Last Safe Place, The (28 page)

“I … drum roll please … am a poet.”

Her own words surprised her. She wasn’t being disingenuous, wasn’t consciously trying to mislead him, throw him off the scent so he wouldn’t figure out her identity. It had slipped out. Gabriella hadn’t thought of herself as a poet since those days years ago when her poignant, insightful, lyric verse earned her the Antivenom Poetry Award and the May Swenson Poetry Award and her first book of published poetry,
The Crystal Pillow
, was on the short list for the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award—and its $100,000 prize.

She didn’t see herself as a poet when she was writing lyrics for Garrett’s music, lyrics that spiraled down into the darkness of her brother’s soul. And she certainly didn’t see herself as a poet after she wrote
The Bride of the Beast
.

The handful poems she’d written here—the verse stiff and stilted from disuse—did that make her a poet again?

“You look troubled. Is writing poetry painful?”

“I guess you could say that,” she picked up the geode and watched the shiny crystal refract sparkles in the air. “You start with pure beauty—like this—and you have to exchange it for mere words. Sometimes it breaks your heart.”

“When did you realize that you—?”

“The day Garrett played the piano.”

“The
same
day?”

“Does seem odd, doesn’t it. Obviously, we’d been born with special talent—you don’t instantly acquire it out of nowhere. But I’m with you, I always thought it was strange that we both ... The first poem I ever wrote was about the suit we bought that day for Grant to be buried in.”

Her mother’s face, wild with grief, was still high-def clear in her mind. In a state of unrelenting hysteria, there’d been no reasoning with her, and Gabriella’s father had tried. Though he’d been shattered himself, he’d attempted to make his wife understand that there wouldn’t be an open casket, not with Grant’s body so … damaged. What was the point of a suit and tie? She’d shrieked that she would see him, even if nobody else did. He was her
precious baby and she would dress him herself, make him look nice no matter …

So they’d been dispatched to purchase a suit.

“The poem was about the look in my father’s eyes when he picked it out, about how Mom’s hands shook when she took it from him and carried it into the back room at the funeral home and closed the door behind her.”

The poem described Gabriella’s fantasy of a strikingly handsome Grant lying in the silk-lined box in the suit, juxtaposed against the reality of what it must have been like for her mother to fit him into it, into any kind of clothing after what had happened to his body. It was a profoundly moving piece because it was so simple, a pen-and-ink sketch of horror—told with powerful, haunting imagery in misspelled words and endearingly clumsy iambic pentameter.

“I wasn’t as gifted at writing as my brother was musically, though. Garrett Griffith’s music was pure genius.”

“Garrett
Griffith
?” Pedro turned to her, his eyes wide. “…
the
Garrett Griffith?”

The geode slipped out of her hand and dropped into her lap. She wanted to rip out her tongue! She’d relaxed, dropped her guard. Pedro was so easy to be with, so easy to talk to. She never should have … but how had a Hispanic man in a dead little Colorado town ever heard of a grunge metal musician like Garrett? Why would Pedro listen to the desperately dark music of Withered Soul?

“How did you … where …?”

“Joaquin and his friends discovered Withered Soul on the internet about a year ago. Most of what they listen to is … is …” He turned to look out over the valley. “Rap ees
not
music!” he said. “Rap ees
chanting!”

“How do you really feel about it?”

“The
music
of Withered Soul is amazing but the lyrics are … they bothered me.”

“They bothered me, too. I wrote them.”

“You wrote
Wilted Dreams
?” He paused, then surprised her by repeating the song’s chorus, word for word. “Despair rises in us like the tide coming in, the tide coming in, the tide coming in. Hope lies abandoned with the tide going out, next to death, pain and sorrow on the sand.”

Gabriella’s face flushed. Those lyrics had bubbled up out of the muck of an awful, dark place that had produced all manner of ugliness.

“It wasn’t exactly my finest work, but yes, I wrote it. Only that was when …” When she had hitched her wagon to her twin brother’s star that became a meteor hurling toward its own destruction—and she had very nearly flamed out with it. How could she make Pedro understand a thing like that? She couldn’t. Because she didn’t really understand it herself.

All she knew for certain was that there had been a time once when her … “gift”
hadn’t
been a dark burden.

“When I was younger, before … things were different.
I
was different. I wrote a poem called
Morning
for a third-grade writing assignment.” She closed her eyes and called the words of a stanza to mind.

“The light then scrubs the darkened skies

awakens deer and antelope.

And time breathes life in slow, sweet sighs

perfumed by jasmine, love and hope.”

“You wrote
that
at age … what? Nine!” Pedro studied her face. “Light and dark. You are a complicated woman, Gabriella.”

She felt her face flush.

“No, I’m not. I’m a simple life form. An amoeba, actually, in a protozoan world.”

Ty barreled around the corner of the cabin and skidded to a stop in front of the porch. He had used his shirt as a sack, held the bottom portion of it out in front of him and filled the hollow formed behind it with rocks, all sizes and shapes.

He dumped the pile of them at his mother’s feet and asked, panting, “Are any of these geodes?”

Clearly, they weren’t. Oh, a few hunks of granite in varying sizes were sort of round and definitely lumpy like geodes. The rest were flat slate.

But Gabriella took her cue from Pedro. “I don’t think so, but anything’s possible. The only way to find out for sure is to crack them open and see. There’s a hammer in the toolbox in the mudroom. Get a bucket of water and clean the fish slime off that rock first.”

T
Y DIDN
’
T FIND
any geodes. He used the hammer to crack open all the rocks he’d gathered along the banks of Piddley Creek and near Notmuchava Waterfall where the water was all frothy so maybe it had broken something loose.

Nothing. Every broken rock revealed a solid center. No holes in any of them.

Ty was okay with that, though. He wasn’t likely to find a geode down here around the cabin anyway. He’d already figured out his mom probably found hers up there in the Jesus trees when she wasn’t supposed to go outside. Tomorrow he’d sneak away again and go to the chalet.

He turned and looked up at the mountaintop rising high into the bright blue sky.

He had first gone to the chalet the day after he overheard his mother tell Grandpa Slappy about it. He and P.D. had gone off to the creek, right after breakfast before his grandfather had his second cup of coffee. Then they sneaked through the forest behind the meadow to the other corner of the hanging valley. There was something like a rock wall about two hundred feet tall behind the meadow; Piddley Creek wound along the south side of it and fell into the creek bed below in Notmuchuva Waterfall. He’d seen what looked like a trail on the north side that had to be the one that led to the chalet.

He tried to hurry up it. He’d be in plain view as he climbed if his mother happened to go behind the cabin and look up toward the peak. But the trail was more challenging than he expected. It was steeper than he thought it’d be even though it angled across the incline. And the rock and gray dirt and gravel were loose underfoot. He slipped twice. When he finally made it, P.D. was waiting for him, wagging his tail.

“Show-off,” Ty said.

At the top lay the forest of Jesus trees you could see from the meadow. What you couldn’t see from the meadow was how gnarled and twisted they were, all of them leaning in the same direction, the way the wind had blown them for thousands of years. He could totally see why his mother and uncle had wanted to play there. Most of the stubby trees were short enough for grown-ups to see over, but they formed a labyrinth of passageways for children. He wasn’t about to get lost in them, though, like those terminally stupid kids you saw in movies or read about in stories who ran mindlessly into the woods without giving any thought to how they were going to find their way back out. He was smarter than that! He’d brought along a sack full of marbles from the Chinese checkers game in the cabin and dropped them at intervals behind him as he explored.

The trail was overgrown, barely visible. Just past a big pile of boulders stood the chalet. It was pretty bunged up. Unlike the cabin below that had been redone, nobody had fixed up this building. One of the posts that held up the porch roof lay on the steps and there was a hole in the chalet roof near the chimney. Ty managed to shove the door open and inside was the picnic table his mother had described. It was bunged up, too, but he could see carved into the surface the three G’s his mother had talked about.

Pedro’s voice interrupted Ty’s memory.

“Gotta go,” he said, and pulled his hat low on his brow. Ty knew that was so the hat wouldn’t blow off, but it still made Pedro look kind of like the bad guy in a cowboy movie. “Remember, you do not cast the fly rod, you—”

“Cast the fly
line
,” Ty finished for him. “The rod is an extension of your arm.”

“I have taught you well, Grasshopper.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

As Pedro’s muffler-free jeep rumbled away from the cabin, Ty picked up the hammer and cast a final glance at the mountain. Maybe the geodes were farther up, near the aquamarine at the peak. He absolutely, one hundred percent did
not
want to climb up that high. But no, his mother had said that while her parents and older brother went up the mountain, she and her twin played in the forest and that Uncle Garrett had wanted to explore …
under the overhang!

Mom didn’t think the overhang would still be there, but it was. He’d seen it in the distance when he was at the chalet. It was just as his mother described it. Maybe the magic geode had come from there.

* * * *

The Reverend Jim Benninger actually had internet access! For the first time in three months. He and his wife had boarded a steamer a week ago—maybe more than that, the days tended to run together here—and traveled up the White Nile River to Khartoum so Betty Ann could get back on her feet from the virus that had been draining her strength since Easter.

The minister had been going through the backlog of emails in his Yahoo! account and spotted one sent yesterday from Pedro Rodriguez in St. Elmo. When he opened it, a smile spread quickly over his tired, lined face.

The message was short:

Thought you would like to see how much Gabriella’s son is enjoying St. Elmo’s Fire.

Pedro

So she’d actually come this year!

The attached picture said it all. It showed a little boy on the porch of the cabin holding a smallish trout and grinning so wide the smile almost split his face open! The look on the child’s face captured the essence of joy and peace Jim’s family always felt when they were in the mountains.

It occurred to the pastor then that he ought to capture that joy for Gabriella to remember. Quickly, because the WiFi in the hotel wasn’t reliable, he went on Google and found a store in Pittsburgh called The Frame House that did custom prints and framing. He emailed the photo of the little boy to the store and paid by credit card to have it printed, mounted, framed and delivered to Gabriella’s house so it would be waiting there for her when she returned home from Colorado.

He wanted the picture to bring her time in the mountains to a surprise end.

And it did.

CHAPTER
13

G
ABRIELLA FIGURED THAT IT MUST HAVE BEEN INDIGESTION
—courtesy of the fried trout she had for dinner. Or maybe it wasn’t a memory at all, but a dream. After all, it had come to her in that gray twilight between lying in bed wondering when you will ever go to sleep and the netherworld of disconnected dream images.

Whatever its origin, the night after she and Ty watched the Fourth of July fireworks display in Buena Vista from the front porch of the cabin, Gabriella recalled a memory—or invented a fantasy—about finding the geode full of pure quartz.

It is shadow-day. That’s what she and Garrett call it. The rising sun lights up the valley and would wake everybody in the house at dawn if not for the room-darkening blinds. That part is sun-day. But after the sun balances on top of the mountain at lunchtime—you can look at it there if you squeeze your eyes all squinty—then it goes down behind the mountain and the rest of the day is in shadow.

She and Garrett are standing next to the hunk of granite that sticks up out of the ground by the front porch, breaking open the rocks they collected that morning while they were at the chalet. Grant always encourages them to pick up rocks they like and they have their own rock sacks. Of course, their mother and father don’t know they found most of the ones they’re breaking now while their parents were near the peak of the mountain looking for aquamarine.

They don’t find any thunder eggs, though. Grant said there aren’t any here, and Gabriella would have stopped looking except Garrett keeps at it. He is sure if they look hard enough, they’ll find one. So she goes along, is patient with Garrett’s determination to find what he’s looking for—even when he sometimes gets so caught up in looking that he forgets they have to get back to the chalet by noon.

Garrett bangs the hammer down on the last of his rocks. A hunk of it breaks off, enough to see it is solid inside instead of hollow.

“I’m gonna go see the aquamarine Grant found,” he says, tosses the hammer over into the dirt and starts up the steps.

“I bet he won’t show you.”