“Did you see that?” Sean said, pointing to the hand.
“I know, right? Like Dad’s.”
“What’s it doing up here?”
“I’m guessing it has something to do with those,” and she pointed to a cluster of stone tablets rising from the ground like teeth, thin and chalky and pitched every which way.
Next to the Virgin was a stone bench, and they sat down to drink water and eat waxy energy bars in the shade.
“Who do you think they were?” he said, and she shrugged and said, “Settlers.”
“Donner party,” he said.
“Wrong mountains. Look, there’s a plaque.” She pushed scrub growth aside at the base of the Virgin to expose a bronze plate and its verdigrised inscription:
Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,
Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,
In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace
For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods
And Praying before It,
1938.
“The right reverend,” said Caitlin. “I like that.”
“What’s forty days of grace?”
“I think it means you don’t have to pray again for forty days. Like a vacation.”
“Maybe it means you’re safe for forty days. Like nothing shitty can happen to you.”
“Maybe. Hand me my phone.”
He groped into the pack and handed her the red phone. She checked for messages, then aimed it and took a picture of the shrine.
A breeze came to stir the aspen leaves. The boy chewed on the energy bar and made a gagging sound and Caitlin told him not to eat it on her account.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Go ahead. I don’t care.”
He hesitated. Then he tossed the energy bar into the pack and fished into the cargo pocket of his shorts and fetched up the big Snickers and began to peel back the wrapper.
“Want some?” he said, and she took the candybar and opened her mouth as if to jam the whole thing in but then only clipped a little off with her front teeth. He ate the remainder in three great bites, mouth open, chewing and gasping. He took a long drink of water and caught his breath. He drummed his fingers on the backpack and stared at the Virgin’s fingers. Their mother believed in God but their father said they had to make up their own minds.
“Caitlin,” he said.
“What.”
“Do you think Dad’s screwing around?”
She leaned away from him, twisted at the waist, and beheld him from this new vantage.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t you think he’s been kind of weird lately?”
“Dudley, he’s always weird. How do you go from that to screwing around?”
Sean looked off into the woods. “I saw something. A while ago,” he said. It was at their father’s office, the steel building behind the house out of which he ran his contractor’s business. Sean had been there earning his allowance—cleaning, sweeping, putting away tools. But one of the chests had been locked and he’d gone back to get the key and the office door was open and . . .
“And what?” said Caitlin.
“And he was sitting there. And there was a girl.”
“A girl?”
“A woman. Sitting on his desk. And she was wearing a skirt.”
Caitlin waited. “And what else?”
“Nothing else.”
“That’s all she was wearing?”
“No—that’s all I saw.”
“Jesus Christ, Sean.” She crossed an ankle over her knee and snatched at shoelaces and swept the shoe from her foot and shook it as if it were full of beetles, and then she fit her hand into the humid cavity and felt around. She pulled the shoe back on and retied the laces. “Then what happened?”
“Nothing. The girl—the woman—got off the desk and shook my hand and went away. He told me she was a client.”
“So what gave you this screwing around idea?”
“I don’t know. Shit.” He rezipped the pack with a violent yank and sat staring at it. “Forget it, all right? Let’s just get outta here.”
Caitlin stood and looked down on him. “Don’t bite your fingernail. It’s gross.” She brushed at her bottom and walked toward the graves.
Sean looked at the Virgin, and then got up and followed.
She stood at the edge of the little graveyard with her arms crossed, an elbow cupped in each palm. Her body was cooling. She needed to get running again. The boy stood next to her.
“It wasn’t anything,” he said. “Forget it.”
She rubbed her arms. She remembered a line from a poem she’d read the night before, I cease, I turn pale.
Then she told him about the time their father had stopped living with them—three, maybe four months in all, though it had seemed much longer. Sean had been very young and wouldn’t remember. Their mother said it was nothing to worry about but Caitlin had heard the way she spoke to him on the phone, and she remembered her mother’s face—this new face she’d never seen before. She remembered the words her mother said into the phone too but she didn’t repeat them now.
She was silent, and Sean stared at the old tombstones. At the base of one, in the grass, lay a small black bowl, or saucer. After a moment it became what it was: a plastic coffee lid with a sippy hole. A piece of trash, the only piece, come to rest here, at this stone, way up here, and nowhere else.
“When he finally came back home,” Caitlin said, “his fingers were missing. I always thought that’s why he came back—because wherever he’d been was a place where you lost your fingers.” She shivered, remembering. She hadn’t cared about the fingers, all she needed was his arms, the sandpaper of his jaw, the thrill that rolled through her each time he said Caitydid, my Caitydid.
“He used to tell me—” Sean gave a strange snort of laughter. “He used to say they fell off from smoking.”
“Did you believe him?”
He didn’t answer. In an instant everything was changed, each one of them.
“What do you think will happen this time?” he said, and Caitlin released a breath that seemed to stir the spangle leaves of the aspens into their dull chiming, a sound like rain.
“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said.
THE DRAPES WERE DRAWN and sunlight leached from them along the wall and upward in a bright coronation. Naked under the bedsheet, Grant stared at this. He’d dozed a few minutes and then popped awake with his heart kicking. What bed was this? Whose arm across his stomach?
Now there was a gasp, a spasm, and Angela said, “No,” and he said, “It’s all right,” and touched her shoulder. Long ago, she’d described a dream she’d had longer ago still, in which a voice told her she needed to be with her sister. Which one? she’d asked the voice, which sister? but there was no answer.
“—What?” She lifted her head, her brown eyes.
“You said no.”
She drew the hair from her face, unsticking it from her lips. “I did?”
“Yes.”
She shifted, resettled her head on his chest. She breathed. Somewhere a door slammed and a joyful stampede shuddered the hallway, many small bare feet racing for the pool. The high summer voices.
“It’s going to be weird, isn’t it,” she said. She was looking beyond him to the other bed. The scrambled heap of bedding, the illusory suggestion of a body within it. She spread her hand on his chest.
“What is?”
“You know what.”