Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  “That’s what I mean,” Charlie said. “After all that and everything else you’ve been through, I think it’s pretty amazing how put-together you are.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that.

  Dalton took a lighter from his pocket and flicked it several times, but no flame came out.

  Charlie rested his leg on the log, elevating it as he slid onto the ground. “And at least at a time like this, you have God to turn to. He can be your comfort.”

  She stared at the mess of pine needles under her feet. She’d been wondering when Charlie was going to get around to this subject. “I don’t believe in God.”

  Charlie’s mouth dropped open. “You don’t mean that.”

  “No, I do. I’ve been an atheist for a few years now.”

  “But you used to go to church with me and Dalton in high school. That wasn’t so long ago. How could you lose your faith in only a few years?”

  Church had always been her mom’s thing. When she took off right after Reagan’s high school graduation, Dad was less enthusiastic about going every Sunday. He eventually opted to stay home full time, and Reagan moved to Austin and discovered a new non-church world she’d never known existed.

  “I just stopped going,” she said.

  “How can you believe in nothing?”

  “Charlie, give it a rest,” Dalton said.

  “No, this is important,” Charlie said, his face flushed. “How can you believe all of this came from nothing and is going nowhere? What about the Bible?”

  Reagan’s temper started to flare orange. “The Bible is a book, Charlie. Just because it’s written down doesn’t make it true. That’s like saying Harry Potter proves the existence of wizards. Plus how do you know you picked the right religion? How do you know the Hindus are wrong?”

  Charlie frowned. “Because I have my faith. I don’t need to learn about other religions because I’ve found the true path.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying. If your faith isn’t strong enough to stand up to questioning, is it actually strong at all?”

  “She’s got you there, bro,” Dalton said.

  Charlie seemed stumped for a second and his face fell, which made Reagan feel guilty for attacking him. After the stress of the day, it had all slipped out, and she now regretted arguing. “Look, Charlie, forget it. I think it’s great you’ve got faith. It’s just not where I’m at right now.”

  “I’ll pray for you,” Charlie said.

  “I appreciate that,” she said, and she meant it.

  He seemed satisfied, so Reagan stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  She walked away from camp toward a cluster of trees, feeling the day’s miles in her legs, hips, feet, and back. She was glad the backpacking loop was half over because the trail had worn on her muscles more than she’d expected.

  She entered the trees and looked back toward the camp. Suitably hidden. On the ground below her was a bed of disintegrated pine cone shards like torn bits of amber paper. Leaning against a tree, she took a moment to appreciate all that had happened that day, and hues of anxiety started to bubble up inside her. Yellow, orange, and red. She focused on slow breathing and letting the difficulties in her life pass out of her hands and into the universe, as Dr. Ahern had taught.

  Some tears came, and she let them gather for a minute. Then she wiped her eyes and walked back to camp.

  As she rounded the tents and her cousins came into view, she saw Dalton had taken her backpack from her tent and was rifling through it. The sheer unexpectedness of it made her take a step back. “What are you doing?”

  He stood up. “Oh, uh, hey cuz. Nothing. I wasn’t… I was looking for a bandage. Got a blister on my heel.”

  He’d removed a few things from the pack and set them on the ground, the first aid kit among them. Big white box with an unmistakable red plus sign on the top.

  She grabbed the box and held it out to him. “They’re right here.”

  He snatched it from her, opened it, and took a Band-Aid. He held it up. “Right. I should have known. Thanks for pointing that out.”

  He smiled, but yet again, there was something in his eyes that felt wrong. Dalton’s look always betrayed his real intentions.

  He wasn’t looking for a bandage. He was looking for something else, and he’d lied about it.

  ***

  8:10 pm

  After dinner and a brilliant purple and orange sunset, they all retired to their tents. Reagan had been mostly quiet, rattled from Dalton’s intrusion into her pack. Not so much that he’d done it, but the guilty look on his face when she caught him and the way he glared at her while lying about his purpose. She didn’t like the fact that he was a few feet away from her, separated only by the thin walls of their respective tents.

  The more she thought about it, the more nervous she got. Anxiety was not something she could afford right now. The park ranger hadn’t stopped by, or at least she hadn’t yet.

  In the tent, she opened her sleeping bag, unlaced the boots and rubbed her feet. She slipped her headlamp on and took the thick fantasy paperback Spoon had given her from the pack and examined it for water damage. She’d wrapped it in his t-shirt, which no longer smelled like him, only like rain. The book’s pages were wavy and crinkled, but still readable. She opened to the dog-eared page and tried to read a few lines, but the words blurred on the page. Too much was swirling around in her brain: the mystery key from the urn, her devious cousin, Spoon.

  Tomorrow was the day she would open the urn and release her father’s remains into Lake Nanita and he would be gone forever. Would she feel sad? Relieved? Would it feel like some kind of resolution, or would it twist the knife? Or maybe it would only send her spiraling into a depressive episode of doubt and shame and sinister self-criticism.

  Without her meds to keep her stable, the last thought progressed from paranoia and into the territory of actual possibility. She would be back in Denver with Spoon and her medication in less than two days, and she could hold out until then. She could do this. She had to maintain until she returned to Spoon, and she would tell him about the key and Dalton’s suspicious behavior and they could figure out what to do next.

  As she pondered the key, the other thing that had come from the urn appeared in her mind: the letter.

  She gasped. It had been in her pants cargo pocket all day during the rain.

  She took the headlamp and hung it from the loop on the tent ceiling, then reached over to the cargo pants, which lay flat, drying next to her sleeping bag. She dug into the pocket and pulled out the piece of paper, which was soaked through.

  Ruined.

  She hesitated before opening it, the same fear about reading his last words reappearing. Didn’t matter. She had to do it. But when she unfolded the paper, the ink inside had smeared all over the page. She read what she could still make out:

  Dearest Reagan,

  I wish I had time to write everything I want to say, but…

  I had hoped that you…

  I made some mistakes. I was selfish. And I’m sorry…

  what the key in…

  farmer’s market. You’ll understand when you get there. Your grandfather…

  I hate to be so vague, but I…

  to say I’m sorry, other than to tell you that I’m proud of you and I love you. I know that’s not good enough.

  Dad

  The paper was so wet it almost tore in her hands. She read the letter several times, desperately trying to make sense of the blurred sections, but the rain had turned half of her father’s looping cursive into unintelligible blurbs.

  She read it again, this time focusing on the parts she could read. His tone was strange… I made some mistakes. I was selfish. And I’m sorry. What was he sorry about? What mistakes was he talking about?

  Dalton had ranted yesterday that her dad was a compulsive gambler, but that didn’t seem possible. He was a good man who always put the needs of others before his own. But then what was he talking about?
Was Dad in some kind of financial trouble? That would seem to make sense since the will had indicated there was no inheritance, which had so surprised and enraged Anne.

  Dad had mentioned the key, so that, at least, gave Reagan a small measure of comfort. He meant for her to find it. Dad put it there, or someone put it there for him, although how it had gotten in there was still a mystery. But what should she do with it? You’ll understand when you get there. She would understand what when she got where?

  The most confusing piece of information was the mention of her grandfather. He lived at an Assisted Living home in Boulder, and Reagan hadn’t seen him for at least a year, maybe longer. None of these fragmented clues fit together.

  The only part that made sense was the last bit, about how he was proud and loved her. She touched his words on the letter, absorbing a little of the ink into the creases of her fingertips. The last time she would ever hear that from him. The sorrow burrowed into her with such ferocity that she closed the letter and longed for her Seroquel. She wished she could take three of them and sleep away the pain.

  Thursday

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  2:25 am

  Reagan woke in total darkness, the swelling of her bladder ending a restless sleep. She fumbled for her headlamp. After slipping the elastic band over her head, she pressed the button on the side to activate the LEDs. Hundreds of tiny dust particles danced in the path of the brilliant beam of light. The crinkled rainfly covering the tent reflected some light through the black mesh of the inner tent.

  She reached for the tent zipper and opened it enough to peel back the rainfly, so she could flip it back over the top of the tent. Blast of cold breeze hit her. Leaving the security of her makeshift portable home in the middle of the night to pee always unnerved her because of the possibility she might lean out of the tent and catch the eyes of some creature in her headlamp. Those surprises were not fun. Once she’d found herself face to face with a startled deer, and the way the beams of light made the animal’s eyes glow an eerie green kept her up for hours that night.

  She pivoted her head left and right, casting the headlamp’s light on the ground close to her tent, and no surprise animals were waiting for her. Her hands found hiking boots under the tent vestibule.

  She walked outside and stretched, looking up at the stars. Millions of them flooded the sky, tiny pinholes through a vast sheet of black construction paper. You couldn’t get this view anywhere in the city.

  She trudged a hundred feet away from the campsite, found a tree to brace herself against, and squatted.

  From back at the campsite came a snuffling sound. She pointed her head toward it to focus the beam of the headlamp and saw a figure sitting outside the tent.

  She pulled her long underwear up and carefully approached. Slouching on a log next to her cousins’ tent, Charlie was rubbing his hands up and down his shoulders.

  And crying.

  She crept toward him. “Charlie? Are you okay?” She kept her voice low, since he was sitting only a few feet from where Dalton was sleeping.

  Charlie didn’t look at her, only shook his head.

  She clicked off her headlamp, sat next to him on the log, and put an arm around him. He leaned into her and wiped a hand under his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Whatever it is, it’s okay, Charlie. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “No, it’s not okay,” he said, loud enough that Reagan glanced at Dalton’s tent to make sure he didn’t stir.

  “You can tell me, if you want.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s the thing: I can’t tell you. If he finds out I said anything to you, I don’t know what he would do. I don’t think I can stop him.”

  A chill ran up Reagan’s back. “You can’t stop who?” But she already knew the answer.

  “He tricked me, and now we’re here and I can’t do anything about it. I should have done something but now it’s too late. I’m so sorry, Reagan.”

  She sneaked another look at Dalton’s tent. No movement, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t awake. She decided to risk it. “This is about him going through my backpack, isn’t it? What was he doing that for?”

  Charlie lifted his face toward her, desperation coloring his red and misty eyes. His mouth hung open, air hissing out. “I can’t… I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just tired. I’m going to go back to sleep.”

  He stood up, wiped his eyes again, and skulked back to his tent.

  As she listened to him zip the tent and wrestle with his sleeping bag, she sat on the log and shivered in the stark night air, feeling more alone and unsure than she ever had in her life.

  ***

  6:05 am

  Reagan hardly slept after the cryptic conversation with Charlie. When she decided to stop trying, the sun had still not risen, but enough light from the pre-dawn lit up the inside of her tent. Her mouth felt dry so she licked her lips to produce a few seconds of relief. Thoughts snapped like firecrackers and she could barely keep up with them.

  Dalton knew something. Charlie had essentially confirmed it. She was in danger, and the whole world felt like a puzzle.

  The ranger hadn’t come by the previous night, or if she had, she hadn’t disturbed them. Reagan wished the woman had made herself known. A visit from an authority figure would have been a reassurance. Instead, Reagan had curled on her side, hoping the things she feared were only in her head as she had done so many nights after getting out of the hospital.

  When Reagan checked out of the hospital in Denver two years ago, she learned that she’d failed all of her classes the previous fall, and she had missed enough of the spring semester that she was going to fail those too. A college dropout with no job, going to live at Dad and Anne’s house.

  Stable: the word they’d used to release her back into the world. It meant that she no longer had outbursts during Group. She no longer skipped therapy sessions to stay in bed. She no longer refused to take the medications that turned her stomach and made her eyes so blurry she could barely read more than a paragraph or two at a time without developing a splitting headache. She’d learned to play the game of the model patient.

  At Dad’s house in Denver, surrounded by a stepmother who seemed inconvenienced by her presence and a father who had little or no idea what to do with her, she stayed in her room for days on end. She listened to Austin college radio stations from their websites, read trashy celebrity tabloids because they required no concentration, and streamed endless hours of online video.

  But she was getting better. At least that’s what all the fair-weather people drifting in and out of her life told her. Friends commanded her to seize the day. They told her to be strong, to look forward, and to take control of her life. But she felt weak-willed and under the thumb of the pharmaceutical companies. How could she take charge of her life when she needed pills to wake up, to sleep, to silence the desire to slit her wrists?

  Wait it out, Dr. Ahern had said. Just keep living.

  As the weeks dragged by, particular incidents from high school resurfaced, how she displayed a tendency for mania and depression even then. She hadn’t wanted to see it, but the episodes had been there. They were smaller, lasting only a few days in each direction, and never to the level she reached in Austin. Maybe that was why her mom left. Perhaps she had seen it coming and couldn’t take it. Reagan suspected manic depression was the reason her mom’s sister had ended her life when she was in her early twenties.

  Each morning, Reagan stared at the prescription bottles lining the bathroom counter and went to war with herself. The rational mind argued she needed them to live. But they also made her a shell of what she could be. Flat, dull, unambitious. Was the mania so bad? Maybe she could manage it now, after having seen the ugliest side of it. After all, was she going to be a slave to pills for her entire life?

  The lithium troubled her most of all. She had difficulty going out in public because she never knew when the violent tornad
o of nausea would strike. Once, halfway during a movie, she sprinted to the bathroom to retch partially-digested popcorn. She had to leave a friend’s birthday party when the room spun so fiercely she couldn’t do anything but cry and brace herself against the kitchen wall.

  Staring at those pills one morning, she decided to stop taking them. She would practice yoga and deep meditation and free herself of this addiction. She would begin again.

  Forty-eight hours later, at the beginning of a manic phase, she tried to persuade Anne to move out. When Anne refused, Reagan took it as a sign that she should move out instead. As she packed her clothes, Reagan lectured Anne about how she was too old to understand the younger generation. Confusion and disgust contorted Anne’s face.

  Dad found her the next day in Boulder, smoking pot under a bridge with some kids she’d met earlier in the day. She didn’t even like smoking pot. They had a fierce argument about the nature of the illness, and he asked her not to talk so fast, but she kept telling him he couldn’t understand what she knew now.

  But she agreed to come home because, through the fog, she could see his kindness and the brilliance of his aura.

  That’s when he talked her into going on a backpacking trip. And as far as Reagan knew, that trip saved her life. Away from Anne, away from the city where she’d experienced sickness, away from responsibilities and pressure and tension. Reagan and Dad, alone in the wilderness, hiking and talking and not talking and doing all the things they’d loved to do when she was little.

  He made sure that she took her meds at the right times, washing them down with water from Nalgene bottles and celebrating with s’mores and granola. He was her savior, and being a slave to medication was a worthwhile trade-off to have a connection with him.

  Two years later, her savior had fled from this world and left her alone. In the same tent in the same national park, she had a key and a mysterious note. The last words he’d ever write to her. The empty casket.