The Water Keeper(70)
While Bones plays the happy-go-lucky grandpa everyone loves to love, he walks those mountains morning and night, and there isn’t a footprint or broken twig that gets past him. These are his sheep.
For lack of anything more creative, we used to just call it The Town. But somewhere in our first year of operation, one of the girls said something to change all that. She’d had a rough go. Through no fault of her own, she was taken from her home and sold as a sex slave. For two years she was traded around. Suffered horrors untold. To medicate, she took anything she could get her hands on, numbing the pain of the present and past and future.
Took us a while to find her. When we did, we airlifted her there. She stayed in ICU for two months. Bones took her under his wing, which I thought was amazing when we learned what she had endured. The fact that she would ever get within arm’s length of another man surprised me. But Bones is like that. Everybody’s grandfather. Or the grandfather they never had. Four years into her stay here, she’d graduated college—with a nursing degree no less—and taken a job in our hospital. Working with the girls. Nursing them back to life. She’d met a guy. Bones liked him. They’d set a date. She’d asked Bones to walk her down the aisle.
During the early years of The Town, many of the girls wanted to climb to the top of the mountain, which leveled out just above fourteen thousand feet. Problem was, most of them were in such bad shape or they’d been beaten so badly that they were months from being physically able to make the trek. So Bones and I bought a chairlift and had it installed. All the way to the top. It sits four across. We also built a cabin. Roaring fireplace. Espresso machine. We called it the Eagle’s Nest.
A few weeks before her wedding, this girl and her fiancé and Bones and I had ridden to the top and were sitting on the porch, sipping coffee, looking out across a view that spanned seventy to a hundred miles in most every direction. And as we sat up there, she started shaking her head. She said, “There was a moment in my life when I was lying in the darkness, a different man every hour, on the hour, day after day after week after month, and I felt my soul leave. Just checked out of me. Because to live inside me was too painful. I let it go because I couldn’t understand how anyone, much less me, would ever want to live inside me. Too filthy. Too . . .” She trailed off, just shaking her head.
Finally, she turned and looked at us. “Then you kicked down the door. Lifted me up and carried me. Here. And slowly, I learned to breathe again. To wake up and see daylight. And what I found with every day was that something in me stirred. Something I hadn’t known in a long time. Something I thought was long since dead. And that was my hope. Hope that somebody, someday, would see me. Just a girl. Wanting love and willing to give it—to give all of me. I had this hope that somebody would accept me without holding my past against me. Without seeing me as stained. As the horror. As something you just throw away. But somehow . . .”
She sank her hand into the snow resting on the railing. “Like this.” For several minutes she just cried in the arms of her fiancé. But it was what she said last that changed the name. Looking from Bones to me, she said, “I never thought I’d walk down an aisle in white. How could I ever deserve that? Not when . . . And yet, I am. I don’t really understand it, but somehow, in some impossible way, love reached down inside me, took out all the old and dirty—the scars and the stains that no soap anywhere would ever wash out. And love didn’t just clean me but made me new. And maybe the craziest part of that is how I see me.”
She held her fiancé’s hand. “It’s one thing for him to see me as I want to be seen. It’s another thing entirely for me to see me, and I want to see me.” She laughed. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see the freak. The maggot. The refuse. I see the new. Sparkling. Radiant. And I like her. I have hope for her. I think she’s going to make it. She is now what she once was . . . beautiful. A daughter. A wife. Maybe one day, a mom. If you only knew how impossible that seemed not so long ago.”
She waved her hand across The Town nestled in the valley below. “I cannot begin—” We sat in silence several more minutes. The temperature was dropping. I stoked the fire. She reached into the air in front of her, made a fist and returned it to her chest. Pounding. “I was there. Now I am here. Love did that.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I am free.”
So, while it may seem cheesy if you don’t know the story, The Town became Freetown. It worked in West Africa; why can’t it work in western Colorado?
Walking into Freetown is a bit of a homecoming for me. It’s there and really only there that I possess some sort of celebrity status. These girls know nothing of my artistic career. Sure, they read my books; they just don’t know I wrote them. They only know I’m the guy who kicked down the door. Some don’t even know that. So walking down Main Street can take a while. I love seeing their faces. Hearing the stories.
Sipping my coffee, the wind whipping around me as Gone Fiction split the water, I let my mind wander back to Main Street and the sound of freedom. Which is laughter.
One hand on the wheel, staring at water staring back at me, I needed the sound of that laughter. I would have given most everything I had to teleport all of us to Freetown in that moment. Just lift out of here and leave all this behind.
We motored south out of West Palm Beach into Lake Worth, Delray Beach, and Deerfield Beach. It was slow going but I had a pretty good feeling that whatever captain or captains I was chasing would not venture out into the Atlantic. The wind was blowing out of the northeast at greater than thirty mph. No captain in his right mind would take a pleasure boat out into that. Not if he wanted to keep the people on the boat. And my guess was that he desperately wanted to keep them on the boat and keep the party going. Even if it meant turtling down the IC.