Abandon (45 page)

“Please, just . . . get me inside.”

The sheriff helped her to stand, then, with her arm around her waist, walked Abigail into the house and shut the door.

“Do the locks,” Abigail said.

As the sheriff relocked the door, Abigail tried to unzip her muddy jacket, but her hands trembled too much to grasp the zipper.

“Let me help with that,” the sheriff said.

“Thank you. What’s your name?”

“Jennifer.”

“I’m Abigail.”

Abigail pulled her arms out of the sleeves, and Jennifer took the jacket and hung it from the coatrack. Then she guided Abigail through the foyer, past the staircase, and up a dark hallway into the kitchen.

“Here, sit down.” She pulled a chair back from a small table and Abigail collapsed onto the seat.

“Could I have some water?”

“Of course.” Jennifer opened a cabinet and took down a glass, filled it at the tap.

Abigail glanced around the kitchen, a peculiar mix of new and old—Sub-Zero fridge, granite countertops, an old gas stove salted with rust, an ancient faucet. On a wooden shelf above the sink, she spotted an array of empty Grey Goose bottles and antique bottles that a century ago had contained bitters and tonics, and a clear flower vase full of stained wine corks.

Jennifer set the glass down on the table and returned to the sink and filled a pot with water. Abigail caught a whiff of propane, heard the gas ignite. Jennifer sat down across from her.

“I know you’re tired and hurting, but why don’t you try to tell me what happened out there.”

The heat from a wood-burning stove slithered in from the living room.

“They’re all dead,” she whispered. “Except my father, who’s trapped in a cave.”

“How’d they die?”

The cold had scrambled and clouded her thoughts, and she tried to decant the sequence of events, but the days and nights kept mixing and running into one another and reversing, like the warped memory of a fever dream, several versions of the last seventy-two hours emerging, until she couldn’t separate with certainty exactly what had happened when and to whom and the horrible chronology of it all.

She shook with chills as she attempted to piece it back together, the events crystallizing and falling into order the more she talked.

But the version she told took a departure once they’d been locked inside the mountain. It was only a long-forgotten mine, and empty at that.

No bones, no gold, no revelation.

.   .   .

“Here, get this in you.”

Jennifer set a big steaming mug of tea on the table before Abigail, who cupped her hands to the warm ceramic and left them there until her fingers burned.

“How long has your father been alone in the cave.”

“Almost two days.”

“How much water did you leave him with?”

“We ran out.”

“I’ll call search-and-rescue, get that ball rolling. Go on, drink your tea. You’ll feel better.”

Jennifer walked out of the kitchen, and Abigail heard the creak of her footsteps ascending the stairs. She raised the mug to her lips and sipped the tea—piping hot, peppermint with a harsh, bitter bite—wondered if the sheriff had sneaked in a bit of Grey Goose for good measure, hoped so.

Her feet ached. She set the tea on a place mat and reached down and pulled on the double-knotted laces of her left boot. The knot slipped. She tugged out the tongue and winced as she slid her heel out of the boot, the wool hiking sock cold, damp, and pink with blood.

Abigail loved her feet—small, feminine, exuding a slender, proportionate beauty her friends openly envied. These shredded, swollen blobs of flesh did not belong to her. They looked more like battered cod, blanched and translucent, with silver dollar–size blisters on her heels and ankles that peeled back, revealing raw skin the color of watermelon pulp.

She got up, had to walk on the balls of her feet to bypass the excruciating pain.

Being down there alone unnerved her, though she still caught fragments of Jennifer’s voice upstairs. She took her mug of tea and limped out of the kitchen in search of a bathroom, came instead into a small office with a scratched-up desk, which faced a window. The desk barely provided the surface area to house its computer, printer, and fax machine.

Peering through the beaded glass, Abigail saw that the rain had changed over to snow.

Way off in all that darkness, a barb of red light slanted up and left through her field of vision and she thought she was hallucinating until she pegged it for the taillights of a car climbing the steep grade south out of Silverton toward Molas Pass.

Spider plants in need of watering hung from the ceiling, a pair of leather snowshoes from one wall, and her eyes fixed upon a framed photomontage beside them of jagged mountains under the heading C
OLORADO’S
54 F
OURTEENERS
.

She sipped her tea. Beside the desk, two unfinished pine bookcases almost
touched the ceiling, but instead of books, they contained relics from the past—rusted railroad spikes, an old burro’s shoe, pitons and a pair of crampons from the forties. Perhaps most fascinating, the middle two shelves of each bookcase displayed photographs of Silverton.

On one side stood framed photos of the present-day town and the buildings of Greene and Blair streets—the courthouse, city hall, the Grand Imperial—all set against the backdrop of mountainsides blazing with aspen and blue sky the purity of which could exist only above nine thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies, and there were photos of the Durango and Silverton Narrow-Gauge Railroad, the train having stopped to unload at Twelfth Street on a summer day, tourists leaning out of the gondola cars, smiling and waving, thrilled to spend a few hours in this romanticized mining town, to lunch in remodeled saloons and brothels, watch staged gunfights, have portraits taken in old-West costumes, children destined to return home with cowboy hats and six-shooter cap guns, tortured parents having to suffer their kids saying “Howdy, pardner” and “Get along, now” for the foreseeable future.

On the opposing shelves stood more Silverton photographs, these all in black-and-white, little windows to the past: a burro train standing in late-nineteenth-century Greene Street, the mule skinners staring dour-faced at the photographer. Soot-blackened miners and whores and suited gold and silver kings in a saloon, everyone raising beer glasses and tumblers, and not a smile to be found under all those handlebar mustaches. The railroad in winter, tracks framed by fifteen-foot walls of snow, and five bundled men with iced mustaches standing in front of a steam engine’s cattle guard, shovels in hand.

But what caught her interest more than anything were the portraits of people long dead, their faces stoic, expressionless: a woman who might’ve been her age, carrying in her eyes the world-weariness of a refugee. A white-bearded gentleman, ragged bowler perched on his head, whose eyes betrayed their longing to cut loose a smile, despite having to sit still for the long exposure.

She considered all the photographs in her studio—family and friends at weddings, graduations, vacations, Christmases—and couldn’t recall a single picture where someone wasn’t smiling their heart out, thought how strange it would be if people in modern times never grinned for the camera.

Going solely on photographs, historians in the next century might mistake her world for a happy place, just as she’d always assigned misery and hardship to the past, prejudiced by a few grim portraits.

Abigail noted that she felt much better, the pain receding from her feet as she inspected the last portrait—a black-and-white shot of a young man with hair so unkempt that it struck her as contemporary, and for all its gravity-defying
waves, might’ve run two hundred dollars, not including product, in a Manhattan salon.

The face that wild hair sat upon was handsome but uniformly pocked with tiny colorless indentations, so that he looked less like a live human being, more like a Seurat Pointillism.

The portrait’s frame rested upon a brown leather-bound book, stiff and dry, so old that as she lifted it to her face and inhaled the smell, she couldn’t detect even the faintest odor of tannins or glue.

She opened it to the first page, which contained six words handwritten in elaborate, perfect script:
The Journal of Dr. Julius Primack.

There were eight lines in haphazard succession down the middle of the page, the first of which read
Lana Hartman.

“You found it.”

The sheriff stood in the archway adjoining the kitchen and the office, and Abigail couldn’t exactly nail it down, but her posture evinced tension—Jennifer’s arms hanging at her sides, knees slightly bent, her body coiled as if for a race or a fight.

And Abigail felt different—seismic shifts in the unavowed frequencies. She was edgy, a little nauseous, her awareness heightened, and she realized it wasn’t that her body didn’t ache anymore—she just cared less and less with each passing moment.

“You’re a historian, too?” Abigail asked.

“You could say that.” Jennifer walked into the office and stood beside Abigail at the bookshelf. “This guy”—she touched the portrait of the young man with the ruined face—“came out to Silverton from Chicago in 1891 with investment money. Lost it all on poorly chosen claims in less than a year.”

“But he stayed.”

“Julius had studied a little medicine in the mid-eighties, and since you didn’t actually have to have a diploma to be a doctor where they were in high demand, he started a practice, kept prospecting on the side. If you read his notes”—Jennifer pulled the journal out of Abigail’s hands, placed it back carefully under the photograph—“it becomes clear he was a very driven but very frustrated man.”

“Why frustrated?”

“He became obsessed with finding some gold that went missing in Abandon, thought he knew where it was, that he had the key that would open this secret mine. But he could never find it. He went crazy, shot himself in 1924.”

“Why do you have his picture and journal? Are you studying—”

“I’m his great-granddaughter. My brother and I are fourth-generation Silverton Primacks.”

The sheriff slipped out of focus, and Abigail had to rub her eyes to bring her back.

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.

“I don’t know . . . it’s weird.” It wasn’t a bad feeling, just a sudden, blissful calm, and the only thing that unnerved Abigail was how fast it had bullied its way in.

Jennifer said, “That’s probably the Percoset I crushed up in your tea.”

Abigail’s heart hammered so hard, she thought it would explode, then realized that the beating hadn’t originated within her. Someone had knocked at the front door.

Jennifer had left the room.

Abigail looked down, saw a puddle and four pieces of ceramic on the hardwood floor.

She almost fell moving past the stainless-steel refrigerator, braced herself against the kitchen table, which turned over—place settings, her glass of water, and a vase of plastic lilies crashing to the floor.

She sat down on the tile.

In the foyer, Jennifer reached the front door and pulled it open.

A man loomed in the porchlight. Abigail knew him from somewhere. His shoulder-length brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, his silver-and-black down jacket dusted with snow.

He wrapped his arms around Jennifer, nothing remotely sexual or romantic in the embrace, the energy reflective of close friends or siblings.

He said, “We did it, Jen.”

Abigail leaned against the refrigerator, her head humming as she watched Jennifer redo the locks.

The mosaic of pastel-colored tiles ensnared Abigail’s attention, and the next time she looked up, that tall man stood at the sink, washing his hands.

Her eyes slammed shut, and when they opened again, her face lay pressed against the cold tile and the kitchen table had been righted and the sheriff and that familiar man sat across from each other.

“. . . this storm, we won’t be able to get back to Abandon until next summer. I told you it might come to . . .” His voice left audible trails, as if he were speaking in triplicate.

Abigail had been stoned before, drunk, even took Ecstasy a couple years back at an ill-advised rave in the Meatpacking District. This was nothing like
that. She didn’t feel euphoric, just tranquil and dreamy and wise. On some disassociated level, she understood the danger, but it was knowledge without emotion or investment, no more upsetting than hearing of a stranger’s death on the evening news.

“I fucking hate this.” The sheriff’s voice.

Somewhere in the kitchen, a crow squawked nine times.

“This isn’t the first blood spilled for those bricks. But we do this right? Finish it? Maybe it’s the last. You thought of it that way?”