What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  Back in the tack room, Carly picked up the next saddle and tried to do better as she saddled T. Rex, her favorite. Great-Aunt Rae saddled three horses in the time it took her to saddle one.

  Just then the guests arrived, spilling out of a rental car, big smiles on their excited faces. Carly watched as Great-Aunt Rae shook their hands and welcomed them, then pointed them to the pile of saddlebags and gave them some time to transfer their belongings. The guests’ excitement was contagious, and Carly smiled in spite of herself. She was going to get paid to do something other people paid a lot of money to do. Quickly, though, she dialed that smile all the way down to obligatory politeness so she wouldn’t show Great-Aunt Rae too much enthusiasm. After all, she still wasn’t completely sure how this was going to go.

  “Okay, kiddo, time for a quick driving lesson,” said Great-Aunt Rae.

  “I already know how to drive,” said Carly. “I’ve had my license for almost two years now.”

  Great-Aunt Rae laughed. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said as she walked into the barn and placed her hand on the chuck wagon. “This handles a little differently than your parents’ car, so I suggest you take me up on my offer to teach you how to drive it.”

  Unable to stifle a chuckle, Carly smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  In a nearby stall stood two black Clydesdales Carly hadn’t seen before. Rae clipped ropes to the bottom of one’s halter and led him out. The other tried to follow, but she said, “Not yet, Drake.” She handed the rope to Carly and said, “I just got these two last year since Mr. T is getting old and I didn’t want him to have to work this hard. Their official names are Frankenstein and Dracula. Ugh. I wish everyone would just name their horses ‘Buddy’ and call it good. I would have completely changed their names if they weren’t already nine, but since it’s a little late in the game for that, I call them Frank and Drake because animals perform better without negative names.” Great-Aunt Rae began to put all kinds of straps all over him, and though Carly tried to make some kind of sense of the order of things, she could not. As if reading her mind, Great-Aunt Rae said, “Don’t worry about learning how to harness them. I’ll do it for now. It’s a fine art.”

  When the harnessing was done, Great-Aunt Rae stepped up onto the bench in the front of the wagon and motioned for Carly to sit next to her. Then she gave the reins a little flick and called, “Ha!” It seemed like with a command like that, the horses should have shot out of the barn like bullets, but instead they simply plodded forward with no drama.

  Once out of the barn, she pulled back on one set of reins and turned them to the left and then to the right. “Not so complicated, right? Not a steering wheel, but not so different from riding. To stop, pull back like this. Ho!” Handing the reins to Carly, she said, “Now, you try.”

  It took Carly a few tries to flick the reins in such a way that Frank and Drake responded. When they walked forward calmly, she felt victorious. She turned them to the left, then turned them to the right, and then stopped them just like Great-Aunt Rae.

  “Well done, Carly. Now, that all seems pretty easy, and it is. But horses are horses, so freak things can happen. Say they smell a cougar or a bear and decide to run. You can pull back, but since they’re each about fifteen times larger than you, you’re probably not going to outmuscle them on a good day and especially not in a panic. Nonetheless, pump the brakes like this because that’s your best chance. You can also try it one hand at a time so they think about turning this way and then, oh, no, now you’re asking them to turn that way, and then this way and that way, back and forth until they’re so confused, they stop. Worth a shot. If this happens on a straight road with no large areas to turn them, try to just hang on and keep them on the road. Eventually, they’ll get tired. If you run them up to a fence or something in hopes of stopping them, they may stop suddenly, sending you flying, and you may land where they can trample you. If you turn them too sharply, the wagon may roll. That would be bad for everyone involved. You want to be able to turn them into a wide circle until they calm down, but that’s rarely possible when you need it most. Out here, you are going to have a hard time sticking to the bench, should you decide to leave the road at high speeds. The really good news is that I’ve only had this happen twice in my lifetime, so the odds of it happening to you in the next two months are slim. When we go out, you’ll be driving behind the riders, so I expect there will be no problem. Should something like this happen, other riders will bring their horses under control pretty quickly and Frank and Drake will want to stay with them instead of strike out on their own. But again, this is all very unlikely.”

  Unlikely. A lot of things were unlikely. A mom with breast cancer. A gene mutation. The Oklahoma City bombing. They were all unlikely, and they all happened. Pump the brakes, hang on, and try to stay on the road. Carly wasn’t sure there was any value in this advice because what she knew to be true was that it didn’t actually matter what anyone did. Life was more or less a crapshoot. It could deliver all kinds of unlikely things. And when they happened, some would live and many would not. At the end of the day, that’s the way it was. It reminded her of a video game where she tried to stay alive, the one where she’d made it to the eighth level only once. She would try to stay alive, and she might make it to her eighties if she was really lucky. But at some point, the game ended. It just did. There was no “unlikely” to that. It was certain.

  She flicked the reins again and drove the horses down to the road and then back, because even though disaster was inevitable, as it turned out, there was no choice but to move forward. It was what people did.

  Amy

  The next morning, Amy poured lukewarm water from her thermos into a bowl of instant oatmeal and into a mug of herb tea. She had gotten hot water from a gas station the night before while fueling up. It had seemed like a good idea, but as she choked down her oatmeal and water, it became clear she was going to need a camp stove. A camp stove, a pan, and a fat foam pad for the back of her car. Her back, hips, and shoulders all hurt from her eight-hour attempt at sleeping. The bright side was that it distracted her somewhat from the pain in her abdomen.

  She walked down a trail to the river, then crossed it. Walking uphill toward the dunes caused pain deep in her vagina and below the incision near her left hip where the camera had been inserted. Still, she pressed on until she found a spot on the east slope of a dune, where, bundled in a coat and hat, she lay back in the early morning sun, closed her eyes, and tried resting. After some sweating, followed by the removal of her hat, she fell into a light sleep, enough to recharge her for the day ahead.

  By the time she woke, the visitor center had opened, so she stopped in to buy four postcards and stamp her little book. As she pressed the gold ink onto a select spot in her copy of Passport to Your National Parks, she smiled. If her dad were here and still himself, this would make him so happy. Maybe it still would when she returned and showed him.

  On one postcard, she wrote, “Dear Dad, I just stamped my passport book here at Great Sand Dunes. You probably don’t remember giving it to me. That’s okay. I just wanted to thank you for it and for teaching me to love the national parks and for being my dad. You were a wonderful dad. Do you remember being a park ranger? You were really great at it. I love you always. Your Younger Daughter, Amy.”

  To Aunt Rae, she simply wrote, “Thank you for taking my girl under your wing and helping her heal. I sure do love you. Amy.”

  Carly was harder to write to. There was so much she wanted to say, but every single word seemed risky, as if it could push her away forever. “I wish I knew how to help you through this difficult time. I love you and I miss you. Wishing you great adventures. Mom.”

  And then, there was Paul. She had no clue what to write to him. “Wish you were here”? No. That was a lie. She didn’t wish he was there, and she had no idea how to write something normal to him when nothing was normal. In fact, just writing to him felt like a lie in itself because she didn’t want to. She wa
s tired of pretending that everything was okay, and now that her survival didn’t depend on it, she didn’t have to. No, she didn’t have to even pretend long enough to send a postcard. She tucked it into her purse, then addressed and stamped the others and dropped them into a receptacle before she got back in her car and headed toward the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

  * * *

  After nearly five hours, Amy turned off the highway and drove up the road to the visitor center for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Along the canyon rim was a sparse forest of mostly ancient junipers, twisted and gnarled like the hands of old women reaching toward the heavens. It felt good to Amy to be among them, but it was nothing like being dwarfed by the ancient trees closer to the coast.

  The Black Canyon itself was every bit as twisted and gnarled as the junipers, strata in the canyon walls as random as abstract modern art. She had read that this gneiss and schist was some of the oldest rock on earth. The very rock she was looking at used to be almost a mile underground. How remarkable that something she saw as so static, as stable as the earth itself, could move so much. She thought it was something she could count on, but she should have known better. After all, she had seen the aftermath of Mount St. Helens just a month following its eruption back in 1980 when they had returned to Washington after her freshman year of high school. Still, this notion that she was floating on pieces of the earth’s crust as it slowly shifted always astounded her. Stripes in the canyon walls contained newer basalt, from where magma had crept into the cracks of the ancient gneiss when it had been far below millions of years ago.

  She walked along the rim for a little bit, pondering how little it mattered that shifts happened so slowly that they were imperceptible. In the end, the ground under her feet shifted, whether it was the earth or the foundation of her marriage or her very life. Everything in nature changed, both things that were alive and things that were not. How foolish she had been to ever think things could have stayed remotely the same or even on the same trajectory.

  She found a place to perch where she looked down on the slightly iridescent blue of the black wings of white-throated swifts, which flew acrobatically below her. While she knew birds didn’t have human emotions, she wondered whether they did experience some kind of happiness, because they appeared happy. If they experienced, say, the stress of avoiding predators and the stress of enduring cold weather, wouldn’t they enjoy the times when living was easier? Sometimes two individuals flew together, flirting, perhaps, before parting ways, watching from afar, and singing. Then, as if on cue, they would do it all over again, coming together and drifting apart. Maybe that was part of nature too. It was possible that if she waited long enough, she and Paul would come together again. Yes, it was possible, she knew, but she sure couldn’t imagine it.

  Back at the visitor center, she stamped her passport book and wished she could share this moment with her dad. Perhaps she should have taken all the risks that would have come with taking him out of the care facility and bringing him along. Surely the part of him that had awareness would have enjoyed these places. But then she remembered how scared he was of her the last time she visited, how unkind that visit had been for both of them. The reality was that taking him on this trip would not have followed the script she had in her mind; it would have been even more unkind than the visit.

  * * *

  “Hi, Dad,” she had said with a polite knock before walking into his room.

  Startled by her bald head, he shrieked. Then he barked, “Who are you?” accusingly.

  It was the first time she had visited him after losing her hair, and she marveled that she had made it this far, really—that she had gotten out of bed, showered, dressed, walked out the door, and driven. Each step had been a huge accomplishment. Physically, she did not feel great, but emotionally, she felt even worse. It was real now. Being bald made the cancer so real. She could no longer have moments where she pretended it was all just a bad dream. The whole world could see what she was going through. It was her new identity. The days when people looked at her and saw a beautiful woman were over. Now, they looked at her and saw a cancer patient, a reminder of how tough and scary life could get. And she hated that—hated reminding people of their own mortality or of the loss of someone they had loved. It felt like being a dark rain cloud that ruined everyone’s day.

  But this moment was far worse. Until now, her dad had always recognized her after a few minutes or, on a bad day, after a little while. Now, he couldn’t.

  “Dad,” she said firmly, “look at my eyes. It’s still me. I have cancer. My hair fell out because I have cancer. It’s still me. Your daughter. It’s still me.” But there was no recognition. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over. “Please, Dad. Please don’t abandon me right now. I need you. Please recognize me. I’m sick and I need my daddy. It’s me. Amy. Your daughter.”

  The combination of her baldness and her crying agitated him. “I don’t know who you are, but you have the wrong person. I’m not your dad. I don’t know who you are. You should go. You should go find your dad. I’m not him.”

  She paused for a moment and covered her mouth, still hoping that he would see her underneath all of her baldness, see her and recognize her, still hoping he would recognize her voice, maybe. “I am Catherine’s daughter. You used to be married to her. I am Alicia’s sister. I am your daughter.” She knew better. On every other day that he hadn’t recognized her instantly, she had simply sat quietly next to him and played backgammon. Eventually, something sparked a memory within him, one from long ago. Today, she had been too desperate for that, and now she was going to pay the price.

  “I know who you are…,” he said, and for an instant she dared to hope he did, despite the darkness in the tone of his voice, because she just wanted him to hug her so badly. She just wanted to crawl right up in the arms of her daddy. But then he said the worst thing. “You’re an alien, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on TV. Well, you’re not going to kill me!” With that, he hopped out of bed and threw a cup of water on her. “Somebody! There’s an alien in here trying to kill me!”

  Sobbing, she turned and walked out his door. The young nurse rushed in to calm her dad while the grandmotherly one embraced Amy and said, “Alzheimer’s is the cruelest disease. It really is. His brain is all haywire, but his spirit still loves you. I promise, it does.”

  Unfortunately, there was not one single ounce of big girl left inside of her. She had used it all up being brave on so many recent occasions—every diagnostic appointment, her first chemo, the day her hair fell out. “I want my daddy,” she cried, sobbing onto the nurse’s shoulder.

  And the nurse just cooed, “Oh, sweet girl. Oh, sweet girl,” because sometimes there were just no words. No words at all that could fix anything.

  She knew she couldn’t go back—not for a long time, if ever. If he was still alive after her hair grew back, maybe she would try again, but until then, she couldn’t see how it was kind to either one of them to do that again.

  * * *

  Even though she couldn’t imagine writing to Paul, she bought four postcards anyway.

  “Dear Dad,” she wrote on one of the postcards. “You would love the white-throated swifts here that fly in the canyon below. I’m on an adventure back to Mt. Rainier to come home to the places we loved. On the way, I’m visiting other parks and monuments. I wish you were with me. You would love this. I love you. Love, Amy.”

  “I hope your reunion with T. Rex was wonderful,” she wrote to Carly, “and I hope you’re having fun. Love, Mom.”

  To Aunt Rae, she wrote another thank-you. After she addressed, stamped, and dropped them in the receptacle, she inquired about available campsites in the park and learned there were none. The ranger asked questions about her plans and then enthusiastically encouraged her to consider Colorado National Monument, just a little farther to the north. “National monuments are some of the best-kept secrets,” she said. “It’s beautiful there. I promise you won’t b
e disappointed.”

  Nearby, in Montrose, she stopped at Walmart and picked up the camp stove, pan, and thick foam pad she had wished for the night before, along with more food and a box knife to cut the foam down to size.

  A bakery caught her eye before she left town, so she pulled over abruptly and ordered a sandwich. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but that didn’t matter because there was no one else’s needs to consider. All that mattered was that she was hungry now.

  With time to kill, she checked her phone more out of habit than a true desire to hear from anyone. Paul had sent a text: Thinking of you. Amy bristled as she read it because it was bullshit disguised as sentiment and she knew it. Thinking of you, too, she considered writing back, because she was. She would just leave out one key word—leaving. Thinking of leaving you, too. Annoyed, she put away her phone, deciding against any action that might lead to dialogue that resulted in permanent decisions when she might be temporarily not quite balanced enough to make decisions she wouldn’t regret.

  Across the room sat two women and a man who all appeared to be in their eighties, and Amy found herself trying not to stare at one of the women in particular. In the old woman’s eyes, Amy saw peace and happiness, and she wondered how … how that was possible … what that woman’s secret was. Amy’s fear of dying was so acute, a dragon she slayed several times a day but one that just kept coming back to life. It startled her to think it was entirely possible for cancer to resurface somewhere in her body and that her life could not only be cut short but involve unthinkable suffering before it was. The three old people laughed now—despite the fact that they probably didn’t have another decade or even another five years … despite the fact that so few people got a quick death anymore and unthinkable suffering likely lay before them. For now, they were happy. They had figured out a way to simply eat their sandwiches together and not think obsessively about death. Was this what happened when people had the luxury of a slow boil instead of being microwaved into this reality as she had? She desperately wanted to ask them how … how to simply live … how to cope with this fear.