Ghost Washed

Chapter 1: Crystal Rock

The cicadas were making their increasingly shrill scream, as if I needed reminding that I was no longer in crisp Colorado. Through the humid haze tulip poplars towered like mountains, their light green canopy speckled with broad yellow leaves.

The latch on the black mail box that had absorbed a full day of scorching sun burned my fingers. Inside the oven the mail wouldn't give, stuck from its size and weight. But the return address on the heavy brown envelope stamped DO NOT BEND chilled me like jumping into a turquoise alpine lake.

Max McRary

87 Silver Moon Way

Pandora, CO. 81435

I ran up the steep driveway, almost unaware of breaking a sweat for the tenth time that day. Inside at the cool table I spread out my loot.

The hand-developed photographs he had promised were happening at last. I carefully freed the thick stack of expensive paper from its melting wrapper. And then I disappeared into the world of Pandora.

The recycled paper note in his casually precise writing read:

Star,

I hope these arrive before your camping trip—never know with Pandora time. Let me know what you think, especially with the one of Buck. Mari wants to hang it at Populus but I'm not sure I've got the light contrasting enough. Anyway, I'll be waiting at the cemetery for your call tonight...

your adoring fan,

Max

I honed in on the first picture. Silver light was catching my hair over a grin a mile wide as I posed beside the last phone booth Opal and I had painted for the town. The wildflower we had chosen to depict was the Brook Primrose, the star-centered flower I was nicknamed after. Although anyone else looking at this photo who knew me would have seen a happy girl at her creative summer job with her cute ten-year-old cousin for an assistant, I knew the desperate sadness behind the smile. That was before my last night in Pandora, the night Max and I said goodbye. For an entire six weeks.

Halfway there, I thought glancing at the calendar that insisted August was going to take her time ripening into September. The next photograph I already knew well, Opal's dark curls framing her face as she hung suspended in her favorite water fall. That was the thing about living on water time. If you chose to stay more than forty days like she and Max had, you got to do stuff like that while aging more slowly. But Water Time had its down side too. Vividly, the memory of saving Opal from being trapped in rubble beneath an abandoned mine made me shudder. Between never being able to leave Pandora without drinking the water daily for the rest of my life and applying to the art school of my dreams—which did not happen to be there—my head knew I had made the right decision even if my heart didn't.

Pandora was another world entirely and here was proof. I flipped anxiously through the slick images for what I really wanted to see. I passed a portrait of Buck, the Ute Artisan without whom I could never have rescued Opal. He was in his element, fly fishing beside the wide river reflecting enormous peaks surrounding the valley. The contrast between the sharp mountains and shimmering water was right on, but it was just like Max to humbly ask for my advice.

The photo I really wanted to see was the picture of him he had promised, the one I had taken on our last picnic at the highest falls streaming through a green basin.

I absorbed an image of the Welon clan, Mom's family posing at Populus, the restaurant Opal's Mom, my aunt Mari and her chef husband, Thomas, owned. I even found one of Heather in front of the one phone booth she had painted, the Butter and Eggs wildflowers covering the sides of the booth, reminding us to be careful of the wolf in sheep's clothing.