Lands and Forests

by Andrew Forbes

  Shona saw things a bit differently, I can tell you now. She once told me that anything that doesn’t make you happy can and should be jettisoned from your life; that she could be happy from the moment she woke up until she fell asleep again, and that her dreams should be pleasant, too. And every day that this wasn’t the case frustrated and upset her, made her look for things to change, in order to bring about a perfect state.

  It was for this reason, I think, that her sadness came dressed like anger. Whereas mine, when it came, was more of a sloped-shouldered resignation. I could not tell you, given our approaches, which of us was better prepared for all of life’s tiny assaults.

  ***

  One Saturday, we found ourselves in the car before dawn. Candace was wrapped in a blanket and strapped into her seat in the back. Shona, in denim and fleece, dozed in the passenger seat, her head resting on the window, padded only by a balled-up nylon jacket.

  We were following Mercedes and Joe and their kids out to the Imperial Sand Dunes. Joe said there was nothing like them. After an hour’s drive, he said, we could walk on the surface of the moon.

  The plan was to time a hike so that we could have a picnic breakfast and watch the sun come up over the dunes, then be back in our cars and headed home before the day’s heat really hit. We crossed over into California on Interstate 8, then followed Mercedes and Joe’s aging Chevy Tahoe north. Outside the car there was nothing. The world was confined to my high beams: a small, concentrated spray of light on the straight road, barren space just to either side. There were no businesses, no houses. It was blacktop and empty sand and nothing more.

  We came to another highway and followed it west. Before long I could see the Tahoe’s lights flashing staccato as Joe tapped the brakes. He pulled off the highway, onto the flat, sandy shoulder, and into a space marked by nothing but the tracks of vehicles that had been there before. He shut off his engine. There was nothing else around. No cars, no buildings, no people.

  The dunes ran in a sandy gash from the northwest to the southeast, from the Salton Sea to Mexico, a shifting ocean of sand, hillocks, and swales remade daily by the wind. At the southern end they were cut by Interstate 8 and crosshatched by a stretch of border fence. There, white SUVs patrolled and recreational off-roaders blazed. The area from where we had come, toward the northern end, off 78, was closed to off-road traffic. It was, as Joe promised, an alluringly desolate and lunar place.

  We were nearing the lip of day when we stopped. The light was just beginning to seep above the horizon, back over the way we’d come. Shona woke when I stopped the car. I opened the back door and spoke gently to Candace, to wake her.

  Mercedes was putting on a backpack while Joe let Annabel and Sonny out of their seats. Their faces were sleepy. Sonny held a little plush cat by the paw, dangling it. “We’d better leave Kit-Kit here,” Joe said to him, “so we don’t lose him.”

  “He can protect the truck,” Sonny said in his small, eager voice.

  “That’s right.”

  The air was dry and cool. Only a small breeze swept us, but you could hear it clearly, raking over the sand.

  Joe approached, a sort of backpack-cooler over his shoulders. “How was the drive?” he asked me. “Did Candace sleep?”

  “They both did,” I said, and Shona laughed. “It was great.”

  “There’s kind of a trail from here,” Joe said. “If we follow that for twenty minutes we should find a nice spot to stop and eat.” Then he turned to his kids. “Everybody hungry?”

  They nodded slowly. Annabel shyly slipped behind Mercedes’s legs.

  The trail, such as it was, was a narrow, dusty line somewhat beaten by shoe prints. We walked single file. Mercedes took the lead, then Joe. The three children followed, intermingling in a way that made me happy to see. Then Shona and me.

  Five minutes in and our shoes were filled with sand. It was remarkable, the way our feet would sink in only so far, then find something like firm ground. It was like walking on an enormous beach, I suppose, above the waterline, except there was no water. I could feel the effort in the muscles of my calves and hips. I walked with my head down.

  We paused and I had a chance to look up, back to the east. The faint pre-dawn light was leaking over the waves and dips of sand. There were no artificial lights, no signs of life, no vegetation save the odd lonely bush.

  “Just ahead,” Mercedes said. “There’s a kind of a slope over that way. We can put a blanket down and eat.”

  The spot she indicated was inclined toward the east, forming a natural theatre from which we might watch the day begin. The sand was cool and chalky. Mercedes pulled a rolled-up blanket from her pack and laid it out, and Joe slipped his pack off and unzipped it. The kids sat on their knees as he handed them juice boxes.

  We whispered when we spoke. I’m not sure why, except to say that it felt as though some degree of reverence was appropriate. When someone’s voice rose, usually one of the kids’, the sand had a way of swallowing the sound. Like snow does, I thought.

  Mercedes then handed out egg sandwiches and fried potato patties while Joe distributed the contents of a coffee Thermos. The sky lightened perceptibly as we sat and ate.

  “You have to admire that landscape,” Joe said, indicating it with his plastic cup of coffee.

  “It’s such a strange and beautiful place, isn’t it?” said Shona.

  The kids were standing, twirling on their feet in the sand, corkscrewing themselves downward, filling their shoes.

  “There’s more coffee if you want it,” Mercedes said.

  It was a nice moment, sitting there anticipating the sun. Every once in a while the wind gave the smallest gust and kicked grains of sand against our cheeks. The smell was something I have trouble describing, something between charcoal and warm pavement. A grand moment was coming and we didn’t want to miss it. But neither was there any particular hurry. We were at rest, among easy company. The only sounds were of a bit of wind, our sparse chatter, the voices of our children.

  An orange wedge suddenly appeared above a tall ridge of dunes.

  Joe stood. “Welcome to Saturday,” he said.

  Molten smudges of light began pouring over the horizon and running toward us, and the wedge quickly became a ball. It was an incredible sight. It looked like the beginning of the world. Or the end of it, I suppose.

  I swallowed my coffee and stood next to Joe, one hand on my hip. Shona stood, too, and put her arms around my waist. “God,” she said. “I’m no morning person, but Jesus.”

  “How do you feel now about being woken up so early?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, “totally worth it.”

  The sun lit us up as it sprung up over the sand. I could feel the air getting warmer immediately. Everything was on fire. A cauldron from the earth’s heart had been tipped and its contents were flowing toward us. We were of the morning. And then we were in it. The day breaking over the world was enormous.

  “Candace,” I said, “are you watching? Do you see the sun coming up?”

  I wanted to share it with her, hoped maybe to create some memory: that time we watched the sun come up over the Imperial Sand Dunes.

  She did not answer me.

  “Candace?”

  Nothing. I don’t know if it requires having a child of your own to imagine my terror. I suspect it does. Think of it: your child there, and then gone.

  “Candace,” I said again, trying to moderate the panic I knew had crept into my voice. I turned fully around and saw only Annabel and Sonny. “Where is Candace?” I said, not at all calmly, though I knew I ought not alarm them.

  Shona’s antennae picked up all this, and she said, “Oh Jesus. Candace! Candace!”

  “She can’t have gone anywhere,” said Joe. “There’s nowhere to go around here. Look. There’s nowhere.”

  He was right, but there was also no Candace. We fanned out and began turning in circles, all of us except the other children, who stood with their hands to their mou
ths and their shoulders balled up, afraid.

  I looked at Annabel and Sonny. “Did you see her?” I asked.

  They shook her tiny heads no, their eyes growing wider with fear.

  “Candace, baby, where have you gone to?” said Mercedes.

  I could not imagine where she could be. There were no trees, no rocks—nothing, as Joe had said, to hide behind. Had the sand swallowed her up? Had something silently carried her off? I felt my body go cold, my limbs and digits taking on a numb rigidity at precisely the moment I needed them to be most agile.

  “Candace!” I shouted. “Candace!”

  I broke into a run, away from the blanket, away from the rising sun, which I could feel on my back and shoulders. It was the only direction to go, since I had not seen her in front of us, and the trail was clear in both directions. I ran west into the nothingness, my knees high, the sand pulling me downward. Shona ran behind me, calling to Candace, calling to me.

  I stopped running a moment, just to breathe, and had an instant of strange clarity. I could see beyond my own life, to a time when we no longer existed, a time when all we were and all we’d had was lost, when all that was left was the air and light encircling us. I don’t know what brought it on, except that strange landscape, and the thought of my daughter being gone.

  I snapped back to the immediate world when Shona called my name again. I turned and saw she’d fallen and was reaching down to her right ankle. She had misstepped, found something beneath the surface of the sand, and turned her ankle over.

  “Shon,” I said.

  She sat kind of crumpled in the dust, lit from behind, her head haloed by the sun. She was taking these sorts of hiccupy breaths and her hair was strung across her face.

  “Baby,” I said, “I can’t help you right now. Stay put there. You’re fine.” And she looked at me quizzically, her cheeks reddened with pain, and likely her vision gone a bit soft. “I have to find her,” I said.

  And I did not help Shona to her feet.

  The moment didn’t need to be a significant one. I see that now. I might even have seen it then. But I chose to make it significant. Willed it to be so. Made of it an opportunity to plainly display the order of things, the hierarchy I planned to defend and reinforce in my life.

  Shona, I’d said with my eyes and with my actions, you are wonderful, but you will never be anything close in importance as my little girl. And if that isn’t acceptable to you, you can rest there in the dust eternally, for all I care.

  And in the hurt way in which she looked at me before I turned my shoulders away from her, I saw that Shona understood all of this, as clearly as if I’d spoken it.

  I continued on toward my own long shadow, calling my daughter’s name. Wandered for many more minutes. I turned back, only once, to see that Shona had gotten to her feet, unsteadily.

  I kept walking toward the west until I came to a small ridge. There was a dark space beyond it, a cool depression that I hadn’t seen until I was right atop it. It was perhaps twenty feet across, and nearly as deep. Just a little hole in the dunes, caused by who knows what.

  And down there, in the bowl of sand, sat Candace. She lay curled in the bottom of it, untouched by the sun.

  “Candace, baby!” I shouted.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  I heard the voices of the others calling my name now.

  “Here,” I called. “She’s here!”

  I slid on my heels and my palms down the side of the bowl and then crawled over to her. I grabbed her and pulled her into my chest.

  “Candace, baby, are you okay? What are you doing? We’ve been calling you.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “My God, I thought you were lost.”

  “I was just here,” she said.

  The others appeared at the rim, looking down at us.

  “She’s all right?” Joe asked.

  “She’s okay,” I said.

  Mercedes said, “Oh, thank God.”

  “Look, Dad,” Candace said, indicating the walls around us, “it’s like a fort.” She was not in the least bit distressed.

  “You scared the wits out of me, baby. Don’t you wander off like that.”

  “I wanted to see how far the sun got,” she said.

  “Come on out,” I said.

  With some effort, and some help, we climbed out of that depression and back up to where the sun was.

  Shona was hobbled. She held her right heel off the ground and was putting her weight on her left.

  “Sorry, Shon,” I said, nodding at it. I was apologizing, at least partially, for something other than her physical injury. We both felt that.

  “I understand,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”

  Because what else was there to say?

  She put her arm over my shoulder and I helped her walk slowly back toward the blanket. There, I helped Joe and Mercedes gather the breakfast things, and then we went back up the trail to the cars.

  We were different people, suddenly. The children, even Candace, carried on as though nothing had happened. But Mercedes, I could see, was a bit shaken by what had occurred. She watched her two with an extra bit of alertness.

  As we walked, Joe said to me, “Bit of a scare, huh, Russ? You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “All’s well.”

  Shona grunted a bit as she put weight on her foot.

  We drove back east. The rim of the world was aflame. The road was on fire. The hood was on fire. I squinted and pulled down the sunshade, before finally putting my faith in geometry—in the road’s straightness across the earth’s gently curved face.

  Candace peppered us with questions such as “Where are the animals?” and “What’s under the sand?” I tried my best to address them with short answers, in order to preserve the overriding silence, which I felt was the only thing keeping Shona from beginning an uncomfortable conversation.

  Shona rode with her right foot up on the dash, looking out the window at the brightening world.

  When Candace’s questions tapered off and then stopped altogether, I felt a tightness, a hesitation. Quietly panicking, I sped up and passed Mercedes and Joe. It was an act of aggression and desperation, and I was sorry for it even as I executed it. It was as if I were attempting to speed away from what had happened, as though if enough distance was traversed in a short enough period of time I could reverse the events of the morning thus far.

  I turned on the radio and found a classic rock station from California, its signal cascading over the dunes and the tarmac and into the rising sun. On came the opening salvo of “Seven Wonders” by Fleetwood Mac. It came over me like unearned relief. I turned it up, way up. We looked out our respective windows—Candace, Shona, and me—and were overwhelmed by the song’s shimmering cocaine opulence, its incandescent beauty. A certain time, a certain place, cooed Stevie Nicks. I have trouble conveying just how at odds the song was with the mood within the car, but I relied on it to buy me a few more minutes of non-conversation.

  When it was over, a commercial began and Shona reached for the knob. She turned the sound down and said to me, “I didn’t know you liked Fleetwood Mac.”

  “I believe that everybody, somewhere within themselves, loves Fleetwood Mac,” I said.

  I wondered then what made me the person I was. I felt unhooked from almost everything I had ever known.

  Once home, Shona took some painkillers and sat on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on her ankle, sipping tea and checking her phone.

  “Anything I can get you?” I asked her.

  “I’m fine, Russ,” she said. There was a flatness to her that I couldn’t miss.

  She had an evening shift at the Red Lobster, which I welcomed. I thought it would give us a bit of time to pull back from a precipice. I helped her wrap the ankle up tight so she could walk on it. She popped a couple of Advils and pulled her stockings over the bandage.

  “You sure you’ll be okay?” I asked her.

  “Sure. Just have a bottle
of wine waiting for when I’m done,” she said.

  “You bet I will,” I said.

  ***

  It was nearly midnight when she got back. I’d had a quiet afternoon and evening with Candace. We’d had hot dogs for dinner, and when I put her to bed, she went down quickly. Then I turned on the TV, flicked around, grew bored, and switched it off. I opened some wine, lay in the dark with the bedroom window open, and finished the bottle, just thinking, just talking to myself. I dozed off, woke, dozed some more.

  Shona stood in the bedroom doorway. “Russ?” she said.

  I started awake but tried to pretend I hadn’t been asleep.

  “Just lying here, baby,” I said. “How’d it go? How’s the ankle?”

  “I got through it,” she said. “I’m gonna hop in the shower now.”

  I lay a little longer in the dark, listening to the running water and the usual outside hum of traffic and dogs, then walked to the kitchen and took a wineglass off the shelf for Shona. I opened another three-dollar bottle of California red, filled her glass to the brim, sipped a bit off, and carried it to the bathroom. I knocked gently, too gently for Shona to hear it in the shower, and pushed the door open.

  “Hey there,” I said, so that I wouldn’t startle her.

  “Hey, hey,” she said.

  I pushed the shower curtain aside and poked my head in. She was slick and red, the water running in a hundred different streams all down her body. I looked down at her ankle, which was red and puffy and would turn purple and black the next day. Then I looked back at her face. She frowned theatrically. I handed her the wine.

  “Thank you,” she said, and took a big gulp, then handed it back to me. “Just gotta wash my hair.”

  I put the glass on the counter and walked out, back to the bedroom.

  She came out many minutes later, wrapped in a towel. “I just had one of those moments, you know,” she said. “When you kind of don’t know how you got here?”

  I was lying on the bed in the dark again.“Got here?”

  She switched on the little bedside lamp. “Like, Yuma. What am I doing here?” And she laughed, to show me she wasn’t sad or angry.