Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

Was this even the same Súmáí? He’d said we were headed to the place we’d met, so I knew this Súmáí was the one who’d been there that first time. Last night at dinner, he’d smiled at the face I’d made at the food, like it was payback for my toying with him in the cabin. But that could just have been coincidence. I remembered the hat I’d seen on his bed, and, a few minutes ago, when he’d seemed pleased and said, “You remember.” Had he also been confirming that I was his Sovern?

  “Have you visited me beyond my time?” My words were careful not to show emotion.

  He slowed to let me catch up. “I have seen your land.”

  “No. I mean a me beyond that. An us beyond then.”

  His head cocked. Silence. I grabbed his arm.

  “Have you met a me from a different land?”

  His expression showed he understood me completely. His eyes clicked through possible answers, and I knew he understood way more than I did.

  “Tell me!” I said.

  It took him a minute to decide what to say. “I traveled through the trees, but I did not visit you. Or other Soverns.” He grinned. “I did not want to fight your father. He is big and strong. Like a bear.”

  The mention of Dad made me feel sick again. I remembered that night Súmáí’s face had appeared in the cabin’s window while Dad and Wash had been out investigating the noise at the pumps and how afraid I’d been that they’d battle.

  “Thanks,” I said, sarcastic. I turned and flung out my arm as if I were throwing something—I can’t say what. I just needed to throw something.

  His voice turned gentle. “I also grew weak.”

  I glanced up the mountain, the direction of the Always spruce. “I know the cure for that. Just eat a lot of salt.”

  Súmáí snorted. “I began to feel like air.”

  “In my world, there are places where we could just go buy food and bring it back. They sell whole containers of salt.” I showed the height of a salt container with my hands. “You don’t have to steal.” I pictured Sapphire East. “But if you need salt from the lodges, it comes in white paper packets, about this big.” I held my finger and thumb about an inch apart. He cocked his head and looked at the ground.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your shadow. It is like mine.”

  I looked down and saw the shadow my hand cast was half as dark as the other shadows around. Súmáí held out his hand, and its shadow was similar.

  “You have wealth. Yes?” he said, studying our shadows. “Our number is half what it once was, but we are still many stomachs.”

  “Half?”

  He looked away from our hands and said, like giving up, “I do not want to travel through the trees anymore, and if you left, we could not know when you would come again.”

  “Why don’t you want to travel through the trees?”

  He shrugged.

  “You mean, if I leave today and return, it could be before now, or after?”

  “Yes. I might be a child, or an elder. Or another Súmáí.”

  Or on a reservation, far from here. “So this is why you were so happy to see me?”

  He kept his eyes averted but nodded. The careful way he held his torso and arms and the sad cast of his face sent a chill through me. He was guarding every last word he told me. Warrior, indeed.

  “So if I leave now … ” I spoke carefully. “If I leave, I might never find you, this Súmáí, again.” I suddenly realized that my being there, just then, with him, was a fixed point on a grid of infinite dimensions. I faced him fully. “Why us?”

  He met my gaze. “Why you and me?”

  I nodded.

  “The quills, I believe. Beyond that, I cannot say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the day we met? How you … left, and I held your quill?”

  I remembered Gage pulling me from that spruce, and my fury. “Yes.”

  “After that, I could walk in your land.”

  “Could you walk in any others?”

  He shook his head.

  Was that why I was here? Tramping around? Because he’d given me his quill?

  We resumed our ascent, and I realized I’d probably made Súmáí’s vandalism possible—even before I’d met him. Dad would love that. My head searched so hard for a pattern to explain everything, to explain what bound us, that I felt dizzy.

  We arrived at the Always spruce. I stood before its trunk and traced Mom’s claw marks with my eyes. Súmáí gestured for me to follow and led me to the spruce’s other side. He pointed to newly healed claw marks in the rough bark. Marks for Súmáí + marks for me = weird. I craved laying a palm on that trunk and going home, but if Súmáí was right, I might never be able to return to this place and time. He’d said he didn’t want to travel through the trees anymore, and I definitely wasn’t ready to give him up yet.

  So it was now or never.

  I thought of that guarded way he’d stood moments ago, and I craved every last one of his answers. He’d said that I would return to my world on the same day at the same time. If that was true, what could it hurt, spending more time here? For Dad’s sake, I prayed Súmáí was right … and I decided to stay.

  I laid my snowshoes against the spruce, picked up my parka, and stuffed my hat into its sleeve. I felt my phone in its pocket, dug it out, and pressed the camera icon.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Súmáí turned from scanning the forest, watching for the Mom-bear, no doubt.

  I clicked a photo and brought it up on the screen. “Súmáí, look! This is you!” I stepped to his side.

  He sucked in his breath, squinted at his image, and leaned close to it. “My brother! You have captured him!”

  “No. That’s you! Look at the forest in the background.”

  He scanned the pines behind him.

  “I took it just now,” I said.

  “You have imprisoned my spirit?”

  “No. It’s just a picture.”

  He looked at the image, then me, then my phone’s shape, and something seemed to register. I made a mental note to get that scrap of information too.

  “Your spirit is free,” I said. “I promise. Look.” I held the phone at arms’ length, the choice to stay with him fresh and raw in my chest as I snapped another photo. I held the image before him.

  He looked from me to the photo. “Why do people do this?”

  I shrugged. “To remember, I guess.”

  “Remember?” He said it like the greatest irony.

  A lump filled my throat, and I worked to swallow it just as the last thing I’d expected hit me full on and defenseless: Mom’s dying moment. Metal and gas smell, distant sirens, hair curtaining her cheek, and her wrist’s pulse beneath my fingertips diminishing—fainter, fainter, gone. And then screams erupting in my gut as I pressed my lips to stop them. I’d pressed my palms to my ears against the tick, tick, tick of the hot crushed engine and sealed the sound of her pulse in my memory.

  “You’re right,” I said. “The important things you never forget.”

  I took Súmáí’s hand, pressed his palm to mine, and held our pressed hands up to the sun. His was a little bigger and wider. A string of light lined the back side of our joined hands, but their fronts and our thumbs met in a line of shadow. I thought of Cairn’s research. Were our particles connected? Could something from that tiny realm have drawn me here?

  I bumped my fingertip over the four bones on the back of his hand. “Spooky action,” I said. I turned his hand and studied his wrist where his heart pulsed. “Entanglement,” I said. All this would lead to a breathing Mom restored to my life. I knew it.

  I slung my parka over my arm. “Let’s go.”

  We crested the ridge, me huffing, and crossed west from Gold Bowl into Platinum Bowl. In summer a mountain bike trail snaked around this
spot. In winter it was a run called Fool’s Gold. The wind blew over its top and formed cornices that tourists skied off in droves—hooting, crashing, cheering. When the cornices got lethal, Dad dynamited them. Now a family of marmots whistled their way beneath a pile of rocks. We skirted the forest where Last Chance would exist and dropped into Shangri-La.

  In Súmáí’s world, the meadow forming Shangri-La was larger. He slunk along its edge, and I followed till he crouched in the grass near the spruce I’d collided with. I looked up at it, realizing that in this world the tree was still big, but with less girth and height. When I’d traveled to Mom’s universe from this spot, it had seemed the same size as it was in mine. I was definitely in the past.

  “We wait,” Súmáí whispered. He pressed his finger to his lips, gesturing quiet, but now seemed a perfect chance to grill him.

  “Why—?”

  “Shhh!”

  “Súmáí—”

  He glared at me.

  With my soreness, crouching was impossible, so I sat down, not graceful at all, my long legs resembling the grasshoppers that I scared to clacking leaps. I listened to the missing hum of tires on the valley floor, the lack of rumble from planes overhead. I started to make a list of what I wanted to learn from him. I heard instead the drone of bees and flies. A squirrel scolded us. In the distance, a crow seemed to speak a sentence. I looked over to where the Mom and little-me had sat on a blanket in that other universe. What would have happened if Súmáí hadn’t stopped me? The sun was warm, and, though I tried to finish that list, the world turned syrupy.

  I woke to an odd warbling. I’d collapsed to my side, and I rose on an elbow, wiping drool from my mouth.

  Súmáí held a folded aspen leaf in his lips, and he was blowing on it. His bow was cocked, arrow ready. I looked into the meadow just as two velvety does lifted their heads. He shot, and one collapsed to its forelegs, and then to its side. The other bounded away.

  Súmáí sprang up and stood over the deer faster than seemed possible. I maneuvered myself to my feet like the Tin Man and walked to him, palming back my hair. Súmáí drew his knife and knelt over the deer, reciting something in Ute. He leaned toward its throat and I turned away, picturing him moving the same way over yesterday’s miners. My hand traced the scabs on my chest. I pressed each one, concentrating on its sting to keep from retching.

  When I heard him rise, I said without looking, “What was that sound you made?”

  “A fawn’s cry.”

  My legs wobbled and gave out. I landed on my knees in the grass.

  Súmáí frowned. “The Great Spirit smiles on us. Game is scarce.”

  “Why is it scarce?” I asked.

  He shrugged, not like he didn’t know but like he didn’t want to answer, and glanced down the valley.

  The half-formed, early-afternoon face on Phantom Peak resembled the line of shadow that had existed between Súmáí’s and my pressed hands. I’d screamed at this valley on 2/22: my silence’s end. I estimated the place on the highway where Mom and I had sat trapped in that Honda. I squinted, looking closer. Smoke rose from the chimneys of a cluster of three cabins. Around them stretched furrowed green fields. It all looked wrong. Unnatural.

  “That is where my ancestors made summer camp,” Súmáí said. “That is where my brother died.” He strode into the forest.

  I sighed and held up my thumb against the valley’s image below. Its tip to my knuckle—that was the distance separating where Súmáí’s brother and Mom had died.

  Cracking and banging came from the forest. Súmáí emerged dragging a long, narrow log, all the branches hatcheted off.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to pull the deer.”

  “Pull?” I said, keeping my eyes averted.

  “Did you not listen?”

  “Not really,” I said. I’d been focused on getting to that Always spruce. I hadn’t even planned to still be here. Now, with an actual deer as big as me—a dead thing I couldn’t even look at—the idea of dragging it all the way back to camp was daunting.

  “Why didn’t we bring a horse?”

  “You do not like horses,” Súmáí said.

  “I might start.”

  He grunted and returned to the forest. The hacking sound rose again. I just stood there with that dead deer. I dared a glance at its lean body, and then I took a long breath and turned, making myself look. It had delicate-seeming black hooves. My eyes traveled up its legs to its white chest. White like snow, I thought. I followed the shining line of its black nose, its guileless brown eye, its large white-lined ear, its curve down its neck to its strong back, ending in its white rump and lean haunches. This doe had been drawn to a fawn’s call. In that Honda, I’d complained—a call for help—and Mom had lifted her hand from the wheel to comfort me. My throat clogged with bile, and I looked down the valley to keep from bawling.

  Súmáí emerged, dragging another log. He paused, considered the defeated way I stood, and said, “I also do not like horses. They are white man’s animals.” He dragged the log to the deer. “Many Ute men love horses—to race them, to bet on them. The killing of Meeker happened because he plowed our race track for farming. My father had many horses. My mother came to him in a bet on a horse race.” He snorted. “Now we keep only as many horses as can remain hidden. ‘Magic dogs,’ we first called them. Magic ?” He laughed bitterly.

  Shoulders back, hands almost clenched against the invisible and unstoppable equations of life, he was so thoroughly Gage that it stole my breath. Gage saying, Why would I want to go to college? Why would I want someone to teach me how to think? My mind’s eye saw Gage say, Sovereign, like self-rule? That’s fucking cool!

  Sorrow for them both pierced me. Fate’s track barreled straight toward us, and, somehow, this, here, seemed the start of it. Súmáí and me, that little point on that profound graph. I looked at the lifeless deer, and suddenly I couldn’t handle it all. I turned and shouted, “I hate tests!”

  I could feel Súmáí watching me, no doubt wondering at the meaning of my English words. In Spanish, I said, “Life isn’t fair.”

  I heard him move behind me and felt the warmth of his hand on my shoulder.

  37

  As the western sun cast sturdy shadows, we entered the village, Súmáí dragging the deer. He pulled it to his tepee, and his mother emerged, beaming. An ancient woman was with her. They seemed so small and bent, like the scraggy windswept bushes above timberline. The older woman’s face resembled a raisin, each wrinkle no doubt containing a story, and her eyes glittered as she beheld the deer. She spoke in Ute, and her voice was surprisingly strong and steady.

  “Grandmother says our wedding brings good luck,” Súmáí said.

  I made a face at him.

  Súmáí’s mother spoke, and he cocked his head. “She says we must follow her.”

  The women walked toward camp’s western end. The children saw us, and they ran over, cheering and laughing, the dogs barking and leaping. Other women joined till we became a parade. The few men in camp stayed seated around their fires or tending their weapons. A few of them eyed us and chuckled and shook their heads.

  Súmáí’s breath caught. A tepee stood before us.

  Súmáí’s grandmother spoke ceremoniously. His mother smiled. Súmáí walked to the tepee’s side and looked up at the poles sticking out its top like in KerPlunk. He looked across the gathered faces, even the kids, and spoke. His last word was towéiyak.

  They looked at me, expectant. I blushed, speechless.

  Súmáí stepped to me, took my hand, and led me into the tepee. He closed the flap while muffled giggles from outside drifted through.

  “They give us this,” he said.

  I pivoted in a circle, taking in the tepee’s interior. On the far side stretched two willow beds with blankets on top. I couldn’t help but remember the
twin beds in the cabin’s bedroom—one for me, one for Dad. I said another prayer that Súmáí was right and that Dad hadn’t lain in the dark last night staring at my empty bed.

  Two tall storage baskets stood against the side a little ways over. My snowboarding clothes were folded in a neat pile beside them with my dancing dress on top. My snow boots were there too. Súmáí set his bow and quiver down next to them.

  On the opposite wall stood a water basket, dark pitch lining its bowl. In the tepee’s center lay a fire ring. I looked at the sky through the tepee’s open flap and then at Súmáí.

  “They think I’m your wife.” My words sounded desperate. I was worn out from the day’s emotions and exertion, and my whole body ached.

  He sighed. He was tired too.

  I bit my lip. “You’re sure I’ll return to my world on the same day?”

  “Yes. You will stay?”

  “For a while.”

  His mouth twisted to hold back a smile. “It is custom that we lie together.”

  I stepped back. “I can’t!”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You don’t understand—I’ll hurt you.” I touched my chest. “Here.”

  “I know.” He stepped closer.

  “No really! I’m disaster for everyone I—”

  “I am used to these things. I am a warrior.” His mouth quirked up on one side.

  This weird thing happened then. Maybe fatigue + learning all he’d lost and would still lose = hallucination. All I know is he transformed to the one person—anywhere—who understood how I felt. I lunged to him and hugged him.

  I must have stunned him, because it took a minute for his arms to circle me. When we pulled apart, he touched the freckle on my lip.

  “I like this,” he said.

  I hated that freckle, and, embarrassed, I pressed my face into his chest.

  I washed my bra and underwear every several days. Each day, Súmáí and I hunted, and I grilled him with questions, which he mostly evaded. It became obvious that I wasn’t going to hang out with the women and learn their responsibilities, so Chief Úwápaa, with Súmáí’s uncle and cousins flanking him, presented me with a bow. A left-handed one.