A Morning Like This (9 page)

For one instant David allowed himself to indulge his anger. Tourists visiting these mountains could do idiotic things. He
had a saying for whenever the weekly
Guide
came out with an article about a sightseer. Every week in the summer, someone got lost in the mountains or burned in a hot
pool or stranded in the Snake River or gored by a bison in Yellowstone.
Your brain, don’t leave home without it
.

More often than one could believe, visitors camping in the Tetons allowed their children to wander farther afield than those
same children would be allowed to wander at home. Now David and Nelson hurried toward these two little girls. Though they
were protected from the hail, a mad gush of water had entered the gulch of their hiding place, threatening their feet. They
huddled among a vast assortment of accessories: two dolls dressed in sweaters and mountain gear, a trunk, and a table with
a plastic birthday cake, all arranged upon one dry strip of earth.

Nelson bent down and peered in at them, noting their somber, serious faces. “What are you girls doing up here?”

One tucked her knees tighter beneath her chin. “We climbed up this far with her brother and her uncle. But when we got tired,
they said we should stay down low and wait.”

The other clutched a pair of tiny doll crutches and a yellow plastic foot cast made to open and shut on tiny hinges. “We had
to bring them someplace dangerous,” she said. “Our dolls wanted to break their legs so they could use their crutches.”

“We didn’t pass anybody climbing this route.” David surveyed what he could see of the mountain’s summit. “They must have tried
the Exum Ridge instead.”

The hail tapered off even as the rain came harder. Tiny pellets of ice covered the ground. Lightning cracked in the trees
below them, sending up sparks and the splintering crash of breaking wood. Thunder boomed against the rocks.

“How good are you two at piggy-backing? Bring your Barbie stuff and let’s go.”

Indignant, one of them said, “This isn’t Barbie stuff. They’re American Girl dolls. Don’t you
know?”
She began loading the dolls and the little birthday cake into a sodden paper sack. A minute later, they were fording the
washout and getting soaked to their bones. Nelson lifted the child in the yellow raincoat. David took the one in the pink.
She grabbed on and hung there, a dangling weight just like the pack beside her on his back. Slippery legs wrapped around David’s
ribcage, ankles plaited in front of his midsection. He hitched up her knees and locked them against his hipbones with his
elbows.

A wet little girl felt contradictory to everything he’d ever known on his shoulders—light and willowy, like driftwood or a
sparrow, so opposite from Braden’s robust, square weight. She held on to him for dear life, her doll’s sharp plastic fingers
jabbing David in the ear. The two of them together, doll and girl, smelled like dust and vanilla and toothpaste.

Down they went, flapping pink and yellow coats behind them like flags. David wondered who on earth could have been stupid
enough to climb a mountain and leave two little girls waiting behind with no one to make sure they were out of danger.

“We’re in a tent in the campground,” the girl atop David said. When she spoke he could feel the jut of her chin working against
his scalp.

“Try this way.” Nelson edged over to one side of the path. “It might be easier.”

But there wasn’t an easier way. David’s feet slid and his ankles buckled every time he broke through into a hole in the scree.
His knees ached from going downhill. His calves burned.

Just when he’d managed a steady gait, the little girl atop him began to sing, the cadence a jarring rhythm to each of David’s
steps.

“The een-sy, ween-sy spi-der went up the wa-ter spout…”

Her innocent, clear voice resounded all through David. On one side of his head, doll fingers poked holes in his scalp. On
the other side, two small, real fingers walked up his temple and into his hair, sending goose bumps the length of his neck.

“Can you not sing, please?” he asked, feeling her fingers meddling with his hair.

“How come you don’t have very much hair on the back of your head?” she asked back.

Mercifully, the thunder began to echo again, far enough away that they could hear it bouncing back from across the far mountain.
A forest-service campground came into view; soggy dome tents sat like gum-drops in spaces among the trees. Everywhere lay
the signs of fleeing in haste from the rain—tablecloths left in rumpled puddles on tables, aluminum coffee pots and grills
hastily thrown into boxes, firewood brought up under cars and covered with tarpaulin.

“Grandma. Grandma!”

“Oh, my word! Mandy. Kendra,” said the breathless woman who met them, screwing her grimy shirttail in her two hands. “Oh,
you’re
here
.”

“We found them up the mountainside,” Nelson said. “We thought maybe we’d better lug them down to civilization.”

The distraught woman cupped each of the girls’ faces in her hands. “We didn’t know where you were. The boys got back hours
ago.”

The girls slid off and fled into their grandma’s arms. She embraced them in a tight hug. And another. “Oh, you’re all right.
Thank heaven you’re all right.” She rocked back on her heels and they all saw her face become stern. “You should be punished,
you know that? Both of you. They’ve gone down to the ranger station to see if people could help find you.” She gave them both
a swat that didn’t reach home. And then hug, hug, hug. “You had us worried sick.”

“You ought not to punish them,” David said. “Someone just left them there. Someone deserted them.”

“Thank you so much,” the overwrought woman said in the direction of her left shoulder, without ever even asking David or Nelson
their names. And then, to the girls, as she herded them inside the tent, “Get on in there and change if you can find anything
that’s still dry.”

The only sounds as the disappointed rescuers made their way to the car were chickadees lilting in the trees, the chatter of
hikers along the trail, and the slop of their boots in the mud. David called Abby to let her know where they’d been.

“Yes, there’s a storm here.” He took the phone from his mouth. “Nelson, it’s clear as a bell over at the house. Can you believe
it?”

They didn’t speak again as they strung out along the trail and broke into the open of Lupine Meadow the same time as the sun.
Nelson dug out the keys to his Subaru, jostled them to unlock the door. They pitched ropes and cams into the backseat and
loaded up with a slam of car doors.

Side by side the two friends sat staring at the front windshield. They sat for so long that the Subaru filled with the smell
of their sweat, the windows fogged from damp clothes and hot breath.

In that moment, David thought about saying something about Samantha. He thought about bringing her up, only he didn’t know
how to begin.

Nelson, I wanted to talk to you
—

I made a bad move and I don’t know what to do
—

Nelson, you’ll never guess who called the other day
—

But Nelson must have decided it was time to pull out. The Subaru sprang to life on the first twist of the key. He shifted
the car into reverse and slung his elbow across the car seat. The moment was gone.

S
aturday evening. All quiet except for the neighbors eating outside two doors down, leaning in toward their conversation, their
plates mounded with exotic barbecued shish kebabs. The food smelled so good for two square miles that there ought to be a
law.

When the telephone rang, David didn’t think to be concerned. He and Braden—his nose bandaged and still slightly swollen—were
outside playing catch, doing their best to ignore the fragrance of marinated teriyaki beef wafting down the street. The rhythmic
slap slap slap
of the baseball as it exchanged hands, the long-awaited cool as the sun wallowed atop the western ridge of hills, had lulled
David. That, and the sight of Abby standing on their back deck in black pants and a sleeveless chambray blouse. She was sans
makeup, fresh-faced and young, and David thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.

“I couldn’t stand it.” She saluted him with a tray of dismembered chicken that she’d arranged drumsticks parallel, thighs
aligned, breasts together. “Whenever the neighbors grill out, it makes me want to do it, too.”

“Let’s find something that smells better than theirs. Do we have any barbecue sauce?”

“Yeah.” She pulled a plastic jug from beneath her arm. “The old Treasure family recipe. Stuff in a bottle.”

That’s when the telephone rang. Right then.

David mindlessly caught Braden’s throw and sidearmed it back. “You want me to get that?” he asked Abby.

“No, I will. The grill has to warm up before I put on the meat.”

“I’ll cook if you want me to.”

“Nope. I’m in the mood. Just don’t let Brewster get into this chicken.” Two decks down, the diners began to scoot back their
chairs. Two little girls began to joust with shish-kebab skewers. David heard Abby’s faint voice answer the phone indoors:
“Hello?”

Brewster loped onto the deck and began nosing around the table. “Hey, you dog. Get away from that chicken.”

With a sidelong, disappointed glance, the dog sauntered away and, heaving a sigh from the very depths of his soul, slumped
into the grass.

“Dad.” Braden opened and shut his glove like a clamshell. “Throw it back to me. I want to show you how I changed my knuckle
ball.”

The screen door slid open. Abby stood framed in the dark rectangle, her bewilderment illuminated by the backyard sun. “David?
The phone’s for you.” Her voice sounded uncertain and confused. “It’s a woman. I can’t imagine who.”

The moment she said it, David knew. When Braden threw the ball, David missed it. It nicked the edge of his mitt and bounced
onto the grass out of reach. He ignored the ball completely and laid his glove with precise care on the patio table.

“Well. Guess I’d better go find out what this is.”

He squeezed past Abby where she stood scraping the grill with a wire brush. He tried to take his time, tried to pretend it
didn’t matter, tried to pretend he wasn’t in a rush. Once inside, though, he seized the receiver off the counter. As an afterthought,
before he answered, he searched for Abby again, outside the window.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry.” Susan’s voice, no surprise. “I know you wanted me to phone you at the office.”

The snare of guilt clamped tightly around him. He said cryptically, “I certainly did.”

“I couldn’t get you there. First you were gone yesterday afternoon. And then I didn’t think you’d want to wait over the weekend
to hear.”

“Why not, Susan?” He wouldn’t give himself away. He wouldn’t let her know how disconcerted he’d been, thinking of them. “I’ve
waited all these years. Why not a little longer?”

To Susan’s credit, she floundered a bit at that. “I thought you
wanted
me to hurry. On the phone, you sounded odd. Anxious. You said you needed to know.”

“Of course I sounded odd.” He stalked around the kitchen stool, yanked it up to the counter with one hand, and straddled it
like he would a saddle. “I thought this chapter of my life was over.” He said one thing, and was thinking another:
I heard her, Susan. This little girl is for real
. “I’ve been trying to put an end to this for nine years.”

“Well,” Susan said quietly. “I see you haven’t changed a bit. You never were one to let your heart get in the way of what
was really important.”

Back to the measured words—unresponsive and impenetrable. “You have news.”

“I do.”

“And?”

“It didn’t work, David. You’re only a marginal match.”

“What?”

“It isn’t good enough.”

The barstool creaked beneath him. He leaned forward, as if changing his posture could change her answer. For a long moment,
he stared at himself in the reflection of the stainless steel over the stove, seeing nothing. “You want to explain that to
me?”

“There could be better matches. With you, we’d run the risk of graft versus host. That she’d reject. That it could be fatal.”

The constriction in his heart pressed clear through into his spine. None of the emotions he’d expected came to liberate him.
Not anger. Not blame. Certainly not relief.

His ears rang. He tried to cope with her words, but couldn’t. All of his running away, and now this. “Oh, Susan. I’m so sorry.”

“If one more person tells me how sorry they are, I’m going to break something.”

The screen door scraped open and in came his wife. Brewster followed, his toenails clicking on the linoleum. Abby rummaged
through the utensil drawer, her back toward the counter where he sat. When David spoke now, he was deliberately vague. “But
you said it was close. Would that make any difference at all?”

Abby fished a long, two-pronged barbecue fork out of the drawer. Something to stab meat with. When she started scrabbling
again, he figured she was searching for a knife. He could tell from the angle of her back that she was listening.