A Morning Like This (36 page)

The sun was just beginning to come up when Abby turned in off the highway to Horse Creek Station. She hid the car in a parking
space behind a row of A-frame rental cabins. With one glance behind her, she scrabbled up the pathway between two rusty barrels
where the restaurant burned its trash, through a narrow vee between two boulders, out into a grove of aspen, tree trunks silver-blue
in the waxing light.

A fox crossed the forest floor in front of her, stopped, and peered suspiciously in her direction. Abby leaned her head against
a tree trunk, staring at the colors of the sunrise as they began to mount into the sky and stain the hilltops. Only then did
she sink to the ground, wrap her arms around her middle, and finally let loose.

Oh, Father. What is this? What is this awful thing in me?

She held herself so tightly that her ribcage and her shoulder blades ached, and she stared up into the leaf-framed shapes
of sky. She had expected David behind her, but he hadn’t come. For some reason, a weight fell off her chest. This moment,
this moment, she didn’t have to answer to him. She felt an odd sense of peace with that.

Why does blame get cast everywhere except where it belongs?

In this place, where she was separate and alone and alive, the leaves on the trees, the silence of the rocks, seemed to whisper
of what she had to do and why she’d come here. Abby stood, brushed off the seat of her pants, took a breath that expanded
her stomach like a balloon.

Yes.
Yes
.

Later, she would go back and find Samantha. They would lower the steps to the attic together and climb up. She would go to
the unsealed cardboard box containing a papier-mâché piggy bank with rhinestone nostrils, spiral notebooks with pictures doodled
in ink, old scribbled notes that had been handed desk-to-desk during school days, and a pink cardboard jewelry box. She’d
lift the jewelry box and run her palm over the top of it, brushing off a thick layer of dust. She would wink at Sam, find
the little key on the back, and wind it up.

When she lifted the lid, there would be a dilapidated ballerina there, still leaning sideways from her long incarceration
beneath the lid on her rusty spring. Even though her tiny tulle skirt had been eaten away by a moth years ago, the ballerina
would begin to spin with one hand held high over her head. Ever so slowly, the old music box would begin to play “The Waltz
of the Blue Danube.”

“You have to understand why this has been so hard for me,” she would say to Samantha. “You have to understand how I want you
to have your dad because, after awhile, I didn’t have mine.”

She would pull the cotton out of the jewelry box and find the rabbit’s foot that she’d hidden there, the black-and-white fur
worn off the toes from too much rubbing. “A Souvenir of Yellowstone,” the little tag would read. When Sam asked, “What is
that?” Abby would say, “This is the last thing my dad ever gave me before he left my mom. It’s really important that I give
it to you. It’s time I started giving things away instead of counting the cost.”

Maybe later in the afternoon, she and Samantha could drive up to Moose, to the entrance to Grand Teton National Park and the
little log Chapel of the Transfiguration. Maybe they could stand in the front gateway of the church and they could yank the
chain on the bell and, after the sound clanged across the river and echoed back from the Cathedral Mountains and across Jenny
Lake, she would say to Sam, “I heard once that forgiveness is like a bell. God’s the one who makes the bell ring. But it doesn’t
stand a chance of making a sound if we’re not willing to pull the rope.”

Abby picked her way back down the trail, shivering. Even though it was mid-July, the temperature hovered around freezing this
early in the day. She opened the Suburban door, checked the seat for the cell phone, and realized she hadn’t pitched it in.
Well, she’d have to do it the old-fashioned way and use the pay phone. She gathered up all the loose coins she could find
in the cup holder, walked to the front porch of Horse Creek Station, and began to feed in coins. She stopped short once to
check the sun. It would be okay. Baltimore was two hours ahead. It wouldn’t be too early to call.

She dialed information for the 410 area code and asked for a listing for Charles Higgins. When the operator announced the
number, Abby foraged through her purse for a paper and pen.

She found a pen in time to jot down the number on her arm. She hung up and stared at her hand for a long time before she fed
in more quarters.

“Y-ullo?”

“Is…is…” She hated herself for her voice sounding so small. She cleared her throat and tried one more time. “Is Charlie Higgins
there?”

“Who’s this?” asked a male voice she didn’t recognize.

“It’s… well, it’s Abigail Treasure.”

“Who?”

“Could you… could you just get him? Please?”

A long wait in which she plunked down more money. Then, “Y’ullo?”

“Charlie?” she asked. A pause. “Dad?”

A drop in tone. “Who’s this?” But of course, of course, he already had to know.

“It’s Abigail.”

Silence.

“I just… wanted to talk.”

“Abigail?”

She clutched the receiver with both hands, hoping. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Well, sheesh. It’s been years.”

“Yeah.”

What could she say? She had never been a part of his life again, not really, after he’d gone away. He’d gotten married again,
had a batch of kids she hardly knew, and for years she’d been the outsider.

“Well, what do you want?”

“I’m calling to apologize, Dad. To ask you to forgive me.”

“What?”

“I’m calling to tell you how sorry I am.”

“What for?”

“Maybe you weren’t a very good father. Maybe you really hurt us. But I wasn’t a very good daughter, either. I held a lot against
you.”

“Abigail.”

“I should have done something. I should have phoned way before now.”

“Well,” he said quietly. “Isn’t this something? Isn’t this just something? You still got that crazy rabbit’s foot I bought
you that time?”

“I do,” she said, the hollow in her heart growing to the size of the Bighorn Basin. “I’ve kept it a long time. I have somebody
I’ve decided to give it to.”

“Well, isn’t that just something? Can’t believe you’ve kept that thing all these years.”

For the time being, there seemed nothing more to say. Abby waited. And, on the other end of the line, Charlie Higgins waited,
too.

“Dad?” she asked just before she hung up. “Can we talk again sometime?”

“Sure we can,” he said. “You want to give me a number?”

“You’ll call me?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like that.”

She gave him the number. Then, just before she told him good-bye, she added one more thing. “I’m not out to prove I’m right
with this. I just… well, I think it’s worth working toward something. Not deciding who’s right and wrong. Just… finding out
who we still are with each other.”

“Yes,” Charlie Higgins said. “Yes.”

She hung up and saw that the sun had topped the trees. A beautiful thought came to mind as she turned the key in the Suburban
and then inched out onto the road toward Hoback Junction.

You’ve been going through a desert, beloved one. I’ve been watching you journey for a long time. It won’t be much longer before
you get to the water.

Will I? Father, it hurts so much to even hope.

She signaled to the right, turned toward home.

O
h, David.” He could tell she was self-conscious when she walked back inside their door. If she hadn’t been, she would have
dropped her purse on the couch and knuckled away those first tears.

“Ab. You’re back.” David’s words held the weight of the world in them.

“Yeah, I’m back.” Then, “You won’t believe it. After seventeen years, I called my dad.”

He stared at her, thinking how something subtle was changing, something he didn’t understand. “Ab, are you nuts? When?”

“At Horse Creek. I stayed there for a while.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Asleep. Last night was a little rough on her.” He took a step forward. “Maybe a little rough on you, too.”

“It’s been seventeen years since I’ve talked to him,” Abby said again.

“I know that.”

“We’re going to talk some more later. I gave him the number.”

“You think he’ll use it?”

“Maybe. Maybe it’ll be a start.”

“Are you going to tell your mother?”

“I don’t know.”

David stood across the room from her, the sunlight streaming in the window. Across the living room, it dusted the folds of
the afghan strewn across the ottoman and lay in a rectangle upon the floor.

“I think…I—I mean…I don’t…”

“Abby, what is it? What’s wrong?”

She stared at him as if she was seeing him for the first time. “David, when we first got married, I didn’t trust anything.
I said I did. I wanted to. But wanting to do it and doing it are two very different things.”

“I’m sorry about your dad, Ab.”

“What I’m trying to say… what I’m trying to say… I think I closed you out when I was preg-…pregnant. Because, with what happened
with Dad, and all the responsibility of a baby, I was just so scared.”

“I know that’s been really tough.”

“What I’m trying to say is… when you started reaching out to Susan, I think that happened because of me.”

“Look,” he said, wanting to shake her. “Look. It wasn’t you.”

Her shoulders shuddered with her gasping breath. He watched her fight her own grieving down in silence. She turned fully toward
him, shivering even though it wasn’t cold. Her face, her entire silhouette, was nothing more than shadow to him against the
sun. “I don’t know why, but I’m not seeing what
you
did anymore, David. God’s showing me things in
myself
.”

Braden Treasure began praying for his sister, Samantha, on the day that the Jackson Hole All-Star Little Leaguers brought
home the state championship trophy. He prayed the day his mother came home with an X of white medical tape crisscrossing a
cotton-ball in the crook of her arm.

“What’d you do, Mom?” he’d asked, readjusting his Elk’s baseball cap to one side of his head.

“You know what I did, Brade,” she told him. “Something I should have done at the same time you did yours.”

He touched the bandage. “Did it hurt?”

“Only for a second. That’s all.”

Braden kept praying. And this morning, while Braden watched his dad hold the telephone receiver against his ear with both
hands, sounding concerned, he prayed the hardest of all.

“Yes?
Yes
… I see… A week. Not much time, then?…We’ll be there. She would
want
us to be there. We’ll get a motel in Portland.”

Braden stood holding his mom’s hand with his heart poised in his throat. David hung up the phone and turned to them. “We’ve
got to pack our bags,” he said somberly. “We’re making a trip to Oregon.”

“David. Tell us.”

“Dad, what is it? Is she okay?”

Braden’s dad smiled. With one hand, he clamped down hard on Braden’s shoulder. “It’s good news, sport. They’ve found a transplant.
Almost an identical match.”

“What?!” Abby shrieked. Braden couldn’t keep from leaping up and down. Brewster barked the way he always did when his family
got this rowdy. Braden saw his dad staring gratefully out the window, up toward the summit of the mountain.