by Nick Lake
DONATED BY ROCKING RESTORATIONS, JUNEAU
All this time the child is crying, I can feel it in my bones. I am drawn toward it, irresistibly. I want to touch the horse, touch its hair, the worn smoothness of its saddle, but I can’t.
I have to follow the crying. It’s filling me now, it’s not so much in my ears as in my head. The terror, the need. The loneliness.
The corridor is short, and there’s no door at the end—it just opens into the second waiting room, with the doors along its walls, where the doctors see people. I don’t know how I know what’s behind the doors, but I do. I move quickly—the child is in the second waiting room, waiting for me, crying for me.
The child is always in the second waiting room.
I reach the open doorway. There are the doctors’ doors. And to my right, another corridor, leading deeper into the hospital. An arrow is on the wall, and next to it, in green, restroom signs—a man and a woman in simple silhouette, the woman known by her triangle dress. Below it is a low shelf with picture books on it.
More plastic chairs.
And sitting in the middle of the floor, next to a play mat with gray roads and green fields, is the child.
It’s a little girl, she’s a little girl, maybe two years old. She is cross-legged on the floor, wearing a dress with birds on it, and her head is tilted up and she’s crying, crying, crying. Her chubby arms are wrapped around herself, her hair is tied back in a tiny ponytail. In one of her hands is a stuffed gray bunny, at least I think it’s a bunny, I’m not exactly sure because it’s pressed into her body, but I see the long ears. Her whole body is shaking with her fear and her need.
I move quickly to the center of the room, and she looks up and sees me, and just for one moment her big brown eyes look into mine and she stops crying—breath hitching in her chest, as if catching on something—and then she starts again, even louder than before, reaching her hands out for me to pick her up. I can see now that it definitely is a bunny she’s holding. Soft, plush fur, worn and shiny as if it’s been washed lots of times.
I bend down, put my hands under her arms, I’m about to feel the weight of her, to hoist her into the air and hold her tight against me, to stroke her hair and tells her it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, to—
And then I wake up, with a start; I’m all twisted up in my sleeping bag, drenched in sweat.
Mom sits up next to me. She turns on a flashlight. What’s wrong, honey? she says.
Nothing.
You’re crying, Shelby.
Just a bad dream, I say.
The little girl? she says.
Yes.
She puts her arm around me. Tomorrow is a new day, she says.
I lean into her. I’m scared, Mom, I say.
I know.
Is Dad … I mean … He really wants to kill us?
She sighs. He’s a very bad man, she says. But I’ll keep us safe. I promise you, I’ll keep us safe.
I close my eyes and we stay like that for a moment, in the flickering light of the flashlight, in the back of the rental car. I feel okay, the amped-up emotion of the dream is fading, the painful urge to comfort that child, to stop her crying, and I’m in the car with Mom, I can feel the warmth of her—it’s hard to imagine some guy, some father I never knew, turning up and breaking into this picture.
Still.
Still, it’s a promise she can’t keep, her promise to protect me, and part of me already knows it.
5…
Chapter 12
The next morning, Luke cooks eggs. Then we get into his car. He actually watches me fastening my seat belt, making sure. He starts talking to Mom about side impact or something but I’m not really paying attention.
We pull out from the little campsite, leaving our rental car behind, and follow the road down from the forest to the desert plateau. I take shotgun, and Mom rides in back.
I coulda worked around here, says Luke as we drive, sort of to himself. He’s looking around at the trees, the rocks. Nice and cold. Hell, where I was in El Paso, every other day in summer we were breaking down a door to find an old lady who’d cooked herself, ’cause she was scared to go outside, with all the dealers on the corners. He turns to me. They can’t afford air-conditioning, he adds, as if this needs explaining.
I say nothing. I can see sweat beading on Luke’s forehead, and it’s got to be only forty degrees. His dead eye is focused on the sky, or a squashed bug on the windshield. I love being in Luke’s car. I love how my life has gotten so weird lately and now I’m riding shotgun in a weird old half-blind guy’s car. It’s THE BOMB.
I can tell Mom isn’t too happy either, no matter how good an actress she turns out to be—the dead old women stuff has freaked her out too, and she’s fidgeting, I can feel her feet rubbing against the back of my seat.
Here they’ve got the hikers, I guess, he says. Mountain bikers. But what’s that? Broken legs? And no smell. Really, the smell, with those old women … Yeah. A couple skiers and climbers, just extreme-sport dumbasses stupid enough to break their own limbs? I could have dealt with that.
Then he swallows.
I … ah … I mean, present company excepted, he says. From the whole dumbass thing, you know.
I look down at my leg and remember I was supposed to have broken it climbing. Crap, I’m going to have to speak. This is going to be the first time I’ve spoken to him. I can feel Mom’s nerves behind me, like there’s an electrical storm suddenly brewing in the car; clouds gathering, sparking.
I lick my lips.
That’s fine, I say.
She speaks! says Luke, and it’s totally cool, he’s laughing, and then Mom’s laughing. The storm breaks, and in the car the sun bursts through clouds. The relief is enormous, like someone was standing on my chest that whole time, and I only half knew it, and now they have stepped off.
Luke turns off when we get to the sign that says AGUA FRIA NATIONAL MONUMENT. We follow something called Bloody Basin Road, which seems like a bad omen to me, until we get to a parking lot.
Luke pulls up and stretches when he gets out of the car. There is literally no one else here. It’s not exactly Disneyland, of course. Grassland, with little shrubs, stretches out to the end of the world, where mountains rise, purple against the pale blue sky. A couple of cacti prod the air with their fingers, reaching for the torn clouds. The words that come to mind are:
Vast.
Epic.
Enormity.
I’ve never been beyond the desert just outside Phoenix, I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. It’s like standing in the landscape from a story, the way it stretches to the horizon, the dreamlike quality of it. It is just unbelievably beautiful.
As I’m standing there, probably with my mouth open, a couple of deer appear on a rise just in front of us, silhouetted for a moment against the sky. Deer! For a second a bad thought goes through my head, like a twinge of neuralgia—the coyote, standing outside the car last night.
But no. I imagined that, or something.
The deer see us and spook; they spring into the air like a weapon being fired, and ghost away down the other side of the low hill. An afterimage of their bodies, elegantly in flight, burns against my retinas.
Sacred animal, says Luke.
He reaches in the back of the car and takes out a couple of bottles of water—big ones, like gallon ones. He also puts a compass in his pocket, along with his knife.
You think we’re gonna get lost? says Mom. I’m still watching the beautiful scenery in front of me so I’m only half concentrating on their conversation.
I’ve treated people for sunstroke and [ ] who only went for a walk in the woods behind their [ ]. I don’t take chances.
Mom: [ ], giggling.
Me: barf.
Luke gestures to the path and we follow, me going slowly on my CAM Walker.
Luke stops when he sees me walking gingerly on it. You sure you shouldn’t wait in the car? he says.
&
nbsp; Yeah, Shelby, says Mom. Maybe you—
I’m fine, I say, as loud and clearly as I can.
We’re on a little plateau within the larger plateau, next to a miniature canyon that opens on a tiny creek that runs silvery below us. We come to some ruins—little low stone walls, all fallen down.
Is this Apache? says Mom.
No, says Luke. It’s P—
I don’t get what he says after that but it doesn’t matter because there’s a sign, telling us not to leave the path or touch the ruins, and it says that these ruins belong to the Perry Mesa culture, and date from around 1,000 CE. They predate the Apache, Yavapai, or Navajo, and not much is understood about their culture.
Luke is gesturing at everything, beaming, like it’s all really exciting and not some stones.
I roll my eyes at the crappy ruins and Luke sees me.
Ah, he says. But it’s the [ ] that we’re really here for.
I frown at him.
Pe-tro-glyphs, he says. Rock paintings. Over a thousand years old.
I shrug.
He takes out a little guidebook and leafs through it. Then he points to the canyon over to the right. Down there, he says.
Down there? says Mom. It’s pretty steep—we can see the little ribbon of the creek, all green with algae, a long way below.
There should be a path, says Luke.
Suitable for a girl with a cast thing on her foot?
He frowns at me. I don’t know. Let’s see.
It turns out, though, that the path is quite smooth, and zigzags around the steepest section of cliff, taking us down into cooler and cooler shadow. It takes a while, especially with me hobbling, but then it’s not like we have anything better to do.
Down there, when we step out from the shadow of the cliff, the creek is surprisingly wide, and when I look up I see why: the cliff towers above us, the plateau gone now, and we’re locked away down here in a rocky ravine. Spiny trees grow on both sides of the lichen-green water, which runs sluggishly past us.
Luke consults the book again and then leads us along the creek, toward some other cliffs, lower, overhanging. He offers me his hand to help me over a couple of rocks, but I shake my head, and sit on them and then swing my heavy storm trooper leg around, using my butt as the fulcrum of a lever, and then limp past the fleshy leaves of a cactus. We come to the cliff face and Luke points up.
I look.
There, on the reddish wall of the rock, are little drawings scratched into the stone: deer, some kind of stag, geometric patterns.
Despite myself, I feel something resonate inside me, a plucked string. More than a thousand years ago, someone scraped these pictures into being. A man with a spear. A sun.
Luke turns to me and Mom. This one is thought to be some kind of star map, he reads from the book, while pointing to a circle, in which have been carved shapes like starbursts.
See how many elks there are? he says. He gestures, and shapes I hadn’t quite discerned pop into being as I look at them, become antlered creatures, large deer.
Ah, I think. Not stags. Elks.
Elks were sacred to the Perry Mesa people, it seems like, he goes on. The modern-day peoples here—the Yavapai, the Apache—don’t particularly revere them. But there are so many of them on the rocks all around this area that they just have to be significant.
He’s no longer reading from the book, and I realize suddenly that this is his thing: prehistory, or Native Americans, or whatever.
Not that I’m complaining. I mean, rock paintings are 789 times better than stories about people being cooked alive and stuff.
We spend like an hour down there, in the creek. Not in the creek, you know what I mean. The ravine. A couple of times, Mom and Luke climb up somewhere I can’t get to, looking at some pictures, but after a while they all look the same to me so I don’t mind that I can’t follow.
Finally, Luke seems to have had enough. You want to get some lunch before we head back to camp? he says. I figure I’ll stay there tonight again if you are. Mexico can wait another day.
Sure, says Mom.
Luke turns and starts making his way up the path, back to the plateau. Mom glances at me. Then she picks up a heavy, smooth rock. She hefts it in her hand.
What are you doing? I say.
She looks down at the rock as if she doesn’t know how it got into her hands, as if it materialized there. Nothing, she says. But we need to switch cars.
Luke is still walking, facing away from us, and Mom speeds up, still holding the rock.
I don’t think: I just snap my foot out, putting my weight on the CAM Walker, and trip her. She goes down on one knee, the rock clatters off and comes to a rest by the stream. She stares at me.
What the hell, Shelby?
What the hell, MOM? What were you … were you going to knock him out? Was that your plan?
No.
Bullshit. I’m furious, all the pent-up confusion and frustration of the last twenty-four hours boiling over inside me, brimming past the point where I can contain it.
Mom is pissed too, she stands up and puffs her chest out, primal, facing up to me. Then she seems to catch herself, and I see something departing her eyes, like a sparrow taking flight, leaving her behind, and all the anger is suddenly gone from her and she kind of slumps.
But it’s not like that’s going to stop me—I mean, after everything that’s happened, this last day, I feel like someone’s pulled a rug out from under me. I hate it, and I’ve had enough of it.
For God’s sake, Mom, I say. Have you thought about this AT ALL? That rock could have killed him.
She shakes her head.
Yes. And how do I know you’re not going to try to, I don’t know, tie him up tonight or something? That’s your plan, right? Steal his car and then we can—
But Mom isn’t paying attention, she’s staring at something behind me, and there’s a cold crawling thing on my spine, and I realize I got turned around on the path, and what’s behind me is—
Luke, says Mom.
I turn.
He’s been watching me, watching me speak; his mouth is open.
But mine is not.
Because I don’t speak with my mouth, I have not been speaking with my mouth to Mom.
Wait, says Luke, looking at my hands. You’re deaf?
Chapter 13
So yes, BTW, I’m deaf.
And Luke knowing that I’m deaf is SUPER AWESOME. Because now he’s got a whole load of stories about deaf people getting hit by cars and stuff like that, and he tells them all as we have lunch at this little truck-stop diner. There’s a particularly sweet tale about a cyclist who got dragged under a semi truck because she didn’t hear it coming—Luke uses the word “hamburger” when he describes her body.
Worse still, Mom is on his side—she’s all, like, yes I worry about her so much on the street.
She doesn’t add that I don’t go anywhere without her, maybe even she thinks she might be a tiny bit overprotective sometimes.
I have ten percent hearing, I say. Of course I do: I wouldn’t be able to lip-read so well otherwise.
Luke looks blank.
She says she can hear a bit, my mom translates, interpreting my hand gestures. But not much. Sorry, she doesn’t like speaking. Because she can’t really hear herself, you know, her voice sounds weird.
Yeah, thanks, Mom, I think. Way to build up my confidence.
I get that, says Luke. But you could have told me, you know. I mean, it’s no big deal, but just for safety, you know? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
No, I think. No, it’s not. Actually I’m not sure why we didn’t tell him; we both just kind of fell into it, or maybe my mom led me into it. Looking back, yes, I realize, she was the one who said something about me not speaking much. Cover, I guess, because my father is looking for someone with a deaf daughter? I make a mental note to ask Mom later.
Anyway, we’ve blown that cover now, and with all of Luke’s gross stories, I’m kind of wish
ing by the time the check comes that I had let Mom brain him with this rock, which is totally what she was planning even though she denies it now.
The sun is already setting when we go back to the car—it was a late lunch, and Mom and Luke talked and laughed for a long time in the diner, like teenagers. It was, like everything to do with overweight glassy-eyed Luke, THE BOMB. Especially when she touched his arm when he was speaking. I have made a particularly highlighted mental note to myself to NEVER DO THIS when I’m speaking to a guy.
If I ever speak to a guy. Which if my mom gets her way is unlikely.
We get in the car and this time I go in back so the two of them can talk in front—I can’t see their lips so I don’t know what they’re saying.
Back at the campsite, Luke parks the car and then busies himself making dinner on the stove, to repay us for the burgers. I think it’s some kind of chicken. He has cans of sauce and little plastic plates.
My foot is killing me, after the walk in the reserve, so I snag my backpack from the car. Mom packed me a makeup bag when we left the hospital and I put my two bottles of codeine in it—now I take two pills out and wash them down with a bottle of water from the front seat. Then I go back to the fire.
The whole time, I’m wanting to talk to Mom, grill her about, oh, the whole bashing-in-Luke’s-head-with-a-rock thing, but I never get the chance because there’s no way to get her on her own. Instead, we all sit together by the light of a fire that Luke has built and eat, and I wonder how soon I can say I’m tired and go to bed.
I say bed.
I mean car.
Because I totally sleep in a car now, with a woman who thinks nothing of picking up a rock to smash someone’s head in. That is my life. And it is super!
To be clear, I’m being sarcastic here. It is not super AT ALL. It is so not super that I feel like I’m going to cry, only the tears won’t come, and anyway you don’t want to hear about that. It’s depressing.
After a while, it’s obvious that neither of them is paying much attention to me, so I get into the car and close my eyes.
When I open them, there’s a blanket over me, and it’s full night. I sit up—Mom isn’t in the front seat, but I see the glow of a flashlight or something from Luke’s tent. And I see two shadows in there, kind of intertwined. Oh, no.