Dead Time

by Stephen White

  “I always have opinions. Wisdom? That’s a longer shot.”

  “I’ll accept your opinions and hope for some wisdom. Is that fair?”

  I’d convinced myself that if I made dinner into a fact-finding mission and didn’t try to get Amy talking about herself, then I wouldn’t flirt, and this wouldn’t be a date.

  But then again, earlier that day I’d convinced myself that an avatar was living in the dashboard of my rented Camry.

  By the time I’d finished explaining what was going on with Merideth and Eric and Lisa and Stevie, our food had started to arrive in a series of small portions that landed like sets of waves. Amy had moved on to an Oregon pinot noir. I hadn’t.

  Amy’s first question to me about the situation was, “And this is why you’re in Los Angeles?”

  “I think.” To fill in some background, I offered an abbreviated version of the Adrienne and Jonas and Marty story, and the day trip with Merideth to Strawberry Fields. My agreement to help Merideth. Wallace’s concern about his daughter. When I was done I asked, “Any thoughts about Lisa’s disappearing act?”

  She ignored my question. “Where is the rest of your family? Your wife and daughter? While you and Jonas were in New York? While you are here?”

  “Lauren and Grace are in Amsterdam. That’s another…very long story.”

  She nodded as though she understood something. She kept her eyes on mine. She sipped her wine patiently. I realized that she was waiting for me to tell her the long story.

  I didn’t want to.

  She said, “Why do you care what I think? About the surrogate?”

  “I don’t know. Lisa—isn’t that much older than you. I was wondering if there is some…generational influence at work in all this that I’m not aware of.”

  “Generational?”

  “Different worldview. I’m continually surprised at how much changes.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “I’m constantly surprised at how much doesn’t. Music changes. Movies change. People? Not so much.”

  She put down her glass and picked up her fork. After a few seconds she set the silverware back down and lifted her wineglass again. She cradled it in both hands and leaned toward me. Her elbows were on the edge of the table, her face not far from mine. “You’re what, ten, twelve years older than me?”

  “Around there, I guess.” I’d been thinking fifteen.

  “Is that a generation?”

  Good question. “Maybe.”

  “I was raised to keep my promises,” she said. “To fulfill my responsibilities. I don’t think those are generational-specific values. Not among my friends.”

  I felt chastened. “You’re right. Absolutely. They’re not. I don’t know what I was thinking. I apologize.”

  She sat back again. “I wouldn’t have made the decisions Lisa made. To be a surrogate? I couldn’t do that. I admire her generosity, but…it’s not something I could ever do. But if I were carrying someone else’s baby, I would feel an absolute responsibility to let them know where I was at all times. Loaning your womb to someone? That’s an incredible gift. But it’s also a pretty sacred trust. Goes both ways, of course, but…unless Lisa is a callous person—which is hard to believe about a surrogate—if I were in your ex-wife’s shoes, I would be much more worried than angry. I can’t imagine not staying in touch with the baby’s parents, so I’m assuming that if Lisa’s not in touch, she’s not able to be in touch.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I wasn’t looking at things through a clear lens. I should’ve been able to get there on my own.”

  I thought she was done with the topic. I was wrong. “Being a surrogate would be way too much of an anchor for me. I haven’t had a relationship that lasted nine months since high school. I have to follow the work. Especially if I want to direct. Vancouver. London. New York. Wherever.”

  “Relationships are—”

  “For later,” she said.

  “Now?”

  She sat back. “I hook up when I feel a need.”

  The brash intimacy surprised me. “That’s enough for you?” I said.

  “Enough what? Sex?” She shrugged. “Depends on the frequency. Enough romance?” She sighed. “Can’t afford it. I won’t sleep with guys who make my heart go flip-flop. Way too complicated. Enough companionship? Girlfriends and gay guys are easier for that. Usually better, too.”

  “You never want…more?”

  “I always want more. Of everything.” She looked at my ring again. “You do too.” She waited a few seconds for me to untie my tongue. “Everything in its time. Sometimes it’s lonely. I get over it,” she said. “We all make choices.”

  Kanyn delivered a couple of guys who were a little older than me to the table beside ours. They kissed before they sat down. Kanyn turned to Amy. “Working through the backlog. You two need anything?”

  Amy said, “You and Mel have a friend named Jack?”

  Kanyn’s face became a mask. “What did you hear?” she said.

  I could see in Amy’s eyes that she recognized the peculiarity of Kanyn’s reply. “Nothing,” she said. “Mel…went to the Valley. She’s worried about Jack.”

  Kanyn forced a smile. “I’ll call him. See what’s going on. Gotta go.”

  We finished our meals in silence. We both declined the waitress’s offer of dessert. I paid the tab when Amy excused herself to go the bathroom.

  Kanyn wasn’t at the front desk when we left. On the sidewalk outside Amy asked, “Is tonight about your ex-wife and this Lisa? Or is it about your current wife and me?”

  “Maybe I was…I don’t know…You asked. I said yes.”

  She froze me with her eyes. “I think you’re attracted to me,” Amy said. “Maybe we should talk a little about our first date.”

  “Our first date?”

  “The one we just had, Alan.”

  I somehow forgot how easy it was to breathe.

  She leaned in close. Her face was inches from mine. “See how it happens?”

  “What?

  “We’re this close to hooking up, Alan.” She held up her hand and extended her fingers. The space between her fingertips was much narrower than the gap between my lips.

  THIRTY-THREE

  His Ex

  I called in sick to work. I haven’t called in sick to work in five years.

  I always hated it when he got constipated. I’m talking about Alan, when we were married. And the constipation in question had absolutely nothing to do with his bowels.

  I played it cute on the phone with him about staying at my condo, not desperate. I teased him. I didn’t complain. I didn’t push. Mostly, I didn’t whine. But I felt desperate.

  I did all the things that used to work with him when we were together, but I still couldn’t even get him to tell me where the hell he was going to dinner.

  Or more to the point, with whom.

  Fifteen minutes after he hung up on me to go off to his dinner meeting I realized—Jesus Effing—that I was still waiting for him to call me back and get reasonable. Want to know why I left him? Put that near the top of the list—too many hours wasted waiting for him to be reasonable.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Her Ex

  The call during dinner hadn’t been from Merideth. My cell’s missed-call log registered the origin of the incoming call simply as PURDY. That would be Sam. He hadn’t left a message. Sam seemed to have given up caring about people tracking our telephone habits. That was progress.

  I was sitting on the balcony of Merideth’s condo, facing vaguely west, as I tried to decide whether I wanted to return the call. I’d grabbed a bottle of water from the almost-barren refrigerator. To my left an insistent string of landing lights from descending planes—they dotted the sky at intervals like illuminated pearls—marked out the approach from the desert toward the runways at LAX. I followed the lights of one plane until it landed, allowed some room up the coast for the expanse of Marina Del Rey, and guessed that my seat on Merideth’s balcony was
facing almost directly toward Santa Monica.

  I couldn’t see the beach. Couldn’t even discern a clear line where the lights of Santa Monica ended and the opaque Pacific began.

  I returned Sam’s call.

  He said, “Hi. How’s L.A.?”

  “A little hazy. Not too hot. How about the Grand Canyon?”

  “Definitely too hot. Short visit. I may need to fix the AC in the Cherokee. Ended up going to Vegas. Talked to a guy.”

  Sam was feeling cryptic. Experience told me this would be a short call. I said, “That’s where you are now?”

  “No, I’m halfway to L.A. Got some news. Want to hear it?”

  “I’d love to hear what you thought of Las Vegas.”

  He ignored me. “I’d never given much thought to the Grand Canyon before I got there. I figured it was the result of some grand cataclysmic event. The earthquake of all earthquakes. The fault of all faults. A geologic Super Bowl, that kind of thing. But it was just erosion. Water on stone for a gazillion years. Life going by, drop by drop. Rain. Floods. Lots of floods. But no major drama. Hard to imagine when you’re standing there on the rim looking down at the biggest damn gash in the entire planet, but…it was all just erosion.”

  I wondered where he was going. “Yeah?”

  “You and me? I think we’ve developed a tendency lately to look for drama. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “This is a metaphor?” I said. “We should be looking for erosion?”

  “Be open-minded. You’re supposed to be open-minded. You want my news?”

  “Please.”

  “Nothing earthshaking from the Grand Canyon”—he laughed at his own pun—“but there’s a lot to the investigation of that girl’s disappearance that never made it into any of the newspapers,” he said.

  “Tell me,” I said. I found myself settling in, awaiting Sam’s story the way that I liked to sink into the sofa on Friday night with Lauren as we got ready for a long-anticipated DVD.

  Sam had spent less than a full day at the North Rim.

  He had a way with people. Although he was big enough and tough enough to be physically intimidating when he felt it was in his best interest, he was also capable of using his solid prairie roots and intuition about people to charm strangers.

  “Aren’t that many people who have gone permanently missing at the Grand Canyon,” he said as prelude. “That was another revelation. That, and the erosion thing. You see the canyon from the rim, it looks like the kind of place that swallows people the way Canada eats hockey fans. I thought there’d be a thousand stories about folks vaporizing down there. But everybody who works for the Park Service can tell you the names and histories of the few people who vanished down there and have stayed vanished. Say that missing girl’s name to any of the park rangers, they know what happened, and most of ’em have theories about how it all came down.”

  Within an hour of reaching the North Rim, Sam befriended a National Park Service ranger named Ramona Marks. She was a woman about his age who had unofficially inherited the task of wet-nursing the mystery of what happened to Jaana after she vanished. Whenever a hiker or a rafter or another ranger discovered a suspicious personal artifact downstream of Jaana’s last known campsite, Ranger Ramona—that was what Sam was calling her during our conversation—was the Park Service officer who checked the latest find against an inventory she kept close at hand of what it was known that Jaana had been wearing or carrying the night she vanished.

  Sam described Ranger Ramona as being “tall like Lucy”—his partner on the Boulder police force—but having “a stronger frame.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but that he described her at all got my attention.

  Ranger Ramona had eagerly retrieved the thick investigatory file about Jaana’s disappearance for Sam and sat beside him as she walked him through the records that documented all that had been done initially by the Park Service to find the woman after it was determined she was missing. Sam noted a couple of peculiarities. First, at a time when law enforcement was going digital, almost all the initial reports were handwritten. Second, Sam spotted a marked change in enthusiasm and resources for the search after the second day. He mentioned his appraisals to Ranger Ramona.

  “First one? Ranger running the search didn’t like computers. Handwrote whatever he could. Used to bitch that he came to work at the canyon because he didn’t like technology.” To explain the second, Ramona pulled out topo maps of the section of the canyon near where Jaana was last seen and explained to Sam about slot canyons and natural drainages, about nonabsorbent soils, about the end of the heat wave, and the return of the monsoons. Most important, she explained about the stalled thunderstorm and flash flood that had hit the Bright Angel Creek drainage thirty-six hours after Jaana had been reported missing. She described to Sam what flash floods looked like on the canyon floor, showed him photographs of the damage they do.

  Ramona made it clear to Sam that if Jaana or her body had ended up in the river the night she disappeared—even if she were initially in an eddy—she was probably dead by dawn. If it turned out she was injured or incapacitated on dry land at any elevation that was close to the river that night, and if she was still there when the flash flood hit thirty-six hours later, the water that flowed out of Bright Angel Creek and the nearby slot canyons—along with the mud and rocks and crap captured by the torrential flow when it reached the Colorado River—would have carried Jaana’s body miles and miles downstream.

  From the moment the flash flood roared from the Bright Angel Creek drainage, she explained, there was no point in continuing to focus a ground search on the riverbed adjacent to the Colorado River where Jaana was last seen alive.

  “What do you think happened?” Sam had asked Ranger Ramona. “You know the canyon. You’re interested in what happened to the girl. You’re smart. You obviously know the case. I’m thinking you have a theory.”

  Sam told me that he thought Ramona’s reply was reluctant, which piqued his interest. “One of three things happened to Jaana Peet that night,” she said. “She had an unfortunate accident—maybe she was careless, maybe she was stupid, or maybe she was just unlucky—and she ended up in the river or down some cliff, and we’ve never found any sign of her body. Or…somebody hurt her and she ended up in the river or down some cliff, and we’ve never found any sign of her body. Or…she climbed out of the canyon by herself in the dark, which is why we’ve never found any sign of her body.”

  “That’s it?” Sam had asked.

  “She’s not still down there, living in a cave—not anywhere near that campsite anyway, if that’s what you’re wondering. You been down to the canyon floor? To the river?”

  “No. Like to. But I haven’t.”

  “I’ll take you down on my next day off.”

  “Wish I could, Ramona. Don’t have time this trip. I’m on the clock. For that producer?”

  “Rain check?”

  “Rain check.”

  “It’s not too hospitable down there, Sam. Magical, yes. Life-changing. Magnetic. Otherworldly. Erotic, even. But it’s not too hospitable. Especially in the summer. She went missing just about this time of year. But it was hotter. Twenty-five degrees hotter than it is today. A legendary heat wave. Near one-twenty for highs during the days. People still talk about that week every time we get a little bit warm up here.”

  I stopped Sam at that point in his story. “The Ranger described the Grand Canyon as ‘erotic’?”

  “Got a problem with that?” he asked me.

  He was daring me to have a problem with that. “No,” I said.

  Sam had pressed the ranger about her theory. “From your list of possibilities of what happened that night, you ever settle on a personal favorite, Ramona?” Sam asked. “Something that feels okay to you? Satisfying. Lets you sleep when you put your head on the pillow at night?”

  “What’s most likely is what I said first. People underestimate this canyon and this river in ways that never cease to amaze. They walk
right up to a big warning sign that says don’t do this, they take two more steps, and then they do it. They track down a ranger for advice about how much water to carry if they’re taking such and such a trail down from the rim, and then they carry half as much. They listen to all our advice that says only well-equipped hikers who are highly experienced in the backcountry should take this trail to the floor or try that route to the river, and they head right off and buy a pair of brand-new hiking boots, put on some shorts and a T-shirt, get a daypack, stick a couple of liters of Gatorade, some gorp, and a granola bar in it, and off they go.

  “This is not forgiving terrain. The weather can change in a heartbeat. A little mistake about where you stand to get a better view or how far you step off the trail to see exactly where you’re heading next—I’m talking one extra step in some places, Sam—a rock gives way, gravity intervenes, and seconds later you’re a thousand feet or four thousand feet farther down the canyon than you had planned. Before your brain even has a chance to recognize that you screwed up big-time, you’re dead, half the bones in your body busted into kindling.

  “It’s true up here on the rim. Hell, I could walk you to places right close to here where people just fell off the edge of the damn canyon while they were taking snapshots to put on their refrigerators. It’s true when you’re halfway down the North Kaibab—and that’s one of the easier trails to the floor. People think a maintained trail means a safe trail. Not true. And that river? Might as well be a people-trap.”

  “The rim part I understand. The weather part I understand. The canyon trail part I understand,” Sam told her. “But the river part? I don’t get that. Why’s the river so dangerous? Other places, people fall in rivers all the time. I’m from Minnesota. We have rivers. People fall in. They fall in drunk, even. Most of them…live. If it’s not winter.”

  Sam said that at that point Ranger Ramona went into a well-worn rap: “Since they built the dam fifty years ago—the Glen Canyon Dam—the Colorado is no longer a natural river. They release water from Lake Powell to keep the river flowing. What they let out of the lake is pulled from the deepest water that backs up against the dam. Deep water is cold water, even in the desert. So the Colorado runs cold here, year round. The outside temperature on the banks of the Colorado might be near a hundred twenty degrees, like it was the year Jaana vanished. The water in the creeks that feed from the side canyons might be pleasant. But that’s all natural flow. Most of what’s in this whole section of the Colorado is getting dumped out of Lake Powell at a pretty constant fifty-eight degrees.