“Ka-te.” My name reverberated a hundred times, loud and bellowing, alive throughout the canyon. We stopped.
“That was Bone’s voice,” Sofia said. We looked around. Ahead and several hundred feet above us, we could see Mom pull Finny back, away from the edge of the trail. We saw Anton and Cynthia Banks. A shear rock face separated us, impossible to climb, but I wanted to climb it anyway.
Only Finny noticed us. Mom and Anton and Cynthia Banks hiked forward and away from the edge. I couldn’t see them anymore. I started to race inside, thinking they’d hike on without noticing us and we’d be stuck down here forever. At once I started hollering.
“Mo-m,” I screamed. My voice echoing. I wanted to climb the wall. I thought we could do it. I started to try, but Julia yanked me back.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said.
“Shut up,” I snapped. I hated her.
Little Finny reappeared, pointing down to us. “Mo-m,” I yelled again. Then Sofia started yelling and then Julia too. The distance between us seemed impossibly large, an ocean, a universe. We were all yelling at once. The echo of our voices merged. Then Julia said we should all be quiet. I heard laughter. Cynthia Banks. I hated her. Everything was funny for her as if nothing bad could really happen. More laughter. I imagined Mom was laughing with her and hated Mom. For Mom it was that way too, as if nothing bad could ever happen. “Are you happy? Aren’t you happy?”
The four of them stood up there on the edge, a family, looking down at us. So far away their figures were tiny. I wanted to be with Finny. I wished I’d never stopped to rest my knees. I wanted Jane. She was probably at Anna’s now. I imagined her making creamed chipped beef and felt hungry. I wanted us all to be back in the camper again.
“Come get us,” I hollered. A piercing cry. Julia held me from behind and put her hand over my mouth. Quietly she tried to speak up to them, asking how to find the trail. Anton tried to explain the route, gesturing with his arms. I looked up to them as if I could make out what he was saying by the way his arms moved. He seemed to be pointing in the direction we were going, but the wind carried his voice away.
“They’re going away. They’re going away,” I shouted, shaking Julia off. I started crying, hard like a child. I was scared. I felt stupid standing there with that gun in the holster belted around my hips, trying to be so cool, so grown-up. “We’re going to die down here. I feel it. I had a premonition.” I hadn’t had a premonition, but I said I had anyway because it felt as if I had. I wondered what Dad would do when he found out we were dead. I wondered if Jane would be with him. Everything seemed hopeless. I slumped to the ground. We waited, hoping Mom and Anton would return, hoping they’d appear on our trail in front of us.
“We need to be strong,” Julia said. She started organizing us, taking charge, surveying our supplies, calculating the time and the sun to see if we’d be able to find our way before dark. Sofia didn’t like that Julia took charge and started saying how difficult everything would be and how dangerous it was out here with all the coyotes and cougars and rattlers. She said we’d never have enough water to get out of here alive. Just looking at Sofia frightened me.
“We need to pray,” I said. I took the rosary beads from my pocket and started counting them.
“Grow up,” Julia snapped. “The sooner you realize that God’s like Santa Claus the better off you’ll be.” I stopped crying and just stared at her.
“That’s mean,” Sofia said, and suddenly the two of them were fighting. They were crying and screaming. Tears made their faces ugly. They fought about this trip and Anton and the strangers and Cynthia Banks. About God and money and home. About Mom and how she was using up all of Sofia’s Mom’s money and how it was this money that was supporting us. I shut my ears to their voices. The past few months rolled in front of me like a dream. It seemed so impossible that we’d ever become a family.
“Stop,” Julia hollered, her face a burning red. That stop echoed a million times through the canyon. We heard it ringing even after they stopped fighting. Julia apologized and then Sofia apologized and they hugged each other.
“Okay, so we won’t pray,” I said. I wanted to make them laugh. They laughed.
Sofia took me in her arms. Her arms were big and strong and warm, like a mother’s arms. I wanted to stay in them forever. I wanted to fall asleep and not wake up until this was all over and we were out of here. My face burned from tears.
“They’re gone,” I said flatly. I looked up at the spot where they had been. Nothing was there and once again we were alone and I realized that we really were lost. Sofia ran her fingers through my hair. Julia used her T-shirt to wipe my face. “I can tell you one thing about Dad,” Sofia said. “He isn’t going to leave us down here, Kate. And even if he did, do you really think Eve would let him?”
We were quiet for a moment; everything was quiet, brown and dead. A vast expanse of brown parched land spread out in front of us and behind us, above us. All the colors seemed to be gone. It was as if we were the only life out there. My sisters and I were alone in the desert. Our whole lives had been funneled toward this. The only difference was that Sofia had replaced Jane.
But then I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before. A line of ants crossed the trail, methodical, busy carrying crumbs. Two ants to one crumb. A few white-throated swifts. James had said they spend most of their life in the air. The light changed; a purple haze colored the canyon. A variety of cacti poking from the rocks, prickly pear. I remembered Sam’s baby taking a bite out of a prickly pear. Hundreds of prickers stuck into his tongue and I’d been glad. The dirt, sandy and soft, a cushion beneath us. A splash of red from a lone Indian paintbrush. A few tiny ground-cover flowers, sapphire blue, rising from the dry earth, thriving with life.
The horror of being lost was in the first realization, not in the knowledge of it. Once we knew we were lost the horror dissipated and a calm settled down on us. We sat there for awhile, exhausted, resting. The difference between us and Anton was that Anton had become so used to getting lost that the surprise of first learning it was no longer chilling. Now the trick was to be found, to find our way out, and that task loomed in front of us like a pissing competition or a poker game that was just within our grasp.
“They were in Bright Angel Shale,” I said lazily, staring off blankly. “That’s just one level above us.” I wanted some of that greenish rock. I was going to hack some out as a present for my father even though the field guide said you couldn’t: “Take only pictures, leave only footprints.”
Julia fanned me with her baseball cap and Sofia asked me how I knew so much about rocks. I explained where we were now, how between the Vishnu Schist and the Tapeats Sandstone a billion years of rock is missing. “Like missing volumes in a set of encyclopedias,” I said. I explained that Anton and Mom had been on the Tonto Plateau in Bright Angel Shale, a greenish shale deposited in a Cambrian sea that covered that area about 570 million years ago. “The trails of marine animals are fossilized in that shale,” I said. “Along with trilobites, brachipods, hyolithes, mollusks and crinoids.” I didn’t know what those things were – they came from my field guide – but I used them as if I did. I told them that Bright Angel was the name of a creek, named by a one-armed geologist who first explored the Colorado. “He named it that, you see, because the creek was so clear in contrast to a muddy one upriver that he’d named the ‘Dirty Devil’ in honor of the great Indian chief of the ‘Bad Angels’.”
“You see, our father is a geologist,” Julia said. “That’s why Kate knows so much. Dad used to bore us to death, giving lectures about rocks. We were supposed to come here with him last year.” It sounded funny hearing Julia explain about Dad. We were supposed to love Sofia like a sister, yet she knew very little about our father.
A hawk flew toward the other side of the canyon, getting smaller and smaller, receding in the distance. We got up and started hiking again. We had more energy than before. My knees didn’t ache so badly. We walked for a g
ood hour, while the sunlight faded and night filled in the canyon. The colors changed again, and the forms of mesas and buttes and cliffs became distinct. We walked until it was too dangerous to walk anymore.
A gap broke open in the cliff and we took our packs off. My back was sweaty, but the air had a chill and the sweat dried. Sofia gave us water from her canteen. It tasted of iodine, but good. We took little sips. We didn’t have much. For dinner we shared the remainder of a chocolate bar and the remainder of a beef jerky stick. We set up camp. Julia took our packs away from where we would sleep, the way Anton had taught us to do, in case some animal smelled something and wanted to eat it. We laughed at that. We were hungry. Before long we got into our sleeping bags. There was nothing else to do. Sofia and Julia talked about the stars and then Sofia made plans for each of us to take a turn keeping watch, since there were so many dangerous animals down here. She agreed to go first. I said it was a good thing I had my BB gun. I took it out of its holster and spun it on my finger. I was glad now that I had it.
“I should hold on to it,” Julia said. She cracked a smile and brushed her hair away from her mouth. I thought she was beautiful. She looked just like Mom.
“I’m a better shot,” I said and she couldn’t say anything because she knew that was the truth. I set the gun above my head, within easy reach. The wind was gentle and a canopy of stars illuminated the sky. I felt good and tough like John Wayne, in my bedroll in the desert beneath the moon. For a moment I felt all right, as if everything were fine. The velvet wind caressed my face and I think I almost fell asleep.
♦
There was a story my father used to tell about a time when I was two years old and had almost died. It was a story my father loved to tell because he’d saved me.
We were picnicking at the foot of an observation tower in a pine forest. I crawled away from my sisters and parents and climbed to the top of the tower. There was no railing, and the tower was over eighty feet tall. I’d heard this story so many times that I believed I remembered the experience. I remembered the sunny day and the strong scent of pine and my sisters and mother and father sitting around a checked blanket below, laughing and eating. I remembered that being up there was like being on top of the world because you could see the Atlantic Ocean and the endless forest of pine cut here and there with small rivers. You could see the curve of the earth.
Whenever my father tried to pick me up, I had this little thing that I did: I would giggle and jump back from him. When he realized where I was, he was afraid that I would do just that when he approached me. On the top of the tower there was a metal grate that you could see through. I saw my mother and sisters below, looking up with fear, wondering what I’d do. The ground was sandy and from the sand came all those millions of pine trees and the whole world seemed white, bathed in sun. My father dashed up the steps, two at a time. Then, cautiously, he approached, praying I wouldn’t giggle and jump back. My father had always said that nothing worse could happen to a parent than to lose a child.
When I was little I was afraid of losing my father. Joshua Shapiro’s father died and his mother didn’t have a job and suddenly they were poor and his mother had to work in our caféteria at school, collecting money from the kids who bought hot lunches. Joshua Shapiro had a very white tongue and he dressed entirely in black and punched kids when he felt like it until he punched too many and got suspended. He was a grade ahead of me. The next year he was gone because he couldn’t afford private school. He had to go to the public. I was afraid Dad would die and sometimes I’d tell him I was afraid. “I’m not planning on dying anytime soon,” he’d say. “When I die you’ll be a woman and I’ll have lived a long life and at my funeral I want you to celebrate. I want you to have a party after the funeral and I want you all to eat the biggest, juiciest steaks. I’ll be watching you.” He’d describe his favorite steak with peppercorns, rare, slicing into the thick slab of meat. The beautiful rose color, the juices. I thought of all of us sitting around a long table, all grown-up eating steaks with peppercorns, big steaks like the ones we used to eat when Anton was courting Mom. I wondered how I’d look all grown up. I hoped I’d look like Mom. Dad’s dying didn’t scare me anymore.
♦
“Kate,” Sofia whispered gently. “It’s your turn.” A few hours had passed. Julia slept soundly. Sofia shuffled in her sleeping bag, getting comfortable. I wondered if she’d really been awake all that time.
The sky was thick with stars, cutouts against the night, and the moon was gone. The stars so thick like the lights of a far-off and enormous city called something-or-other, and I was warm. I thought of my children and my children’s children and their children’s children seeing these same stars. I made plans for what I’d do when we got out of here. I’d wash my clothes. I’d help Mom clean out the camper. I’d be good. Incredibly good.
I was almost nine. I had a gun. I was awake, warm in my sleeping bag. I had faith. I could take care of myself. I wasn’t tired anymore. I was racing inside, could feel the blood in my veins. I could earn money. That made me laugh, earn money. I heard sounds and saw beautiful shapes. I wanted to stay awake. I never wanted to fall asleep. I felt big, grown up. I could cook. I could take care of myself. I was almost nine.
I crawled out of my sleeping bag and went to my pack and from the top pocket of the pack I took the gold rock that Dad had given me. I had the urge to throw it. I imagined someone, a geologist, finding that nugget of rock that gold comes from. He would think he had discovered gold and soon there would be a whole gold rush in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, an excavation of the whole damn thing. I laughed. No, better: the rock would hide somewhere, becoming a fossil of gold, and a hundred million years would pass and it would metamorphose to form gneiss. It would become a million different things. The possibilities were infinite for that rock, that rock had life. And so I threw it with as much strength as I had. My legs were cold. I could feel goose bumps on my skin. I listened. I wanted to hear it land.
Julia and Sofia were black silhouettes, a few shades darker than the night. I loved Sofia for having stopped with me. I loved little Finny, who broke his silence to try to save us. I loved Caroline and Timothy and Nicholas and Anton. That’s all that Anton and Mom wanted, for us to love and trust one another. I held my rosary in my hand, fingering the beads, counting them. I tried to remember how to say Our Father and Hail Mary and then said a few. It felt as if God were really close, as if He could hear me or I could hear Him. I pressed my ear into the ground, the way you can press your ear into sand and hear the whole ocean, and listened.
“You still awake?” Sofia asked. Her eyes glowed. Head on arms as if on a pillow. Her hair long and wild, frizzed out the way it did. I closed my eyes tight and kept listening. Hearing things. Night-creeping things. I thought of all that time surrounding us, cupped here in the canyon. I felt both small and insignificant and large. Very large. I thought of all the fossils that must be trapped in the strata of the canyon, recording time.
“It’s your turn, Kate. You better watch. What in the world are you doing with your head to the ground?” I thought of the three of us as fossils, curled in our sleeping bags wedged up against these rocks with the trilobites and the crinoids, with the brachiopods and the mollusks. Lost. And even that didn’t bother me. Of the ledge overhead sliding and trapping us and of where we’d be a billion years from now. In another Great Unconformity? “Are you praying again?”
“Shsh,” I said. “I’m listening. Shsh.”
“For what?” She sat up quickly, scared.
“For God.”
“Oh, Kate,” she sighed, and slumped back down into her sleeping bag.
But I could feel God, inside, embracing me and I filled. Mom and Anton were one level above us, on the Tonto Plateau in Bright Angel time – in that time that seemed to be named by God, that seemed to hold a promise. In the morning we’d hike out of here to them, one way or another. I knew that absolutely, like you just know some things.
And
then we’d head home to Jane, who was waiting.
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Bright Angel Time Page 25