The Last to Vanish(28)
Trey took a deep drink as Celeste continued on, alone. We both watched as she disappeared behind the next switchback, swallowed up by the rhododendron. The sound of her footsteps quickly faded to nothing under the breeze rustling through the leaves.
He handed me the bottle. “She’s not worried? Being out here alone?” he asked.
“No,” I said, my back teeth clenched together. Celeste was stubborn in a way that did nothing to ease my concern. “She thinks the fact that she comes out here every day means that nothing can touch her. That just because nothing has happened before, nothing ever will.” I took a deep breath. Although we always warned our guests to go with a partner, Celeste rarely did. “After her husband died, she scattered his ashes on the mountain. She says she likes to start her day talking to him each morning, just like she always did. I guess she thinks it’s worth the risk.”
In truth, I sometimes felt Vincent’s presence out here, too, in the same way I felt him at the inn. I’d asked about him a lot when I first arrived, when the loss of him was still heavy, and recent, and I wanted to get to know him however I could. Celeste revisited the same stories, the same moments, until I could feel her memories as if they were my own: the first time they met, at a work event, when she had just started at the same design company, where he was an architect; the first time he saw this place, when they were still just dating; the fact that they couldn’t even remember whose idea it was to buy the land and build the inn, as if the thought had always existed, like magic. Listening to Celeste, I could picture him carrying a guest’s luggage effortlessly up the steps, could hear his deep laugh echoing through the lobby. But I found that over time, I got to know Vincent from his absence best of all.
When I arrived, I could still see his shadow in everything. His loss was tangible in the things that suddenly fell to disrepair. Vincent came into focus in these gaps, and I imagined him organizing the receipts, and sweeping the entrance, and straightening the picture frames that had fallen off kilter. All these tasks I picked up in his absence. I grew into the places that Vincent had left vacant.
“Well,” Trey said, “she’s a little intimidating, despite her size.”
I nodded, listening closer to the woods, trying in vain to track her back to the exit. “I think you’d have to be, to build this place from scratch and run it pretty much by yourself for thirty years.”
His eyes were narrowed, still watching the corner, as if she might be waiting there all along. “You know her well?” he asked.
I started walking again, felt Trey falling into stride. “She’s family,” I said. I always felt protective of her, admired her for what she’d created and everything she’d done for this place, and the people within it. Everything good about this place was because of her, and I wanted Trey to know it. She’d given me a home when I had no place else to go; her car when mine had died; a job when I’d needed one most. I knew, from the way people talked in town, that she’d done the same for others over the years. People thought highly of the inn primarily because they thought highly of Celeste herself.
We walked for a few more moments in silence before he continued. “What was it like, growing up here, with a town with this sort of history?”
“I didn’t.” When Celeste introduced me to the others in town, all she’d ever had to say was, This is Abby, Vincent’s niece, and nothing else needed to be said. “Her husband was my uncle,” I explained. “But he was older than her, and I didn’t know him growing up, either. They built this place together. I came to visit after he died. And then… I never left.”
“How come?”
The reasons one leaves, the reasons one comes… impossible to say which was the stronger. “Well,” I said, “I had just lost my mother.” By then, most of my friends had left for college, and the calls and texts had grown farther and farther apart, and even then, I didn’t feel there was anything to talk about, anything to connect over anymore. It was like we were living in alternate realities, and I couldn’t breach the divide. In the end, it wasn’t just my mother I had lost, but the momentum of my own life, the person I might’ve become, the others who I’d have made the journey with.
“I’m sorry.” He had stopped walking, and now he called out to me. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated, looking at me, like he understood.
I waved him off. “It was a long time ago.” And it wasn’t the same. There was no mystery to it: a diagnosis, a passage of time, a result. Not the ending I’d hoped for, but a definitive and permanent resolution. That’s not what had brought him here—that’s not what brought anyone here. It was the mysteries that drew people closer.
We were approaching a clearing, with a drop-off to the right, which would give him the first unobstructed view of the ridge in the distance. “Look at this,” I said, as if the open air, the looming mountains, could answer all his questions. The people you could feel out there, those who had come before. I imagined all of us stopping at this point, seeing the same thing, a moment that bound us all together, across time.
But he furrowed his brow and leaned forward, eyes downward instead—to the open air of the drop-off beyond the trees. “Who would hike this in the winter?” Trey asked, seeing something very different in the exposure. A missed step. A stomach-dropping precipice.