At these words, the change in his body, Angela came around to see his face. He met her eyes and looked away, out the window. The man on the phone identified himself in some detail, but all Grant heard was the word sheriff.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “Where’s Sean?” There was a pain in his forearm and he looked to see the white claw fastened there. He pried at it gently.
“He’s here at the medical center in Granby, Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “He’s a tad banged up, but the doctor says he’ll be fine. I found his wallet and this phone in his—”
“What do you mean a tad—” He glanced at Angela and stopped himself. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean it looks like he got himself in some kind of accident up there on the mountain, Mr. Courtland. I ain’t had a chance to talk to him yet, they doped him up pretty good for the . . . Well, you can talk to the doctor in a second here. But first—”
“But he’s all right,” Grant said.
“Oh, his leg’s banged up pretty good. But he was wearing that helmet. He’ll be all right. He had some good luck up there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he could of laid there a lot longer, but it happened some folks come by on their bikes.”
Grant’s heart was hammering in his skull. He couldn’t think—his son lying there, up there, on the mountain, hurt—
“Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “Where are you all at?”
There was something in the man’s tone. Grant shook his head. “What do you mean?”
“Well, sir. We found your boy way up there on the mountain, on a rental bike. So I’m just wondering, sir, where you’re at.”
“Caitlin,” Angela said suddenly, and Grant’s heart leapt and he said, “Yes. Let me speak to my daughter. Let me speak to Caitlin.”
“Your daughter . . . ?” said the other man, then was silent. In the silence was the sound of his breathing. The sound of him making an adjustment to his sheriff’s belt. The sound of a woman’s voice paging unintelligibly down the empty hospital corridor.
When he spoke again he sounded like some other man altogether.
“Mr. Courtland,” he said, and Grant stepped toward the window as though he would walk through it. He’d taken the representations of the mountains on the resort maps, with their colorful tracery of runs and trails and lifts, as the mountains themselves—less mountains than playgrounds fashioned into the shapes of mountains by men and money. Now he saw the things themselves, so green and massive, humped one upon the other like a heaving sea. Angela stopped him physically, her thumbs in his biceps. She raised on her toes that she might hear every word. “Mr. Courtland,” said the sheriff. “Your son came in alone.”
Angela shook her head.
“No,” she said, and turned away and went to the suitcases and began to dress.
When they were young, when they were naked and young in that apartment of hers above the bakery where the smell of her, and the smell of the bread, had been a glory to him, Grant had tracked her heartbeat by the little cross she wore—by the slightest, most delicate movements of the cross down in that tender pit of throat. Touched it with his finger and asked without thinking, Wasn’t it ironic, though?
Wasn’t what?
That God took your twin sister, whose name was Faith?
She turned away. She would not speak to him. Her body like stone. I’m sorry, he said. Please, Angela . . . please. He didn’t yet know of the other heart, the tiniest heart, beating with hers.
Now in the little motel room, his wife’s phone to his ear, he begged: Please God, please God, and the sheriff was asking him again where he was at, telling him to stay put. The boy was safe, he was sleeping. He was coming to get them, the sheriff—no more than fifteen minutes. He would take them up there himself, up the mountain. He would take them wherever they needed to go. But they wouldn’t be here when the sheriff arrived, Grant knew. They would be on the mountain, on their way up. The boy was safe. The boy was sleeping. Grant would be at the wheel and Angela would be at the maps, the way it was in the life before, the way it would be in the life to come.