Coming Down The Mountain

Synopsis: Maggie, who has recently moved to a rural mountain town, thinks she’s met the man of her dreams.  Then she discovers that there is someone in his past that he cannot forget.

 

Peter and I walked along the rutted country road together.

It was high summer.  The setting sun hung burning in the air as the dust we kicked up caught the light.  We walked on, and the fire in the air died and was reborn in the light of the fireflies.  The heat and the thrum of crickets made the world into a womb, full of chemicals, and blood, and maternal love; we bathed in it together.

There is peace for me here, in this memory, even now.

“That’s my house,” he told me, pointing some way up Hermit Mountain.

“Where?”

“Follow that ridge-line,” he said, and I saw it.

Late-Victorian, white-washed by moonlight, and perched defiantly at the edge of a cliff, it was so many types of ridiculous that I laughed.  Peter looked at me quizzically.

“It looks like a wedding cake about to fall off a table,” I said.  Peter laughed in his deep-belly way.

“It sure does,” he said, and squeezed my hand.

 

*

We had drinks on the back porch, which looked out over the valley.

“This place is gorgeous,” I said.  “And the view is amazing.  Did you grow up here?”

“No,” Peter said.  “I bought it cheap, two summers back.”

“Two summers ago,” I said, trying to think of why two summers ago was important.  And then I remembered Mrs. Josephs, telling me about her daughter Amy.

“She died two summers ago,” Mrs. Josephs had said.  “In the landslide.”

“Wasn’t that when that landslide happened here?”  I asked, with the vagueness of the newly-arrived about important local dates.

“Yeah,” Peter said, and his tone closed the topic with a bang.  We sat there a while longer, drinking and talking.

And then we went to bed together.

It was the first time we’d done that.

I liked hearing him say my name.

Later, Peter nuzzled his face into my hair, instinctively curling around me in his sleep, and I thought that maybe we really were meant to be together, that this was destiny, and that destiny was a good thing, despite its chilling philosophical implications.

 

*

            The kitchen was flooded with morning light.  Peter was at the stove, and a slim older woman sat at the kitchen table, her thin fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee.  Peter turned and smiled at me.  “Maggie, this is my mother.”

I had heard of Peter’s mother, and had wanted to meet her, because she had been a professor at Harvard until her retirement two years ago.  Professors have a lot of glamour for me.

“Call me Sonja,” she said, smiling.

“Maggie,” I said.  She nodded regally, and turned back to her son. “Peter, I didn’t just stop over here for the free breakfast; I have a possible scoop for you, and I don’t know if it will keep.”

Peter handed me coffee and twinkled at me.  “Oh?”

“Yes.  This could be nothing, but-” she shrugged.  “It sounds like they’ve found another body,” and she jerked her head up, towards The Hermit.

All the locals did this jerking gesture, and they always seemed to know exactly where The Hermit was, regardless of their own current position.  The Hermit seemed to have a magnetic pull for them, the kind that birds use to migrate, only with the people of Grantonville, it was the magnetic pull of grief.

The Hermit is a face in the mountain that you can see from the town, a natural formation of rocks and dirt and a waterfall that looks like an old man with a flowing  beard.  He used to have a kind face.  For 200 years, the townsfolk thought of him as something between a local mascot and a local God.

But then a big chunk of The Hermit’s face, the left eye and cheekbone, and one side of the mouth, fell down.  It fell on a group of hikers and rock-climbers, all locals, who’d taken a day-trip up the mountain.

They had all died.

And after the slide, the face of The Hermit had changed.  Its left eye was missing, and its lips were twisted into an expression of knowing hatred.

Since I was new in town, I’d never seen The Hermit’s face before the landslide.  I had seen pictures, though, and the difference in expression is terrifying.

Peter gulped down the rest of his coffee.  “I should go check it out.  Thanks mom.”  And he was gone and Sonja and I were alone.

She looked me over, pleased.  “Well, I am relieved to see that Peter’s found someone nice.  I’ve been worried about him ever since Bea died.  He was devastated.  Beyond devastated.  Broken.  That’s why I took early retirement and came back here.”

“Bea?”  I asked.

“Beatrice Hunter,” she said.  “Peter’s fiancé.  They’d been together since high school.”  And her head jerked up again, in the way that meant only one thing, in Grantonville.  “She was one of the people who died up there.  Not that we know that for a fact, because most of them are still buried, but…”  she trailed off.  “It’s pretty certain.”  She stood up and started to prepare for departure.

“He never told me,” I said, dazed and a little defensive.

“He probably assumed you knew.  In a town this small, and with a tragedy like” another head jerk, “the idea that a person could not know all about it becomes almost inconceivable.”  She left.

When Peter came back, he was muddy and silent, and his eyes did not seek out my face as they usually did.  He only looked at me when I was speaking, and somehow I didn’t seem to have much to say.

“Was there a body?”  I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“It wasn’t.”  I stopped, feeling scared.  “Was it Beatrice’s body?”

“No.  Not much left, but it was a man.  I should get to work on writing it up.”

“I guess I’ll go home,” I said.  “Call me?”

“Ok,” he said, absently.

But he didn’t.  Days passed, Peter’s article on the body appeared in the Grantonville Herald, and still Peter did not call.

I called him.

When he answered the phone, his voice was frozen.  He didn’t want to see me.  I told him he had no choice.  He bowed to this, and I was at his door within the hour, determined to remind him that I was loveable, too.

It took doing, but, when I left Peter’s house, late that night, he was in love with me again.

But it didn’t last.

*

            Peter’s birthday was on August 29^th.  I’d made him a cake; I’d arranged, without letting on that I knew it was Peter’s birthday, to meet him at his home.

But when I arrived, he was not there.

I sat down on his porch to wait, and spent the next two hours waging war against the insect kingdom.  They wanted that cake; they wanted to eat it, to bring it back to their nests, or simply to fly into the icing and die there.

After an hour, I was furious.

At 61 minutes, I was scared.

When Peter finally came home, stumbling down a path that led from his back yard up the mountain, I was crying, and I’d been staring down at my cell phone for the last 20 minutes, trying to decide whether it was appropriate to call the police or Peter’s mother.

“Thank God!” I cried when I saw him.

But when I got closer, and saw his face, I wasn’t sure he’d really returned to me, or that I should be grateful.  He was on lock-down again; his eyes were wary.

He looked at me; he looked at the cake; he looked annoyed, then penitent.

“We were supposed to meet, weren’t we?”  He asked, looking sadly down at the icing, which was full of dead or struggling insects.  “God,” he said, “they look like landslide victims.  Struggling to get out of the mud.”

I stared at him.  He flushed and looked away.

“You were up the mountain?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“Doing a little investigative journalism,” he said, and he smiled, as if he was amused by a joke that was only funny because it was the saddest thing he knew.

*

            It was the wettest autumn in 50 years.  It seemed to be raining all the time.

And Peter was fading out of my life by inches, dissolving like a dream upon waking.  He still cared, but the distance grew between us all the same.

Once, I asked him why this was happening.

“I hate wet autumns,” he said.  “It makes everything smell like a grave.”

*

            “I ‘m worried about Peter.”  It was Sonja’s voice on the phone.

“So am I,” I said.

“Sam- his editor- left a message earlier.  I just got it.  Peter is late with an article, and he’s never late.  I can’t reach Peter, I can’t reach Sam.  I don’t know what’s happening.  I’ll be over to pick you up in ten minutes.”

“Where are we going?”  I asked.  But she’d already hung up.

 

*

            When we reached Peter’s house, Peter’s car was in the driveway.  No one answered our knock.  Sonja went around to the back yard, lifted a planter with no plants in it, and got the spare key.  She unlocked the door and flipped on a light.

“Peter?”  She called.  No reply.  We searched the house.

In Peter’s office, we found a sea of papers, all dealing with the identification of victims from bones.

In the root cellar, we found a neat collection of human bones, all precisely labeled.  Each was tagged with the date Peter’d found that particular bone, the location of the bone, and what he’d figured out about the person the bone had belonged to.  The earliest bone was one Peter had found six months after the landslide; most of the bones he’d found that autumn, and many of them he’d found in his back yard, where the rains, he surmised, must have washed them down.

I felt sick; I suddenly understood everything about Peter’s behavior in the last couple of months.  He’d tried to forget, and to be with me, but then the bones started washing down the mountain, coming to his door.  Knocking for admittance, for remembrance.

And it didn’t look like any of the bones could have been Bea.

“Call the police,” Sonja told me.  “Tell them what we’ve found, and that Peter is missing.”

“He’s probably up on the mountain,” I said.

Sonja nodded.  She was very pale.  “I know.”

I called the police.

When they heard where we were, they told me that we needed to evacuate.  They’d tried to contact Peter earlier, but hadn’t been able to.  There was going to be another landslide, and Peter’s house was right where they thought it would be.

“But Peter’s missing,” I said.

“Let’s get you two ladies safe and then we’ll talk about that.”

“We have to evacuate,” I told Sonja.  “They’re expecting another slide.”

I was on the phone with the police again as soon as we’d started off in the car.  They said they’d send helicopters to comb the area; they couldn’t risk rescue workers on the ground.

We were told our homes were out of the evacuation zone, so Sonja dropped me off.  But I didn’t go inside.  I stood on my front porch, staring up at The Hermit.  His one eye seemed to be looking directly at me.

And then, he winked.

The face of The Hermit was moving.  I didn’t understand.

And there was a noise that grew, that I knew would keep growing.

The landslide had come.

*

The Hermit is gone.  So is Peter’s house.

So is Peter, though they haven’t found his body.

I waited three weeks, and then I went to stay with a friend in California.  I sold my house from out there.

I didn’t want to stay.

I didn’t want to wait for Peter to come down the mountain.