They’d set off again then, and when they came around the bend there was another road, unpaved, intersecting the blacktop at an oblique angle like an X, and without hesitating and without consulting him, Caitlin simply took it. And although the road was unmarked, and although it appeared as though it would take them higher up rather than down, he said nothing. Later, he would think about that. He would remember the shrine of the woods. The graves. He would see the Virgin’s face and her mutilated blessing and he would remember thinking they should pray before her just the same, like the right reverend said, just in case. Forty days was forty days. But Caitlin had already been on the path, moving toward the road. She was wearing a white sleeveless top, white shorts with the word BADGERS bannered in cherry red across her bottom, pink and white Adidas, and for a moment, in that place, she had looked not like herself but like some blanched and passing spirit. A cold wanderer around whom the air chilled and the birds shuddered and the leaves of the aspens yellowed and fell.

HE RAISED THE PHONE and said, “Hello, Sean,” and a man’s voice said, “Is this Mr. Courtland?” and Grant’s head jerked as if struck.

“Yes. Who is this?”

At these words, the change in his body, Angela came around to see his face. He met her eyes and looked away, out the window. The man on the phone identified himself in some detail, but all Grant heard was the word sheriff.

“What’s happened?” he asked. “Where’s Sean?” There was a pain in his forearm and he looked to see the white claw fastened there. He pried at it gently.

“He’s here at the medical center in Granby, Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “He’s a tad banged up, but the doctor says he’ll be fine. I found his wallet and this phone in his—”

“What do you mean a tad—” He glanced at Angela and stopped himself. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean it looks like he got himself in some kind of accident up there on the mountain, Mr. Courtland. I ain’t had a chance to talk to him yet, they doped him up pretty good for the . . . Well, you can talk to the doctor in a second here. But first—”

“But he’s all right,” Grant said.

“Oh, his leg’s banged up pretty good. But he was wearing that helmet. He’ll be all right. He had some good luck up there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he could of laid there a lot longer, but it happened some folks come by on their bikes.”

Grant’s heart was hammering in his skull. He couldn’t think—his son lying there, up there, on the mountain, hurt—

“Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “Where are you all at?”

There was something in the man’s tone. Grant shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“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?

Th at 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.