When he’d left, Abigail pulled down into her lap the pile of mail rubber-banded together. As she perused the month’s accumulation of magazines and past-due bills, she noticed the package from the mail-order film-processing company, and her face must have darkened, because her mother said, “What is it, Abby?”
Abigail tore open the envelope, withdrew a sheaf of photographs.
“Emmett Tozer shot a roll of film on the hike in, and his wife gave it to me our first night in Abandon. I guess I sent these in to be developed before I flew out to Colorado for the trial.”
“Sure you wanna see those right now?”
The photos had been shot in black-and-white, and the first picture wrecked Abigail’s stomach—a long downhill shot of the llamas, Scott and Jerrod, June and Lawrence, with Abigail bringing up the rear, every head hung as the party climbed a steep wooded section of the trail.
“This was the first day,” Abigail said, handing the picture to her mother.
They worked their way through the bottle of wine, Abigail providing captions for each photograph until she came to a picture that closed her throat and sheeted her eyes over with tears.
Sarah said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”
The ominous skyline of Abandon was a blur behind them, the low cloud deck expressed in a few dark strokes of gray, but their faces stood out in perfect focus—Lawrence smiling, not at the camera, but at Abigail, who was pulling away.
Abigail shook her head, laid the photograph on the table so her mother could see. Whispered, “I’ve never seen a picture of us together.” She recognized herself in the way his eyes had gone to slits with his smile, saw Lawrence in the shape of her mouth. “I know you were angry that I went to see him.”
“No, honey—”
“It wasn’t a betrayal. I needed to see him, and it’s strange to say, but all this shit I went through . . . meant I at least got to know him.”
“And I’m glad you did, Abby.”
“He was a broken man, Mom. What he did to us, it wasn’t right, but he was so young.”
Sarah was nodding now, and Abigail watched her mother push back the emotion.
“And he tried, Mom, you know? Asking me to come to Colorado, that was him trying. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Sarah lifted the photograph, stared at it for a moment, and when she looked up at Abigail, she was smiling through tears.
“He’s looking at you here like you’re someone he loves.”
Abigail wiped her eyes, watched a man walk out of the watch-repair shop across the street. “Mom, I tried to find him. Three times we flew into that box canyon, but—”
“I know.”
“—the snow was so deep, it had blocked—”
“Abby, you have to let all that go now.”
“He died doing what he wanted, I guess. What he loved.”
Sarah tilted the wine bottle, topped off her glass. “Where do you stand financially?”
“The lawyer wiped me out.”
“If I had the funds to—”
“I know.”
“Abby, I’ve been thinking.” Sarah scooted her chair over and leaned in close, speaking just above a whisper. “It’s summer now. Snow’s melted in the high country, right?”
“In a month or so. Why?”
“What if you went back to that mine, took a few bricks—”
“No, Mom.”
“Just enough to get you out of—”
“No.”
“Darling, you’re broke. Could you find the mine entrance?”
“Probably.”
“So why suffer when you don’t have to?”
Abigail leaned back in her chair.
“For hundreds of years, Mom, that gold’s done nothing—nothing—but bring out the worst in people. Make misery and death. There isn’t even the smallest part of me that’s tempted to go back to that wilderness, into that mine, to get it.
“You know I’m not a superstitious person, but if anything in this world is cursed, that gold is. I couldn’t be broke enough to resort to that. Now you’re the only other person I’ve told about the gold and the bones. Not even my lawyer knew, and I expect the secrets of Abandon to die with both of us, so the awful history of that town can stay shut away.”
Sarah had been biting her bottom lip. “Honey, that’s noble of you, but it’s gonna take you years to replenish your savings, get back on your feet.”
“So be it.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you’ve really decided this?”
Abigail finished her wine. “I jogged to Brooklyn this morning. Halfway across the bridge, I stopped and threw the key to that mine into the East River. So yeah, Mom, I’m sure.”
They’d nearly killed the bottle of wine. Abigail was feeling pleasantly buzzed now, working up a good sheen of sweat just sitting in the city heat, no relief but when the buses roared by, and she thought about that snowy night in the boardinghouse with Lawrence and the vision he’d shared of spending a Colorado summer with her, with grandchildren he would never have. There was still anger. God, plenty of that. She didn’t know how she’d ever be fully rid of it, but maybe there was space now for other things. Things that didn’t keep you up nights, that didn’t push good people away.
And she wondered where in that vast cave system her father had finally eased down to die, hoped he hadn’t been scared, and that when he’d finally broken free of all that freezing dark, he’d found his way to that Colorado summer and the man he might have been.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
—T. S. ELIOT, “BURNT NORTON”
T
hrough the grottoes and tunnels of this cold and silent underworld, he returns, impossibly, to Abandon’s crypt.
The beam of his dying headlamp sweeps across the battered iron door—still closed, still locked.
She hasn’t come.
The disappointment cuts deeper than he imagined it would, despite having warned himself she wouldn’t anticipate his actually making it back to the cavern. He hadn’t figured on it, assuming instead he’d run out of light and die of thirst, lost in the granitic entrails of the mountain.
He turns away from the barred exit and walks back into the cavern among the bones, fearing his light will expire at any second, wanting at least to see and choose his final resting place.
Lawrence doesn’t procrastinate with the decision. He picks a spot along the wall beside a blond-haired skeleton wrapped in a deteriorated woolen jacket and slumped over on the rocky floor, the browned skull resting on the humerus of her left arm, Gloria watching the last flame of the last lantern sputtering in the middle of the cavern.
She wonders, Am I the only one alive? No one else has made a sound in hours.
The coal oil is nearly used up, the batteries almost dead, and they wait for the light to go away, each passing moment charged with the possibility they are seeing the last they will ever see of this world.
The flame recedes into the wick and the headlamp dims.
Lawrence pulls off his lamp, looks into the bulb, the light fading before his eyes.
Soon there is only the molten glow of the tungsten filaments, the lantern’s wick, then nothing.
He breathes in slowly, out slowly, trying to soothe himself with the proposition that this is where he belongs, a certain justice inherent with being locked in the mountain to die alongside the objects of his obsession, but finding little comfort in anything but the knowledge that his daughter is safe, thinking it must be a sad testament that saying those hard truths to Abby before she climbed out of the cave was the single decent moment of his life.
Time limps by in the black.
They tremble with helpless terror, thinking it’s death they crave, but they long only to be spared sitting alone with their fracturing minds, listening to death creep toward them.
Lawrence slides his arms out of the shoulder straps and unzips his daughter’s pack, lifting out the water bottles he filled at the subterranean lake and standing them up.