“But we are prepared for any eventuality,” Cappy said, folding his arms in front of his chest and glancing behind him at the bridge. “We’ve got a cold-regions engineer on call.”
What? An engineer? It must mean they really thought the bridge was at risk. Mona threw down her fork and clicked the TV off. She stood up and started pacing back and forth in the kitchen. That bridge couldn’t go down. It was the heart of her life in Wild Mountain.
The phone rang. Still pacing, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Do you have the TV on?” A deep, familiar voice. She stopped pacing, frozen, paralyzed. Oh, my God, why hadn’t she paid for caller ID? Why was she such a cheapskate? Should she just hang up now?
Cappy on TV had created enough mixed feelings—but now there was a screeching flutter in her chest. She dropped into her chair. “Yeah. I saw it.”
“Sounds like your bridge is going down.”
“That bridge has been through a lot of storms.”
“But what will you do if it falls?” he persisted. “Won’t that affect your business? All those people who come across from the north, and from West Paris?”
She held the phone away from her and looked at it. How dare he? He hadn’t called for almost two years, and now he presumed to worm his way back in by trying to scare her again. She started to set down the receiver, then brought it back to her ear. “They’re working on it.” Neutral tone. She wouldn’t be intimidated.
“I can come and help,” he said in that deep, seductive voice that had always reached into her gut with delight, then wrenched out like a saw-toothed saber.
“You?”
“Sure. You know me. I wouldn’t want your store to go bust.” The flutter in her chest had migrated to her gut, and now constituted a mass of confusion. Help? Yes, they could use help—and he sounded so authoritative.
But Johnny O.? He would come in and take over, then do something nasty. She kicked the sofa. She’d gotten over this bastard years ago. She’d gotten stronger, and had thought she was immune to all of these feelings.
Change the subject. “So, how’s Michelle?” she asked.
“Oh, we’re divorced.”
So, that was it. Michelle, the woman she’d hated because she’d taken him away—and then thanked because she’d kept him away—was gone. Again.
Mona didn’t need this. Didn’t need these feelings, these old feelings that could throw her into a confusion so profound that she had barely been able to move through a day without being overwhelmed by them, feelings that enveloped her like a heavy fog she’d had to push though just to take one step at a time.
No. She stopped pacing, and looked up. Boris was snuggling into his dog bed, and the house was quiet. Her body was calm. There was no heavy fog. Those feelings were gone. Mona filled her chest with air, and held her head up tall. She had sloughed off that mess a while ago. He had no more power over her. She had the power now, and she could say something sarcastic and cutting, something really nasty that would strike him dumb, and out of her life forever.
But that would be like throwing a lighted match on an oil-soaked woodpile. Stay neutral, Mona. “Thanks for the offer, Johnny, but Cappy and his crew are taking care of it.”
“Yeah, I saw that clown on the news.” He laughed.
Mona kicked the sofa again. Fire in the belly. Wasn’t there a poem about that? Again, she stuffed it, quenched the fire, the rage, with the barest sliver of rational thought she could muster to end the conversation. “Gotta go. Bye, Johnny.”
When she hung up, she went to the door and put on her boots and parka. Boris was already there. In the light of the half moon, she made her way down the path to the store and across the road to the riverbank, Boris jogging along beside her. Mona stood on the edge of the bank and looked at the bridge, the icy chunks so high they almost touched its roadbed.
Was it only yesterday that Frank MacFarland, all brown and gray in the storm like a lost explorer, had stood on one of those chunks and watched her creep out to meet him? What a strange guy he was. Kind of goofy, but serious, too. He’d been in the store a lot, and he was always cheerful and funny, always talking about new adventures. You never knew how much to believe. You figured most of it was just talk. But yesterday, he’d gotten himself almost drowned or frozen, so he’d probably really done some of those crazy things he talked about. Frank was not just adventurous—he was reckless. But there was at least one thing in his favor: he was nothing like Johnny O. Duval.
Johnny O., coming to town? No, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
She picked up a twig and threw it into the water, watching as it rushed downstream, bobbing and jumping around the ice, vanishing into the night river.
5
FRANK OPENED HIS EYES AND SAW AN ANGEL. A vision, a heavenly being, with clouds of golden hair spreading out around her head, and waves of light emanating from her body. He’d died and gone to heaven.
But the angel was in his cabin, in his bedroom, sitting in the captain’s chair beside the window, her head bowed, reading a book. He turned over, or tried to turn, to see her better, but a pain shot up his leg from the ankle, his back wrenched into a spasm, and his head throbbed with a hundred booming beats. Maybe this wasn’t a beatific angel, but an avenging one, some representative of purgatory come to make sure he suffered for his sins. Frank sighed, and a pain like a knife seared his chest. It was only what he deserved.
Gingerly, tentatively, he reached over to the bedside table for his glasses. He brought his arm back, glasses in hand, squinting as the sunlight hit his face.
The angel looked up and pushed back her halo of hair. She winked. Had he seen that correctly? Did angels wink?
“Hi, Frank.” She winked again, this time with a grin.
He managed to fit his glasses over his nose, hook them behind his ears, and keep his head up enough to see this vision sitting in his chair. Her hair was actually a light red, and she had freckles. The halo of radiating light was the sun coming through the window behind her. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Heather,” she said. “Heather Brae, from the store yesterday.” “Oh.” He sank back onto his pillow. And now he remembered. The hospital, the ride home with the fire chief. Without opening his mouth too much, since any movement of his head brought that screeching pounding again, he mumbled, “I thought you were an angel.”
“You want a bagel?”
He shook his finger back and forth. “You’re only supposed to have soup and Jell-O and stuff like that.” She had a high-pitched voice, not very angelic.
He stared up at the ceiling, then shifted his eyes back to look at her. “What,” he said, pronouncing each word very slowly, “are you do—”
“Mona sent me to check up on you,” Heather said, gathering a bright yellow shawl around her shoulders. “And I brought some parsnip soup. Do you want some?”
He shook his finger again. Parsnip soup. It sounded like something his grandmother would have concocted, something she would have forced you to take as a “constitutional.”
Mona. Mona had sent the angel. There had been the storm, the ice, the moose, and then Mona. And then the hospital. Had they given him something for pain? He shifted his gaze over to the night-stand. A bottle of Percocet.
“Do you need a pain pill?” Heather saw him looking.
“Yes.” He held up two fingers.
“Two?” She studied the label, then unscrewed the bottle cap, took out two white pills, and handed them to him along with the glass of water. He managed to sit up enough to handle the pills and the water himself.
Heather sat down again on the chair, and gave him a most beatific smile. “A reporter called.”
“A reporter?” His chest clenched in pain again. Had somebody found out about the merger? He’d been working on it for months, first the restructuring of Questwander, then the merger with Feral Journeys, two startup adventure businesses. But the whole thing was supposed to be top secret. He glanced around the room. This room had
always been dark, except on a sunny morning like today, with the east light streaming in the window. Patsy used to complain that the cabin, and the bedroom in particular, was gloomy, but he’d always loved the summer-camp feeling of it. He closed his eyes and drifted into sleep.
When Frank opened his eyes, morning sunlight paled the weathered pine walls and sharpened his senses, and the smell of the wood fire zinged the air with something fine and crisp, like the sound of a string quartet that wakes you into consciousness. He was beginning to feel better.
But what about this reporter? Where were his merger files? In the far corner, behind Heather, his birch desk looked undisturbed. On top of the desk, in the same place he’d left it, lay his briefcase with the Questwander folder in it. Six empty beer bottles were lined up beside it—yesterday’s evidence. Heather sat beside him, serene, reading her book.
He cleared his throat. “Now, what’s this about a reporter?”
She looked up. “They want a story about the accident.”
“Accident?”
“You know, being out on the ice, the FAST Squad, the firetrucks, the dramatic rescue.”
“Oh, God.” The pain in his head came back like the thrust of a knife.
The phone beside the bed rang.
“Want me to get it?” Without waiting for a reply, Heather picked up the phone. “Frank MacFarland’s residence,” she said in her almost-squeaky voice. “Yeah.” She turned and faced him, her hair swinging around in the sunlight. “It’s for you, Frank.” As if it might have been for someone else.
“I don’t want to talk to any reporters.” He slid farther down in the bed, but the sheets were so twisted that he pushed up against a fold, and didn’t get very far.
“I don’t think it’s a reporter.” She thrust the phone toward him.
Reluctantly, Frank took the phone. “Dad.” Erica’s deep voice cracked, as it always did when she was upset, and the sound of it brought a cascade of feelings and a flutter in his heart. “My God, Dad, what have you done?”
“Erica,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call you.” How many times had he said that in the past few years?
“They called me from the hospital. My God, Dad, I can’t believe you would go and get into another accident. You just recovered from that broken arm you got skiing in Utah.”
“Take it easy, baby,” he said. “I only banged up my ankle, and I’m a little sore.”
“They told me you broke two ribs! Dad, you’re fifty years old. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? You can’t go walking out on a half-frozen river in the middle of a storm.” Since she’d been in Boston earning her living as a social worker, Erica seemed to have acquired Patsy’s parental attitude toward him.
Frank felt his ribs and winced. Now he remembered what they’d said at the ER. Two cracked ribs and a very bruised ankle. They’d thought the goose egg on his head was from falling on the ice, too, and he hadn’t disabused them of that notion. But he couldn’t avoid the lecture on alcohol abuse. Okay, he did drink too much. Mea culpa, he thought, mentally beating his chest, the thought of which made his chest hurt more.
There was some kind of tapping at the window, and another golden-haired head, glowing in the sunlight, peered into the room. A boy. He was gesturing and mouthing something to Heather.
“Well, Erica, thanks for calling. Someone’s at the door. I’ll call you later.” He put the phone back on the receiver.
“That’s just Eli,” Heather said.
Eli was shouting something through the window, and Heather stepped closer. “Okay,” she shouted back, “come in, but leave your snowshoes outside.”
Frank lay back on the pillow, remembering the solitary retreat he’d been envisioning for this weekend. Heather was picking up the clothes that were strewn around the room, and loaded one arm with beer bottles from the desk. She paused, giving him an ambiguous look. “I know,” he said, “I drank too much.”
“I didn’t say that.” Her face softened into a compassionate smile, and now she did look like an angel of mercy, tall and stately in her yellow shawl and long, red skirt covered in shiny disks that shimmered and tinkled. She was cradling the beer bottles as though embracing his sin with forgiveness.
He felt moved to confess. “Six bottles of Otter Creek. I don’t know why I did it. I never drink more than two beers. Maybe it was the headache. And then getting stuck out on the ice like that. God Almighty, this is not Frank MacFarland! I’ve skied glaciers in Oregon, and flown small planes into the Bob Marshall wilderness to rescue people myself. I’m not a person who needs to be rescued.”
“Yes. Well.” She raised one eyebrow and carried the bottles out the door into the main room. He seemed to be developing a credibility problem here. At the hospital, the doctor had shaken her head, in disgust or resignation, after asking how much he had consumed, and the nurse had given him a scolding and a brochure for a treatment program.
When Heather came back into the bedroom, her red skirt sparkling, Frank cleared his throat. “Did Mona say anything about me?”
Heather started. “Say anything about you?”
“I mean, anything negative. Or positive, for that matter? I mean, that was a pretty strange experience, and I wouldn’t want her to think me a complete fool.”
Heather’s face flickered into a half-smile. “She didn’t say anything to me.” Eli was behind her. “Do you mind if Eli comes in?”
“Not at all. Hello, Eli,” Frank said, rallying his normally hearty tone of voice. He was definitely feeling better now. Maybe he would eat something. But not parsnip soup. He’d get a hamburger.
“Hi, Mr. MacFarland.” Eli, a tall slim teenager, stood in the doorway. He was wearing sleek black pants and a black parka with gray stripes down the sides, and his golden-edged afro was matted, flattened on one side and sticking up on the other. “I heard you went out on the river.” His eyes were bright, and he looked eager to hear the story.
“An aborted rescue mission,” said Frank. “A moose calf.”
“Cool.”
“But don’t follow my example. Or you’ll end up in bed with broken bones and all the women in your life giving you lectures.”
Eli laughed and puffed out his chest, staking his claim with the men of the tribe. “Yeah,” he said, glancing toward his mother in the main room. His voice had become an octave lower.
He was making light of it, but Frank felt a wrenching in his stomach that had nothing to do with the physical pain. Maybe it was about his image of himself. Frank MacFarland was someone who didn’t shrink from danger, who forged ahead when forging ahead was called for, whose heart went out to anyone in distress, and who fought for the underdog. His foray onto the ice had been a noble attempt to save a moose calf, and he’d probably do it again. But that look Mona had given him (was it puzzlement or disgust?) made it clear she didn’t see it that way.
When he was with Patsy, he’d had a vision for how he would live: forging ahead, fashioning his octopus life with fingers in every pie, and bringing them together into unique enterprises. After Harvard Business School and then Merrill Lynch, he’d gone off on his own, and for the past five years, he’d been consulting for the adventure travel business. Patsy had never been able to see his vision, his creativity. Of course, he did get manic, at times, too involved in his projects and neglectful of those around him. The day he’d seen this, he’d felt humbled and enlightened. When you can break through the crust of self-definition you’ve built up and see what others see, you learn something valuable. He’d learned that he could use Patsy’s criticisms to grow and change. He just hadn’t changed enough for her.
Heather tidied the bed, pulling and smoothing out the brown duvet. “Frank, can I get you some soup before we go?”
“No, thanks, I’ll go out and get a hamburger.”
Heather hesitated, looking puzzled. “I don’t think you’re supposed to drive on Percoset. Especially not twenty miles to West Paris for a hamburger. We’ll go up to Mona’s and get you s
ome frozen burgers.” She winced.
Eli rolled his eyes and smiled at Frank. “We don’t eat meat.”
Frank sat up and began to swing his feet around to the floor. Nothing hurt now, but he moved cautiously. “I’ll come with you.”
“Oh, but—” Heather clenched and unclenched her hands, took a step, and then looked out the window.
“I want to thank Mona for saving my life.” And to show her that he was not some invalid. And maybe, too, that there was something he could do to help her out.
Heather’s face softened. “Well, okay. We’ll wait in the main room while you get dressed. Let me know if you need any help.” They departed through the door.
“No help,” Frank said to the door. He stood up and staggered as a wave of dizziness hit him, steadied himself, and limped to the wall where his flannel shirt was hanging on a hook. He slipped out of his pajamas, letting them lie on the rag rug, and slowly put on his shirt. No problem. He took his jeans and undershorts down from the other hook. This was a little more difficult, but he managed without bending too much. He went to his duffel bag, still packed on top of the bureau, and took out a pair of wool socks. When he leaned down to put them on, he gasped. The ribs were excruciating. He lay down on the bed and brought his feet up, just barely managing to get the socks on over the bandage-wrapped ankle without moving his chest too much.
When Frank came into the main room, Eli was poking at the fire in the wood stove with the tongs, as Heather, standing at the kitchen alcove, was opening the door of the little blue refrigerator and putting something into it. Probably the parsnip soup. There wasn’t much else in there except bagels and cream cheese. Well, if he was starving, he could eat the soup.
Frank limped to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch.
Below him, the Abanoosic Valley shimmered, the browns and greens of the trees softening the stark white of the snow; and beyond the valley, as clear as he’d ever seen it, with its pristine snowcap, stood Wild Mountain. The air was warm, and the sky a delirious blue. Snowshoe tracks crisscrossed the yard, and in the driveway, spots of bare earth exposed deep ruts that would soon become mud.
Wild Mountain Page 3
