Dead Time

by Stephen White

  “It could be somebody’s life we’re talking about,” Carmel said.

  Eric’s voice was cold. “If we don’t get out of here before the sun gets directly overhead, it could be all of our lives we’re talking about. She’s not our problem. There’re plenty of other people down there to help that idiot look for her. You think you see something from here, then what—you’re going to run back down there only to find out she’s hooking up with somebody in one of the other cabins? You’ll have wasted a ton of energy and lost the best part of the day for making progress to get out of here.”

  Carmel was offended. “How could you say that? What if it were one of us who was lost? And what if one of us is the one who is supposed to find Jaana?”

  “‘Supposed to find—’ Never mind.” Eric wasn’t much of a fan of fate. He didn’t respond any further.

  The women on the lower section of trail continued to examine the canyon floor. So did Jack.

  Lisa resumed the monotonous climb behind Eric.

  Kanyn took a few tentative steps uphill.

  Depth of field was especially difficult to discern in the shadows. The hikers scanned the landscape below. Checked the narrow swaths of beach. Surveyed the twine-colored trails that cut into the sandstone and led into the side gorges of the canyon.

  Despite the fact that more than a hundred years had passed since John Wesley Powell’s first Anglo expedition moved down the canyon, human forms remained alien in the landscape. In the area away from the civilization created around Phantom Ranch, spotting visitors on the canyon floor was as easy as finding astronauts on the moon.

  At the campground between the ranch and the Colorado River, where Jaana should have woken up in a sleeping bag beside Nick, smoke snaked in a gentle ribbon from a stove. Someone would soon be starting coffee.

  One after another each said, “Nothing.”

  Jack said, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

  Carmel removed her wide hat. She said, “Me too. Could she have fallen into the river? Is that possible?”

  Eric and Lisa were directly above the others on a switchback. Lisa called down, “You guys should get moving. It’s not getting any cooler.”

  Jules glared at her.

  Jack said, “You know what? I’m going back down.”

  Jules hesitated. She looked up the hill at her boyfriend, then back down toward the river rushing through the canyon. Finally, she said, “I’m with you.”

  Carmel said, “I think Jaana needs my help too. I feel her calling.”

  The three turned downhill.

  Kanyn watched them. She stood frozen on the trail for a moment as the once-cohesive group split, some climbing, some descending.

  After another twenty seconds she took a step uphill.

  For almost a minute Eric and Lisa continued their climb up the wall.

  “Stop,” Lisa said when she looked back. “Eric, hold on. Some of them are going down. Look.”

  Eric stopped. Kanyn had resumed her climb. The other two women and Jack were making a gravity-assisted descent back toward the canyon floor.

  “Shit,” Eric said. Jules was among the descending Samaritans.

  “Let’s hold on here a minute,” Lisa said. “Let Kanyn catch up with us.”

  Eric stared down to the river for an extended period, then craned his neck back so that his eyes were pointed in the direction of the distant rim. It wouldn’t be long before the rising sun would be high enough to clear the edge of the canyon and become visible in the eastern sky. Hot would soon get hotter. He imagined the heat radiating off the dark rocks higher in the canyon.

  “I’m climbing out before I get fried by that damn sun. I don’t care what the hell anybody else does.”

  Kanyn caught up with them in two minutes. No words were exchanged before the three resumed their climb. Eric paused to allow the two women to pass him, taking up a position in the rear to contain the impulses of any more stragglers.

  The column stopped when it reached the turn of the next hairpin. They hadn’t stopped to look for Jaana, but rather to monitor the progress of the posse that had split off. The trio retracing their steps was approaching the network of trails on the canyon floor. Before long they would be approaching the oasis at Phantom Ranch.

  Eric abruptly pulled off his sunglasses and screamed, “Jules! Jules! Goddamn it, Jules!”

  His angry bellow sliced through the morning calm and the vehement echo followed instantly, bouncing fresh rage off the vertical faces of the gorge.

  “You have the fucking car keys,” he said. “Goddamn it.”

  He threw his hat down at his feet and kicked it. It levitated about eighteen inches before it floated down and tumbled over the edge of the narrow trail. It skipped and stopped and started again until it got caught on a rock outcropping about halfway between the switchbacks.

  TEN

  The three who continued the climb that morning were interviewed individually by the ranger coordinating the search at the North Rim. Eric was first. Then Lisa. Then Kanyn.

  When did you last see the missing girl?

  What was she wearing?

  What, if anything, did she say?

  Did you see her with her companion? Did they get along?

  Did you speak with her at all about her plans to come back up to the rim?

  What was her mood? Was she upset?

  Did she say anything about the guy she was with? Were they getting along?

  What did he say when he came up to your group this morning?

  Did he seem drunk? Angry? Worried?

  Did you see any blood on him?

  Before they reached the rim, Kanyn dropped back on the trail so she could speak to Eric privately.

  “Before? You said you didn’t see her,” Kanyn said. “The girl he was with. Why? I know you talked to her.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. Just after dark. Between the campground and the river.”

  “He asked if we saw her around bedtime. I didn’t.”

  “Still. You saw her.”

  “We said hello on the trail. That’s all.”

  “You weren’t on the trail when I saw you. You were back by the canyon wall. You were talking.”

  “Were you alone?” Eric asked her.

  Kanyn hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Could you hear?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see us. What you think you saw is not important,” he said.

  “If they haven’t found her, they’re going to ask us questions when we get up to the top, Eric. What are you going to say? You want me to lie about it?”

  “I didn’t see that girl last night. That’s what I’m going to say. If you say otherwise, I’ll say you’re mistaken.”

  “Why?”

  “There’re some things it’s better not to be involved in.”

  “You can just pretend something didn’t happen? How do you do that?”

  Eric didn’t respond at first. “I don’t know what happened to her, Kanyn. I can’t help them.”

  “Do you think he had something to do with it? Nick? The shirtless guy?”

  “Whatever happened, they’ll figure it out. The Park Service people. They’ll do what they do. Whether I saw her or not won’t change anything. And whatever you think you saw, I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken.”

  “I hope he didn’t do anything to her.”

  Eric said, “They’ve probably already found her.”

  He picked up the pace. She matched him.

  “Do you want me to lie, Eric?”

  He took a few more steps before he replied. “I’m going to tell them I didn’t see her last night, Kanyn.”

  “Do you want me to lie?”

  From above them, Lisa called out, “You guys are slowing down.”

  Kanyn let Eric pull ahead and catch up with Lisa.

  Aloud, to herself, Kanyn said, “Well, I saw her.”

  Jack, Carmel, and Jules had dumped their packs at the ranch and we
re nearing the boat beach on the Colorado to assist with the informal search for Jaana.

  Carmel pointed toward the canyon wall. “This is where we were last night. Did we see her?” Carmel asked. “Was that her with Eric? Was that Jaana?”

  Jack said, “I don’t know. I checked my camera this morning when we first got on the trail. Everything I took last night without the flash is just dark, dark, dark.”

  “Could it have been her?” Carmel asked. “Do you think?”

  “Could have, I guess. But it could have been someone else. That’s what I thought last night—that’s what we all thought last night. I don’t know about you guys, but I was a little buzzed by then.”

  “Lisa? Is that who you thought it was?” Carmel said. “She’s been all over Eric.”

  Jules said, “We all thought it was Lisa. I’m not saying for sure that it was, or it wasn’t. If it was, I think what we saw is between me and Eric.”

  “So you think it was Eric? For sure?”

  “Mel, this is between him and me. Let us handle it.”

  “Jules, what do you—”

  “I don’t know, Mel. It was dark. I’m not even sure it was Eric. I’m certainly not going to pretend I can identify a woman I only just met if I can’t even identify my own boyfriend.”

  Jack said, “It might not have been her, Mel. We don’t know what we saw. At least I don’t know what I saw. Not for sure.”

  “Can I see the pictures you took?” Carmel asked.

  “The batteries are dead. I can’t take anything. I can’t show you anything.”

  “You don’t think that was Eric we saw? I’m pretty sure—”

  “I can only say what I think I saw, Mel,” Jack said.

  “Jules, you’re a lawyer. Do you think—”

  “I don’t know, Mel. I just don’t know.” She turned and smiled. “Let’s just find her. Then none of it matters.”

  Carmel said, “Yes. Let’s go find her. Right now.” She hitched her pack higher on her hips and skipped twice down the trail.

  ELEVEN

  Her Ex

  The cast came off my hand in late June.

  A little more than a month later, Jonas and I were in New York.

  He was—against his wishes, and against my better judgment—a thirty-minute train trip away from New York City, spending a few weeks with his aunt, uncle, and two cousins in White Plains. I agreed to stay close by. We would spend a day together each week doing something fun.

  After checking to see what a hotel would cost for three weeks in New York City, I used Craigslist to find a sublet in Murray Hill, only a short walk to Grand Central. The woman renting her apartment to me insisted I pay for the full month she’d be gone.

  My landlord was a woman about my age named Ottavia Barbarini.

  Her apartment was a tiny—by Colorado standards—one bedroom, but it had a lovely view to the west. Ottavia explained how each year there were a glorious couple of weeks during which she could look down Thirty-ninth as the sun dropped straight between the long rows of buildings before splashing in slow motion into the Hudson.

  “Summer or winter?” I asked her.

  She recognized that, given the brief interval of my sublet, it was an important question. She laughed and said, “Sorry. You will miss it.”

  Based on my limited Craigslist experience I accepted Ottavia’s biased appraisal that my new sublet was a steal, but I also allowed that New York rules applied—I was paying the equivalent of a hundred and fifty percent of my monthly Boulder mortgage payment for three weeks’ use of about twenty percent of the square feet. I also knew I got the deal from Ottavia only because I was stupid enough to be looking to stay in Manhattan during a time when anyone who had the resources was doing his or her best to get out of the city to someplace where air actually moved, where breathing didn’t require that lungs do double duty as dehumidifiers, and where the myriad odors assaulting their nostrils weren’t stupefying in their complexity and general putridity.

  Ottavia was charming and funny. She spoke beautiful English, but her Italian accent—she said it was Sicilian—was spicy. I had to concentrate to understand her.

  She initially danced around my question about what she did for a living, but eventually revealed that she worked in a health ministry at the United Nations. She let me know she would be in the Canary Islands while I was in her apartment. She would be almost unreachable. “I have a mobile. I can get messages. I would rather not,” she said.

  My sublet fees were undoubtedly subsidizing her holiday.

  After she showed me around the apartment, she revealed the rules of our apparently illicit arrangement. When she stopped suddenly and turned to face me in the hallway, I found myself only inches from her.

  Her perfume was perfect. For five seconds I was incapable of noticing anything other than how good she smelled.

  “Don’t worry about the doormen,” she said, interrupting my appraisal. She made a motion with her hands that I couldn’t decipher. I guessed the gesture meant “They’re cool.” She instructed me that if the building super asked or if, God forbid, her landlord knocked at the door wondering what was going on, I was to tell them that I was her brother visiting from Champaign, Illinois. Under no circumstances was I to answer her telephone.

  I said, “You have a brother in Champaign? At the university?” I was making conversation.

  Her shoulders jumped along with her eyebrows. “I make one up. All my sublets are relatives from Champaign. Uncles, aunts, brothers.” She smiled. “No one here knows Champaign. They think France, wine. What are they going to do?”

  She meant her landlord, and her super.

  “I don’t speak Italian,” I said. “Will that be a problem?”

  She leaned toward me as if to share an intimacy. She was still smiling—her front teeth could have used a little straightening, her solitary physical flaw. “The war?” she said, comporting her face so that it held a bushel of dramatic confusion. I didn’t bother to ask which war, suspecting that was the point.

  “Say nothing more to them,” she insisted, making a gesture with her left hand that I translated as dismissive. Of her landlord, not of me. “Not a word. Not necessary. My landlord is in the Hamptons. He won’t come back to the city unless…Not necessary. No. I told them you were painfully shy. A serious…problem. You are on medicine.”

  “Medicine?” I smiled.

  “Sì.” She reached out and touched me above the elbow. She left her fingers there. I think she was pleased that she had sublet her apartment to a willing coconspirator. “You can move in two days if you would like. I leave tomorrow night. JFK. My holiday begins.” She laughed.

  Her laugh was like a song. I wrote her a big check.

  She offered to buy me lunch to introduce me to the neighborhood. She looked at her watch and frowned. “But quick?” she said.

  “You choose,” I said.

  “Pesce? Fish?”

  “Great.”

  “Bene. There’s a place in Grand Central.”

  After we ordered she took my Zagat guide from my hand and circled a few places she liked in Murray Hill, in the neighborhood near Grand Central all the way over to Times Square, and in the nearby Garment District. She told me which deli was good and where to buy groceries. When she asked me if I wanted any recommendations for clubs, I declined.

  She found that amusing. I explained vaguely about Jonas in White Plains.

  She glanced at my left hand. “You are married? Sì?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your wife is…?”

  “Traveling. In Holland.”

  “Ah, sì… And…non. I understand. And with your time here when Jonas—sì?—is away, you…?”

  You understand what? I thought. “I hope to get to know the city better. Relax. Kill some time.”

  Ottavia made a perplexed face. “You want dead time?” she said, struggling with the idiom.

  I was tempted to explain that her interpretation was more apt than she coul
d imagine. Instead, I said, “Something like that.”

  “I am in town for one more night. Then I leave.” She opened her hands as though she were releasing a dove. “You will be gone to Colorado—Boulder—before I get back.”

  She pronounced it “bowl-dare.”

  “Sì,” I said, unconsciously adopting the rudiments of her vocabulary.

  “This will be the only time we…meet.”

  She was describing an opportunity gained, not one lost. My next words could hardly have surprised me more. “I know almost no one in the city. Would you have dinner with me tonight, Ottavia?”

  Were my superego doing any monitoring—like the rest of me, it appeared to be taking August off—it would have noted that I had spoken without consideration, because any consideration at all would have stopped me in my tracks.

  Ottavia looked away. I thought for that instant that I might have misread her.

  “We will go downtown,” she said. “I know a place. Sicilian. More pesce. But for true.”

  Transit lessons over, lunch complete, we walked through the massive terminal out onto Forty-first. “Have fun here, Alan,” she said. “In the city. My home. I will leave with a safe heart. I know now I can trust you. That’s good.” She placed a closed fist between her breasts before she added, “Ciao.”

  She took off down the sidewalk to get to a bus or a different subway line. She walked away in that determined, head-fixed, gaze-set, long-strided way that is peculiar to solitary women in big cities. Half a block away Ottavia turned back, caught my eye, and waved. I was surprised that she’d looked back. But mostly I was surprised by the fact that I was still looking at her when she did.

  I’d been looking at her ass.

  Her face lit up in a laugh before she resumed her march. I assumed that her amusement was at my New York virginity. And perhaps at my extramarital virginity. In a few more seconds she was gone from my view, lost in the sidewalk chorus of Midtown.

  I pulled out my cell and checked the time. I’d see her again in less than six hours.

  I was looking forward to it.

  Holy shit, I thought.

  For the rest of the afternoon I wandered between Fifth and Times Square. I joined in the madness while the skyscrapers emptied and the streets and sidewalks filled with people hurrying or exhaling at the end of their workdays.