The Last Safe Place

by Ninie Hammon

  Theo sat in his favorite rocker and cradled his new saxophone tenderly in his lap, his eyes closed, his mind transported to that place jazz musicians go, a country far distant from this Colorado mountainside.

  She closed the back door softly behind her, didn’t want to break some kind of spell, though Smokey said that when his father got into a zone you could switch on a food processor full of quarters next to his ear and he wouldn’t drop a beat.

  She also didn’t want to intrude on the endearing scene. The boy and his dog at the feet of the old black musician, absorbing every sound, every nuance. She wondered if Ty would become a musician someday and shuddered at the thought. The lives of almost every musician she’d ever met were marked by hairline cracks—in response to life or to art, she didn’t know which. And the cracks never healed, just got bigger and deeper until the artists could only hold their fragmented lives together by medicating. Drugs. Booze. She could write the names of those who had survived to see their thirty-fifth birthdays on the back of a gum wrapper—Dentyne at that. Sooner or later, most of the musicians she knew fell into the fissures in their own souls and died in the dark there, alone.

  Except Theo, of course. A faith from his distant childhood had somehow sustained him, kept his head above water while most everyone he loved slipped below the surface and was gone.

  Ty put his finger to his lips. Clearly, he didn’t want her to break the mood either. So she stopped, leaned against the porch railing and tried to go to the place jazz transported those who loved it.

  She didn’t know how long Theo had been playing before she heard a jeep on the trail through the aspen forest. Even though she clearly recognized the rumble of Pedro’s muffler-free engine, the sound of an approaching vehicle instantly dried up all the spit in her mouth. She turned and watched the spot where the trail emerged from the trees until Pedro’s jeep bumped out into the open, dragging a thin plume of dust behind it.

  He waved, almost like he knew she needed reassuring. Surely the man wasn’t really as tuned in to her feelings as her imagination led her to believe.

  He pulled up beside the cabin and killed the engine but didn’t get out of the jeep, and Gabriella realized he was listening to Theo, too. When Theo’s music abruptly stopped a few minutes later, Pedro opened the door and stepped down to the ground.

  “I did not mean to interrupt,” he said.

  Ty leapt to his feet, barreled down the porch steps and skidded to a stop in front of Pedro.

  “I found something in the creek. I’ll show you.” He turned and bounded off across the meadow with P.D. on his heels.

  Theo stood, holding his saxophone, and fixed Pedro with a steely stare. “Don’t ask,” he said. “All I’ve done since I got here is drink water and make wee.”

  “I was at Heartbreak Hotel talking to Steve,” Pedro said, “and we heard this sound. It was you. We could hear you playing all the way down the mountain.”

  “Sound carries that far?”

  “The wind distorted it, gave it an eerie wail that freaked out his grandchildren. They didn’t know what it was.”

  “What’d he tell them?”

  “That Bigfoot plays a mountain goat’s horn when he ees hungry—and he ees not a vegetarian. Steve will not have to worry about the kids sneaking out after lights-out tonight.”

  “A furball honking a goat horn, huh? I s’pect I do sound like that. Don’t have the wind up here to get it right. Think I’ll go lie down.”

  He turned and shuffled across the porch. Gabriella watched him anxiously.

  “It takes longer with some people,” Pedro said. “Getting used to the thin air is harder the older you get.”

  “Did you come all the way up here to listen to Theo play?”

  “No.” But he didn’t say why he did come. “You figured out how to make coffee yet with the jet engine?”

  “As a matter of fact, I made a fresh pot for breakfast. Have a seat and I’ll get you a cup.”

  “Just black, strong enough to trot a squirrel across.”

  When she took his coffee out to him, she found him sitting on the top porch step, not in one of the two rockers. He had hung his hat on the post on the porch railing and she noticed what she hadn’t seen before. There were streaks of gray in his thick black hair. She sat down beside him, on his right side, so her scar would be facing away from him. Ty stood on the ground in front of him with a wiggling tiger salamander in his grubby hands.

  “These things don’t live long in captivity,” he told Pedro knowingly, “or I’d keep it for a pet.”

  “You don’t say.” Gabriella leaned back away from the creature and wrinkled her nose as if it reeked—which it didn’t. “Take it back to the creek and let it go.”

  “I was going to, Mom. I just wanted to show Pedro.” To Pedro, he said, “You ever seen a green snake? There’s one that lives under a rock by the creek.”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “I’ll try to catch it and show you!” Ty turned back to his mother. “They’re harmless, you know. You’d like to see one, wouldn’t you Mom?”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  She made a shooing gesture and the boy turned and bolted for the creek.

  “Did you say ‘sound’s wonderful’ or ‘I just smashed my thumb in a car door,’ because it was hard to tell from my end?”

  “And you’ve never seen a green snake?”

  Pedro shrugged.

  “I like animals that have fur on them and legs—no more than four. I don’t do creepy crawlies.”

  “Neither does my sister.” He pronounced the word “see-ster.” “But that’s because her older brother, who shall remain nameless, put a wet frog down the back of her shirt when she was a kid. Something like that happen to you?”

  “Goodness no! Grant would never do a thing like that. He was perfect.”

  She was astonished to hear the word drop out of her mouth. How ridiculous. Of course, her older brother wasn’t per … Yes, he was. Grant was perfect. At least he was from the viewpoint of a little girl who tried to emulate his every move, every gesture, his lazy smile and that laugh of his that was so infectious everybody laughed with him when they heard it, even if they had no idea what was funny.

  She never allowed herself to think about Grant. Never let the image of his face form in her head. But she did now, maybe because she couldn’t help it, being here, so close to where she last saw him. Or maybe just because it was time.

  Her mind served up snapshot images, like black-and-white photos on the front page of a newspaper.

  Snap-snap.

  Grant punching Mikey Zambino in the nose for putting bubble gum in her hair on the school bus.

  Snap-snap.

  Grant lifting up the covers in the midnight dark so she could get in bed with him when she had a bad dream.

  Snap-snap.

  Grant answering her questions about rocks or salamanders or why Pamela Wolenski didn’t want to be her best friend anymore. Or explaining how aspen trees grew close together because all their roots were connected. Or reassuring her that Mom and Dad were just busy; that’s why they told her to “hush and go play” all the time.

  Snap-snap.

  The silver box that held Grant’s body. Her father said he was in there and she knew her father was telling the truth because she’d seen … but she kept looking for Grant at the funeral home anyway, expected to see him leaning against the back wall or standing in the doorway with his grin warming up that awful cold room that smelled like her mother’s Jungle Gardenia perfume. The room where everybody cried and her parents didn’t even know she was there and she couldn’t take her patent leather shoes off even though they’d been too small for her since Christmas but Mom never got around to buying her new ones.

  “My little sister could probably come up with a lot of words to describe me, but I do not think perfect would be on the list,” Pedro said.

  Gabriella’s mind had one foot in today, the other in yesterday, and she hopped f
rantically back and forth, trying to make it across the bed of hot coals in between without getting burned.

  Grant told her once that the aspen trees dropped leaves on the ground in the fall that looked like scales shed by a golden dragon. He said rubies and sapphires were the same stone. Sapphires were blue rubies; rubies were red sapphires. He said—

  “You know, having a conversation with you is a little like being on hold without any music,” Pedro said. “After a while, it ees hard to tell if you are still connected.”

  Gabriella returned to the porch, to the smell of fresh coffee, the murmur of the aspens and the feel of the hard porch slats on her butt.

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t thought about Grant in … He died up here when he was fourteen. Struck by lightning.”

  She never mentioned Grant’s death, not to anybody. Pedro said nothing, but somehow his silence didn’t feel awkward.

  Then he said softly, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Nobody had ever asked her that! Not her parents, her grandparents, her friends or teachers. Not even Garrett. Not once in the twenty-eight years since Grant was killed had anybody ever wanted to know how she felt about it.

  Gabriella had to use a crowbar to pry open the locked door in her mind and then walked tentatively into the bunker. The first sight she saw there plowed into her chest like a runaway train.

  “I got to him first, to his body after it happened. I found him.”

  “How old were you?”

  “It was my eighth birthday.”

  Pedro groaned like somebody’d punched him in the belly. Then he reached out wordlessly and placed his hand over hers. It felt warm. The warmth spread up her arm to her chest and neck, thawed the words frozen in her throat so she could speak.

  “I remember it smelled like the time a sparkler singed my hair on the Fourth of July. Only a thousand times stronger. And I didn’t know at first what it … what he was.”

  The ground is wet, the rocks slick, but she runs anyway, slips in a puddle, goes down hard in it and soaks the leg of her jeans, skins her knee. She gets back up and keeps running. The raindrops dangling off the needles of the bristlecone pines sparkle like Christmas tree lights in a shaft of sun beaming through the clouds. She stumbles and brushes up against a branch and the whole left side of her shirt is instantly wet, but she doesn’t care about that either, just keeps running.

  Grant is looking for her! She’s certain of it. Maybe she even heard him call her name, but she’s not sure about that part. Sometimes she hears his voice in her head when he’s not even talking to her and maybe this was one of those times.

  She has left Garrett behind; she can run faster than he can. And he’s not as scared as she is so maybe she did only hear Grant’s voice in her head and not out loud.

  The storm that just passed didn’t wait until afternoon, had popped up out of nowhere from the other side of the mountain. She and Garrett didn’t even have time—

  She races around a boulder so big she can’t see over it and finds something lying on the ground ahead of her on a bare spot encircled by stubby bristlecone pines. She has no idea what it might be. It is black and little trails of smoke rise off it into the damp air. But she doesn’t have time to gawk at weird things right now. She has to get back to the chalet. If Grant has been calling her, that means her parents have returned early from rock hunting! Which means she and Garrett are in big, big trouble.

  As she gets closer, she catches a whiff of the black thing. It smells like burned hair. And it looks burned, too. Blackened like a hot dog. That’s what it looks like, a blackened hot—

  The world slows as Gabriella slows. The black thing isn’t a hot dog. It’s a giant doll. A doll bigger than she is! A burned-up doll. Now she can see the form of legs and body and … the clothes are stretched tight on it, like the doll’s a balloon that’s been blown up too big.

  She stumbles over a shoe on the ground. Blackened and smoldering. It’s an Air Jordan like Grant’s.

  She stops running there, at the shoe. And her eyes are dragged to the doll’s bare feet, so puffed up they’re round on the bottom and she thinks, “Why did they make a doll’s feet like that? You’d never be able to get it to stand up on round feet.” Her eyes travel from the round feet up the too-tight, burned jeans—split open they’re so tight. And so’s the shirt and jacket. A red jacket like—

  The doll’s face is a ruin. The skin is charred black. Not skin! It’s just a doll. Dolls don’t have skin.

  Gabriella starts to scream, to shriek. She puts her hands over her ears so she can’t hear. And screams and screams.

  There’s the sudden smell of vomit. She didn’t hear it happen because her hands are over her ears and because she’s screaming, but she feels Garrett next to her and knows he’s throwing up.

  Then she sees her mother come running down the trail on the other side of the burned doll. She stops so abruptly when she sees it that Gabriella’s father runs into her from behind. She stands totally still, staring, her eyes so huge you can see white all the way around. And then she shrieks, but it’s not a wail like Gabriella’s. It’s a word. It’s the word Gabriella doesn’t want to hear. That’s why she put her hands over her ears, so she couldn’t hear her own mind screaming it. But she can’t not hear her mother. Her mother’s voice is too loud and the word gets into Gabriella’s head in between her fingers.

  “Grant!”

  The rest of it was only fragments of memories. The world shattered into a million shiny pieces when she saw him lying there. Every time she tried to pick one up to remember it, the sharp edges cut her hands. So she stopped trying a long time ago.

  Gabriella turned and looked at Pedro. Tears were welled in his chocolate-brown eyes and the sight of his response to her pain lessoned it somehow. She dropped her gaze again, stared at a spot on the ground where a lone Indian paintbrush grew, the petals blood red dangling from a green stem. Then she pushed ahead. For some reason, it had become terribly important that she finish it. That the first time she had ever spoken about what happened on this mountain almost three decades ago she would tell it all.

  As Smokey used to say about playing football, she would leave nothing on the field.

  She knew—without understanding how she knew—that her words would land in the same place in Pedro’s heart that they’d come from in hers.

  “I screamed until my mother slapped me. It didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel it at all. It just knocked me sideways and bloodied my nose or my lip. I don’t remember which, just that the blood spots were bright red … the color of an Indian paintbrush on my clean white shirt. And I shut up.”

  “And I remember Dad came over and tried to pull Mom away, but she wouldn’t let him, fought him. Clawed him with her fingernails.”

  She gathered a breath and said it, out loud. It was the truth.

  “Mostly, I remember that my mother wailed and my father didn’t make a sound. He didn’t say anything to Garrett or me, never even looked at us. It was like we didn’t exist.”

  She waited for Pedro to offer some platitude about how upset her father must have been, both her parents must have been. How they’d just lost their son, they’d been in shock, didn’t know what they were doing. Those were the things she always said to herself. But she didn’t believe them. Apparently, neither did Pedro because he didn’t say them.

  What he did say was, “Tell me the rest of it.”

  How did he know there was a “rest of it”?

  Gabriella couldn’t sit still. She stood abruptly, took two steps down the porch stairs, then stopped and leaned against the railing. Her eyes were pointed at the mountain beyond the meadow, but she saw no further than her own heart.

  “There are holes in my memories about that day. I’ve told you all the actual memories I have of when Grant was killed—everything before I found him and after is gone, blocked out, I guess. Garrett remembered more than I did. But it wasn’t until we were older that we realized neither one of us remembered it al
l. We didn’t have the complete picture until each of us put our pieces out there and we fit them together.”

  “Garrett is …?”

  “My twin brother.” She almost said, “And he’s dead, too.” But she didn’t. If she went there …

  “He remembered Dad didn’t speak to us, too, but he also remembered that Mom did. She shrieked at us. He said she didn’t slap me because I was hysterical. She slapped me because she was hysterical.”

  They’d been twelve years old when Garrett told her about it, but by then he really didn’t have to. He was merely painting words on a reality they both understood intuitively.

  She and Garrett had been loading up boxes for one of their many moves. After Grant’s death, they moved around like nomads. Moved out of the only home the two of them had ever known because her mother said she couldn’t live there, too many memories. They moved again because the second house they picked looked too much like the first. So it went. Eventually, her father lost his job. It was a family law firm; they understood. But after a few years, they had to fill his position. She was sure her father was glad to stay home where he didn’t have to put a pretty face on his shattered life.

  Garrett bobbles a box full of books and the contents spill out on the floor. Something falls out of one of the books where it had been slipped between the pages. It is a faded snapshot of Grant. Their parents took hundreds of pictures of Grant—the first on the day he was born and the last two days before he died. She and Garrett have stared at all of them, looked longingly into the depths of them again and again over the years until they can see each one with their eyes closed. In fact, sometimes it seems that Gabriella can’t really remember Grant at all anymore, only the pictures of him, like his face has been erased from her memory and all that remains are the replicas of him—faded images she looks into, searches, looking for … something, but she doesn’t know what.