“Here, sit down.” She pulled a chair back from a small table and Abigail collapsed onto the seat.
“Could I have some water?”
“Of course.” Jennifer opened a cabinet and took down a glass, filled it at the tap.
Abigail glanced around the kitchen, a peculiar mix of new and old—Sub-Zero fridge, granite countertops, an old gas stove salted with rust, an ancient faucet. On a wooden shelf above the sink, she spotted an array of empty Grey Goose bottles and antique bottles that a century ago had contained bitters and tonics, and a clear flower vase full of stained wine corks.
Jennifer set the glass down on the table and returned to the sink and filled a pot with water. Abigail caught a whiff of propane, heard the gas ignite. Jennifer sat down across from her.
“I know you’re tired and hurting, but why don’t you try to tell me what happened out there.”
The heat from a wood-burning stove slithered in from the living room.
“They’re all dead,” she whispered. “Except my father, who’s trapped in a cave.”
“How’d they die?”
The cold had scrambled and clouded her thoughts, and she tried to decant the sequence of events, but the days and nights kept mixing and running into one another and reversing, like the warped memory of a fever dream, several versions of the last seventy-two hours emerging, until she couldn’t separate with certainty exactly what had happened when and to whom and the horrible chronology of it all.
She shook with chills as she attempted to piece it back together, the events crystallizing and falling into order the more she talked.
But the version she told took a departure once they’d been locked inside the mountain. It was only a long-forgotten mine, and empty at that.
No bones, no gold, no revelation.
. . .
“Here, get this in you.”
Jennifer set a big steaming mug of tea on the table before Abigail, who cupped her hands to the warm ceramic and left them there until her fingers burned.
“How long has your father been alone in the cave.”
“Almost two days.”
“How much water did you leave him with?”
“We ran out.”
“I’ll call search-and-rescue, get that ball rolling. Go on, drink your tea. You’ll feel better.”
Jennifer walked out of the kitchen, and Abigail heard the creak of her footsteps ascending the stairs. She raised the mug to her lips and sipped the tea—piping hot, peppermint with a harsh, bitter bite—wondered if the sheriff had sneaked in a bit of Grey Goose for good measure, hoped so.
Her feet ached. She set the tea on a place mat and reached down and pulled on the double-knotted laces of her left boot. The knot slipped. She tugged out the tongue and winced as she slid her heel out of the boot, the wool hiking sock cold, damp, and pink with blood.
Abigail loved her feet—small, feminine, exuding a slender, proportionate beauty her friends openly envied. These shredded, swollen blobs of flesh did not belong to her. They looked more like battered cod, blanched and translucent, with silver dollar–size blisters on her heels and ankles that peeled back, revealing raw skin the color of watermelon pulp.
She got up, had to walk on the balls of her feet to bypass the excruciating pain.
Being down there alone unnerved her, though she still caught fragments of Jennifer’s voice upstairs. She took her mug of tea and limped out of the kitchen in search of a bathroom, came instead into a small office with a scratched-up desk, which faced a window. The desk barely provided the surface area to house its computer, printer, and fax machine.
Peering through the beaded glass, Abigail saw that the rain had changed over to snow.
Way off in all that darkness, a barb of red light slanted up and left through her field of vision and she thought she was hallucinating until she pegged it for the taillights of a car climbing the steep grade south out of Silverton toward Molas Pass.
Spider plants in need of watering hung from the ceiling, a pair of leather snowshoes from one wall, and her eyes fixed upon a framed photomontage beside them of jagged mountains under the heading COLORADO’S 54 FOURTEENERS.
She sipped her tea. Beside the desk, two unfinished pine bookcases almost touched the ceiling, but instead of books, they contained relics from the past—rusted railroad spikes, an old burro’s shoe, pitons and a pair of crampons from the forties. Perhaps most fascinating, the middle two shelves of each bookcase displayed photographs of Silverton.
On one side stood framed photos of the present-day town and the buildings of Greene and Blair streets—the courthouse, city hall, the Grand Imperial—all set against the backdrop of mountainsides blazing with aspen and blue sky the purity of which could exist only above nine thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies, and there were photos of the Durango and Silverton Narrow-Gauge Railroad, the train having stopped to unload at Twelfth Street on a summer day, tourists leaning out of the gondola cars, smiling and waving, thrilled to spend a few hours in this romanticized mining town, to lunch in remodeled saloons and brothels, watch staged gunfights, have portraits taken in old-West costumes, children destined to return home with cowboy hats and six-shooter cap guns, tortured parents having to suffer their kids saying “Howdy, pardner” and “Get along, now” for the foreseeable future.
On the opposing shelves stood more Silverton photographs, these all in black-and-white, little windows to the past: a burro train standing in late-nineteenth-century Greene Street, the mule skinners staring dour-faced at the photographer. Soot-blackened miners and whores and suited gold and silver kings in a saloon, everyone raising beer glasses and tumblers, and not a smile to be found under all those handlebar mustaches. The railroad in winter, tracks framed by fifteen-foot walls of snow, and five bundled men with iced mustaches standing in front of a steam engine’s cattle guard, shovels in hand.
But what caught her interest more than anything were the portraits of people long dead, their faces stoic, expressionless: a woman who might’ve been her age, carrying in her eyes the world-weariness of a refugee. A white-bearded gentleman, ragged bowler perched on his head, whose eyes betrayed their longing to cut loose a smile, despite having to sit still for the long exposure.
She considered all the photographs in her studio—family and friends at weddings, graduations, vacations, Christmases—and couldn’t recall a single picture where someone wasn’t smiling their heart out, thought how strange it would be if people in modern times never grinned for the camera.