“No. Nobody’s been by this morning,” Jack said, as though he were translating his friends’ silence for the newcomer. Jack spoke into the dirt and sand, still unable to look back up at the man and the dried booger.
“Maybe last night. After bedtime, I guess. Since midnight or so,” the shirtless man said with the shrug of a solitary shoulder. “I don’t know. She got up in the middle of the night, said she had to pee. I went back to sleep. It’s so damn hot. When I woke up a little while ago to get ready to climb back up”—he gestured toward the canyon wall—“she wasn’t around. I just walked down to the toilets by the river and…I hiked around a little down there looking for her, and…”
His words hung in the parched air. Almost everyone focused on the word “hiked” and glanced down toward the man’s feet, at least for an instant. He was wearing a faded pair of once-but-no-longer red, beat-up, worn-heeled, drugstore flip-flops. His footwear argued that if he had hiked around near the river at all looking for the woman, he had hiked around only a little. The scorpion population alone rendered the Grand Canyon floor terrain ill-suited for protracted journeys in ninety-nine-cent flip-flops.
“She wasn’t down there,” the shirtless man continued. “I mean, I couldn’t find her anywhere. Can’t. I…um…was hoping she might’ve come over here at…some point. Looking for…I don’t know. She’s friendly, maybe to say hi, whatever. If you’ve seen her, you know?”
When no one responded to his meandering queries, he shrugged apologetically, as though his own suggestion about what might have happened to the girl since she’d wandered off to pee in the middle of the night didn’t make sense, even to him.
“Don’t think so,” one of the women—Jules, half of the couple from Santa Monica—replied. “Anybody see her this morning? Hear anything?”
No one responded. She turned to her boyfriend. “Eric? You see her?”
Eric was stuffing his backpack. “No,” he said.
“She and I were—We partied a little last night. Maybe too much,” the shirtless man added, grinning at the memory in a way that caused his nose to move and the dried booger to crack. The lower part began hanging from his nostril by a snotty, elasticized thread. He swiped at it as though it were a fly buzzing in front of his face—he knew something was there somewhere that shouldn’t be, but he wasn’t sure precisely where or what. “At least I did. You know how it goes sometimes?”
Jules said, “We partied a little bit last night too. We were back and forth to the river all night, kind of saying good-bye.”
Eric, whose physique compared favorably to the shirtless man’s, turned to Jules, his girlfriend. He whispered, “Do you know which girl he’s talking about?”
Jules’s ponytail of long blond hair picked up every ray of spare light in the dark canyon. Even in full sun, her hair was the kind of blond that evoked silver almost as much as it did gold. She furrowed her forehead. “You don’t?” she asked.
He lowered his voice, and said, “Do you?”
She didn’t whisper her reply. She said, “Curly brown hair. Pretty eyes. My height.” She pressed her lips together for a moment before she repeated, “Very pretty eyes. Green, surrounded by…amber.” She twirled a finger in front of her. “We said hi yesterday evening on the trail. Down there, on the way to the beach.” She pointed toward one of the paths that led down toward the river from the cabins. “After dusk. We talked for a little while. Where we’re from, what we did, that sort of thing. She seemed…nice. She has an accent. She said she’s from, what, Latvia?”
“No…Estonia, I think,” said Kanyn, one of the students from Oxy. “It’s on the Baltic, near Russia, she said. I talked to her too, about the same time you did, Jules. She is friendly. Nice.” She nodded. “And great eyes, definitely. Gorgeous.” Kanyn couldn’t look at the shirtless man either. The snot.
The shirtless man said, “Estonia, yeah. That’s her. She is… friendly.”
The group exchanged glances. Some surreptitious. Some not.
TWO
His Ex, Merideth
If anyone else I knew from the old days in Boulder had died, Adrienne would have picked up the phone to let me know that something awful had happened.
She, not Alan—my ex-husband, Alan Gregory—had been the one who had called and ordered me to “Sit down, damn it,” before she sobbed out the news of her husband Peter’s murder so many years before.
Her harbinger duties weren’t limited to death announcements. Adrienne called to inform me when Alan had a serious new sweetheart, and later on, that the sweetheart had become his wife.
Adrienne knew that I would want to know that the loving couple was pregnant, and later, that they had a healthy baby daughter they’d named Grace.
Adrienne would start each of the news-from-Colorado-involving-my-ex-husband conversations with something like, “Do you really want to know this, Merideth? I don’t have to tell you. I don’t. Say the word and I’ll ask you about work, or the weather, or if you’ve found one decent man in New York City. We can talk about something girly. I can do girly. Not for long, but…Or I could bitch about something here. In Boulder, I mean. July? January? The damn chinooks? The Broncos? I don’t like any of them.”
I’d reply that of course I wanted to know what was going on in Alan’s life. Why wouldn’t I? Then Adrienne would tell me whatever it was she had called to tell me and my heart would get plucked like one of the long strings on a harp.
Adrienne was my only enduring link to my Colorado past.
She and I had always been perplexed by some of the same things about Boulder. Neither of us had ever been able to understand the local populace’s insistence about forgoing motors and using muscles—jogging, biking, cross-country skiing—to ascend the local mountains. Nor had either of us ever comprehended Boulderites’ inclination to squander free weekends and precious holidays wandering off into the wilderness, pitching tents, squatting in the woods, and generally pretending they didn’t have houses.
We were both baffled by women we knew in town who were more interested in a new backpack than they were in new earrings.
But beyond our addresses—we’d been across-the-lane neighbors—and our shared editorial critiques about the local mores, Adrienne and I had little in common.
Personality-wise she and I couldn’t have been less alike.
Still, Adrienne and I were. We endured. Despite the differences, despite the distance, and despite the years, she and I continued to exist as something. Friends? Sure. Not buddies. Not…girlfriends. Not like my girlfriends here, in New York City or L.A.
Adrienne and I could never have gone shopping together. Not for fun. We’d never be eager to show each other the new shoes we just bought. I would never think to call her to go out to a bar for a recreational flirt with the latest crop of I-bankers from Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Never.
What kept us connected?
There was part of me that thought we had stayed in contact because we had the natural attraction that outsiders feel for one another. As neighbors in Boulder, we catalyzed each other like the components of epoxy. When we touched, we stuck.
In the mile-high air of Boulder, each of us had been an outsider. She was the shoot-from-the-hip, New York–raised, Jewish urologist living in the always-hip, ever-progressive, but-be-careful-what-you-say Peoples’ Republic of Boulder.
Me? I was a Left-Coast princess in a mountain paradise that, alas, did not appreciate royalty.
At least, non-Buddhist royalty.
Adrienne didn’t call with the news of the latest death.
It was her diminutive body that had gone still.
It was her irreverent laugh that had been quieted.
No one from the old crowd bothered to assume her role. No one remembered that I’d been forgotten. No one thought to tell me that my old friend had died a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time death from a senseless bombing outside a café in an Israeli Mediterranean resort town. I was left to learn about Adrienne’s end while I was
scanning the AP wire when I arrived at my office at the network where I worked in Midtown. I noticed a familiar name in a follow-up story about a recent bombing in Israel.
After reading the wire report of the new developments, and then rereading her name—I must have checked it five times—I cried alone at my desk in my office until my assistant asked me if I was all right. I wondered at the time if I had stopped weeping because my assistant had intruded upon my sorrow, or if I had stopped weeping because someone had finally noticed that I was so sad.
For other people it might have been a small distinction, but for me it was an important one. It was important, too, that I was asking myself the question at all, and that I was unsure about the answer. The very fact that I recognized there was a difference—between the desire to grieve privately and the desire to have my sorrow acknowledged publicly—was significant to me.
It’s silly, but that I knew there was a difference was a sign of my growth.
I was changing.
Alan used to quote Confucius to me. He’d say, “Confucius said the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second-best time is now.”
I’d wasted energy back then doubting whether the quote was really from Confucius. My growth had been a long time coming. Ten years sooner would have been a more ideal time for my development. Even five years sooner would have been good.
Since Alan hadn’t called, I didn’t know whether he expected I’d come from New York to attend Adrienne’s funeral. Or if I’d show up at the reception. Or even whether he had given me a solitary thought since the bombing.
I wanted him to acknowledge that I had lost a friend, too.
An old colleague from Denver’s NBC affiliate—it had been a CBS horn when I was there—had e-mailed me about the memorial service that was planned for Adrienne in Colorado. Her note said that her ex-husband—he was an oncologist in a big group in Denver’s northern suburbs—had known Adrienne through the Boulder medical community. My old coworker knew that Adrienne and I had once been neighbors, and she thought I would like to know about the service.
The woman had been trying to get the hell out of the incestuous Denver news market since her divorce, and she was hoping that my gratitude might assist her in finagling a producing gig in New York or California.
Her ulterior motive didn’t bother me. I knew what to expect from the business I was in. They call them networks for a reason.
Although I’d been back to Colorado—I adore Aspen and Vail; who doesn’t?—I hadn’t set foot in Boulder between the two funerals, the earlier one for Peter, Adrienne’s husband, and this one for Adrienne.
I take responsibility for my antipathy for the town. I’d never really made room in my heart for Boulder. I had expected Boulder to first make room for me.
The informal gathering after Adrienne’s funeral was scheduled to be in the house where my ex-husband and I had lived during our brief marriage. The cottage—that was Alan’s quaint counterportrait when I described the house where he was living when we had first met as a “glorified shack”—had been built prior to the Depression as the caretaker’s dwelling for a decent-size ranch. The frame home sat near the top of a western-facing slope in Spanish Hills on the eastern rim of the Boulder Valley. On a clear day—most of them were clear days, at least meteorologically—Alan and I could look out almost any window and see an expanse of the Rocky Mountains stretching from Pike’s Peak north to Rocky Mountain National Park, and from the Front Range foothills immediately behind Boulder all the way west to the glaciers that frosted the Continental Divide.
I loved to stand beside our guests as they inhaled that vista for the first time.
Showing off our ramshackle house had never been an option.
Adrienne and her husband, Peter, had lived up the hill across the lane, only a few dozen yards away. Theirs was the big house, the one the founders of the ranch had built a hundred years before. It was the house I coveted.
I had always imagined that the architect had conceived a lovely turret for the southwest corner of the two-story farmhouse. A wraparound covered porch would have been a perfect perch to take advantage of the expansive views toward Chautauqua and Eldorado. I suspected that the homesteaders had either lacked the vision or had been too modest to construct the signature element. The result of their timidity was that the prime corner of Adrienne’s house was a blunt, windowless expanse of intersecting planes.
I picked up a car at DIA and drove straight from the airport to the gathering in Spanish Hills. So many people were already at the reception that cars—okay, it was Boulder, mostly SUVs—lined the familiar dirt lane halfway back to South Boulder Road. I had to park a few hundred yards away.
The hike to the dead end of the lane wasn’t pleasant in heels. Boulder or not, though, I wasn’t about to attend a memorial service in anything else.
I spotted Alan and his black-lacquer-haired wife on opposite sides of their new great room seconds after I’d walked in the door. The renovations they’d done made the space feel familiar yet foreign. I thought they could have benefited from a more imaginative architect and a better designer.
Or maybe any designer. They actually had a pool table—with burgundy felt—in the center of the dining room.
I weaved through the crowd—the place was packed—toward the western-facing windows without turning my head even a few degrees. I didn’t want to be sidetracked by anyone I knew before I made it to Alan. He was standing near the sliding door that led from the living room to the long deck on the mountain side of the house.
My ex was facing away from me, leaning forward slightly. He was involved in a conversation with a woman whom I thought I recognized but I couldn’t place.
I paused behind him and waited for a few seconds. Alan had always had a thing for women’s scents; I thought he might pick up mine. I hadn’t changed perfumes since before we were married.
He didn’t notice. I waited until a break in his conversation before I said, in a quiet voice, “Hey. It’s Me.”
Me.
THREE
Her Ex, Alan
Jonas had been my son for mere days.
Jonas’s father, Peter, had been murdered years before, when Jonas was a toddler. His mother, Adrienne, my dear buddy and neighbor, was so recently deceased that the depth of the loss I felt at her absence still crept nightly into my restless dreams.
Jonas had been by his mother’s side in Israel when a terrorist’s bomb exploded. He had witnessed her death and that of their Israeli cousin. Once they had finished healing, two shrapnel scars—one long straight one that ran almost the entire length of the bone on Jonas’s left shin and another one shaped like the letter L on his left forearm—would be permanent reminders of what had happened to him that day.
Especially, what he’d lost.
In her will Adrienne had named my wife, Lauren, and me as Jonas’s guardians. Adrienne’s decision didn’t digest easily for either her long-dead husband’s family in Wyoming, or for her own distant family in New York, where Adrienne’s only sibling lived with his wife and two sons. Her brother made it clear during a phone call on day three—days one and two, for me, were spent in shock as I flew to Tel Aviv to retrieve my traumatized stepson and his mother’s remains from Israel—that he considered the idea of his nephew becoming the child of “strangers” to be incomprehensible.
Lauren and I were the “strangers” that brother Martin was dismissing. The reality was that Jonas had lived yards across a dusty lane from us since the day he was born. Other than his parents, and maybe one or two luminescent pearls in a long string of forgettable nannies, he was closer to no one than he was to us.
Although we were anything but strangers to Jonas, we were strangers to Martin. And that, apparently, was what was most important to him as he maneuvered in the shadows cast by his sister’s death. I forced myself to try to find some empathy for Martin’s position. It wasn’t hard to do.
Martin, however, made it hard to hang on to.
Adrienne had been estranged from her family, who had questioned every choice she’d made since she’d decided to attend medical school. When she had shown an inclination for biology in college, they had been hoping she would become a radiologist or a pharmaceutical researcher, certainly not a clinician. When she made it clear that she had a passion for patient care, they switched tracks and made it equally clear that they thought she should become a dermatologist. They had been appalled by her decision to become a urologist.
Adrienne’s take was, “Bottom line? They don’t like that I have a job that involves pricks. My mother won’t tell her friends what I do. She thinks I’m one step removed from being Hand-Job Judy.”
Although I’d been tempted at the time, I had never asked Adrienne about the eponymous “Hand-Job Judy.” I really wished I had. That provocative omission was a poignant addition to the long list of conversations I would never have with her.
The familial disappointment didn’t stop with career. Adrienne’s family didn’t like that Adrienne had fallen in love with, and then eloped with, a woodworker. A carpenter. They hated that she’d settled with him in the West in general, in Colorado specifically, and in Boulder in particular.
Over the years, Jonas’s only contacts with his maternal uncle and his family had taken place during visits East with his mother. Adrienne considered the infrequent trips to New York to be obligatory vacations, which in her unique shorthand she labeled “oblications.” Lauren and I kept an eye on the Boulder house while she was out of town. When the trips involved an oblication, the interludes were inevitably short and Adrienne always seemed relieved to return to her Spanish Hills home.
Martin flew west with his wife, a pleasant woman with lovely gray eyes and an unnervingly loud voice, to attend Adrienne’s funeral services in Boulder, and to come to my home to the reception that followed.
I was trying to decide if that trip counted as a family visit. If Adrienne had been around I knew she would have said, “Hell, no.” She would have considered her brother’s pilgrimage the ultimate oblication.
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