, when they’d reintroduced themselves with polite details of belonging and heritage. “Mrs. Pulaski” was hard
even for an articulate two-year-old like Gabriel to say, so he mispronounced it a few frustrating times until he resigned himself to a mightily abbreviated version that brought Alta nearly to tears and ruined any pretense of formality among them.

Meanwhile, Lidia slipped off her boots and, once Gabriel let Alta go, went to find his box of toys. She gave Alta a quick hug and then hotfooted it over to the couch across from the fireplace, where she spread an afghan over her legs. “Don’t make a mess, Gabe,” she said.

Alta called out a second later from the kitchen, “No, you go on ahead and make one, Gabriel. Your mother knows I don’t mind.” She came back into the room with a wink at Lidia and two full cups. Setting them both down on the coffee table, she turned the handles out so that each of them — Lidia and Gabriel — could easily reach over and pick their own up.

“Thank you,” Lidia said with chattering teeth. “How’d you do that so fast?”

“I heard you all coming a mile away. Voices carry better when it’s snowing. Like church bells at Christmas.”

Lidia blew the steam off her tea. Alta always put in a tiny bit of nutmeg and milk, and it was the only way Lidia would drink it now.

“Lidia, you don’t mind me telling you,” Alta said, sitting down. “But that child doesn’t need as much worry as you give him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I can hear you clear down the mountain telling him to watch his step and to be careful of this or that. I know you had a scare, but you don’t need to fuss all over him. He’s a smart boy. He’ll do fine.”

Lidia took a sip of tea and set it down on the table. Then she sighed and slumped down into the seam of the couch and pulled
the afghan up higher. Gabriel was dumping pieces from two different puzzles out on the braided rug next to her.

“I can’t help it.”

Alta reached over and patted her on the shin. “You’re a good mother. I know how much you love him. How much you want to protect him.”

Lidia rested her eyes on her son and slowly nodded.

“My Abel was a smart boy, too,” she said. “Much as I loved him — love him — he was nothing like Gabriel. The way his mind works, the way he talks.” She jutted her sharp chin toward Gabriel. “That one’s really special.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said before,” Lidia said. “But I don’t know. I don’t know if I can send him to that early school. My mama kept us home. She taught us herself as long as she could.”

Alta nodded. “It’s hard to let your babies go.”

“No,” Lidia said. “I mean, yes. That would be hard. But I don’t mean so much that as …” She lifted a finger to her teeth to work a hangnail. “I mean, it’s because he’s so …” She lowered her voice. “Different.”

Alta glanced at Gabriel, who was picking pieces out of a jumble and building a picture of a Union Pacific train coming around a mountain bend, without the benefit of a picture to go by. If he was aware of them talking about him, he made no indication.

“I won’t deny it,” Alta finally said.

“So what should I do?”

“You’ve got some time yet,” she said. “You’ll know.”

The snow fell, the fire burned, the tea cooled, the shiny black diesel locomotive materialized on the rug. Lidia breathed deeply and roamed her eyes around the now-familiar cabin. They lighted upon a small watercolor in a corner that she hadn’t noticed before.

It was of a willow tree bending toward a stream. Its bark was thick and even, its tendriled branches like yellow hair. It looked strong but somehow defeated, the way it dropped its leaves into the water, as though it was being pushed too hard by the wind and succumbing to the earth and stream below.

“Did you paint that?” Lidia asked after staring at it for a full minute or longer.

Alta nodded. “Seventeen years ago. Not long after I lost … my love.” She looked at the painting with a slight squint, as though wincing. “I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “That’s the best self-portrait I ever did.”

Lidia looked at her, expectant.

“Willows grow strong and fast, and can absorb standing water like other trees can’t. But when they begin to die, they decay from the inside out. Looking at one, you can’t even tell if it’s gone to rot.” She shook her head and looked back at the painting.

Lidia said nothing but just sat alongside Alta in the comfortable quiet that followed, wondering what memories played behind her closed eyes, inexplicably certain that someday she would know. She had the sudden urge to confess to her the truth about Gabriel and Eagan and her constant, lonesome worry — of discovery, of her son’s monstrous conception, of his unsettling seriousness and mysterious commentaries — that manifested as a blend of nightmares and insomnia, leaving circles too dark for her young eyes.

She knew right then that if —
if
— she ever decided to tell anyone, she could tell Alta. But in the silent meantime, she tucked her legs up, closed her eyes, and waited.

Gabriel crouched on fat legs to help Lidia wrap tinfoil around a box that would be his Lunar Orbiter 5 costume.

“I’ll crash on the moon.”

“Of course you will.”

“I saw the moon before.”

“You did?”

Gabriel nodded.

“When did you see the moon?”

He grinned. “Yesterday night.”

Lidia let out a breath. Such questions asked of or by her three-year-old weren’t always so easily answered. Where he came from, why the sky was blue, who made up the alphabet, how fast someone can run, why people blink, how ducks can fly … They were endless, the questions. Lidia realized how little she knew, even though she’d been a diligent student — excellent, they’d called her. The simplest questions were forgotten amid the complex. How to hide the biologic manifestation of an incestuous rape, what to do with a feeble older brother, what to say to an awkward widower father, how to hide from her child-husband the somnambulistic terrors that
sent her mind reeling back to the tile floor of her childhood bathroom.

They were endless, the questions.

“Can I be a astronaut?”

“Yes,” Lidia said, taping down the corners of the foil. “Of course you can. And you can soar through the blue sky and into the dark and see the moon and the stars.”

Gabriel’s face grew serious and he put his tiny fat hand on her shoulder as she worked. “Because I don’t want to be a miner like Daddy.”

Lidia looked up. “Why?”

“I don’t want to go to the mine.”

She spread the piece of tape into place and then rocked back onto her seat and sat down cross-legged.

“Why don’t you want to go to the mine?”

“It’s dark there. And there’s rocks. I saw it.”

“When did you see it?” She sat down and pulled him into her lap. “Did Daddy take you there?”

Gabriel wadded a bit of foil and furrowed his brow. “No. I went there.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Where we go in. Remember?”

Lidia breathed deeply. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard Gabriel tell of something she didn’t remember. “No, I don’t remember,” she said.

Gabriel picked up one of the pipe cleaners Lidia was going to use to represent a telescope that would photograph the far side of the moon. “I don’t ever want to go to that place again.” He climbed off her lap and turned to her. His face was grave, his hazel eyes dark.

She reached out and took the pipe cleaner from him. “Why not?” she asked, slow and without looking up, ignoring the use of “again.”

“I don’t want to fall again.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“It was dark like in the sky,” he said. “We were running and then I fell.”

“Oh no.” Lidia searched her memory for some forgotten event, a walk Danny might have taken him on, a time they’d gone out in the dark. But the only thing she could remember that seemed remotely relevant were the stories she’d heard about the mine explosion, what, seventeen years ago? Gabriel knew nothing of that. Hardly anybody ever discussed it anymore. Maybe he’d overheard one of the older men talking at the barbershop or the hardware store sometime.

“Remember that?” he asked.

“No,” she shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Yeah. And I was in it.”

“You were?”

“Remember?”

Lidia shook her head no.

“Yeah, and those people helped me, remember?”

Gabriel patted the tin against the box.

Lidia, with a knot in her stomach, asked, “What people?”

Gabriel reached out and took the roll of foil and unrolled a long stretch of it, which crumpled in his inexperienced hands. “The dead people.”

She took a slow breath and handed him a piece of Scotch tape. “Do you know what ‘dead’ means?”

With the tip of his tongue poking out, he taped the foil down. Then he stood back and looked at it, and looked at his mother, and nodded.

Lidia took a pair of scissors and stabbed a hole into the rectangular head of the box. She twisted the blade until she had enough clearance to cut a small circle around the jab. When she was finished, she struck the blade once more into the box a few
inches over and twisted and carved an identical orb. She lifted the foil-covered box and placed it on top of Gabriel’s serious face. His dark eyes peered out of the holes at her.

“Do I look like a astronaut?”

“Yes,” she said, quiet. “Exactly like one.”

“I’ll fall into the sky and see the moon and all the stars.”

Lidia pressed the box down a tiny bit farther and made a few adjustments to the foil and pipe cleaners while he watched her through those two circles, quiet as an owl inside a tree hollow. Halloween was just four days away. She wanted to be certain his costume was just right.

Coming down the mountain from Alta’s cabin, Gabriel had seen a duck peel away from the flock overhead. Their V-pattern of flapping white stood out against the bright blue and cloudless migratory path, and he had pointed upward and asked Lidia why they were flying that way. She was explaining that it was easier to fly one behind the other instead of flying alone, when one of them veered inexplicably off. “She’s going away!” he said, “Get her, Mama! Tell her to go back!”

Lidia and Gabriel were close to the railroad tracks that ran the length of the town of Verra, parallel to New Creek. Theirs was a shortcut, away from the train station and shops, an alternate path from the camp houses up to Whisper Hollow, where Alta lived. Gabriel skittered down the last sloping bit onto the train tracks. “Gabriel!” Lidia shouted. “Be careful!” She’d told him a hundred times not to jump onto the tracks without holding her hand, in case a train came suddenly roaring down upon them. “But you can hear them coming, Mama,” he always replied.

“You can hear anything if you’re paying attention, Gabriel,” she would answer. “But we’re not always paying attention.”

He ran the flat shoulder along the two sets of tracks without taking his eyes off the lone duck in the sky. “Tell her, Mama!” he called.

Lidia ran after him, picking her way over fallen rocks and flung bits of coal. She was slowed by her basket, heavy with produce from Alta’s garden and another rolled-up watercolor of a rainbow trout Gabriel had painted for Danny. “Gabe! Slow down!”

Without looking back, Gabriel came to an abrupt stop ahead of her. He pointed at the sky. The duck had changed its trajectory and rejoined the formation. The other ducks shifted their positions to absorb it back into the flock. Lidia looked up to where Gabriel was pointing and, in so doing, lost her balance and tripped on a rail spike, which turned her ankle and sent her sprawling a few feet behind her son. She cried out at the lightning bolt of pain.

Gabriel turned at the sound of her falling and sprinted to her. “Mama!”

She slowly heaved herself to a sitting position, fighting the searing sensation in her ankle, her eyes wide with shock. When she tried to stand, she fell back from the pain. “I think it’s twisted,” Lidia said aloud, though not particularly to Gabriel, who crouched down and tried to tug her upward. “I can’t walk on it.”