“One sunny day, Mama woke me and told me to go for help before I was so weak I couldn’t make it.” Words poured from him now. Memories. Pieces of his heart and his mind he thought the long years had banished. “She told me she couldn’t come. There weren’t enough warm clothes for both of us. She stitched me into the few hides she had managed to tan. She had even made knee-high boots. She hugged me, told me she loved me. I walked for about a mile, and as the cold air cleared my mind, I realized that she’d given me all the food in the house. She was sacrificing herself. I couldn’t leave her to die alone. She was my mother. I rushed back... She was already gone, out into the snow. I followed her tracks and found her, frozen to death in her thinnest summer clothes...”

Elle broke down in tears.

“I brought her body back to the cabin. I placed her on her bed, covered her with blankets and set fire to the place.” Softly he said, “I wanted her to be warm at last.”

Elle’s tears hiccuped to a stop. “What about you? What did you do?”

“I stood there and watched it burn and figured I’d die beside her pyre.”

She stared, teary-eyed. “But?”

“The huge plume of smoke alerted the Forest Service. A helicopter came to see what was going on. They wrestled me onto a stretcher—I was both charred and frozen—and took me to the hospital. They recovered my mother’s fragile remains. In the spring, hikers found my father’s body still wrapped in the coat.”

“What happened to you?”

“I became a reasonably civilized human being who doesn’t go camping for fun.” He was not trying to be humorous. “Years later, I found a black-and-white photo of a disheartened woman who lived in the Dust Bowl and saw Mama as she was in that last year.”

“You keep a copy of that photo on your desk.” Elle had wondered why.

“It’s the nearest thing I have to a picture of my mother.”

And now she knew.

59

ADAM HAD NO MORE words to say. He waited to hear what kindly comment Elle would make, what platitude she would express.

Instead, in a prosaic voice, she said, “For a moment, when you said you were headed to oblivion, I thought you meant it was a place. You know. Like Gothic.”

He thought, then chuckled. “That does make a kind of sense.”

“I’d share my childhood story, but it’s probably not as wrenching as yours. Also, I don’t remember it.”

“Pretty sure I win the wrenching-childhood award.”