‘Not that there’ll be any. This is my land, and I keep it posted. Maybe when I wasn’t here people took advantage, probably used the path to stare across to where the Overlook used to be, but now I’m here, and I plan to stay. Thanks to Billy, I’m retired. Just another old mountain man. There are thousands of them between here and the Western Slope, growing their hair down to their asses and listening to their old Steppenwolf records.’
Now Alice stands at the foot of the grave and says, ‘Hey, Billy.’ It feels natural to talk to him, natural enough. She wasn’t sure it would. ‘I finished your story. Gave it a different ending. Bucky says you wouldn’t have minded. It’s on the same thumb drive you were using when you started in that office building. Once I get to Fort Collins, I’ll rent a safe deposit box and put it inside with my Alice Maxwell ID.’
She goes back to the fallen lodgepole pine and sits down on it, first taking the paperback out of her pocket and putting it in her lap. It’s good to be here. It’s a peaceful place. Before wrapping the body in a tarpaulin, Bucky did something to it. He wouldn’t tell her what, but he said there wouldn’t be much smell when the hot weather came back, if any. The animals wouldn’t disturb him. Bucky said it was the way such things were done in the old days of wagon trains and silver mines.
9
‘Fort Collins is where I’ve decided to go to school. Colorado State University. I’ve seen the pictures and it’s beautiful there. Remember when you asked me what I wanted to study? I said maybe history, maybe sociology, maybe even theater arts. I was too shy to tell you what I really wanted to do, but I bet you can guess. Maybe you even guessed then. I thought about it sometimes when I was in high school because English was always my best class, but finishing your story made it seem possible.’
She stops, because the rest of it is hard to say out loud even when she’s alone. It sounds pretentious. Her mother would say she was getting above herself. But she needs to say it, she owes him.
‘I’d like to write stories of my own.’
She stops again and wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. It’s cold out here. But the stillness is exquisite. This early even the crows are asleep.
‘When I was doing it, when I was …’ She hesitates. Why is the word so hard to say? Why should it be? ‘When I was writing, I forgot to be sad. I forgot to worry about the future. I forgot where I was. I didn’t know that could happen. I could pretend we were in the Bide-A-Wee Motel outside of Davenport, Iowa. Only it wasn’t like pretending, even though there’s no such place. I could see the fake wood walls and the blue bedspread and the bathroom glass in its plastic bag with writing on it that said SANITIZED FOR YOUR HEALTH. But that wasn’t the most important part.’
She wipes her eyes, she wipes her nose, she watches the white clouds of vapor from her exhalations drift away.
‘I could pretend that Marge – fucking Marge – only creased you, after all.’ She shakes her head as if to clear it. ‘Only that’s not right. You were only creased. You did write me that note and put it under my door when I was sleeping. You walked to the truck stop up the road even though the truck stop was back in New York and you went on from there. Are going on. Did you know that could happen? Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn’t last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it’s awesome. It’s everything. Because you can have things the way you want and I want you to still be alive and in the story you are and always will be.’
She stands and goes over to the square of earth she and Bucky dug together. In the real world he’s under there. She takes a knee and puts the book on the grave. Maybe the snow will cover it. Maybe the wind will blow it away. It doesn’t matter. In her mind it will stay here. The book is Thérèse Raquin, by émile Zola.
‘Now I know who you were talking about,’ she says.
10
Alice walks up to where the path ends at the knife-cut valley and looks across to the flat ground where the old hotel used to stand – the reputedly haunted hotel, according to Bucky. Once she thought she actually saw it, no doubt a hallucination caused by being unused to the thin air up here. Today she sees nothing.
But I could make it be there, she thinks. I could make it be there just as I was able to make the Bide-A-Wee be there, complete with all the details I didn’t put in, like the bagged glass in the bathroom or the stain, sort of like the shape of Texas, on the rug. I could make it be there. I could even fill it with ghosts, if I wanted to.