The Mountain Story

by Lori Lansens

  Dantay embraced me. “Don’t try to talk.”

  The third man was Native American also. I recognized him but couldn’t remember his name. He held a motorcycle helmet in his hand. “I’m Byrd’s cousin,” he said. “Juan Carlos. We’ve seen each other out at Harley’s ranch.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “There’s one more from our team,” Dantay said.

  My eye stopped on the person who entered the room next. His posture was stooped, his expression solemn. When I realized who it was I couldn’t speak for a long time. “Byrd,” I said at last.

  He approached my hospital bed with his crooked smile and drooping left lid.

  “Yo,” I said, grinning.

  “Arra fah ken ut,” Byrd said, without missing a beat.

  Harley told us then that he’d been startled awake by noises in the early morning hours. He’d gone to check on Byrd, and found him sitting in the leather chair by the window, watching dawn break over the mountain. He was about to take him back to his bed, when Byrd said, “Wolf.” It was the first word Byrd had spoken in the year and four days since his accident. Harley couldn’t ignore it.

  Byrd followed Harley out to the car and they drove straight to the gas station, where Byrd pointed out the accumulation of newspapers outside of the apartment door. Harley’s concern grew when they entered the small apartment and saw my knapsack on the hook by the door. Within the hour a team from Mountain Rescue had been dispatched to the mountain.

  “Bridget,” I said, flashing back to the mountain—that moment. “Vonn doesn’t know.”

  “I understand,” Harley said.

  Nola gestured for Harley, Dantay and Juan Carlos to leave Byrd and me alone and so they did.

  “Wilfred,” he said, grinning. There was a glimmer of the old Byrd.

  Something in his face changed then and I had the sense my friend was gone, body surfing some parallel universe.

  “Byrd?”

  He blinked hard. “Wolf,” he said, taking a seat by the window. And that was the last word Byrd said for nearly a month.

  Byrd’s been like a brother to me, but sometimes like my son, and sometimes, in the most irritating way, like a father too. That’s the beauty of Byrd—you don’t know, one moment to the next, where or who he’ll be.

  I suspect, when he tilts his head a certain way, he’s on the mountain, taking in the view from the peak. When he talks to himself, when he’s incoherent, like he is sometimes, I imagine he’s standing on the spot where those fractures intersect, getting answers to questions he didn’t know he had.

  That day I woke up in the hospital, after Byrd had gone, one of the nurses finally came in to say that Vonn was ready to see us. But when I attempted to roll into her room behind Nola, another nurse said, “Family only.”

  Nola had me covered, telling the woman, “He’s the baby’s father.”

  It was as if we’d been separated for ten years, instead of a few days, and known each other forever, instead of less than a week—at least for me. The fetal monitor at Vonn’s bedside beeped steadily. I played the role of dutiful father but it was more than an act, even then.

  “Vonn,” I said, when I saw that her eyes were open. She tracked me with a blank stare as I wheeled closer to her bed. Finally a smile began to pull at the corner of her mouth.

  Intimate strangers that we were, I wasn’t sure if I should embrace her and was relieved when she reached for my hand, and then for Nola’s beside me. Finally she turned toward the door.

  “Where’s my mother?” she asked.

  Nola and I shared a look. Neither of us could find our voice.

  “Is she coming?”

  “You remember a little about the mountain, Vonn?” I asked.

  “Not much.”

  “The rock slide? You remember how Nola hurt her wrist?”

  “I remember we were lost and it was cold and my toes hurt so much.”

  “Do you remember the crevice?”

  Vonn shook her head. “The doctor said I had a rattlesnake bite. I don’t remember the rattlesnake. Did I see it?”

  I shared another look with Nola. “Maybe we should talk about all of this later.”

  “You let me put my feet under your shirt,” Vonn remembered.

  “Yes.”

  “You let me wear your boots.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s my mother?” she asked.

  I paused. “Bridget died on the mountain.”

  Vonn turned to look at her grandmother, who could only nod.

  “We made it all the way to Corazon Falls,” I said.

  Vonn stopped me. “No.”

  “Bridget saved us, Vonn,” Nola said.

  “No,” Vonn said again.

  “She was amazing,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me,” Vonn said.

  “I was so proud,” Nola said.

  “Please.”

  “It was just like her dream,” Nola said.

  A nurse swept into the room, responding to a change in both of her patients’ vital signs. “We need to keep her quiet and calm,” she said.

  “Should we go?”

  “No,” Vonn said.

  We were quiet for some time. Nola reached out with her good hand, squeezing Vonn’s leg. “The doctor said you’ll recover most of your memories eventually.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Vonn laid a hand on the gentle swell of her womb.

  “We can fill in the blanks for you,” I said.

  “No more talk about the mountain, okay? I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Whatever you need, Vonn,” Nola said.

  We were quiet again, listening to a man whistling somewhere out in the hall.

  “We’ll make rose sachets,” Vonn said.

  I was doing well on my crutches, and Nola’s arm had improved significantly. We left the hospital within days of each other a week or so later. Vonn developed complications from our ordeal. The baby was at risk. Each day brought some new worry for Vonn, another threat to the baby. Thanks to Harley’s generosity, she received the finest of medical care and spent the remaining weeks of her pregnancy at the hospital.

  I took the morning shift at her bedside. She was restless and irritable, but I could usually distract her with a story, something I’d read, or remembered, or lived. Vonn told as many stories as I did, but most of hers were memories—not of the mountain, never of the mountain. She talked about happy family times—and referred to Bridget as “my mom” or “Mama.” She’d completely rewritten the story of their difficult past.

  I wish I could do the same with Frankie.

  I’ve only seen him once since he went to prison, and it was nearly twenty years ago. It was just before Easter. He knew about what happened with me and the Devines on the mountain in November, but he didn’t reach out to me until late March when he tried to contact me at the gas station. He couldn’t have known I was staying in the guest room at Nola Devine’s condo, conveniently located near the hospital where Vonn and the baby were being monitored around the clock.

  Eventually Frankie left word with the receptionist at the physical therapy desk, asking that I visit him in prison as soon as possible. He went from nothing—no contact for four months—to insisting that I visit him immediately.

  I bought a new shirt.

  On that long bus ride to the prison gates I thought only of Vonn. All my life I’d wanted Frankie’s full attention and I was about to get it and I just wanted to be at Vonn’s side. I was worried she would need me. It had only been a few short months since I last saw my father but it felt like a lifetime. My heart was thudding when I entered the musty prison visitors’ room. I found Frankie waiting behind the warped glass at the end of a long row of seats. He flinched when I came into view, at his mortality, mine. I’d become a man during those five endless days I was lost. He could see it.

  When I sat down I dropped my crutches. Neither one of us smiled. It
wasn’t the time for insincerity.

  Frankie’d aged in those few months too. His hair was still thick but threaded with silver. His eyes appeared a paler shade of blue. He picked up the handset and gestured for me to do the same.

  I noticed his thickened neck and pectorals, the ridge of trapezoid when he scratched his head. “You’re hitting the weights,” I said, pantomiming a bicep curl.

  “Thanks,” he replied. “Had to see for myself.”

  “In the flesh.” I grinned. “Your hair went grey.”

  “ ’Bout fifteen years ago,” he chortled.

  He’d been dyeing it? I had no idea.

  “Yours will too,” he said.

  I watched him swallow something else he was about to say then, and could not imagine what it might have been. I love you, son? I’m sorry?

  I leapt for the opening. “I’d come every week if you wanted.”

  “Through this?” He knocked on the thick glass between us, then went silent a moment. “What the hell, Wolf?” he said. “What happened?”

  “Between us?” I asked stupidly.

  “On the mountain.” He laughed in a way that should have thrown up a red flag or two.

  “I got lost,” I said.

  “But what all happened? People have so many questions.”

  I had questions too. I wanted to know what the hell happened the night we left Mercury. I wanted to know if Frankie was there, in the shadows, watching his dying self in Warren’s filthy bedroom. I wanted to know if Frankie had seen me kick him. If he was sorry I’d brought him back from the light. If he ever saw visions of my mother as an angel. I wondered if he was sorry he all but abandoned me when we moved to the desert. If he believed in heaven. Instead, I said, “Okay.”

  His eyes rested on my hands. “Your picture was in the paper every day there for a while.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s it like being famous?”

  “What’s going on, Frankie?”

  “Nothing. I just had to see for myself that you’re okay.”

  I was touched, sorry I misjudged him. “I’m good.”

  “My son the hero.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “I kept all the articles. Got ’em up on my wall.”

  “Most of what they wrote isn’t true,” I said.

  “Why not talk about it then?”

  I’d refused interviews. I made no comments whatsoever to the media. It seemed an affront to the universe to speak of our ordeal.

  “I heard all the talk shows want you to go on and tell your story,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would you not go on the talk shows?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Opportunity’s knocking, Wolf!”

  “Why am I here, Frankie?” I asked, knowing the answer. “Why did you want me to come?”

  Frankie leaned in. “I’m in touch with this agent who thinks he can sell your story. More than anything I’m thinking about your reputation.”

  “You’re worried about my reputation?”

  “I’m just saying that you’re leaving people with a lot of questions.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Think about it,” Frankie said, stroking the Glory Always tattoo on his arm.

  “I don’t need to think about it, Frankie.”

  “A tidbit?” he asked. “How about one tidbit to keep him on the line, until you decide?”

  I paused. I don’t know what I was waiting for. “I got nothing, Frankie.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. He looked into my eyes for a long moment before he motioned to the guard that he was done.

  When he rose to leave I noticed that he struggled with balance, his back hadn’t recovered from his car accident, his knees still not healed. He limped when he walked away, and raised his arm—the one with the rainbow Glory Always tattoo—but he didn’t turn to look at me.

  In the months after our rescue Nola and I found ourselves in the hospital parking lot, which had an unobstructed view of the mountain, several times a day. Nola always turned to look at the magnificent batholith. I never did. We didn’t speak to each other about our ordeal. We were too busy dealing with the aftermath, and too preoccupied by concerns for Vonn and the unborn baby. Vonn devoured parenting books while Nola crocheted booties. I paced on my crutches, restless.

  I guessed that Nola, like me, missed aspects of the mountain. Nature’s mirror is sharply reflective and I missed the clarity the mountain had brought me, even the way our plight had defined our purpose. I missed the hypnotic beauty of the wet rock, and the crisp, fragrant air, and Bridget. I missed Bridget.

  I was at the hospital for a physical therapy appointment, three floors down from Vonn, when an orderly came to tell me that she needed me immediately. I’d switched to canes at that point, and I was slow as hell getting around. The phantom pain in my toes made me irritable. There was a long wait at the elevator and a long clumsy walk to Vonn’s room.

  I found her alone, slumped in a wheelchair, unplugged from the monitor.

  “Daniel,” I said, falling to my knees, spreading my hands over the lump under her hospital gown.

  “They’re moving me to the next floor for the surgery.” Vonn was heaving with emotion.

  I was confused. I thought the unplugged monitor meant—

  “Caesarean section.” Vonn took my chin in her hands. “What did you call him?”

  “Daniel,” I said.

  “How did you know it’s a boy? I just found out today.”

  I didn’t know. The name had come to me like a memory when I placed my hands on Vonn’s womb. Daniel.

  “Bridget’s middle name was Danielle,” Vonn said.

  I kissed Vonn then. And she kissed me back. And when we parted, we looked up to find Nola and two nurses leaning against the door in the thrall of our romance.

  On the day you were born, tiny as you were, they let me hold you while your mother slept. I’d looked at your angel face, the face I already loved so deeply, and said, because I couldn’t help it, “He looks like Yago.”

  The resemblance was uncanny—the black hair, the square jaw, the wide eyes.

  Nola, sitting beside me, said, “You have to stop this.”

  “I know.”

  “Can’t we just enjoy today? Our healthy, beautiful boy.”

  We paused to smile at your sleeping face. “Have you ever thought about moving to Michigan, Nola?”

  “Michigan? Who moves from California to Michigan?”

  “There’s an opportunity. A great opportunity that Harley presented to me. To Vonn and me.”

  “To move to Michigan?”

  “Byrd’s grandparents had this restaurant. It’s been shuttered for years, but the area’s coming back up. We could all go up there—Byrd, you, Vonn, Danny, me. Open a family business.”

  “Michigan?” Nola said. “We’d all move to Michigan?”

  “Might be good for Byrd’s recovery. Might be good for all of us.

  “What’s this really about, Wolf?”

  I glanced down to make sure Vonn was still asleep. “It’s about an opportunity.”

  “In Michigan.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s about the baby’s father, isn’t it?” Nola said.

  “Yes.”

  “Just ask her, Wolf.”

  “She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t want to remember.”

  “It’s crazy to think it’s your cousin. It’s not your cousin.”

  “Okay, what if it’s not Yago. What if it’s someone like Yago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know these guys from Tin Town, Nola.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that he lived in Tin Town.”

  “What if the guy finds out about Danny? What if he finds out about him and kidnaps him?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “What if he takes him out of the country?”

  “
Where would he take him?”

  “I don’t know. Europe. Mexico. South America.”

  Nola shook her head. “The father wasn’t European though,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. Did I dream that?”

  “Did you?”

  “When Bridget told me she overheard Vonn on the phone I didn’t pay all that much attention, but I’m thinking now—it wasn’t European, she said. Or Mexican. He’s something else.”

  “Something else?”

  “He’s something else. What did she say?”

  My mind raced with possibilities.

  Nola snapped her fingers. “French-Canadian!”

  I froze.

  “That was it! French-Canadian!” Nola said. “You see. Not your cousin.”

  “French-Canadian?”

  “French-Canadian.” She grinned. “Don’t you feel better?”

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “He was French-Canadian. He’d been wearing a rainbow T-shirt or something like that. Those are the two things I remember. All that worrying for nothing.”

  “A rainbow?” I said.

  “Actually, there was also something about him being religious. That doesn’t sound right but I think there was also something he said or did. Glory be. Glory something …,” Nola said.

  Glory Always.

  Nola pulled some wool loose from her skein. “Michigan, huh?”

  I felt the flutter of your tiny heart against mine. “Hold on tight, Daniel Truly,” I said. “There will be sway.”

  I can imagine how you’re feeling, and I’m sorry that I’m the cause of it, or the messenger of it, or whatever label, however foul, you’d like to apply right now. I felt the same confusion when I first put it all together on the day you were born.

  You understand now why it’s been so hard to tell you, and why I’ve kept this story from you, and your mother, all these years. It’s a father’s instinct to protect his child, and you are—every cell of you—my son. Besides, Frankie taught me that mysterious people survive better in harsh climates.

  We left the desert when you were three months old, you with Nola and Byrd in the back seat of the Dodge van Harley loaned us for the trip. Vonn sat beside me, and took over at the wheel when I got tired. When I wasn’t driving I sat beside you in your car seat. I watched you for hours—never got bored.