Tonight, from my seventh-story window I see a man in a parka and a bellman’s cap shoveling the walk in front of the hotel’s entrance. The snow returns nearly as fast as he clears it. Salt Lake’s own Sisyphus.
It’s a night to be home. A night to be gathered with loved ones around brick hearths and hot drinks warming the day’s memory. It is a night to bathe in the pleasant aftermath of the season’s joy. So why am I alone in a hotel when my wife, Allyson, and my daughter, Carson, are just minutes away?
I see a car below. It moves slowly up Main Street, its headlights cutting through the darkness. The car slides helplessly from side to side, its wipers blurring, its wheels spinning, correcting, grasping, connecting then slipping again. I imagine the driver of that car; blinded, afraid to stop, just as fearful to proceed. I empathize. Behind the wheel of my life I feel like that driver.
I couldn’t tell you my first wrong step. I’m not sure that I could tell you what I’d do differently. My mind is a queue of questions. Most of them are about the stranger. Why did the stranger come to me? Why did he speak of hope when my future,
or what’s left of it,
looks as barren as the winter landscape? Some might think that my story began with the stranger. But in truth it began long before I met him, back on a balmy June day eight years ago when Allyson, not yet my wife, went home to Oregon to see her father. This is strangely ironic to me, because it all began on a perfect day. And here it ends on the worst of days.
I should say
begins to end
. Because if the stranger is right—and I’ve learned that he’s always right—I have just six more days to live. Six days that I will live out alone, not because I want to, but because it’s the right thing to do. Perhaps my loneliness is my penance. I hope God will see it that way, because there is not enough time to heal two hearts. There is not enough time to make right one broken promise. There is only time to remember what once was and should still be.
My thoughts wander, first to the stranger then further back—back eight years to when Allyson went home to her father. Back to the beginning of my story. Back to a perfect day.
Chapter 1
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER. JUNE 10, 1992. MEDFORD, OREGON.
A
llyson Phelps closed her eyes as she rocked in the saddle to the swing of her Morgan’s gait. She rode with her father, Carson, who had grown quiet in the last hour, and the only sound they contributed to the mountain was the steady clop of hooves, the sharp metallic click of horseshoe against rock and the creaking of leather.
The trail they climbed was beaten and as familiar to the horses as to the riders. Without coaxing, they plodded along, scaling the top of a ridge that broke along a line of aspen and cedar. It was the hour before twilight, and the setting sun tinged the edges of the ragged peaks in pink and sage. The
pinking hour,
Allyson always called it. Allyson shouted back to her father, “It’s been too long since we’ve gone riding together. When was the last time?”
“Been two summers,” her father said without hesitation. “Let’s stop up ahead and let the horses rest.”
She rode thirty more yards, to a small clearing, then pulled back the reins. “Whoa, Dolly.” She leaned forward and rubbed Dolly’s neck above the shoulder. The bay was damp with sweat from their ride.
Her father tapped his horse’s flanks with his stirrups and moved up alongside Allyson.
“Is this okay?” she asked.
He glanced around. “It’s perfect.”
They had stopped on a ridge overlooking the lush, velvet lap of the Rogue Valley.
God’s backyard,
her father called this country, and as a child and full of faith she had fully expected to run into God someday out wandering His back forty.
To some of Allyson’s friends at college this expanse of wilderness would have been a frightening place, but to her it was safe and nurturing—a place she could run to when the world outside became too complex. It was a place that had opened its arms to her when her mother, who had no business dying, died out of turn. In such country it was possible to believe that no one ever really died, they just came here.
They dismounted and Carson took the horses’ reins and led them over to a blue spruce, where he tethered the straps to one of its limbs. He took from his saddlebag a small knapsack then found a flat-topped granite boulder half-buried in the mountainside and brushed the dirt from it with his hands. “Come sit with me, girlie.”
Allyson smiled. She was twenty-four years old and would forever be “girlie.” She walked over and sat down next to him. She pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs.
From where they sat the only sign of man’s trespass was four hundred yards below them, only visible through the thick foliage to someone who knew what they were looking for—the weathered obelisks and crosses of an overgrown pioneer cemetery, choked and dying itself.
Allyson, like her father, had been raised in this country and while she had left it behind for school, he belonged to it still and always would. He owned more than a thousand acres of the raw land, but she knew that the opposite was true—that the land owned him.
“It’s good to be home again,” she said. “Sometimes I forget how gorgeous it is up here.”
“Almost as pretty as you,” he said then added, “Pretty lonely too, sometimes.”
His loneliness always made her feel guilty. “I wish you’d find someone.”
“Too late for that,” he said. She felt traitorous to suggest such a thing to a man who still loved the only woman he had ever loved—almost twenty years after she had been buried.
“I don’t need nobody. I have you.”
She leaned into him. “Thanks for bringing me home for the weekend. It’s been a good day. It’s been a perfect day.”
He nodded in agreement, though his eyes, sometimes as deep and dark as a well of ink, held sadness. The steady rush of the Rogue River rose from the valley below them.
“About Robert . . .”
She looked up. “Yes?”
“Is he good to you?”
“He’s really good to me. Didn’t you think he was sweet to me when he was here last Christmas?”
“He seemed nice enough. But with your old man an arm’s length away, he’d be a fool not to be.”
“He treats me just as good—whether you’re there to scare him or not.” She could tell that he wasn’t satisfied. “Really, Dad.”
“You’re sure you want to marry him?”
“I do.” She turned to look at him. “You’ve always said I could marry anyone I chose as long as he loves me as much as you do.”
“Does he?”
“It’s a pretty high benchmark. But I think he comes close.” With one hand Allyson brushed her hair back from her face. “Do you think I’m making a mistake?”
“Would it change your mind if I thought you were?”
“It would bother me.” She looked at him anxiously. “Does that mean you do?”
His expression lightened. “No, honey. Robert seems to be a good kid. You know me. No one’s ever going to be good enough for my Al.”
“I know.” Allyson suddenly smiled. “Did I ever tell you why Nancy didn’t get married?”
“Who’s Nancy?”
“You know, my roommate. You met her at Christmas. She came with Robert.”
“Oh, yeah. No, you didn’t tell me.”
“Every summer Nancy’s family rents a beach house in Baja. This last summer she took her fiancé, Spencer, along. They were out swimming in the ocean when she spotted a shark’s dorsal fin. She screamed and they both started swimming for shore, but when she got to where she could touch the sand, a wave hit her and knocked her over. She yelled for Spencer to help her and he stopped and looked at her but then he got scared and ran back to the beach house without her.”
“He left her in the water?”
“Yep, he did. She was so mad when she got back to the house she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the week. He tried to apologize, but really, what could he say? It was kind of a defining moment. Her dad told her that if she didn’t have the brains to give him the boot, she deserved what she got.”
Carson shook his head. “Maybe we need to plan a beach trip with Robert.”
Allyson laughed. “Robert wouldn’t run.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“You’ve seen me mad. I can be scarier than any shark.”
“Can’t deny that, girlie.”
A whistling twilight breeze fluttered the trees around them. One of the horses whinnied and Carson glanced back at them. Then he said, “When I asked Robert about his family, he didn’t say much. Just that he was the youngest of four boys.”
“I know. I thought it was odd that we had dated for almost six months and he had never mentioned his parents. But now I understand why. His mother left them when Rob was in middle school. Rob doesn’t like to talk about her. His father raised him but he’s not close to him either.”
“Not much of a family life.”
“No, it’s not.” Allyson leaned her head back onto her father’s shoulder. Her voice softened. “But I’m sure about
him
. At least as sure as I can be. I mean, it’s a throw of the dice anyway, right? No one marries expecting it to fail. And even when it’s good, who knows how long it’s going to last? Like Robert’s mother. Or Mom . . .” She stopped. She never spoke of her mother without wondering how it would affect her father.
“No, you don’t know,” Carson said, though more to himself. “Maybe it is just a roll of the dice.” He looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Those were hard days. For all of us.”
“I remember the night you came into my room with Aunt Denise and Pastor Claire. It was the worst moment of my life.”
“One of mine too,” Carson said softly. He seemed especially troubled by the recollection, the memory rubbing across his heart like sandpaper. For a moment they were both silent. Then he cleared his throat. “So the date is still the eleventh of December?”
“Yes. We’re threading the needle. Two days after graduation, two weeks before Christmas.”
“Then what are your plans?”
“Rob starts his new job in Salt Lake on the fifth. We fly out on the second.”
He shook his head. “Wrong state, sweetheart. ”
“I know.”
“Tell Bob there’s a radio station in Medford.”
“Dad, he hates to be called ‘Bob.’ And Medford isn’t exactly a hotbed of opportunity. This is a great opportunity for him. KBOX is the number one station in the Salt Lake market.”
“That’s what he wants to do? Sell radio commercials?”
“No. What he really wants to do is write books.
Romance novels.”
He frowned. “You mean the kind they sell at Kmart, with the long-haired men with their shirts all open . . .”
Allyson laughed. “No.”
“What does selling radio have to do with being a writer?”
“Not much. It’s just something to pay the bills until he’s able to get published. A friend of his older brother is the sales manager there. And they’re going to let him write radio commercials for some of their advertisers.” While Carson digested the information, she added, “We’re getting a house.”
He turned to look at her. “A house? So soon?”
“Rob’s dad is helping us. It’s one of his rental properties. He’s selling it to us without interest, so it’s the same price as renting an apartment. It’s a Tudor in a beautiful little community south of Salt Lake with horse property. It has a fence around it. It reminds me a little of Ashland. And we’ll have a guest room for you to stay with us. You can fly out whenever you want.”
“I don’t fly.”
“Well, it’s a long drive, so you better start.” She hit his knee playfully. “You amaze me, you know that? You used to ride bulls and yet you’re afraid to get on an airplane.”
“Bulls don’t crash into mountains.”
“No, they crash into you.”
“Wrong state,” he repeated.
They were quiet again. Then Allyson said, “I’m going to miss you, Dad.”
He looked forward. “Me too.” After a moment he said, “You know things weren’t always that great between me and your mom. Sometimes we’d get into it like cats and dogs. When we lived in that little apartment in Medford the neighbors would call the manager to complain about the ruckus.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t want you to take unrealistic expectations into your marriage. Just because the boat rocks, doesn’t mean it’s time to jump overboard. The relationship will change. All relationships change through time. But that’s not always a bad thing. In fact some of the best things to happen to our marriage were the changes. It’s part of the growing process.” He looked forward again and he sighed.
“You look tired, Dad. Are you feeling all right?”
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Maybe it’s time to head on back. What time is our dinner?”
“I made our reservation for nine. That’s not too late, is it?”
“You mean for an old guy like me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He reached over the side of the rock and lifted the knapsack he had brought from the horse. “Before we go I want to show you something.”
He took from the pack a thick leather-bound binder overflowing with pages. Its cover was burnished with a flourish and its leather was aged with time and wear. Allyson looked at the book curiously. Though she did not remember seeing it, something about it seemed familiar to her.
“What have you got there?”
“Something I’ve been working on for about twenty years.” He pulled back the cover. Inside the binder were pages of different sizes and gauges, uneven and dog-eared. The first page was parchment marked with her father ’s wild scrawl.
“It’s your life book. It has your genealogy, letters from Mom and me, your birth announcement, your high school graduation program, thoughts about things—and my thoughts about you. It’s time for you to take it.”
Allyson took the book in her lap. She gently turned through its leaves, as if it were a sacred relic. Each page contained a piece of the puzzle of who she had become. Without looking up she said, “Dad, this is wonderful. I didn’t know you were doing this . . .” She suddenly paused at an aged page with a small note written on lined paper and a photograph taped to its bottom. “Oh, my . . .”