The fifty-five mile trek into the mountains took almost two hours. Audrey let her son drive for the first thirty minutes; she took over against his protests at the Old Gauntlet Road, a one-car lane twisted as an old telephone cord. She didn’t make Ed surrender the driver’s seat because he couldn’t handle it, but because the five-hundred-plus turns on the twenty-five-mile stretch required her full attention. Applying that kind of focus to a task had a way of bringing new clarity and direction to her thoughts.
“I think God likes hanging out up here better than in town,” Ed said, looking out at the slender lodgepole pines, stately sequoias, and frilly red and white firs. Their flat, agricultural hometown had its own beauty, but it was unremarkable compared to these sloping mountainsides.
“Maybe. It’s probably no contest to say that he creates prettier stuff than we do. But I think he likes to be where we are.”
“That can’t be true of everyone,” Ed said.
“What do you mean?”
Ed shrugged one shoulder. “I just think some of us are disappointing.”
“Disappointing to God?”
“Not only to him. But if he’s holy, and holiness can’t tolerate sin, then logically speaking, he can’t stand some of us.”
“Those are much stronger words than disappointing.”
“I’m just saying that we might live on a sliding scale of approval. Puffed-up proud on one side, disgusted on the other.”
“You think God’s disgusted with you?”
Her son didn’t answer.
“Ed, God hates sin, but he loves us. He’s rooting for us to succeed, giving us the tools and the people and the grace we need to do that. You remember the story of the prodigal son. The guy’s father spent every day at the window, waiting for him to return so they could all celebrate, not so he could punish his son.”
“Do you ever wonder if the son left again?”
They moved off the paved road and onto dirt that was loud under the tires. “Until now, that thought never crossed my mind.”
“That part of the story isn’t in the Bible, I noticed. How we redeemed prodigals are always leaving again.”
“You think you’re a prodigal because of what happened with Miralee?”
“Call it what you want.”
Ed’s grief was an ache in Audrey’s heart. Her son was no rebel.
He was a good young man who was sorting out life and wasn’t going to get it all right the first time. Or even the second time. Who could?
Audrey said, “You ever ask your dad what he thinks about that? About the prodigal leaving again?”
“We don’t talk much these days.”
It was her opinion that the distance between the men in her life had more to do with each one’s sense of personal failure than with disappointment in each other, but such thoughts had to wait for the right time for sharing, or else they’d be rejected.
“Well, I’d have to say that the father’s character probably didn’t change in the long run. If his son left more than once, he probably kept waiting by the window. Kept throwing parties.”
This made Ed laugh, a bittersweet sound. “Today, shrinks call that enabling.”
“Also, there’s a difference between leaving and falling down, even though God forgives both.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re so hard on yourself. Much harder than you think your dad is.”
“If we told ourselves the truth, Mom, we’d have to say that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t slept with her—Dad wouldn’t have lost his church, I wouldn’t have lost my scholarship. Jack wouldn’t be looking at you for his wife’s vanishing act.” He shook his head. “The baby wouldn’t have lost his life.”
“As bad as you feel, and as noble it is of you to take responsibility, life is too big to think we understand it all. Some things don’t happen the way we want them to, and we don’t have anything to do with it.”
Ed dropped the conversation then, so Audrey didn’t press.
“Maybe we’ll hike Silver Gap today?” she said, offering him another conversation. “A good midrange hike?”
“Fine,” was all he said.
They encountered no other cars on the winding way. Even in ideal conditions, the road was treacherous enough to prevent King’s Riches from being heavily trafficked. Occasional autumn rains had been falling for weeks, and the snows were imminent. Soon enough, maybe even tomorrow, the road would be shut down. But today the skies were clear and the air crisp, a pale gray-blue.
Silver Gap, one of the shorter trails at the end of the Old Gauntlet Road, followed an old wagon road and ended with views of the Great Forked River to the north and the tall Snaggletooth Peak to the east, pointy like a drill’s spade bit. The trail led toward the ruins of the Dynasty Mine, though one would have to go off trail with a compass and quite a bit of experience to find the ruins themselves.
Four miles before they reached the end of the Old Gauntlet Road, Audrey and Ed passed through Miners Rest, a multicabin resort that had once been a real home to silver miners in the late nineteen hundreds. The cabins here were updated and refurbished, still rustic but transformed into an organized, romantic notion of life clustered around a small general store.
They passed the turnoff, and Audrey’s body was overcome by a chill that made her shudder. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead. The unexpected rush was so startling that she stomped on the brake. Ed braced himself on the dash.
“You don’t look so good.”
“I’m okay.” In seconds, the chill waned and was replaced by a low-grade headache that started between her shoulder blades and moved upward like a rising sun, hot and glaring, up the muscles of her neck and into the base of her skull.
“Want me to drive?”
“No, I’m good.” A matching ache the size of a golf ball blossomed behind her belly button and pulsed there in time with her heart. Audrey took the wheel in both hands and lifted her foot off the brake, allowing the car to creep forward. “We should talk your dad into renting one of the chalets there sometime.”
Ed was turned in his seat as if he expected her to lose control of the car; he looked ready to pounce on the wheel and twist it out of her hands. “You mean at Miners Rest?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Expensive for a place that doesn’t have electricity.”
“Some of the cabins are wired. You pay for the experience of the place.”
“Miralee stayed there once. Said it was nice. A high compliment, considering the source.”
“Miralee doesn’t know her mom’s missing,” Audrey said. Her headache inched its way toward nausea. She couldn’t remember if she’d packed any candied ginger or peppermints, which would help to settle her stomach.
“How do you know that?” Ed asked.
“Jack told me.”
“Miralee isn’t really interested in anyone’s reality but her own. Jack probably knows that better than anyone.”
“What makes you say that?”
“About Miralee, or about Jack?”
Audrey rolled her window down an inch and took a deep breath of clear air. “I meant what’s the rift between her and her parents? Jack won’t tell her what’s going on, and he said she and Julie hadn’t been getting along either.”
“I don’t think Miralee gets along with very many people. It was one of the reasons I . . . I was just being nice to her at first. She has a thing against Christians, church, you know. Like her mom. I thought I could convince her we’re not all . . . like her dad.”
“Like her dad how?”
“Uptight. Rigid.” His laugh was sad. “I guess my behavior was so completely at the other extreme that it only proved her point.”
“Well, Jack’s a lawman. Her mom’s not like that, is she?”
“Not so much when she’s teaching. That’s all I know.”
“Miralee didn’t talk about her?”
“Nope.”
The air took the edge off of Audrey’s strange symptoms. She took another deep breath.
“Do you regret your—”
“Mom. C’mon. It’s embarrassing.”
“I didn’t mean that, Ed. I wondered if you were sorry for trying to be nice to her. It was a decent thing to do. You had good intentions.”
He shook his head in a way that seemed to say I can’t believe you’re asking me this. They traveled the last few miles of the kinked road without sharing their thoughts.
Audrey passed the ranger station on the north side of the road and the campground on the south, where the looping nature trail started. The other trailheads met at a parking lot a little farther down.
“Okay, different thought,” Audrey said. “If I went missing, would you want your dad to tell you about it?”
“That’s a totally unrelated situation.”
“I think Miralee should know what happened to her mom. Maybe she has information that would help.”
“Let Jack make that decision.”
“Jack’s already made it, and I can’t say I understand. It even makes him look suspicious. I think we should call her.”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
Ed shook his head.
“Look, Ed. When things go wrong for somebody, we can’t just sit by and watch them get hurt. We have to do what we can to fix the situation. Like you tried to show Miralee that not all Christians are as bad as she thinks.”
“That’s the worst example you could have come up with. Also, I don’t think you want to do this to help Julie.”
“That’s not fair.”
She pulled into the main parking area opposite two cars, a red two-door and an old gray pickup with a long radio antenna arcing over the cab. Maybe Ed was right. Maybe her true motive had more to do with proving Jack wrong. Maybe her anxiety over having injured the woman was being overtaken by resentment. She stopped the car and turned to her son. The movement strained her aching neck.
“Okay. Maybe my intentions aren’t as pure as I’d like them to be. But if something terrible—something that could have been avoided—happens to Julie Mansfield, I would regret it for the rest of my life. That’s the truth. I have to do what I can.”
“You can’t do everything, Mom. And not everything that’s broken can be fixed.”
“Does that mean we shouldn’t try?”
“Yeah, I think it does. Sometimes we have to let things go. Jesus said it: ‘In this world you will have trouble.’ That stinks. And I don’t think we can avoid smelling it.”
Audrey stared out the windshield at the beautiful valley that had been cut by glaciers—the cold hand of God—eons ago.
“So what does letting go look like to you? If we’re not supposed to try to fix it, what do you think we’re supposed to do?”
Ed stared at her.
Audrey smiled back. “Oh, the mysteries of the world. Maybe a walk will sharpen our minds. And when we get home, we’ll call Miralee.”
He put his hand on the door handle. “We?”
Audrey smiled and opened her own door, turning to get out. She placed her feet on the ground and pushed herself out of the car, and the earth seemed to slip out from under her as it had when she’d slipped in Julie’s blood. The pain of a hot blade sliced through her hips, severing her body’s nerves in two.
She doubled over and fell down.