Whisper Hollow (40 page)

“I said let go, you meanie!” Gabriel said.

And with that, the calendar of her life flipped backward to almost the beginning, the clocks unwound, a lifetime of things undone, unsaid, and there, through the lens of memory, she held on to not a branch of a broken sugar maple tree, but a broken birthday doll handmade by her mother. And she wasn’t yanking it away from Gabriel, but from her long-dead twin, who’d screamed those very words when Myrthen wouldn’t let it go.

“She’s
mine.
Mama gave her to
me
.” The words rang in Myrthen’s ears. She strained not to hear, but one can’t avoid the truth once it’s been spoken.
You don’t understand the Word of God. You don’t hear His voice. You have nothing and nobody, because you are mean. You are wicked. You are evil.

You. Are.

Ruthless.

Myrthen’s skin tingled as though she’d been plunged into an ice bath. She felt nothing, saw nothing. Just held on to the doll-stick that tethered her to the past. There was a tug, and she was pulled back into the present, past the brief bit of life she shared with Ruth, past the stretch of time that followed in which history had been reshaped, past John’s brief and contemptible courtship and their wedding and those long and regrettable years of marriage, past Liam and the confessional, past the plot that blew up the mine and her husband along with it, past the disappointing years in the convent and the disappointing years since, past the organ dirges and prayers — oh, the prayers — that had been tossed up to God, countless confetti words that now rained back down upon her, disassembled into jibberish, as she stood on the precipice of time, doubled back, looking again at an angry angelic face before her that symbolized something of which she wanted no part, and with Gabriel’s
feet sliding in the scree at the edge of earth and her own shaking, aching self struck by horrified awareness, she let go.

In an eternal, screaming instant of damnation, the boy-shaped vision of Ruth stumbled backward, eyes wide. The stick rammed against his tiny chest from the unexpected release and launched him backward into the dark, and then he was gone.

Myrthen gasped through her mouth and blinked and then stepped forward, breathless, to see what she had done — then and now — and saw the bodies on the ground below. Both of them, one spectral and one bleeding.

And all at once the curtain she’d hung up inside herself that night so long ago was torn from top to bottom and she saw everything that she had hidden from herself, everything she had done that could never be undone. Ruth, broken on the cellar floor; Liam, manipulated and banished or dead; John and the other miners crushed and buried inside the belly of the mountain. All of it because of her.

Peggy sped toward Lidia’s curb like an outlaw on the run, repeating her favorite lines from
True Grit.
Lidia had been gripping the door handle with one hand and the edge of the seat with the other, her heart pounding in her chest.

“It’s so good seeing you, Liddie. Tell that sweet husband of yours thanks for sharing you for the night.” Peggy beamed at her and reached over to give Lidia’s hand a squeeze. Then she affected her best southern accent: “Come see a fat old man some time!” She threw her head back and laughed. “I just love that John Wayne.”

“Thanks for getting me home safe, Peggy,” Lidia said. “It was great to see you, too.”

“Let me know if you want to go see it again. I can get a kitchen pass next weekend if you can.”

“I’ll let you know,” Lidia said, and opened the door. She stepped onto the sidewalk and turned back. “ ’Night!”

“Toodles! Oh, and happy belated birthday again! Twenty-one years old! Can you imagine?” Peggy waved and took off.

Lidia raised a hand, but Peggy was already gone, a cloud of dust and dross swirling in her wake. Lidia smiled and shook her
head, then walked quickly up the steps back to the safety and comfort of home.

She turned the key quietly. It was after ten o’clock and no doubt Danny would be tired from running after Gabriel all evening. Closing and locking the door, she tiptoed through the living room, avoiding the creaky planks. The house was dark except for the kitchen.

“Danny?” she whispered, imagining him at the table, whittling something for Gabriel or reading the paper over a beer or a cup of coffee. Dropping her purse on the kitchen chair, she smiled at the quiet, thinking he must have left the light on for her and was probably asleep with his feet hanging off the end of Gabriel’s bed, a book open on his chest. Probably
Mr. Pine’s Purple House
, Gabriel’s favorite.

Lidia walked softly down the hall and poked her head into Gabriel’s bedroom, the light slicing through the darkness as she pushed open the door. But when the bed came into view, she was surprised to see it was made up, just as she’d left it. Of course. No matter how many times she insisted that Gabriel stay in his own room, lest it become an unbreakable habit, Danny couldn’t say no when they felt the slap of yellow blanket on their covers that always preceded Gabriel’s gymnastic climb onto their bed. No doubt he didn’t bother waiting tonight for the stealth approach, but took Gabriel straight into their room to fall asleep there. She hoped Danny had remembered to put a night diaper on him.

But across the hall, her and Danny’s room was filled only with moonlight and silence. The bed, like Gabriel’s, still made. She stared at it for a moment, so unusual did it seem, so empty. There wasn’t so much as an impression in the stretched-smooth quilt, where someone might have sat to tie his shoes, or lain down for an afternoon nap, or rolled around during a tickle fight. She turned her head and listened for something. Breathing?
Voices? Were they teasing her? Were they waiting to pounce out of a closet just as she got near?

“Danny?” she whispered again, louder this time. “Gabe?” Surely they wouldn’t stay up so late just to play a silly trick.

“Danny?” Her voice rang clear and loud as she walked back into the hall. It echoed back at her from the quiet. “Gabriel!” She trotted back into Gabriel’s room, and flipped on the overhead light. “Come out right this instant, both of you!” Yanking open the closet door, she saw his toys and clothes, a stack of puzzles he’d already outgrown. Then she bent over to peer underneath the bed, in spite of the improbability. It rose less than a foot off the ground.

“Answer me!” She jogged now, down the hall and into the few other rooms. Outside! Of course! Oh, the relief. She slowed her gait and closed her eyes, let that nameless panic that had erupted in her gut come to rest.

“Okay, you snipers, I’m home,” she said into the yard. The cicada squall rushed loud in her ears. The moon stared down, unblinking, through the void.

“Danny?” She listened. “Gabe?”

Panic rose again. She ran the perimeter of the small yard, trampled through the garden, tripping on the long, ripe cucumbers, ruining them with the heels of her shoes. “Where are you?” she screamed.

And then, an answer. From within the house, the phone began to ring. She sprinted across the yard and into the kitchen and grabbed the handset before she’d had time to take a breath. “Danny? Where are you? Is everything okay?” Then, “Alta, what’s the matter? Are you crying?”

Her heart beat wildly in her chest.

“What do you mean, fell? Where is he? Is he all right? Where’s Danny?”

The second hand on the clock above the sink began to slow.

“No,” she whispered. “No, that can’t be right. They’re here somewhere, hiding. They’re playing a trick on me.” Her eyes darted around the room, seeking proof, and found it in the form of Gabriel’s blanket draped across the seat of his chair. She stretched the cord to reach it. “See?” she said, lifting it up and holding it close to her. “I have Bobby here. Gabriel wouldn’t ever go anywhere at night without Bobby.”

She clutched it to her chest, knuckles going white as she listened to Alta. And then, the clock stopped ticking. The faucet stopped dripping. The cicadas stopped screaming. There was no noise, no heat, no light, no air. Nothing but the faint, urgent voice that came from the telephone receiver she’d dropped on the floor, “Lidia, stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.”

Alta had been restless that night; there was something too stark in the way the moon hung so full and low outside her bedroom window. She tried rolling away from it, plumping and punching the pillows, but the shadows that swayed on the opposite wall felt just as disarming as the moon. Finally, she flung back the sheet, pulled her work pants on underneath her nightgown, stepped into her boots, and went outside to confront the sky.

Walking into the garden, Alta surveyed the asparagus ferns. The emerging spears shot up thin as pencils, which meant the end of that year’s harvest. John had told her back then that the plants would last twenty years if they were well cared for. It had been twenty-three. She wondered how many more crops these plants would yield.

An owl screeched somewhere in the distance, loud. Then again. Alta was used to the sounds of owls defending their territories and seeking mates, but this one sounded not angry or amorous, but hurt. Desperate somehow. There it was again. Alta turned toward it and listened and when she heard it another time, it was clear: that was no owl.

Without a thought, she took off running, following the sound, hopping over the branches and brambles that lay in her path. In a few minutes, she knew from where the crying came. She’d worn a route between the cabin and the mine during those long, haunted years, those unfathomably dark nights with nothing but the owls and crickets and fallen leaves and snow and ghosts for company. It wasn’t uncommon for her to pull on her pants and boots under her nightgown — dressed half for day and half for night, perfect for the half life she’d lived since then — and make her way down to the entrance of the mine, where she would sit and remember or beg or simply listen in case any of them would care to speak to her. But they never did, and so she played their parts in her mind, speaking for and with them, working out the details of their last hours over and over, always hoping that by some miracle of time or circumstance, they would come walking out from underground, all of them, coal-dusted but breathing, and she’d be there, waiting. To forgive and be forgiven.

A woman’s voice twisted tightly, ululating, “No, no, no, no.” It grew louder as she approached, but only slightly, as though the woman was growing weaker as Alta drew near.

Alta saw her: on her knees, her back curled forward, rocking. The hands, she could imagine, clasped together. She looked just as she did nearly forty years before, kneeling and sobbing at the foot of the Virgin on her wedding day.

She reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Myrthen,” she whispered. “Myrthen, what’s wrong?”

There came no answer except the ghost-owl screech of no-no-no-no, quieted now to merely a whisper. Alta, following Myrthen’s blank stare, walked the few steps forward to the edge of the highwall and looked.

Then screamed.

She ran to the clearing that led down, not caring how steeply, grasping thistles and weeds and skidding on scree
bottom-first and bumping down the two stories of shale, scraping and tearing, until she got to Gabriel. He lay with his arms and legs splayed out, one leg bent an odd way. One of his shoes had come off and his pale foot seemed to glow in the moonlight. He wasn’t moving. She touched his face with both hands, then his chest and ribs, feeling for breath. He was still, but he was breathing. With a heady mix of panic and relief, she gathered him up into her arms, holding her breath and willing him to consciousness, until finally she was able to scream, “
HELP!
”

A sound so fierce and immediate, it silenced everything between them and the nearest pair of ears, which, after a short time and some repeated calls, came running. Of all people, it was Danny, followed staggeringly by his soon-to-be-sober father-in-law, Stanley.

Danny slid feet first into the dirt beside Alta and pulled Gabriel from her arms into his own. “Is he dead?” he screamed. “Is he dead?”

“He’s breathing,” Alta said. “But he’s hurt. His leg. I think it’s broken.”

“What happened?” Stanley asked.

“He fell, I don’t know. Myrthen Bergmann’s up there, crying. I don’t know.”

“I left Gabe with her while I went looking for Mr. Kielar.” His face turned ashen, and he looked up at her from a hollow place, like a scared little boy, not someone’s father. “It’s my fault.”

Alta shook her head. “Where’s Lidia?”

“Movies.” Danny started to stand. “We gotta get him to the hospital.” Gabriel lolled in his arms.

“Wait,” Stanley said, forcing the slur from his words. “Lay him flat.” He bent down and swiped at the ground with his rough hand, clearing it of rocks.

“You’re drunk, Stanley. He needs a doctor!” Danny said.

“I know it. But look at his foot. It’s turning blue.” Stanley reached out and cupped Gabriel’s foot. Blood ran down Gabriel’s leg, and dripped off his heel onto the ground. “No pulse in his foot. Here,” he said, pointing to the space he’d cleared. “Gentle now.” Cupping Gabriel’s head as Danny laid him on the dirt, he ran his hands gently over Gabriel’s left leg, feeling the thigh where blood soaked his blue jeans. “Broken. We gotta set it.” He stood up, wobbling a moment, then finding his balance. “Sticks.”

“Can’t we just get him downtown?” Danny said.

“Stanley’s right,” Alta said. “No pulse in his foot means the blood supply’s kinked up.”

Stanley returned with two branches from a fallen maple. He held first one and then the other against his thigh and broke them at the collar, stripped them of their thin offshoots. “Give her your shirt,” he said to Danny, all hint of liquor drained from his voice. Then to Alta, “Tear it. Three strips. Now, Danny, you hold him under the arms while I pull.” Danny, flustered, didn’t move.

“Do it!” Stanley yelled.

Danny pulled off his shirt and flung it toward Alta, who started ripping it at the seams. Then Danny crouched down at Gabriel’s head and leaned over him to get a firm grip at his armpits.