Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  “Well, sir. We found your boy way up there on the mountain, on a rental bike. So I’m just wondering, sir, where you’re at.”

  “Caitlin,” Angela said suddenly, and Grant’s heart leapt and he said, “Yes. Let me speak to my daughter. Let me speak to Caitlin.”

  “Your daughter . . . ?” said the other man, then was silent. In the silence was the sound of his breathing. The sound of him making an adjustment to his sheriff’s belt. The sound of a woman’s voice paging unintelligibly down the empty hospital corridor.

  When he spoke again he sounded like some other man altogether.

  “Mr. Courtland,” he said, and Grant stepped toward the window as though he would walk through it. He’d taken the representations of the mountains on the resort maps, with their colorful tracery of runs and trails and lifts, as the mountains themselves—less mountains than playgrounds fashioned into the shapes of mountains by men and money. Now he saw the things themselves, so green and massive, humped one upon the other like a heaving sea. Angela stopped him physically, her thumbs in his biceps. She raised on her toes that she might hear every word. “Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “Your son came in alone.”

  Angela shook her head.

  “No,” she said, and turned away and went to the suitcases and began to dress.

  When they were young, when they were naked and young in that apartment of hers above the bakery where the smell of her, and the smell of the bread, had been a glory to him, Grant had tracked her heartbeat by the little cross she wore—by the slightest, most delicate movements of the cross down in that tender pit of throat. Touched it with his finger and asked without thinking, Wasn’t it ironic, though?

  Wasn’t what?

  That God took your twin sister, whose name was Faith?

  She turned away. She would not speak to him. Her body like stone. I’m sorry, he said. Please, Angela . . . please. He didn’t yet know of the other heart, the tiniest heart, beating with hers.

  Now in the little motel room, his wife’s phone to his ear, he begged: Please God, please God, and the sheriff was asking him again where he was at, telling him to stay put. The boy was safe, he was sleeping. He was coming to get them, the sheriff—no more than fifteen minutes. He would take them up there himself, up the mountain. He would take them wherever they needed to go. But they wouldn’t be here when the sheriff arrived, Grant knew. They would be on the mountain, on their way up. The boy was safe. The boy was sleeping. Grant would be at the wheel and Angela would be at the maps, the way it was in the life before, the way it would be in the life to come.

  The Life to Come

  Part I

  1

  He was up at first light. Earliest, frailest light of another day. Sitting on the edge of the bed hands to knees in bleak stillness, staring out the window as his life came back to him piece by piece. Finally, as always, there was only one piece, the missing piece, his little girl.

  He crossed the narrow hall and looked into the other bedroom to see if his son had come home, but the bed sat neat and empty as before. The wood floor barren as before. In the bathroom the left-behind toothbrush stood bristles up in its enameled tin cup. He passed it under the faucet to wash off the dust, returned it to the cup, then made a bowl of his hands and lowered his face to the icy water.

  On the porch he lit a cigarette and stood smoking. It was just September, the chill of autumn in the gray morning, but the sun would come up over the pines and burn that off. The old black Labrador crept out from her place under the porch, stretched, and sat at the foot of the stairs and waited. The ranch house had once been the only house on the property and was now a kind of guest house, or had become that when Grant moved in. You need a break from these mountains, the sheriff had said, and that old man of mine could use some help. The old man, Emmet, meeting them triple-legged in the drive: cowboy boot, cane, and cast. Toes like a little yellow family all bedded together in the plaster. Come down off a shedroof the fast way but I ain’t looking for no goddam babysitter, he’d said, his first words.

  A full year ago, that meeting.

  Grant backed the truck up to the machine shed and spent some time in there preparing the chainsaw, longer than he needed to, taking his time amid the shed’s oily plentitude of parts and tools and machinery. Breathing that air. Then he loaded the chainsaw and a bale of barbed wire and the wire-stretcher into the back of the truck and when he opened the truck door the Labrador came up and looked at him but he told her No, you stay here.

  He drove the truck bouncing and squeaking to the far corner of the front pasture, near the county road where the big oak grew. A limb had come down in a storm a few days before, snapping the top line of wire, and it hung there still, its withered leaves chattering like the sound of winter. The rest of the tree was yet thick with summer’s leaves and the morning air was green with the smell of grass and alfalfa. The haze had burned off. The sky was intensely blue and empty. No cloud, no hawk, no helicopter. As he stood looking things over, the two mares came to snuffle at his hands, dewing up his palms with their velvet snouts. He pulled on his gloves and primed the saw and jerked the cord and the horses went cantering big-eyed across the pasture, ears pricked back at him.

  He lopped off the smaller branches at a point just beyond the fence, then tumbled the remaining log onto the ground and sectioned it into cordwood lengths. He made a pyramid of the logs in the back of the truck and set to work mending the wire. Now and then a car or truck rolled by on the county road, and he would raise a hand to the ones he knew and only stare at the ones he didn’t, at the strange faces that turned to stare at him, this solitary working man in a pasture, this human face among the trees and the grasses and the mountains and the sky. There was such randomness in the world, the passing faces told him, such strange and meaningless intersections—this man could be him, or this man. He looked for some ordinary man in a certain kind of car, any kind of car or truck that said mountain, that said unmarked roads and mud, deeply rutted paths, and he would follow. It was madness, but it was all madness; if a man should randomly pick his daughter, then why shouldn’t that same man randomly cross his path? Wasn’t this the way of the world? Wasn’t this the way of the god of that world? He’d trail the man out of town, up into the mountains, his heart racing, his heart growing hot, until the truck he followed, the jeep, would turn at last into a driveway, an ordinary mountain house, smoke spilling from the chimney . . . a child’s dropped bicycle under the pines, a big dog bounding out and leaping at the man who looked back, who caught Grant’s eye and nodded and waved and turned to his house as the door opened, and there was a woman in jeans, in a loose white sweater, leaning for a kiss.

  The time he followed one man to the end of a high road that turned out to be no road at all but the man’s driveway and no easy way to turn around, and the man was a ranger and knew him. Angela and Sean were back in Wisconsin by then and Grant was alone in the motel, alone in the resort town at nine thousand feet. A year by the calendar since she’d vanished, one hour by the heart. You need a break from these mountains, said the sheriff.

  Now Grant shook his head like a man coming out of a dream and turned back to his hands, the clip they were fastening to a steel T-post, the pliers twisting and tightening.

  Other times he would pause altogether to stare into the hills beyond the ranch, up into the climbing green mountains. The sunlit creases in the pines where some living thing might travel, bear or moose or hiker or daughter. One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.

  A moment la
ter, when a cigarette had been placed in his lips, a flame made to light its tip, the smoke drawn into his lungs and held there, and held there, and released at last into the sky, Grant would be calm again, and he would get back to work.

  2

  They carried the walkie-talkies and they carried their phones and they remembered a show they’d once watched about a girl locked in an underground bunker texting her mother (remembered their own daughter sitting between them, a thin and budding girl of twelve in summer pajamas, bare knees drawn to her chest, smelling of her bath, riveted), and they played and replayed the one message from Caitlin, the last one, her voice breaking on the single word. The sound of an engine in the background and the sound of wind and then a sound like the phone dropping and then the silence.

  Daddy, she’d said—but they had not heard her. Had not heard the call. They’d been in bed. They’d been fucking.

  In those first days, those early disbelieving days in the mountains, they did not hold each other and they did not weep in bed at night. They spoke of what had been done that day and what must be done the next and who was going to do it—who would sit with Sean at the hospital and who would take sandwiches to the volunteers and who would get more posters printed and who would contact the school back home and who would meet with the sheriff or the FBI men or the reporters again and who would go to the Laundromat, a grotesque feverdream of the domestic, and when they had talked themselves to exhaustion, when sleep was coming at last, Angela would pull them back to pray. She would pray aloud and she wanted Grant to pray aloud too, and he would, in those early days, though it made him nearly sick, the sound of his own voice, the sound of those words in the cheap little room.

  Days into weeks. Grant wheeled Sean out of the hospital and the three of them took two rooms on the ground floor of the motel and those rooms were now home and headquarters—papers and supplies and lists and maps on every surface. In town, when a poster came down, Angela somehow knew, and the poster was restored. Weeks into months. In early November Sean turned sixteen; they remembered two days later and went out for pizza. Angela’s calls began to be returned less promptly and sometimes not at all, and when she called the sheriff she was no longer put right through but had to speak to a deputy first, and often the sheriff was not in, nor was he up in the mountains searching some unsearched quadrant of forest. Such helicopters that sounded overhead—the sound of urgency itself in those throbbing blades, of all-out human and mechanical response, massively adept—beat across the sky toward some other purpose.

  It may not be just a case of a needle in a haystack, the sheriff told Grant. It may not even be the right haystack.

  How do you mean?

  I mean a smart man don’t steal a pony from his neighbor. Pardon the analogy.

  You mean he might not be local. This man.

  I mean a man might drive quite a ways looking for just the right pony.

  They’d come to the Rockies thinking it was a place like any other they might have chosen: chronicled, mapped, finite. A fully known American somewhere. Now Grant understood that, like the desert, like the ocean, the mountains were a vast and pitiless nowhere. Who would bring his family—his children—to such a place?

  He returned to the motel and checked with Sean in front of the TV, and then stepped into the other room and shut the door and went to her where she sat at the desk staring at the laptop.

  Angie. He needs to go home.

  What do you mean?

  He needs better care for his leg. He needs to be back in school. Back with his friends.

  She turned to look up at him. What are you saying?

  I’m saying it’s no good for him, keeping him here.

  Are you sure you’re talking about him?

  Grant didn’t answer.

  We can’t go back now, Grant. You see what’s happening here. You see what’s going on.

  One of us can go back with him. For a little while.

  You mean I can go back. You mean me.

  I can keep things going here. I can keep Sheriff Joe going.

  And who will keep you going?

  He stared at her, and she turned away, and she began to shake.

  Angie. He put his hands on her shoulders. He raised her to her feet and pressed her to his chest. He held her as her legs gave out, then moved her to the bed and eased her down and held her. After a while she stopped shaking and he swept the hair from her eyes and kissed the tears up from her cheeks and he kissed her lips and she kissed him back and then she kissed him truly and something broke in his chest and, kissing her, he put his hand between her legs, and at first she let him, but then suddenly her thighs tightened and—No, stop it!—she shoved at him and fled into the bathroom and slammed the door and he could hear her in there moaning into a towel.

  Dad . . . ?

  He got up and opened the connecting door, banging it into the footrest of the wheelchair. I’m sorry, did I hurt you?

  Is Mom all right?

  Yes.

  What happened?

  Nothing, Sean. We had an argument.

  What about?

  Grant shut the door and went around the wheelchair and sat on the bed. Nothing. Just an argument.

  She woke up that night clutching at him. It’s all right, he said, it’s all right.

  No, she said, her eyes bright in the dark. I was driving a dark road. Just me, and she came out of the trees, into my lights. She was naked and covered in dirt. Like she’d been buried alive. But she got out. Oh God. She got out and she was trying to come home.

  He held his wife until she slept again, then he lay with his eyes on the ceiling thinking about that girl in the bunker, the one who texted her mother. Her abductor thought she was just playing games on his phone. He’d kept several girls down there, eventually burying them all nearby. One girl, he said, he kept for two years; they were like husband and wife, he said. People wanted to know why. Mothers in ruin begged it of him. The man shook his head. He looked to the courtroom ceiling as a man would to God. It won’t help you, he told them. I’m sorry, but it won’t.

  He looked like any other man, this man: glasses, blue eyes, halfway bald. In prison now, this man, way back in there, where none of the fathers could touch him.

  3

  In the hours before dawn, in the storm’s first cool blows, thin curtains fill and lift in the dark. They belly out over the bed, rippling, luffing—and abruptly empty again, and for a moment everything is still. The world paused. There’s a terrific light, the room conjures for a white instant, and almost at once comes the shuddering boom, and before it has entirely died away the door opens and a small figure stands in its frame, back-lit by the hallway nightlight. Fine muss of dark hair, pink-hearted pj’s. Angela lifting the bedding and the child slipping into that sleeve and shaping her little backside to her as a hand within a hand.

  I’m scared.

  It’s all right. It’s just a storm.

  The small shivering shoulders. The quick-beating heart.

  Where’s Daddy?

  I don’t know but we’re all right. We’re safe. Okay?

  Okay.

  A kiss to her silken skull and Angela holding her as she quiets, watching the doorframe for the boy to come too, but he doesn’t, and here’s the rain pattering heavy on the roof, on the firm green leaves outside the window, and she is drifting down, smelling the rain, feeling the small girl in her arms, the deep drumtap of the girl’s heart, and her only prayer in that hour of love is Dear God, may the morning never come.

  But it does, of course it does . . . and all Angela held in her arms was a pillow, and the door was shut, and the room was not her room, and the bed was not her bed.

  Before her, on the bedside table: A plastic bottle of water. A small book of poetry with a blue first-place ribbon for bookmark—I cease, I turn pale. A digital alarm clock preparing to sound. An amber vial of pills. She stared at the pills. At the clock. She listened to the house that was not her house, its total stillness. Get up, sh
e thought. Get up now or else lie here and cease.

  Cease then.

  You can’t, Angela.

  Why not?

  The girl’s heartbeat still played in her arms. In her chest. She remembered the hour, the minute, she was born: precious small head, the known, perfect-formed weight of it. All her fears of motherhood—of unreadiness, of

  unfitness—vanishing at the sight of that plum-colored face mewling in outrage. My child, my life.

  She pushed aside the covers and sat up. Got to her feet. Crossed the creaking floor and opened the heavy drapes on a gray dawn. No movement in the leaves of the elm tree. The street and the sidewalk dry. The most ordinary of days. Of worlds.

  When she came downstairs in her outfit and makeup, the children were at the table. She touched the boy’s head and then the girl’s on her way to the coffee, one, two. They watched her as if she were someone who’d just walked in off the street.

  At the stove in the climbing steam he turned and said, “Well, you look nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you eat some eggs?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “These are my special cheesy eggs with dicey ham.”

  The smell is enough, please spare me the description.

  “No, thanks, really,” she said.

  “All right. How about you two monkeys? Who wants more?”

  Angela sat at the table to drink coffee and chew at a cold triangle of toast.

  He served himself and returned the pan to the stove and sat to her left.

  “Are you excited?” he said.

  After a moment she looked up. “–I’m sorry?”

  “I said are you excited. About today. About teaching.”

  She thought how to answer, thinking for so long that he stopped chewing. He swallowed, then picked up and sipped his coffee.