Chapter 21
What Could Have Been
Maisie
The alpacas settle. Barnaby folds his legs beneath him near the porch steps, and Bartholomew follows suit in the shade. The light has shifted, the sun dropping toward the ridge, stretching shadows long across the yard.
Gram sets the wool in her lap. She picks up her mug, drinks, sets it down again. Her hands find each other in her lap, fingers interlacing, and I realize she’s steadying herself.
“I was twenty-three,” she says. “Just arrived back in Coyote Springs. Your grandfather was still in Tucson, finishing up his engineering degree. We weren’t married yet. Weren’t even engaged, though he’d asked twice and I’d put him off twice.”
She looks out at the ridge. The same ridge she’s been looking at for fifty years, maybe, from this same porch, in this same chair.
“I came out here because I needed distance. From Tucson, from the expectations, from a life that felt like it had been written by someone else.”
Oz is very still beside me, listening the way he listens to bodies. Completely.
“I used to walk the ridge at dusk. Every evening. The light does something to the desert right before it goes, and I wanted to be up there for it. That’s when I first saw him.”
She pauses. Her fingers tighten against each other.
“He was standing at the tree line. Watching me. I should have been afraid, but he had this way of holding still. Like he was more afraid of me than I was of him. Like he’d been waiting to be seen and wasn’t sure what would happen now that he had been.”
I keep my voice quiet. “What did he look like?”
“Like nothing I had words for. Tall. Thin. That pale green glow, but faint, like he was trying to dim it so I wouldn’t run. His face—”
She stops, and something in her expression fractures, just slightly, before she smooths it over. “His face wasn’t a human face. But his eyes were so careful. The way he looked at me. He looked at me like I was something to deserve. Not something to take.”
She’s silent for a moment, before continuing.
“We met on that ridge every evening for months. He was shy. Careful. He’d bring me things—stones with veins of copper, a desert tortoise shell he’d found, once an owl feather so white it couldn’t have come from here.
He’d set them on the rock between us and then step back, like he was offering gifts at a shrine. ”
She unlaces her fingers. Relaces them.
“He never touched me. We just talked. Or I talked, and he listened, and sometimes he’d make these sounds that weren’t words but meant something anyway.
I told him about Tucson, about your grandfather, about feeling like I was living in a house someone else had furnished.
He’d tilt his head and that glow would pulse, and I’d feel more understood than I ever had with anyone who spoke my language. ”
Oz shifts slightly. A small movement, barely perceptible, and I know he’s recognizing something in this story. The loneliness of it. The proximity without contact.
Gram’s jaw tightens. “Then the town started whispering. Something on the ridge. Lights in the dark. Livestock acting strange. You know how it goes—same stories they’re telling now, just fifty years earlier.
My father heard the talk. He was a practical man.
A rancher. He sat me down at the kitchen table one morning and told me people had seen his daughter walking the ridge at dusk, and they’d seen something following her, and he wanted to know if there was truth to it. ”
She picks up her mug again, then sets it down without drinking.
“I lied. Said I’d seen lights but thought they were campers.
Said I’d stop walking the ridge if it worried him.
He watched me for a long time, and then he said something I’ve never forgotten.
He said, ‘Whatever’s up there, it’s not for you.
Things that live in the dark want to stay in the dark, and you’re a girl who belongs in the light. ’”
Her voice stays even. Matter-of-fact. The same tone she uses for recipes and alpaca care and instructions for stain removal. But her hands are trembling, just slightly, against the mug.
“I went up that evening anyway. One last time. I told myself I’d explain. That I’d tell him why I couldn’t come back, that I’d make him understand it was about the town, about my father, about things that had nothing to do with him.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are dry, but something in them is raw.
“I couldn’t do it. I stood on that ridge and I looked at him standing in the tree line, watching me with that careful, careful face, and I opened my mouth and what came out was, ‘I can’t see you anymore.’ That’s all. No explanation. Then I walked down that ridge and never went back up again.”
She’s quiet for a moment. The light has gone amber, catching in the alpaca fiber, turning Barnaby’s coat to something golden.
“Your grandfather came home that winter. We got married in the spring. I loved him. I did. He was good and steady and he made me laugh, and we had your mother, and she had you, and I wouldn’t trade any of that.
But sometimes I’d look up at the ridge at dusk, and I’d wonder if he was still there.
Still watching. Still waiting for me to come back and explain. ”
She picks up the wool again, but her fingers move slowly now, without their usual rhythm.
“I never did. Too much time had passed. I told myself he’d moved on, found somewhere else to watch from. Or that he’d forgotten me entirely, which was easier to believe than the alternative. That he’d been up there all along, waiting for an explanation I never gave.”
Her thumb traces the curve of the felt in her lap, a small gray shape taking form.
“I always wondered if I’d made the wrong choice, staying away. And maybe I have, if the message Oz brings me is true.”
She looks at me. Her eyes are wet now, but she doesn’t wipe them.
I feel the words land somewhere deep. That fork in the road. The choice between the known quantity and the impossible thing. I know exactly how close I came to making the same one.
I’m about to say something when the whine of an electric motor straining against a dirt road cuts through the silence.
Then the golf cart crests the low hill, orange flag snapping, and Mrs. Pritchett is behind the wheel in full vest regalia, her sun hat casting a shadow wide enough to shade the entire front seat.
She pulls up beside my truck and steps out in a panic. “Bobby Crawford,” she says. Her voice pitches high and fast, the words tumbling over each other. “He was playing in the Cunningham mine shafts with his friends, and the floor collapsed in one of the lower sections. Bobby fell through.”
I stand up suddenly. “Bobby?” I almost tell her that’s impossible, that I saw him just this morning at the diner. That he was kind enough to greet Oz, and was nowhere near any mine shaft.
But that was this morning, and the day’s gone by fast.
Mrs. Pritchett continues. “Gary went in after him. He got partway down, and it collapsed further behind him.” She’s gripping the steering wheel of the golf cart like it might float away.
“The other kids ran for help. They found me first, and I’ve been trying to find anyone—” She stops, steadies herself with a visible effort.
“The shaft is too unstable. The timber supports are all rotting. One wrong move brings the whole thing down on top of them both. The county rescue crew is an hour out.”
Beside me, Oz’s colors flare. The muted gray of this morning burns away in a wash of deep violet, his posture going rigid.
I know what he’s feeling without asking. Two heartbeats growing faint. Lungs struggling against dust and diminishing air. The slow crush of bodies buried in rock.
Mrs. Pritchett notices. Her gaze snaps to him, taking in the sudden brightness, the rigid stillness, and her eyes narrow.
“Is he okay?”
I glance at Oz, who nods. We both know what needs to be done. “Oz might be able to help,” I say. “He can fit through spaces humans can’t. He can move without disturbing the structure around him. He can find them.”
Mrs. Pritchett’s mouth works. Suspicion and desperation war across her face, plain as text. A slime going into a mine to rescue people. How does she explain that to the town council? How does she write it up in her Neighborhood Watch log?
Gram stands. The wool drops from her lap, and her expression shifts from raw vulnerability to a harder practicality.
“The Cunningham shafts,” she says. “My father ran cattle near those when I was a girl. There’s a ventilation opening on the north side. Smaller, but it might give Oz another way in.”
Oz speaks. Quiet. Steady.
“I can do this. I can find them. I can bring them out or at least stabilize them until help arrives.” He looks at Mrs. Pritchett directly. “But I need someone to show me the way.”
I take his hand. I don’t tell him what to do. I don’t tell him to be careful. I just hold on, his surface warm beneath my palm, and then I turn to Mrs. Pritchett.
“Take us there.”
Mrs. Pritchett watches us. Her gaze moves from our joined hands to Oz’s determined colors to my face, and whatever she sees there makes the decision for her. She turns and climbs back into the golf cart.
“Get in,” she says.