THE BOOK OF ONLYS (sample)

 

August 2006

Ben wakes late and leaves for work without making coffee. He doesn't say goodbye. 

I think I have it figured out. Wendi took off her swimsuit bottoms, fell, hit her head, and passed out. Then I remembered the comforter and the towel the police found in the tub, and I started all over. When the dog begins whining, I get up and wander outside with him. The yard looks worse than usual. Slowly, I realize why. The wind storm had blown the clothes off the clothesline. Instead of collecting them, I lay down in the dirt on the pile of spoiled laundry, wondering how Wendi's comforter and towel ended up in the tub. 

The voices whisper in my head, 'Your sister is dead,' as the wind plays with the weak morning light filtering through the leaves. The raft of fabric beneath me is an amalgamation of sisters. A careless load containing the rain-soaked clothes I wore to the funeral and the dresses, saturated with the smell of Wendi's death, I took from her closet. A cat passes by. The dog chases it off. I turn my head and see the toppled basket containing the shoes that walked through her blood, leaving greasy brown footprints on the floor. Maybe she would want to be absorbed into my life, seamlessly consumed, a diluted haunting. I don't know. That doesn't seem like Wendi. 

I get up and find a Sharpie in the mudroom. I pick up the basketball sitting out of place on the dryer that Ben won't let us use because he thinks it's too expensive to run and the sunlight is free. I write: THIS BELONGED TO WENDI M. BROWN, MAY 2, 1970 to—then I stop. I don't know what day she died. They never told us. I set the ball down. 

I move around the house, picking things up and setting them down. I touch the glass I rescued from her apartment with the two cuttings. I should have thrown out the weaker, anemic-looking plant, but I don't. They will slowly die together on my windowsill.

Beach appears in the kitchen. One side of her shoulder-length blond hair is matted from sleeping. Fiercely independent from birth, she has dressed herself, wearing jeans under a sundress. She stands with the wisdom of a grown woman trapped in the body and mind of a near-sighted toddler. We greet each other in silence. I've become so quiet, listening to the flies buzzing around Wendi's rotting body, that I barely speak. I make Beach macaroni for breakfast. I think someone should come and get her, but there is no one to ask. This is the elevator moment all over again. The difference is that even if I managed to scrape the words from my mouth, 'I need help,' there would be no one around to hear them.

I take Beach for a walk because I know I should be doing something. To the outside world, I am a typical mother pushing her child in a stroller on a summer walk. The cars drive by in a sheen of amorphous ribbons of heat rising from the asphalt. I feel nothing but the bass of the words stomping through my head, 'Your sister is dead.' The flies buzz. We stopped at a park to play, but I suddenly panicked and needed to go home. Back inside the house, the phone is ringing. I don't answer it because I know if I pick it up, it will be Wendi screaming for help. Trapped in this mirage of life, I don't know which one of us is dead.

I felt it again yesterday after the wind died—that feeling of having accidentally survived.

I put on my snowshoes and disappeared upfield with the dogs in tow.

Down in the valley, the men of Clear Creek nodded and spit, 

'Well, I'll be damned. She did better here than we thought she'd do.' 

Now, I belong to a place where I shouldn't even be.

THE BOOK OF ONLYS

 THE BOOK OF ONLYS 

 

 To My Children, Forgive me for being human.

"We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one."

—Confucius

I drive the road home by dime-light, thin, glinting, and useless. Around me, the mountains rise and fall in an unbroken expanse of gray and grayer. This is heaven. This is hell.

    When I speak of Clear Creek, you might remember the photos I shared of the kaleidoscope sky floating above the fallow fields that lounge in the shadow of Bull Mountain. You may recall the massive walls of snow that encapsulated the Raft River Range that record-breaking winter. I posted pictures of cowboys and cattle crossing hillsides of sage, angry storm clouds rising through canopies of quaking aspens, bold deer and timid rabbits framed in halos of golden light, a dog with glacial blue eyes, and a pair of unfortunate cats. Of course, there was no shortage of selfies of me. There was a lot to remember, but when I think of Clear Creek, I picture the road. 

    Straddling the border of Utah and Idaho, the mountain hamlet of Clear Creek is little more than an abeyance where double-wide trailers and shotgun clapboards cling to pockets of antique shade and pilfered water rights. Sagging fence lines catch the dust trailing a forgotten breed of men who move from one lonely ranch to another like rusty automatons, while weary lilac bushes and cracked headstones represent the women who spent their lives fighting the flies and hanging clothes in the unremitting wind. 

    The signs on Old Highway 81 omit mention of the mountain hamlet, yet they list Strevell, a town that hasn't existed for half a century. But it's there in the ghost of Strevell, opposite the wide asphalt scar where Bill Gunnell's gas station once stood; you leave the tar road behind—traversing three miles of cattle-worn fields until you reach the sign for the National Forest Access and turn towards the mountains.

 

    There is only one road in and out of Clear Creek. That matters when summer lightning stalks the mountains and eyes the sage. It also matters in the winter when the wind habitually bullies the snowdrifts over the road, leaving them impassible. In the spring, it's the rain and mud. In the summer, it's dust and cattle.

 

    Clear Creek road climbs out of the Raft Valley, slicing the foothills like a scar. The route is a steep thirteen miles of gravel and dirt funneled between the barbed wire fences with the occasional side road marked by a mailbox or a closed cattle gate. When the road reaches the base of the mountains, it turns toward the canyon that cradles the creek. Then, the way narrows and weaves as it climbs the Sawtooth National Forest, ending at the jaws of a locked gate—beyond that are the cabins of the men who come to hunt the bears and mountain lions. Life above 5280 feet is not gentle. Collapsed cabins, abandoned mines, and fallen barns litter the hillsides. Foot trails end in the graves of old avalanches. 

    

    I've always said houses aren't haunted; people are. But there's something about the peculiarity of an east-west mountain range. I'm unsure if it's the history of failure or the ground itself, but ghosts are on that mountain. I was nearly one of them. 

If I'm not careful and think about the road too long, I find myself back on the ice, standing in the never-ending wind, staring at the mountains and the pall of morning fog traversing the foothills. Even now, safe in North Carolina, eating dinner on his patio, watching the gentle flow of traffic on Rosemary Street, he tries to reassure me by saying, "You wouldn't have done it." 

    I let him believe that because he already doesn't sleep at night. The truth is, had I not realized the dog had followed me out of the cabin that day, I'd be dead, or I would have died trying to be.

part one: i came here to die

"Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous."—Reinhold Messner

 

I have found the bottom of the world. 

I can see an avalanche scar from my kitchen window. It's the size of a soccer field, steep and rocky. All it needs is enough snow, and it will make the perfect coffin.

I've made my decision. Now, the mountain can make hers. 

THE ROAD IN

    Hidden Cabin sits a quarter mile off Clear Creek Road at the end of a rough two-track driveway in the shade of two towering spruces. The heart of the house is the original hand-sawn 1880s log cabin. The additions on either side provide the necessary space for modern living. The spacious kitchen, four wood-burning stoves, two full baths, and two sets of staircases give it grandeur. The wagon wheel chandelier hanging in the great room over the vintage ping-pong table surrounded by the live-edge plank paneling is overkill.

 

    We found it by chance. The small handwritten FOR SALE sign tied to the post was barely visible through the rain hitting the pitted windshield of the truck. Ben, my partner of nineteen years, and I had wandered onto that nondescript dirt road for several reasons, but none would make much sense to anyone but us. Despite Ben's motto, 'work smarter, not harder,' he always did things the hard way. If there were some longer, unpaved, questionably passable route between point A and point B, that's the one he'd choose. He was adventurous, and luckily for me, his anxiety-ridden partner, he had the skills to get in and out of the trouble it inevitably led to. 

    Ben's off-the-beaten-path adventures made me nervous, but they served my interest more than I cared to admit. I like broken things, including broken people. I'm fascinated with the odd and abandoned. I'm known as a dark tourist with a bad habit of trespassing. A habit I excuse by saying, 'If you fit through the hole in the fence, it's not trespassing.' Of course, I don't actually believe that, but I'm dangerously curious. Still, I prefer to avoid getting into trouble because it conflicts with my identity as a rule follower. 

    That leads us to another reason we were on that dirt road on a chilly spring day. After nearly two decades of fighting with the city and racking up zoning fines due to the leaning piles of Ben's salvaged building materials and steadily growing stacks of lumber littering our yard, he wanted to move somewhere with more room and fewer rules. People use the term functional alcoholic. Ben was a functional hoarder. I didn't realize how bad his problem was when we bought a house together and moved across town, away from our separate pasts and failed first marriages.

    When I met Ben, he was my neighbor. We were married—but not to each other. When both our marriages fell apart, we ended up together—proximity, wine, and a couple of hikes cover the extent of our love story. There wasn't time for real romance. I had two kids, and he had one. Sixteen months later, we added our own child to the mix. 

    I had recently quit my job as a secretary in hospital administration and was halfway through my undergraduate courses, heading for medical school, when Ben and I got together. I joined the relationship with a good chunk of change in the bank. I had half the profits from the sale of my house. Thanks to my father's experience with real estate, my ex-husband and I had made a killing. On the other side of the equation, Ben and his ex-wife had created a lot of debt.

Funded by his parents, Ben had started a small construction company that would legally limp along until it eventually faded into a name printed on old business cards littering the floor of his truck. Ben had two mortgage payments and a construction loan in conjunction with the mountain of credit card debt, child support, and past-due utility bills. All three loans sat on the title of the same property. He owed one mortgage to the bank for the initial purchase. Second, he owed his parents when they lent him and his then-wife the money to remodel. The construction loan was then acquired after he changed his mind about remodeling the house, knocked it down, and built a new one, a project Ben would only complete once his parents purchased the home well below market value and paid him to finish it. 

    Our entire relationship would be dogged by Ben and his ex-wife's custody fight that lasted until their son graduated from college. My money quickly disappeared into clearing their debts, mounting lawyer's fees, and our new baby. With Ben working as a one-person construction crew and me in school, resources were stretched thin and unevenly over the his-and-hers lines we drew between us. The budget for a new house was tight, but living in Ben's unfinished house up the street from my volatile ex wasn't sustainable. That's what led us out of the posh neighborhood of Sugar House and across the tracks to the less desirable west side.

    The house on Tenth West was a realtor's nightmare. A two-story, white, cinder block house that urgently required a new roof. It sat on an acre of unkept land, almost unheard of within the city limits. The rooms were so crammed with junk there were doors we couldn't open. The single-pane windows were covered by heavy floral curtains, and animal heads hung on the dingy plaster walls. The two bathrooms were tiny. The ramshackle addition of a mudroom/laundry room was practically falling off the house. To top it all off, it had the ugliest kitchen I had ever seen. The shit brown cabinets and laminate countertop crammed together on one wall looked more like a workshop than a kitchen. 

    A polygamist family built the house in the late 50s or early 60s, which explained the lack of outlets in the kitchen. They raised twelve children there in that small house. Most of them were boys. Later, we would find the vintage porn and erotic novels they hid under the floorboards. None of the house's shortcomings mattered to me. Ben was a master carpenter. I had no doubt he would create a beautiful home for us despite the evidence of his unfinished house warning me otherwise.

    We closed on the property and moved in the weekend before Halloween 2005. We ripped up carpets and tore down the blinds. We stripped her bare. Then we all started over. At first, the move put our newly blended family on neutral ground. It was our house. Farm boots and flip-flops lined the front door. We planted trees and a large vegetable garden, but the plans to update the kitchen and replace the failing roof remained paper promises on Ben's drafting board. There was always a reason to put it off. That's not to say he didn't make changes to the house. He most certainly did.

    One day, without warning, Ben knocked out the kitchen wall with a sledgehammer and installed a second-hand sliding glass door. It fit poorly in the hammered-out hole, but Ben never bothered to trim it, leaving the jagged edges of the concrete block on full display. He did the same to the large picture window in the front room, installing a salvaged atrium that he crammed full of potted plants, all cacti. The tinted glass was dark and attracted spiders. Still, Ben liked the effect so much that he created a larger version on our front porch. He enclosed the pad using a collection of loosely attached glass doors, a corrugated piece of tin for a roof, and a section of downspout as a post. The heavy panels leaned precariously. Zoning enforcers covered their heads with their clipboards while hastily attaching violation notices to our door. 

    Ben was wholly unpredictable. He cut exploratory holes in the ceilings and floors. He tore out the upstairs bathroom wall to fit a wool rug he had miss-measured. The carpet could have gone downstairs, but he said it was too delicate to get ruined in a high-trafficked area. 

We were already one bedroom short, but Ben still pursued a vaulted ceiling by ripping out the little room upstairs that the two youngest children used as a bedroom. It was almost a relief. The space was a death trap. More of a storage space. The door was so small even the kids had to duck to get through it, and the ceiling was so low and the pitch so prominent the only place you could stand up straight was the dead center of the room. The small oval window Ben installed was merely decoration. It didn't open, but the single-walled chimney he ran from the woodstove in the kitchen below through dried wooden rafters into the corner of the room was fully functional.      

    Losing that space meant all four kids would have to double up—which violated Ben's parenting agreement with his ex-wife and gave them more to fight about. The two boys didn't care, but when I moved a three-year-old into my oldest daughter's room, the high schooler politely moved into her father's house full-time by simply not returning home during our visitation weeks. Sharing a room with an alcoholic father and his meth-head girlfriend was better than living with a preschooler. Adding insult to injury, Ben refused to finish the project for years because he didn't trust the roof we hadn't replaced. He worried it would leak and ruin any drywall he would hang. 

    Eventually, Ben demolished the staircase to move it from the center of the house to an exterior wall, creating a great room for the hideous kitchen, with half wooden subflooring, half peeling linoleum, and a piece of plywood between them. His renovations also left half a door frame and a live wire hanging over the refrigerator. It took him over a month, but he rebuilt the stairs. He handcrafted a beautiful open staircase with reclaimed oak treads, rounded bullnoses, and a handrail made from a twisting tree branch—that he snapped at anyone who used it because he didn't want it to come loose. 

    The relocation of the stairs cost us the utility closet. This was an afterthought to Ben. He shoved the water heater into the mudroom on a makeshift shelf. It leaked down the concrete steps to the cellar and blocked the view of the garden from the kitchen sink. He then wedged the furnace into the exposed attic space left by the unfinished vaulted ceiling project. To get it to fit under the steep angle of the risers, he hammered the corners to match the roofline. The vent he cut in the roof leaked straight onto the dinner table. The furnace never quite worked properly after that. It always came on, but it didn't always blow hot air. 

    Nothing in that house worked as it should have—including Ben and me. Despite his oddness, Ben was a good guy, and we had a child together, but we weren't necessarily a good couple. Our disagreements kept boiling over. I was and still am very thin-skinned. Ben is highly opinionated and resentful of any authority or preserved criticisms. Early in the relationship, we tried counseling. It was right after we moved into the house on Tenth West. At the end of the third and final session (that's all we could afford), the counselor turned to me and said, "If you can be happy in a relationship where you never ask for anything, never even do anything that might be construed as criticizing or complaining, and can always assume that Ben is doing his best no matter what it feels or looks like, then you can stay with him." She then turned to Ben and said, "Misty just needs to feel loved."

    Of course, now, I can hear it as you do. The counselor was telling me I should consider leaving, but back then, her words were landing on three decades of untreated wounds. I had secrets that crawled around in my head. They contaminated my perception. I was raised by a father who should have had sons but only had daughters. I was loved and cared for by a mother with no say-so in her own life. A woman desperately clinging to a man she believed was her only chance for salvation—just as he had been her ticket out of abject poverty and the squaller and hoarding of her mentally ill mother when, at the age of eighteen, my parents slipped out of a church picnic and eloped.  

    Even though I had long since left the long wooden church benches behind, I spent my childhood in a religion where the only value of women was marriage and children. It sounds archaic, but to this very day, the Mormon Church openly preaches from its worldwide pulpits that women belong in the home. It didn't matter that I disagreed. The masses believed, and that belief permeated the culture of the entire state. Misogyny was the only backdrop I knew.

I had already let my father down. I had failed to save my first marriage—or, more accurately, I had refused to try. After eleven years of hiding the truth, I showed up on my parents' doorstep with a backpack and two young children. My father told me to go home and fix my marriage to a man he never approved of. We were standing in the driveway. I pulled out the only card I held. 

    

"Dad, Adam is an abusive alcoholic." I had never dared to speak those words to anyone before that moment, no matter who they were and how hard they tried to get me to admit it. 

My father looked me square and said, "He was like that when you married him. Go home and fix your marriage." Decades later, sitting beside my father's bed, only hours before I'd reenter the room and discover his lifeless body, he told me that he always wished I had stayed with Adam for the sake of the children.   

 

   "…never ask for anything, never even do anything that might be construed as criticizing or complaining…then you can stay…" Those words echoed church doctrine, "Keep sweet and obey." I thought the counselor was giving me the recipe to save my family—if I could only learn to shut up. I did my best to control myself in my relationship with Ben. It worked. We quit fighting, but we also stopped existing as a couple. Of course, we didn't realize that. Ben got to do what he wanted, and he seemed happy. Unable to advocate for myself, my needs fell to the back of every line. My resentment grew until it got so big it suffocated all the love. The erosion of our relationship was my fault. I can admit that, but on the other hand, had I heard it differently and left then, it also would have been my fault.    

    Meanwhile, buckets of drill bits, hinges, light fixtures, pipe fittings, and brackets spilled out of Ben's truck and trailers. The mess spread to the driveway and the garage. Attempting to hide it, we built a fence and parked our cars on the street. He built a greenhouse, and the piles migrated in. Stacks of salvaged building materials cluttered the edges of the large vegetable garden and climbed the steps of the front and back porches. He built a beautiful workshop for himself, stuffed full long before he finished roofing it. 

    I tried implementing creative solutions to hide the mess and dodge the messages from the zoning and building departments, but it was like bailing out a boat moored under a waterfall. Ben began salvaging larger construction materials. He bought a semi-trailer filled with doors and windows that he parked half in the front yard and half in the back, making keeping the dogs in the yard impossible.   

    Then my sister died. I quit school. I was always sick. The house on Tenth West rebuilt its hairshirt of junk. The paint peeled, pipes froze, and small black spirals of mold crept out of the corners. The kids were embarrassed to bring friends home. Eventually, the roof we never replaced began to leak. I moved chairs and rugs to conceal the holes in the floors. I taped the children's art over broken windows and hung curtains where there should have been walls. 

We raised our four kids in a slowly crumbling house with the sweet green smell of the Jordan River drifting in and out. At night, the trains lulled them to sleep. By the time the kids were grown, the house was surrounded by leaning stacks of discarded granite, piles of broken tile, and rows of salvaged windows and doors. Stacks of slate and roofing tiles pressed against the garden fences, pipes, oak banisters, and old water heaters scattered throughout the yard. Then Ben bought a portable sawmill, and the yard began filling with towering stacks of lumber. 

    Retreat was the only move left. Lucky for us, by then, the promised wave of gentrification was finally flooding the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. Despite the severity of the house's deterioration, we could sell it for the value of the land and make a small fortune doing it. It was a fortune we didn't deserve. We walked from the house on Tenth West, knowing the home we created together resulted in a house unfit for people to live in. We had planned to be so much more. I was going to be a doctor. Ben was going to build beautiful homes. We were going live happily ever after. The story we left in the dust was one of broken promises and all my dreams of ever being anything other than Wendi's little sister. 

 

The night is a ribbon tied in my hair. I wear it in my soft bed of feathers and fur. It comes loose on my pillow while I dream. Strings of darkness and silk slip through my ears,

kissing my lips on the way to the cold bones of the wooden floor. 

This is how we become unraveled.

 

Salt Lake City July 28, 2006

    I was less than three miles away when her body was found. She was lying face down, wedged between the toilet and tub. The box fan shoved in the window of her third-floor apartment did little to soften the sharp July heat and nothing to erase the smell. It was the landlord who found her. He called the police, and they called her parents. I suppose that's our parents. After all, the thirty-six-year-old woman discovered lying in a viscous pool of human broth was my sister.

            

    I was on campus, in the bookstore, purchasing my textbooks. I was driving home when they loaded Wendi into the Medical Examiner's van. We might have passed in the crowd of rush-hour traffic. It's all very tragic. As children, we had been inseparable. We shared a perfect Mormon childhood. A crayon drawing of an ideal life, a white house with green grass on a tree-lined street, chlorine summers, and salted winter sidewalks. But what if our perfect life was all a mirage, a velvet veneer, or worse, a lie? It certainly would make none of what happened my fault. The problem is I'm an unreliable narrator, so you don't have to believe me, but you might want to hear how I'm solely responsible for how she died. 

    You could probably live without knowing the gory details. Like what happens to a body that rots unnoticed for days in the sweltering heat—the smell, the blood, the flies. You certainly don't want to know how her skin split and spilled under the weight and pressure of decomposition and her hair sluffed away. And later, how the Medical Examiner would have to apologize for not having a photo of her face to identify her body because there wasn't one. I identified her using pictures of the scars on her wrists and thighs. That's what decomposed really means.  

    

    If I close my eyes, I can see myself driving home to the sad little cinder block house on Tenth West, blissfully unaware. I can imagine a life where my sister doesn't die, and the wolves stay hidden in the forest, but she did. I went home loaded with several heavy bags. I stepped around the moat of clutter, unlocked the door, and went inside. In the kitchen, the phone was ringing. I set the textbooks I would never use on the table. Then, on the last ordinary summer day in a desert city built of granite and glass, the city of salt and salvation, I picked up the receiver and said, "Hello."

    

    Wendi struggled in school. I was a good student. She loved The Wizard of Oz. I was terrified of the flying monkeys and the sand slipping through the witch's hourglass. Wendi hated Peter Pan, but I liked the idea that children could open the nursery window and fly away. We planned to move to California together and live inside Disneyland on Tom Swayer’s Island, like the Lost Boys in Neverland. We played in the sprinklers and lay our tanned bodies on the concrete. Streetlights, swing sets, and grape jam, our childhood was endless because, as girls, we had no future. 

    

    We wanted acceptance. What we got were labels and lies. According to Mormon doctrine, only men can hold the highest priesthood, the Melchizedek priesthood. For a woman to reach the highest kingdom in heaven, she must marry a Melchizedek Priesthood holder. Daughters are disposable, having no merit on their own. I wanted to matter. Wendi wanted to be all-consuming. When I grew up, I wanted to be a boy. Wendi never wanted to grow up. Both of our endless childhoods ended on a bathroom floor, but only one of us got what we wanted. The other got what she deserved.  

Overnight, the wind has created a cocoon of fog and silence. The cabin's windows weep curious threads of light onto the fresh snow. My footsteps from yesterday are gone. I shower with my eyes closed to stare into my sister's face. 

It's either that or count my scars like constellations.

PILLARS OF GOMORRAH

 

Chapter 1

Paola appeared out of nowhere to watch the boy. He was the first child she had seen in the canyon, and she was curious. The five ghost towns nestled within its stone walls drew plenty of tourists but never children. Paola guessed the boy was about six. He was pasty-pale and awkwardly thin, teetering precariously close to the crumbling concrete edge of the bridge spanning the dry wash. 

A tall, blonde-haired woman was trailing, wearing a wrinkled denim dress and flimsy sandals. Paola assumed she was his mother. Behind them, parked in the dry grass on the side of the dirt road, was a white SUV. The open doors allowed Paola to evaluate the pair based on the wrappers cluttering the interior. Mass consumer: she labeled.

Spotting Paola leaning over the cattle gate barring the road, the boy’s mother gasped, “Oh—we don't have facemasks!”

Paola raised her hand. "I won't come any closer.”

The boy’s mother flashed a nervous smile. Her eyes darted over Paola’s dingy clothing, landing on the head of the dog creeping from the sage. Zag’s blue heeler eyes remained unblinking as he sniffed the air and slowly melted back into the landscape. She stepped back, pulling the boy with her. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? All these buildings—just abandoned. The way they look on the internet, I thought we could go in them. Are you a local?"

That was a good question. Paola looked at the thin, blue summer sky tiptoeing over the striated cliffs framing the canyon, then over the low fence and across the field to the brick skeletons of the abandoned coal town of Peerless. She tried but failed to recall the emotions of seeing it for the first time. She was in shock, and those initial few days of peering through the broken windows of the abandoned houses and down mine shafts were overshadowed by the dark nights spent in the belly of the lodge listening to the news. The desperate cries for help were dispatched like messages from a sinking ship as the world slipped below the dark tide of a rising global pandemic. Then the riots. When the summer wildfires began again, Paola unplugged the radio, muting the outside world. She was now so lost in her self-prescribed isolation she didn’t even know what month it was, let alone what day of the week. She simply labeled the time as hot, summer.

“It’s too dangerous to go in the buildings,” Paola said, returning her attention to the boy and his mother.

“Because of the ghosts?" the boy asked, blinking the phantom eyelashes framing his bleach-blue eyes. 

"Where are you from?" Paola asked.

“Ogden," he answered.

"Are there ghosts in Ogden?"

Looking for the answer, the boy turned and faced his mother. 

“She’s kidding.” His mother’s assurance was chased by a high, nervous laugh that awkwardly skipped away. The boy shrugged and headed for the SUV. His mother turned to follow. 

“Look,” Paola said, feeling guilty, “up the main road, there’s a cluster of old miners' cabins that aren’t fenced off." 

"Thank you—and I'm sorry about…." The woman stopped talking because Paola was gone. Unobserved, Paola had jumped from the road, receding like a rat into the metal culvert and out of sight.

"That wasn’t nice, Kitty," Jack said over the can of beer perched at his chapped lips. Startled by his appearance, Paola covered her mouth to damper a yelp. 

"You probably scared the shit out of them," he continued. "I bet they think you're a ghost." Behind his mossy eyes and the haze of dark stubble on his cherubically round face, Jack waited for her to explain why she hadn’t offered to let them explore the ruins of Peerless—half of the fallen town was on her land.

"The boy was clumsy, he'd have gotten hurt, and the woman was inept,” Paola said, picking a spot to sit that was a safe distance from him. The heeler moved down the tunnel toward them, his eyes up, watching the sound of the car turning around on the road.

"Still, it wasn’t nice of you to disappear like that," Jack objected between soundless sips of the beer. "Are we gonna stay here all afternoon like moles?" Jack ran his wide fingers through the twisted dark waves of his hair. "I thought we could hike to the bathhouse." Cocking his head, Jack cracked half a smile. His tongue slid out of his mouth to lick the blood from one of the deep splits in his lower lip. 

A shiver rolled down her spine. Paola pulled her knees into her chest. “It’s too late for a hike like that. You know I don't like being in the canyon in the dark.”

"You don't like being anywhere in the dark." Jack smiled again. This time his full grin sunk the corners of his eyelashes so far that they nearly kissed the upturned sides of his wide mouth. Paola always thought it made him appear stoned, especially when he wasn't. 

Still smiling, Jack closed his eyes, sinking into the curve of the metal conduit. His amusement at her expense made her feel sorry for herself. Paola got up. "I'm going home.” Hearing the magic word, Zag turned and began retreating down the tunnel.

"Have it your way," Jack shrugged. 

"I always do now," she said, stomping off. 

"Stop fucking around in the past. It won’t change anything. You need to decide, Paola, because people are coming.”

"Wait, what people?" Paola spun around, but Jack was gone. She stared into the emptiness. "That has always been the trouble with you, Jack Wells," she called into the dripping vacancy. The weight of her loneliness pressed on her throat, making it hard to swallow. "Just like when you were alive—you're never around when I need you."

Literary Review by Tory Hunter

"Incredible writing and incredible scene-setting. I’m immediately sucked in by the dark and gritty imagery."

"The use of language is truly excellent. It generates a gritty, unsettling atmosphere." 

"The descriptions are amazing... realistic and haunting."

"Dark" 

"Clever"

"Just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be another twist..."

"It’s extremely rare that I complete a manuscript and don’t have any big picture concerns to address, but I simply don’t. The character development, pacing, structure, imagery, descriptions--everything is incredible. This is such an intricately woven plot with so many shocking and clever twists that just keep coming and coming and coming. I’m truly blown away by this novel."

The Wendy House

Long before they arrived at the cliff, Granger Madsen felt uneasy. It was the wind. All night it wheezed down the mountain, through the trees, and across the lake. It broke at dawn with a final haunting sigh, like an animal taking its last breath—only to resurrect itself midday. It always seemed to be windy around the reservoir. Even on calm days, rouge gusts flew around corners, scurrying through the shrubs, fitfully tossing leaves and dirt into the air. It seemed inescapable. Even indoors, the wind hunted, rattling windows and shaking the vents like the Big Bad Wolf. Little Pig, Little Pig, let me in.  

The afternoon was fading when the Madsen brothers' canoe crossed in front of the dam. The air was wet and biting, slipping chilled teeth under the long shadows of a tepid sun. The cresting whitecaps summoned by the wind climbed over the low sides of the craft, soaking their feet.

Regardless of the conditions on the reservoir, it was the last weekend of summer, and it was the ritual of the local teens to meet in the cove. Their friends were already there, jumping from the narrow band of granite cliffs that twisted down the mountain like the giant tail of a stone dragon. It was rumored that the Native Americans, the Uintah, and the Ouray tribes buried their dead in the cavernous holes in the white rock. Although, if it were true, looters had long since picked the graves clean. 

The Madsen boys were late, delayed by the overbearing will of their dad. The cord of wood Granger had spent the morning chopping and stacking had not met Iron Ian Madsen's acrid approval, and Granger was forced to rebuild it while his younger brother Rory waited. Being late only added to Granger's anxiousness as he navigated their red canoe into the flock of boats bobbing in their moorings in the deadfall of graying logs wedged between the rocks. 

The white bands of past water lines came in at eye level. Fear bristled up the fine hairs on his neck. In all his seventeen years, he didn't think he had ever seen the water so low. A few years ago, Samantha Neilson died cliff jumping. She was the daughter of the Mayor of Promise, the little town that sprouted into existence in the 1960s after the reservoir filled. It sat a mile below the Mayhap dam, nursing its green fields and gardens on the water seeping through the spillways. 

Rory had been too young to go that summer, but Granger was there. He witnessed Samantha jump. The way Granger recalled the impact, it was as if the lake had become solid when Samantha hit the surface. Then it liquified and swallowed her. 

Once the Park Rangers were on the scene, her body eerily bobbed to the surface—something about ruptured organs spilling gas inside her abdominal cavity. The coroner ruled that she died from the impact of a broken neck. It was called a tragic fluke, but Granger still had nightmares. In his dreams, the water formed an enormous fist that met Samantha on her way down. Colliding with her body, it flung her like a rag doll so violently that her head snapped from her spine. He'd wake with the horrible feeling he was holding her decapitated head, only to discover a wad of blankets or a discarded sweatshirt between his trembling hands.    

 Granger told Rory to wait while he double-checked the safety of the landing. Slipping over the side of the canoe, he dived deep, searching for any hidden hazards below the cliff. His best friend Abel Burbage nearly took him out in a cannonball. Abel popped up laughing, shaking his dark hair and sending a rainbow of water droplets into Granger's face.

The landing appeared safe enough, and Granger knew high water could contain as many hazards as low water. This did nothing to slow the queasiness dining on the lining of his gut. It wasn't that Granger was a nervous kid. He was intuitive. He could anticipate the phone ringing or the doorbell chiming a split second before they sounded. His dreams often held information that was eerily foretelling in a Delphian way. He possessed a strange ability to know when a deer was about to dart from the woods onto the road. He always seemed to know when to leave a party before it got busted and when to stash the old copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang that he and Rory shared inside his History textbook seconds before his dad entered the kitchen.

He knew other things too. The day Samantha died, she had turned and looked at Granger. He hardly knew her. Still, the look she gave him was that of naked terror. Not the terror of a trapped animal but the dread of an already dead one. It was as if they both knew she was about to die, but neither could stop it. 

"I was worried you weren't coming," Abel said, spitting out a mouthful of lake water. His lips and the skin around his wide mouth were blue from the chill. The ashen pallor enhanced the spray of brown freckles covering his sunburnt skin stretched over his abnormally long face.  

"My dad." It was all that needed saying. They had been friends since Kindergarten. Abel knew how hard Granger's dad was on him. 

Together they swam back to Rory, and the three climbed the rocks falling into the jumbled line of jumpers. Someone was playing music from a radio stashed in a pile of discarded clothing. A few older kids were huddled in a pool of thick sunlight, drinking stolen cans of cheap beer and smoking cigarettes. The wind chopped and remixed the music and the laughter into a sicken funhouse of noise. 

When they finally reached the top of the cliff, Rory leaned over the edge. His rigid joints cast his fourteen-year-old thin shoulders in unnaturally wild angles. The glaring light encapsulated his pale skin and shockingly white hair. He appeared to melt into the sallow clouds floating on the cadaverous horizon. He was scared.

It was likely that Rory, with his diminished hearing, couldn't hear the goading from the others growing increasingly clamant. Scanning the line behind them, Granger's blue eyes landed on the body of Abel's girlfriend, Lena Jones. Her waterlogged sneakers sloshed on the rocks as she fidgeted and shivered in her faded suit and cutoff shorts. She smiled at him, and suddenly Granger felt a new sense of urgency.

Standing wet in the wind, he was too cold to uncross his arms, so he nudged Rory with his elbow. "Jump."

"I don't know, Grang. That looks really far," Rory said, stepping back from the ledge. 

Granger moved forward, taking his brother's place on the ledge. He eyed the water and understood what had scared Rory. The high September sun was glinting off the surface, making the waves look like the blades of a saw churring. With the water so low, it had to be a thirty-five-foot plunge. 

"We could go at the same time?" Granger offered to his younger brother.

Rory nodded. 

Granger turned to see if Abel wanted to jump with them, but Abel had stepped out of line to wait for Lena. A shadow crossed the sky. Granger looked up into a massive gust of wind. Something touched his back, and then he was falling. 

The laughter echoed off the rocks as Granger hit the water hard. It felt like he had fallen through a pane of glass. It stung his skin and rushed through his ears and nose in razor-sharp shards. The water should have slowed his momentum, but it felt like he was speeding it up—like a rope around his waist was pulling him down to the bottom of the lake. 

It took Granger a few seconds to react. He spread his arms and kicked his legs, but it did nothing. He was trapped in some kind of undertow. Was he being pulled into the dam? Again he tried to swim but with the same aught result. He was far too deep. It'd be a hell of a swim to the surface. 

Starting to panic, he thrashed his limbs, demanding his body rise. Despite his efforts, he continued to descend. Then his feet collided with something with so much force his jaw chipped at his teeth, his ribs compressed, and his hips and knees folded. Pain shot up his leg, electrifying his spine. Kicking furiously, he tried to swim away. The effort shot bottle rockets of pain up his leg. 

Granger realized he was trapped. His foot was wedged in whatever he had landed on. His eyes popped open. What he saw through the murky, green water didn't make sense. His foot had punched through the roof of a house. 

Like all the kids raised around the reservoir, he had heard the stories about the ill-fated town of Mayhap. The mountain hamlet on the foothills of the Uinta Mountains had been dying from the moment it was conceived. It was settled by pioneer families sent east from Salt Lake to claim more territory for the LDS church. It stepped well over the boundary of the newly designated Tabeguache Reservation. Yet, the local tribes offered no objections to the new white settlers. 

At its crest, two hundred souls lived in Mayhap, but the winters were harsh, the snow deep, the wind relentless, and the nearest gristmill too far—not to mention all the strange deaths. In the 1960s, when government checks were issued to build a reservoir, the number had dwindled to twenty-three individuals. Those who had not already moved to the higher ground took the money and fled without a fight. 

Historians took photographs and commented on how remarkable it was that none of the remaining townspersons objected to the government buyout. The state surveyors mark each building with black plaques, numbering them like toe tags in a morgue. Because the state was in a hurry for the water, they didn't bother to waste diesel bulldozing the town. Mayhap was left as they found it except for the soil sites dug up for the earth-filled dam. 

With the path of the rivers and tributaries blocked, the rising water consumed the valley. The streets flooded. Doorsteps were breached. Windows filled and burst while roofs and chimneys were swallowed whole. The church steeple was the last to disappear. It took two years for the condemned buildings and all their secrets to slip below the body of the new Mayhap Reservoir.    

In drought years, if the wind was dead and the water on the reservoir was calm, one could see the stone foundations glowing through the lake's depths. Occasionally, rotting boards with rusting nails break loose and float to the surface, washed up on shore. Children chasing minions would find the odd abandoned item lodged in the rocks, bedsprings, tin cans, and leather shoes. But for the most part, Mayhap was reduced to a campfire ghost story.

The water was so low Granger had landed on one of the houses. His torn flesh and fragmented bones were locked in the teeth of the rotting trusses of the roof. Grabbing his thigh, he pulled on his leg. The green, moss-riddled shingles groaned and buckled, releasing a swirling cloud of debris that enveloped him. Slowly, out of the murky depth, a brumous face appeared. Pearly and gray, its orifices gaped like the flesh of a rotting fish. The face sprouted a neck and shoulders. A hand reached for Granger with its gnarled fingers spread wide. 

Granger screamed. His mouth and lungs filled with silt and water. Pounding the heel of his unbound foot on the roof, Granger finally tore through the rotten wood, releasing his trapped leg. Granger aimed for the slight glow over his head, but he collided with something flat and square. It was a brick wall. Through the strange underwater current, he had been swimming the wrong way. 

His lungs felt like they might burst in his chest. Granger pushed against the wall. It crumbled in a cloud of sediment. Terrified and out of breath, Granger stopped struggling. Suddenly a hand grabbed his neck and then his arm, dragging him up. He and Lena exploded together through the surface into the barking waves. He tried inhaling a breath, but it hit a wall of water in his chest, pushing it deeper into his lungs. He began violently convulsing. 

Voices around them told Granger that others had entered the water to help. Eric Miller, the strongest and oldest boy, was sent in a kayak for help. The girls were whaling in high-pitch gasps that echoed around the rocky cove. Granger had no control over his body. Coughing and retching, he was towed like a rotten log onto the rocks. His foot was nearly cleaved in half. The big toe hung by a shredded mass of bone and glistening blood-splattered tendons. Shards of white pierced the skin like broken threads in a hemline; each one created a dimple of dark blood. 

Someone rolled him onto his side. Aiming his face at the horizon, he was forced to lay helplessly, layered under the clothing of the others meant to stop the violent shivering rocking his body. Over the pink froth bubbling out of his mouth and nose, he could see the gray waves like wolves nipping at the sky, attempting to bring it down. 

Beneath his ear, a sound was forming. A gravely rumbled that seemed to roll straight out of the depths. The lake was laughing at him. 

"Lena, where's Rory?" Abel shouted from behind Granger. 

"I don't know. I can't find him!" Lena was crying as she drew another breath and went under to look again.