The Last Safe Place

by Ninie Hammon

  “They’re … bleeg,” she whispers in awe. That’s what she and Garrett call beautiful. You can see through the crystals like they were made of glass. The big one is clear; the smaller ones are colored—all different colors!

  She leaps up to go show Garrett and then she stops because she knows what she must do with the rock. She will give half of it to Garrett as a birthday present tomorrow and save the other half to give to Grant for Christmas. She and Garrett don’t ever get each other gifts, but she’s a big girl now—almost eight!—old enough to start doing grown-up things. Then she pauses and a wide smile spreads across her face. Maybe Mother will be as proud of her for giving up her special rock as she was of Grant last year!

  She shoves both pieces of the rock back into her rock bag. She’ll hide Grant’s rock in a really cool secret place she found until they’re ready to go back to Pittsburgh. And she’ll give Garrett his rock right after supper tomorrow night when there might be a “party.” Mother never makes a cake for the twins’ birthday like she does for Grant’s in October—for the same reason she never buys them presents. But last year, she put candles on matching Hostess Twinkies for her and Garrett and everybody sang Happy Birthday. Gabriella hopes they’ll do the same thing again this year, but even if they don’t, her rock will be a great birthday surprise.

  Gabriella awoke with the image of the geode so clear in her head she could almost touch it. Not the half on top of the dresser but the other half, the amazing other half!

  She got up and crossed the room to the geode sparkling in the morning sun, watched the refracted colors dance around the center crystal.

  “Maybe this belongs to you, Garrett,” she whispered softly. “A birthday present you never got.”

  Was it possible she really did find the geode here, somewhere on this mountain? That was utterly ridiculous, of course. Nobody’d ever found geodes up here.

  Surely, she’d only imagined it, conjured up the scene in her head in a dream. But it seemed too real to be a dream, too … ordinary. Details like the feel of the rock in her hand—how it was warm even though it had been lying in the shade on top of the boulder until she threw it down into the hole. There was nothing odd or distorted about the scene, either, the way dreams are fuzzy around the edges. Could it have been … real? And if it was, that, of course, begged a more important question: Where was this “special place” of hers where she’d hidden the other half of the rock?

  She thought about it for three days—didn’t mention it to Ty, of course, or he’d have dug up the whole mountain. There was a lot of Garrett in his nephew. She couldn’t wait for Friday so she could go down to the Mercantile for supplies and tell Pedro about the dream.

  Of course, that wasn’t the only reason she was anxious to talk to Pedro. She was always anxious to talk to Pedro. His gentle voice and kind eyes made her feel … safe. In Gabriella World, that was a precious commodity, indeed.

  PEDRO HAD JUST finished unloading a grocery truck and now ice picks of pain stabbed into his lower back. More irritating than the pain was the sense that he must be getting old. He was thinking about that, and other, more unpleasant thoughts, when he sat down on the porch of the Mercantile, took off his hat and wiped his brow on the back of his arm. He sat for a few minutes catching his breath, then replaced his hat and started to rise. That’s when he saw Gabriella driving into town.

  Seeing her planted an instant smile on his face and he sank back down and waited for her. He looked forward to his trips up the mountain to deliver her supplies, found himself watching the clock on the days she was due to come down. In fact, if he was not careful, he thought about her a lot—occasionally even considered making up an excuse to go up the mountain so he could see her, sit with her on the porch and talk. He knew he needed to put the brakes on, that his feelings had already edged out there past friendship. And he’d do that. He would. He wouldn’t let it get … out of hand.

  There was no danger of that today, though. He was much too preoccupied to entertain fantasies about the golden-haired woman on the mountain with the sweet smile and sad hazel eyes. He listened to her account of the dream and the geode without comment. When he said nothing after she’d completed her tale, she prodded.

  “Well …?”

  “Like I told Ty—anything ees possible.”

  “Don’t give me the anything’s possible line. What do you really think?”

  “I think anything is possible.” Before she could protest, he continued. “I really do believe that we have a much too narrow view of what could happen in our lives—both good and bad. We cruise along on autopilot, assuming that the way things are today will last forever. Only it does not work out that way.”

  When Gabriella said nothing, he realized how caustic he had sounded. He sighed. He needed to man up and tell her what was really bothering him. And it bothered him even more when he realized he wanted her to know, to understand, to … share what he was struggling with.

  “I am sorry. I heard from my ex-wife last night and that is always … unpleasant.”

  Just unpleasant?

  Once a Marine, always a Marine. His sergeant’s response to the sight of a recruit parachuting into a tree and bouncing off every branch of it until he hit the ground was a simple: “That’ll leave a mark.”

  Talking to Adriana wasn’t unpleasant. It was … maddening, infuriating, galling and … He didn’t have the right words, at least not in English, to describe it. Talking to her was impossible.

  “Adriana has remarried. I met her in San Diego when I was stationed at Camp Pendleton and after the divorce she moved back. She called today—again!—about Anza going to San Diego State in the fall, in their nursing program.”

  He could feel his anger rising.

  “You see, Adriana is the moral authority on everything in life. She knows what ees best for everybody. I bet she stops strangers on the street and tells them where they ought to go to school, who they ought to marry, what they ought to—”

  He clamped down hard to shut himself up.

  “Sorry. She pushes buttons I never knew I had.”

  He ground his teeth and stared into the distance. Jim Benninger had once called that look a “thousand-mile stare” and up at St. Elmo’s Fire, you could almost believe you could see that far.

  “What does Anza want to do?”

  “Stay here and help me look after Angelina.” He paused, tried to drain all the emotion out of the words. “Her mother does not understand that. She thinks Angelina should be in some kind of facility. A nursing home.”

  This was the wedge driven between them that had sent an ever-widening crack through the heart of their marriage. Nowhere inside himself could Pedro find a place that understood warehousing their precious daughter. Nowhere inside Adriana could she understand allowing the child’s condition to dominate the rest of their lives. Irresistible force meets immovable object.

  He took a deep breath, tried to pull back from the darkness he’d edged too close to. He cleared his throat and looked at Gabriella.

  “When Anza told her mother she did not want to leave St. Elmo, did not want to move to San Diego … well, that was gasoline on hot coals—and it blew up in Anza’s face!”

  Gabriella’s expression went flatline and her fingers reached up reflexively to cover her scar.

  Pedro groaned. What an outrageously thoughtless thing to say.

  “Gabriella, I deed not mean … I wass not talking about …” What could he say? “I am sorry. Forgive me, por favor.”

  PEDRO’S SPANISH ACCENT was thick. She was right. It did become more pronounced when he was upset. And she didn’t want him to be. She wanted to find some way to get him off the hook for an offhand remark that meant no harm—and to shift the conversation to some subject that wasn’t covered in barbed wire and razor blades.

  But she didn’t know how, wasn’t as adept at sliding effortlessly in and out of pain the way some people could. She wanted to show as much compassion to Pedro as he’d always shown
to her, but that wasn’t a thing you could manufacture out of thin air. You couldn’t give away something you didn’t have.

  “It wasn’t a fire, actually,” she found herself saying. “It was acid. My ex, too, although he wasn’t an ex-husband yet when he threw it in my face.”

  Pedro actually gasped.

  “He said he was going to make it all match—my outside and my inside, make my face as ugly as my soul.”

  Did I say that out loud?

  In the world she had inhabited her whole life, people used rehearsed lines so they could talk to each other and not really say anything. It wasn’t like that here. Gabriella had never told anybody—not the police, the prosecutor or the judge—what Smokey’d said to her the day he’d cornered her in the family room. He’d stood there with the acid in a jar, swaying because he was so drunk he could barely stand. And he’d yelled that at her. Those words were the last thing she heard before he punched her in the jaw and knocked her into the wall. She woke up in the hospital two days later with half of her face missing.

  When Pedro touched her arm, his hand was shaking.

  “Gabriella, please tell me you know that ees not true—what he said about choo.” Pedro’s accent was so pronounced he could have passed for an undocumented alien. “Please tell me you understand that the one whose soul ees hideous … ees a man who would beat up his wife.” How did Pedro know Smokey knocked her around? “And a man who would throw acid in his wife’s face …” Pedro ground his teeth; she could see the muscle clench in his jaw. He had gone from compassionate to a barely controlled fury. “… that man has no soul at all!”

  His rage was almost more touching and comforting than his tenderness.

  But Pedro didn’t know what she’d done. All the things she’d done, starting when she was seven years old.

  “You don’t understand, Pedro. I—”

  “No, you do not understand if you think you somehow … deserved thees.” He reached out and actually touched the scar. His hand was still shaking. “If all our outsides matched our insides, everybody—all of us—would look hideous.” He stopped, then continued in a voice as devoid of emotion as a metronome. “My scars would be bigger and uglier than—” He paused again, seemed to struggle for words. “Gabriella, scars tell us where we have been, but they do not have to control where we are going.”

  “You didn’t create a monster,” she said, her voice surprisingly level. “I did. And it takes a monster to create one.”

  She stood up before he could say anything else and walked up the steps to the Mercantile without looking back. He might have called out for her to stop, to wait. She wasn’t sure because the only sound she could hear was a great heaving roar in her ears. She opened the door, heard the muted jingle of the bell and lost herself among a tour-busload of morning shoppers.

  * * * *

  Billy Whitworth stepped back and surveyed his work. It looked pretty good, if he did say so himself. The picture of a kid with owl glasses holding up a fish—looked like a trout—was a garden-variety photograph. Billy’d had to work hard to give the picture some character.

  Because the St. Elmo’s Fire sign above the kid’s head was rustic, Billy had selected faux barn wood for the frame—it was rough-cut and looked like the sun had bleached it to a chalky gray. Then he’d used a red mat, so the kid’s red shirt would “pop.” All he lacked now was cutting the nonglare glass.

  Billy looked at his watch. Though it was only 4:30, today was Friday and he intended to sneak out early. He and some friends were going down the Yough—the Youghiogheny River—tomorrow. It was a two-hour drive and then they had to set up camp. He’d brought his sleeping bag and tent to work with him in the trunk of his car.

  Setting the picture off to the side of his workbench, Billy cleaned up the scraps of red mat material. He’d finish the picture Monday morning, take it to UPS by lunchtime. He already had the label ready: Gabriella Griffith, c/o Phillip and Natalie Griffith, 4650 Old Boston Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15227. The boss hadn’t said anything about this being a rush job. The picture would be delivered by the middle of next week.

  Billy flipped off the light and headed for the back door.

  Ty sat on the edge of his bed trembling in the gray light of dawn, his sheets tangled and sweaty. His pillow had flopped on the floor when he jerked upright in bed, screaming. But he must have screamed only in his head, not out loud, because his mom didn’t come running. His real mom. Not the monster with the melted zombie face.

  Ty had to bite his lip to keep from bursting into tears. He wanted to dash into his mother’s bedroom, crawl into bed beside her and cuddle up snug and warm, hide from the monster who was after him. Not the real one, the man in black they’d escaped in Pittsburgh, but the dream one who had come to him in South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma and now here in Colorado. And who would come to him no matter where he went for the rest of his life! The monster with a ruined face and arms outstretched to grab him and tear him apart, rip him open with its dagger-sharp teeth and—

  The boy grabbed hold of the thought, wouldn’t let himself go there. He gritted his teeth and held on tight, tears streaming down his face. Gradually, the nightmare images faded and his breathing slowly returned to normal. He picked up his pillow, straightened the sheets and got back into bed. He’d lie there for a little while—didn’t dare go back to sleep!—then get up and …

  When Ty’s eyes popped back open it was mid-morning. The cabin was silent. His mother had already left to go into St. Elmo for supplies.

  Ty padded down the stairs and found his grandfather lying on his bed staring at the ceiling.

  “Ty?” The old man kept staring at the ceiling, didn’t look at him. “Got a headache.” It was a weak whisper. “Sound … hurts.”

  Ty backed out of the room and closed the door quietly. Seemed like Grandpa Slappy’d had a headache every day this week. Must be the altitude.

  His mother wouldn’t be back until the middle of the afternoon so he had plenty of time to go to the overhang. Not that he intended to stay there all day. He remembered how his mother had said she and his uncle always went back to the chalet before noon because of the afternoon storms and he planned to be all the way back down here to the cabin by then.

  He’d gotten seriously scared the first time a really bad storm hit the mountain. It was a couple of days after he got stung by that bee. The wind whistled in the trees, made an awful wailing sound. The rain pounded on the roof. And the lightning! He’d never seen lightning that close; it struck all around the cabin. Ty didn’t intend to ever be outside in the open when a storm like that came up. He wasn’t some bonehead, wasn’t terminally stupid.

  He and P.D. didn’t bother to go to the creek and then angle through the forest along the back side of the meadow. He went straight across the meadow to the path up the mountain and through the bristlecone forest to the chalet. He didn’t have to carry colored marbles in his pocket anymore when he came here because he knew the trail well, could find his way around in the maze formed by the trees that surrounded the chalet. In fact, he’d even taught P.D. a game to play there. On the command “hide” the dog would bound off into the bristlecone forest and hunker down under a low limb or beside a rock and not move until Ty came and found him.

  But Ty had brought a pocketful of marbles today. He and P.D. were going to venture out beyond the part of the forest he knew. Today, they were going to the overhang to look for geodes.

  Technically, he wasn’t being disobedient. His mother had never told him he couldn’t go to the chalet. By the same logic, he wasn’t breaking any rules by venturing out under the overhang, either, except the rules of basic common sense. That overhang was mean-looking. One huge flat rock—like it wouldn’t fit in his school gymnasium!—stuck out from the mountainside like a popsicle stick. It looked to Ty like the only thing holding it up there was a pile of rocks on the far end—and not a big pile of rocks, either. He remembered the comment his mother said his grandmother had made—that it ha
d been hanging there like a gazillion years so there was no reason to believe it’d suddenly drop. But it sure did look like it was about to drop, like it was barely balanced up there at all.

  Ty forgot all about the overhang, though, as soon as he got close enough to it to see what lay in the small clearing below it. Not directly under the overhang, but definitely in the flight path of the rock if it ever fell was a pile of boulders the size of Volkswagens. But these boulders weren’t like the others he’d seen all over the mountain. For one thing, they were all about the same size and shape and it looked like somebody had set them there on purpose, arranged them to form what looked like a giant igloo. And it also looked like that same somebody had built steps beside the igloo. Rocks formed a natural spiral staircase that wound around the side of the igloo to the top, which was probably twenty feet off the ground.

  Before Ty could say a word, P.D. bounded up the steps like a mountain goat, stopped at the top and sat down, like he was looking at something. He turned back toward Ty and barked. A single yap—his happy bark, his come-see-what-I-found bark, and his plume of a tail brushed back and forth across the rocks so furiously you could actually see the dust fly up.

  Ty followed P.D. up the steps. When he got to the top he saw that P.D. was sitting beside a crevice, a hole. You couldn’t see it from the ground, but the rock pile was hollow. There was an empty space between the boulders. Only it wasn’t empty. Right in the middle, eight or ten feet below him, was a lone bristlecone pine tree, growing all by itself in the center of the igloo.

  Ty took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses on his shirt, replaced them on his nose and studied the tree. Again, he wished he’d paid more attention in science class. But even with his limited understanding of the plant and animal kingdom, the boy knew enough to wonder how a tree could grow in there at all, how it got enough sunlight. Down in a hole like that, it couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hours a day—right around noon.