Descent Read Free

want to see your face.”
    SHE’D FOUND SOMETHING WHILE she waited for him, and now Caitlin walked back into the pines and Sean followed on the footpath, and soon they were surrounded by the white trunks of aspens. A subforest within the forest. The footpath wound through the aspens and delivered them all at once into a small glade, a sylvan grotto within which there stood, waiting for them, the Virgin Mary. Life-sized, bone smooth, purely white. Around her had been built a carapace of stones and mortar, the rounded stones like those Sean had cursed in the gully. Two fingers of her right hand, raised in a saint’s greeting, were snapped off at the second knuckle, giving her less an air of beneficence than of disbelief, as if she’d been sculpted in the instant before blood and panic.
    “Did you see that?” Sean said, pointing to the hand.
    “I know, right? Like Dad’s.”
    “What’s it doing up here?”
    “I’m guessing it has something to do with those,” and she pointed to a cluster of stone tablets rising from the ground like teeth, thin and chalky and pitched every which way.
    Next to the Virgin was a stone bench, and they sat down to drink water and eat waxy energy bars in the shade.
    “Who do you think they were?” he said, and she shrugged and said, “Settlers.”
    “Donner party,” he said.
    “Wrong mountains. Look, there’s a plaque.” She pushed scrub growth aside at the base of the Virgin to expose a bronze plate and its verdigrised inscription:
    Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,
    Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,
    In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace
    For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods
    And Praying before It,
    1938.
    “The right reverend,” said Caitlin. “I like that.”
    “What’s forty days of grace?”
    “I think it means you don’t have to pray again for forty days. Like a vacation.”
    “Maybe it means you’re safe for forty days. Like nothing shitty can happen to you.”
    “Maybe. Hand me my phone.”
    He groped into the pack and handed her the red phone. She checked for messages, then aimed it and took a picture of the shrine.
    A breeze came to stir the aspen leaves. The boy chewed on the energy bar and made a gagging sound and Caitlin told him not to eat it on her account.
    She raised an eyebrow at him. “Go ahead. I don’t care.”
    He hesitated. Then he tossed the energy bar into the pack and fished into the cargo pocket of his shorts and fetched up the big Snickers and began to peel back the wrapper.
    “Want some?” he said, and she took the candybar and opened her mouth as if to jam the whole thing in but then only clipped a little off with her front teeth. He ate the remainder in three great bites, mouth open, chewing and gasping. He took a long drink of water and caught his breath. He drummed his fingers on the backpack and stared at the Virgin’s fingers. Their mother believed in God but their father said they had to make up their own minds.
    “Caitlin,” he said.
    “What.”
    “Do you think Dad’s screwing around?”
    She leaned away from him, twisted at the waist, and beheld him from this new vantage.
    “What?” she said.
    “Don’t you think he’s been kind of weird lately?”
    “Dudley, he’s
always
weird. How do you go from that to
screwing around
?”
    Sean looked off into the woods. “I saw something. A while ago,” he said. It was at their father’s office, the steel building behind the house out of which he ran his contractor’s business. Sean had been there earning his allowance—cleaning, sweeping, putting away tools. But one of the chests had been locked and he’d gone back to get the key and the office door was open and . . .
    “And what?” said Caitlin.
    “And he was sitting there. And there was a girl.”
    “A girl?”
    “A woman. Sitting on his desk. And she was wearing a skirt.”
    Caitlin waited. “And what else?”
    “Nothing else.”
    “That’s all she was wearing?”
    “No—that’s all I saw.”
    “Jesus Christ,