Last Safe Place, The (20 page)

“Tell your men I will pay five million dollars cash to the one who finds my Zara!”

CHAPTER
9

G
ABRIELLA SAT PROPPED UP WITH PILLOWS ON HER BED STARING
at the empty screen of her new laptop. The curser mocked her—blink, blink, blinking on the blank Word document. What in the world had made her think she could still do it? Poetry came from a place in your soul that was pure, and nowhere inside her was pure anymore. The core of who she was lay slathered with filth and reeked of sulfur. She reached up and touched the scar on her cheek—
her outside matched her inside.

Words appeared on the page and she wasn’t even conscious of typing them.

Insides and outsides, ugliness all.

No mirror reflects, no nostril detects

wretchedness reeking, forgiveness seeking

a glimmer of hope however small.

It was awful, of course. Totally lame. So were the other words that lined up behind the first ones, leaping unbidden from her fingers. Tortured structure, painfully awkward, forced and clumsy and … burn-it-when-I-die bad.

Gabriella kept typing anyway, on and on. Words filled the white expanse of screen, lined up like cadets for inspection, neat and tidy. She didn’t stop until she heard music. Then she sat still and listened.

She’d always thought it was beautiful, eerie, haunting and way too complex for her to understand. Oh, she grasped the incredible skill it took to produce it, was awed by the musicians’ ability to improvise something that complicated, make it up as they went along.

But unfortunately, when she added all her responses to jazz together, the total still came up just short of liking it.

Smokey loved jazz! Loved to hear his father play, told her that before his father had bailed out on him when he was a kid he would sit for hours as the old man made his tenor saxophone sing, wail, cry, laugh—created sounds on the instrument Gabriella suspected it was never designed to produce.

Slap Yo Mama Carmichael was never more at home, in his element, than when he was playing. And today, that home was St. Elmo’s Fire.

The Tony Lama boots she’d purchased from Pedro on her first solo trip down the mountain three days ago were not broken in yet so they felt stiff and uncomfortable, but she leapt down the stairs in them nonetheless. She’d driven into Buena Vista that day and returned with some of the belongings they’d left in the trunk of their getaway car. It would take several trips to ferry everything up to the cabin, but she’d prioritized—first things first: Ty’s Nintendo and video games, her laptop and Theo’s vintage Selmer saxophone. And now Theo was playing it!

She found Ty sitting with his legs crossed Indian style in front of Theo on the back porch with P.D. lying beside him, his chin resting on Theo’s fleece-lined leather moccasins. The old man wore a flannel shirt, a heavy sweater
and
a denim jacket. Ty was dressed in a western shirt and jeans. Even in the I Heart Oklahoma sweatshirt she’d bought in Tishomingo, Gabriella was cool. Little boys had different thermostats altogether, she thought, and remembered how Garrett and Grant spent the summer in short sleeves—their arms turned a lovely caramel brown in tacky trucker’s tans by the surprisingly hot, high-altitude sunshine.

Theo sat in his favorite rocker and cradled his new saxophone tenderly in his lap, his eyes closed, his mind transported to that place jazz musicians go, a country far distant from this Colorado mountainside.

She closed the back door softly behind her, didn’t want to break some kind of spell, though Smokey said that when his father got into a zone you could switch on a food processor full of quarters next to his ear and he wouldn’t drop a beat.

She also didn’t want to intrude on the endearing scene. The boy and his dog at the feet of the old black musician, absorbing every sound, every nuance. She wondered if Ty would become a musician someday and shuddered at the thought. The lives of almost every musician she’d ever met were marked by hairline cracks—in response to life or to art, she didn’t know which. And the cracks never healed, just got bigger and deeper until
the artists could only hold their fragmented lives together by medicating. Drugs. Booze. She could write the names of those who had survived to see their thirty-fifth birthdays on the back of a gum wrapper—Dentyne at that. Sooner or later, most of the musicians she knew fell into the fissures in their own souls and died in the dark there, alone.

Except Theo, of course. A faith from his distant childhood had somehow sustained him, kept his head above water while most everyone he loved slipped below the surface and was gone.

Ty put his finger to his lips. Clearly, he didn’t want her to break the mood either. So she stopped, leaned against the porch railing and tried to go to the place jazz transported those who loved it.

She didn’t know how long Theo had been playing before she heard a jeep on the trail through the aspen forest. Even though she clearly recognized the rumble of Pedro’s muffler-free engine, the sound of an approaching vehicle instantly dried up all the spit in her mouth. She turned and watched the spot where the trail emerged from the trees until Pedro’s jeep bumped out into the open, dragging a thin plume of dust behind it.

He waved, almost like he knew she needed reassuring. Surely the man wasn’t really as tuned in to her feelings as her imagination led her to believe.

He pulled up beside the cabin and killed the engine but didn’t get out of the jeep, and Gabriella realized he was listening to Theo, too. When Theo’s music abruptly stopped a few minutes later, Pedro opened the door and stepped down to the ground.

“I did not mean to interrupt,” he said.

Ty leapt to his feet, barreled down the porch steps and skidded to a stop in front of Pedro.

“I found something in the creek. I’ll show you.” He turned and bounded off across the meadow with P.D. on his heels.

Theo stood, holding his saxophone, and fixed Pedro with a steely stare. “Don’t ask,” he said. “All I’ve done since I got here is drink water and make wee.”

“I was at Heartbreak Hotel talking to Steve,” Pedro said, “and we heard this sound. It was you. We could hear you playing all the way down the mountain.”

“Sound carries that far?”

“The wind distorted it, gave it an eerie wail that freaked out his grandchildren. They didn’t know what it was.”

“What’d he tell them?”

“That Bigfoot plays a mountain goat’s horn when he ees hungry—and he ees
not
a vegetarian. Steve will not have to worry about the kids sneaking out after lights-out tonight.”

“A furball honking a goat horn, huh? I s’pect I do sound like that. Don’t have the wind up here to get it right. Think I’ll go lie down.”

He turned and shuffled across the porch. Gabriella watched him anxiously.

“It takes longer with some people,” Pedro said. “Getting used to the thin air is harder the older you get.”

“Did you come all the way up here to listen to Theo play?”

“No.” But he didn’t say why he did come. “You figured out how to make coffee yet with the jet engine?”

“As a matter of fact, I made a fresh pot for breakfast. Have a seat and I’ll get you a cup.”

“Just black, strong enough to trot a squirrel across.”

When she took his coffee out to him, she found him sitting on the top porch step, not in one of the two rockers. He had hung his hat on the post on the porch railing and she noticed what she hadn’t seen before. There were streaks of gray in his thick black hair. She sat down beside him, on his right side, so her scar would be facing away from him. Ty stood on the ground in front of him with a wiggling tiger salamander in his grubby hands.

“These things don’t live long in captivity,” he told Pedro knowingly, “or I’d keep it for a pet.”

“You don’t say.” Gabriella leaned back away from the creature and wrinkled her nose as if it reeked—which it didn’t. “Take it back to the creek and let it go.”

“I was going to, Mom. I just wanted to show Pedro.” To Pedro, he said, “You ever seen a green snake? There’s one that lives under a rock by the creek.”

“Not that I recall.”

“I’ll try to catch it and show you!” Ty turned back to his mother. “They’re harmless, you know. You’d like to see one, wouldn’t you Mom?”

“Sounds wonderful.”

She made a shooing gesture and the boy turned and bolted for the creek.

“Did you say ‘sound’s wonderful’ or ‘I just smashed my thumb in a car door,’ because it was hard to tell from my end?”

“And you’ve never seen a green snake?”

Pedro shrugged.

“I like animals that have fur on them and legs—no more than four. I don’t do creepy crawlies.”

“Neither does my sister.” He pronounced the word “see-ster.” “But that’s because her older brother, who shall remain nameless, put a wet frog down the back of her shirt when she was a kid. Something like that happen to you?”

“Goodness no! Grant would never do a thing like that. He was perfect.”

She was astonished to hear the word drop out of her mouth. How ridiculous. Of course, her older brother wasn’t per … Yes, he was. Grant
was
perfect. At least he was from the viewpoint of a little girl who tried to emulate his every move, every gesture, his lazy smile and that laugh of his that was so infectious everybody laughed with him when they heard it, even if they had no idea what was funny.

She never allowed herself to think about Grant. Never let the image of his face form in her head. But she did now, maybe because she couldn’t help it, being here, so close to where she last saw him. Or maybe just because it was time.

Her mind served up snapshot images, like black-and-white photos on the front page of a newspaper.

Snap-snap.

Grant punching Mikey Zambino in the nose for putting bubble gum in her hair on the school bus.

Snap-snap.

Grant lifting up the covers in the midnight dark so she could get in bed with him when she had a bad dream.

Snap-snap.

Grant answering her questions about rocks or salamanders or why Pamela Wolenski didn’t want to be her best friend anymore. Or explaining how aspen trees grew close together because all their roots were connected. Or reassuring her that Mom and Dad were just busy; that’s why they told her to “hush and go play” all the time.

Snap-snap.

The silver box that held Grant’s body. Her father said he was in there and she knew her father was telling the truth because she’d seen … but she kept looking for Grant at the funeral home anyway, expected to see him leaning against the back wall or standing in the doorway with his grin warming up that awful cold room that smelled like her mother’s Jungle Gardenia perfume. The room where everybody cried and her parents didn’t even know she was there and she couldn’t take her patent leather shoes off even though they’d been too small for her since Christmas but Mom never got around to buying her new ones.

“My little sister could probably come up with a lot of words to describe me, but I do not think perfect would be on the list,” Pedro said.

Gabriella’s mind had one foot in today, the other in yesterday, and she hopped frantically back and forth, trying to make it across the bed of hot coals in between without getting burned.

Grant told her once that the aspen trees dropped leaves on the ground in the fall that looked like scales shed by a golden dragon. He said rubies and sapphires were the same stone. Sapphires were blue rubies; rubies were red sapphires. He said—

“You know, having a conversation with you is a little like being on hold without any music,” Pedro said. “After a while, it ees hard to tell if you are still connected.”

Gabriella returned to the porch, to the smell of fresh coffee, the murmur of the aspens and the feel of the hard porch slats on her butt.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t thought about Grant in … He died up here when he was fourteen. Struck by lightning.”

She never mentioned Grant’s death, not to anybody. Pedro said nothing, but somehow his silence didn’t feel awkward.

Then he said softly, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Nobody had ever asked her that! Not her parents, her grandparents, her friends or teachers. Not even Garrett. Not once in the twenty-eight years since Grant was killed had anybody ever wanted to know how
she
felt about it.

Gabriella had to use a crowbar to pry open the locked door in her mind and then walked tentatively into the bunker. The first sight she saw there plowed into her chest like a runaway train.

“I got to him first, to his body after it happened. I found him.”

“How old were you?”

“It was my eighth birthday.”

Pedro groaned like somebody’d punched him in the belly. Then he reached out wordlessly and placed his hand over hers. It felt warm. The warmth spread up her arm to her chest and neck, thawed the words frozen in her throat so she could speak.

“I remember it smelled like the time a sparkler singed my hair on the Fourth of July. Only a thousand times stronger. And I didn’t know at first what it … what
he
was.”

The ground is wet, the rocks slick, but she runs anyway, slips in a puddle, goes down hard in it and soaks the leg of her jeans, skins her knee. She gets back up and keeps running. The raindrops dangling off the needles of the bristlecone pines sparkle like Christmas tree lights in a shaft of sun beaming through the clouds. She stumbles and brushes up against a branch and the whole left side of her shirt is instantly wet, but she doesn’t care about that either, just keeps running.

Grant is looking for her! She’s certain of it. Maybe she even heard him call her name, but she’s not sure about that part. Sometimes she hears his voice in her head when he’s not even talking to her and maybe this was one of those times.

She has left Garrett behind; she can run faster than he can. And he’s not as scared as she is so maybe she did only hear Grant’s voice in her head and not out loud.

The storm that just passed didn’t wait until afternoon, had popped up out of nowhere from the other side of the mountain. She and Garrett didn’t even have time—