Abandon

FORTY-ONE

A

bigail gripped her father’s arm as they traversed the mountain, moving at a crawl on a fifty-degree slope, Lawrence taking his time to thrust the teeth of his crampons deep into the ice, since they bore the weight of two.

“I would have liked to have seen their bodies,” Abigail said. “Just to be sure.”

“Yeah, but way too risky to edge up to the cliff and look over. We might have joined them. Trust me, they’re either dead or wishing they were.”

They pushed on, Lawrence’s dimming headlamp doing little to guide their way. After awhile, he stopped. They’d left the steepest stretch of ice several hundred feet back.

“This isn’t good,” he said. “We should’ve run into our old tracks by now. I was hoping to follow them back into the canyon. That’s the only safe way down.”

They went on, Abigail covering her face with the hood of her Moonstone jacket, unsettled by the disturbing numbness that had begun to diffuse through her cheek from a patch of burning cold under her left eye. Every step sparked a needle of white-hot pain that shot from the tip of her tailbone up into her throat. She’d begun to cry when Lawrence said, “Thank God.”

Abigail looked up. Through blowing snow, she glimpsed a two-story building perched on the edge of a cliff. “What is that place?” she asked. “Are we back at the mine?”

“No, we’re a thousand feet above it. That’s the ruins of the Godsend’s upper boardinghouse. Forty men used to live up here, so they’d have easy access to the mine’s upper reaches, where all the richest ore deposits were located. Oatha Wallace lived here.”

“So is it good that we found it, or—”

“It means I at least know where we are, and I can get us down to the canyon floor from here. Come on, let’s get out of the storm.”

The exterior of the boardinghouse stood in dire disrepair, the wood spongy and soft, the porch overgrown with moss, animals having gnawed partway through the support beams.

The ground floor was bisected into two rooms by a hall that linked the front door to the back porch. The west door frame opened into the kitchen and dining hall, its floor rotted through. All that remained were a couple of cookstoves, four benches, a barrel, and the remnants of a screened cage where the food had been stored to keep it safe from rodents.

Abigail and Lawrence picked their way through the debris of a fallen staircase and turned into the living room. The furniture—rustic handmade pieces—still survived, and aside from a hole in the northeast corner, the flooring was largely intact. As they collapsed before a stone fireplace in the back corner, Abigail said, “I think I have frostbite on my face.”

Lawrence removed his pack, got up again, limped over to a table in the middle of the room, its surface gray with age, still encased in bark. “You didn’t see me do this,” he said, then lifted one of the chairs and smashed it over the table. He carried an armload of broken wood to the fireplace and went to work arranging it on the rusted grate. From the emergency kit in his pack, he took a bar of trioxane compressed fuel and a plastic matchbox. “This may catch the whole place on fire,” he warned. Lawrence struck a match, held it to the fuel. Soon the fire starter glowed and then the old wood began to pop and hiss, flames licking up between the stones for the first time in more than a hundred years.

Abigail scooted up to the edge of the hearth and extended her hands toward the warmth. “Thank you,” she said. Her father had taken off his parka, and he inspected her face by firelight. “Is it bad?” she asked.

“It’s just the top layer of skin that’s frostbitten. It may always be sensitive to cold, but no serious damage. That gash above your eye looks worse than anything.”

Abigail stared into the flames, shadows playing on the warped-board floor, the raw, unfinished walls. The accumulation of everything was pressing down on her, a meltdown coming, though she knew she didn’t have the luxury of falling apart just yet.

“What’s upstairs?” she asked.

“Just a big room with a stove in the middle and twenty built-in wooden bunks.”

A pile of rat-chewed paper lay in a stack near the hearth. Abigail picked up an old catalog, thumbed through the brittle pages. She saw an advertisement for a wedding dress with a check mark by it, wondered if the miner had ever gotten home to marry his love, or if he’d disappeared with the rest of Abandon. She noticed some writing on the nearest wall.

“Who would come up here and defile this place?”

“That’s not vandalism, Abby.” Lawrence crawled over and shone his light on the tiny scrawl. “Some of the miners wrote this. You can tell because it was done with pencil, and the handwriting isn’t like ours. It’s very small and fine, almost like calligraphy.”

Abigail, too sore, too warm to move closer, said, “What’s it say?”

“Well, this is just a column of numbers. Over here, someone wrote, ‘John owes Bill two dollars.’ Below that one, ‘This is hell.’”

“What’s that drawing a couple feet above your head?”

Lawrence stood. “How lovely. I haven’t seen this one. It’s a miner’s Nellie. Someone sketched a woman’s face. You see a lot of these in boardinghouses, since the men were so lonely up here. . . . Abby.” He looked back at her. “I had no idea he was gonna kill Emmett.”

“I know you didn’t. But you and Scott did drag us all into this shit. You did do that.”

“Look, the real reason I contacted you wasn’t for this stupid ghost hunt. It was for the gold. The plan was to locate it on this trip, maybe take a few bars out with us, come back later for the rest. I wanted to share finding it with you.”

“So you just used Emmett and June for their backcountry pass?”

“You have no idea how hard it is to get legal access to this box canyon, and they needed a guide anyway. Abby, I was gonna take care of you. Of your mother.”

“The time when we needed you passed a lot of years ago.”

“I know.” Lawrence sat down beside his daughter. “What did your mother think of your coming out here to see me?”

“Furious at first that you’d . . . after all this time . . . I tried to make her see it wasn’t a betrayal, just something I needed to do.”

“May I share something with you?”

He unlaced his boots, removed his wet socks, propped his bare feet on the hearth. “I was having my morning coffee the day you arrived in Durango, and I had this vision. Least I think that’s what it was. I was a few years older. A little slower. Little whiter. Through some unexpected windfall, I was living in a vast mansion up in the mountains north of town. The house had been built in an aspen grove near a river.

“It was early June, and around midday there was a knock at the front door. I walked through the foyer with a big grin on my face because I knew who it was. I was expecting them. This beautiful family stood on my doorstep—my daughter, her husband, their two kids, Molly and Larry. My daughter and I . . .” Lawrence cleared the emotion from his throat, spoke more softly as he continued. “We embraced, nothing held back. I shook hands with her husband, and he called me ‘Dad,’ and my two grandchildren ran inside and tackled me to the floor. See, this family had come to stay for a while. They had a whole wing of the mansion to themselves, and it was one of those perfect Colorado summers. I taught Larry to fly-fish in the river, and Molly loved to swim, so some days it was just the two of us, and I’d take her pool jumping at Cascade Creek, swimming at Haviland.

“In July, when the wildflowers peaked, we all hiked up to Engineer Meadow, and the flowers were more spectacular than they’d been in years. I showed my grandchildren how to identify the blooms. We even picked a bouquet for their mother.

“The evenings were best. After the kids had gone down, we’d have dinner on the back porch. Candles, wine, lots of laughter, watching the alpenglow fade out on the Needles, and then came the stars, and you couldn’t believe how many there were, and there was no bad history, no pain, and, Abby, you looked at me across the table like I was someone you loved.

“I came out of this vision or dream, whatever you wanna call it, overcome by a devastating emptiness, a sense of total loss. I’ve lived alone in Durango, in a two-bedroom Victorian on Third Avenue, going on twenty years now. I don’t have close friends. There are acquaintances, a brother I talk to on the phone once a year on Christmas morning. Occasional dates, but no real love life. My work’s been my life and love. I’ve demanded absolute freedom, lived on my terms, and I . . .” His eyes were welling up. “I’m just now, at fifty-two years old, beginning to understand what the price of my freedom is. And it’s this. I’ll never have a summer like that one I imagined a few days ago.”

The fire roared now, its heat thawing Abigail’s face, causing an itchy burn in her left cheek. “Lawrence,” she said, “that’s a real sad story. But there’s something you’re missing, and maybe if you figured it out, you might be on your way to changing some things.”

“What am I missing, Abby?”

She looked at his purple right eye, the line of dried blood cracking down his cheek like old plaster. “It’s still all about you. What you lost. What you won’t ever get to experience. It’s about you getting old, feeling empty. I was four when you left, and I didn’t hear from you again until you wrote me about this trip. Not on birthdays. Not on Christmas. Do you know I believed I’d done something to make you leave us? That it was somehow my fault?”

“Abby, you have to know that—”

“And that in some deep and broken part of me, I still believe that? You left us. Mom never married. Practically holed herself up in that house for years, thinking you’d come back. Maybe if I’d had a brother or a sister, it wouldn’t have been so god-awful lonely. When I got into Columbia, you know she had to come to New York with me? ’Cause I couldn’t leave her in Baltimore? ’Cause she had nothing? No one? I didn’t spend college in a dorm. I lived with my mother in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, through two suicide attempts, three commitments, every second spent studying or working so we could eat, so we’d have heat in the winter, waking up, middle of the night sometimes, hearing her talking in the dark as I stood at her door, realizing it was you she was talking to, like you were lying in bed with her. Like you loved her. Even speaking for you. Do you know what that’s like? To hear your mother re-enacting the first time you two met? Fantasizing about a man who’d left her twenty years ago? Look, Mom’s better now, and I’m a big girl, got my own life. This isn’t about me crying for the daddy I never had. But I wish you could’ve been there with me, just one of those nights, seen what you turned her into.”

Lawrence drew back. He got up and walked over to the empty window frame. Several rocking chairs creaked out on the back porch, pushed by the wind. Lawrence looked back at his daughter. Abigail stared up at her father. She wanted to see his face streaked with firelit tears. Wanted to catch just a glimmer of self-loathing or shame in her father’s eyes, though it wouldn’t have changed much. But it might’ve been a start.

Lawrence had gone hard. He scowled, as if deeply offended, and in the light of the flames, his face appeared faintly grotesque and very old.