“I can’t go,” Hunter said. “They know I’m on leave. I don’t have anywhere else to go. This is my home. My family.”
“If I go,” Aiden said, appealing to logic, “what would I say? To your dad? To everyone? I have a story to write. I’ll write it, and I’ll leave. I wouldn’t out someone….”
Hunter turned around. “I’m not gay.”
“Okay,” Aiden said.
“I’m not!”
Aiden held out his hands, like you would to a rampaging gunman. “I didn’t say you were.”
“I just….” He didn’t have a sentence to finish. He hesitated over the unutterable. Why had he been there? Did he even know himself? Sex was easy to find. It had taken Aiden a few minutes to dial up that guy in Salt Lake City. Something more than that had taken Hunter to that bar that night. Freedom? Loneliness? His blue eyes were as brilliant as the winter sky, fierce and imploring in equal measure.
“It’s okay,” Aiden repeated. It was cold. The wind blew up the canyon, the air high and thin. The trees stirred with its touch. In all this breezy wilderness, all the green and red, the two of them were two small dots of contrary color. “I don’t know anything about you,” Aiden promised. “I don’t know about your life. I don’t know about your family. I don’t know about your church. I’m not here to cause any trouble; I’m just here to do a job. And then I’ll go.”
Hunter was silent. “If they find out, my life is over.” It was the flat, passionless honesty of the condemned man.
“I’m not going to tell them,” Aiden promised. “But if you want to talk, I’m here. I know what you’re going through, believe me. I’ve been there. I—”
Hunter pushed past him. “You don’t know anything. If you’re staying, stay away from me.”
Aiden watched him go until he’d vanished into the trees. His shoulder smarted where Hunter had barged into him. Well, you fucked that up, he told himself. His phone vibrated in his pocket. Turned out it was a reception hotspot after all. A few texts from friends asking how it was going, one from Marsha checking in. Maybe it was Hunter Jensen making him feel like a sleaze, or maybe it was just the loneliness of being away in this strange fucking place, but Aiden suddenly felt profoundly grateful to be loved. He sat on a rock and composed detailed responses to each message they’d sent. He even sent Chris a photo from Salt Lake City, because it seemed like a friendly thing to do. When he was done and he was sure Hunter would be well clear of the path, he climbed back down again. The weather had started to turn now; the wind was picking up, and the sky was graying with the fading light, clouds blowing in from the west. Aiden felt fully alone in the rustling pines, a million miles from anywhere. He shivered and wished he had a jacket. Finally, he saw the roof of the Jensen house below and heard a vehicle pulling up. It was Sariah. As he came out of the trees, she was unloading a couple of big sacks from the back of her truck.
“Oh, Aiden,” she exclaimed, looking his way in surprise. “I thought you were Bigfoot.”
“Sorry,” Aiden said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Did you get some service?”
“I did. Want some help?”
“You’re very sweet. I’m just taking these into the studio.”
Aiden lifted one of the bags to his shoulder. It was dense and solid. “What is it?”
“Sand,” Sariah said. “I have a man in Springdale who mills it for me, for painting. I’ll show you.”
Between them, they wrangled all the bags, and Aiden followed her across the yard and up the other side of the house to where her studio was. Sariah backed in, dropping the sack she carried in the corner. “You can put them there,” she said, turning on the lights. Aiden did as he was told. The studio was a narrow, wooden structure adjoined to the main building. It might’ve been a woodshed once. There was paint on the walls, paint on the concrete floor, paint just about everywhere, hardened into rainbow layers over years. A big stack of fresh canvases stood in one corner, a rack of brushes and equipment in the other. In the middle of it all was the work in progress. Aiden took it in. At first, he thought it was the canyon, sinewy lines of oranges and reds, but the more he looked at it the more he realized there was a human shape to it as well. Aiden could see now how Sariah used the sand to texture the flat image, how she borrowed its grit and color to craft an illusion of woven stone, making it seem like something carved not painted. It was a love letter to the landscape.
“It’s Stephanie,” he realized, the rock shapes coming together to form a face, and a pregnant body.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“I’ve been painting it for her. For when the baby comes.”
Some finished pieces were hanging on the far wall. “May I?”
“Please,” Sariah said.
Aiden studied them: landscapes, portraits, abstracts. He wasn’t an expert, but he could tell some were better than others and some didn’t work at all. They all had the preliminary feel of an amateur artist starting to come into her style. Some borrowed Native American symbols in a way people back in Brooklyn would probably call appropriative. But some were good, startlingly so. He found one of Orson, his face drawn out against an abstracted Utah landscape. The likeness was good, but more than that, she’d captured something in his bearing, something immediately, humanly familiar. Another stood out against the red and yellow desert tones for its preponderance of blue, and Aiden realized the man in the painting was Hunter, maybe even copied from the photograph in Orson’s office. Behind him loomed the silvery, shark-like form of a fighter jet, but beyond that only sky, unrooted to the ground. He must’ve studied it for a while because Sariah eventually glanced over to see which one had caught his interest.
“Ah, that one. I’m never sure about that one.”
“I like it.” Here was Hunter caught against the blue again, just as he’d appeared giving Aiden his furious, whispered ultimatum on the top of the hill. Lost against the sky, either floating or falling.
She put down what she was doing, looking with him. “I painted that the first time he deployed to Afghanistan. It gave me something to do.”
“You must’ve been worried.”
“About Hunter? Not really. I mean, yes, of course, but not really. He’s always been my runaway. Always wants to go faster, farther, all the way up there. He used to wake up in the morning when he was a toddler and grab on my bedsheets, and say ‘Mommy, let’s go! Let’s go!’ That’s always been God’s plan for him.” The fine sand she’d worked into the paint sparkled slightly under the light, and Aiden understood: the grains were pieces of home, worked into an image of absence.
“That’s hard for a parent, though.”
“It is. When they were growing up, Brayden was always simple, and Dallin was always tempestuous. Stephanie’s just like me, and Kayleigh’s just like her father. But Hunter’s…. Hunter’s himself. I used to worry. There was a lady in the ward, when he was little. Sister Kimball. She used to say to me, ‘Don’t worry about him, Sister Jensen. He’s a middle-child.’ And she had twelve kids, and I used to think, ‘How do you even know which one’s the middle?’ Anyway, that’s moms. Your mom must be the same.”
Aiden didn’t answer. It didn’t hurt anymore that his mom was gone. Pain receded and absence solidified into reality after a while. He missed her, but in a matter-of-fact kind of way. There were things he would’ve liked to share with her or show her, and he couldn’t. That was just it. It seemed harder for other people. The way they were embarrassed when he told them she was dead, the way they tiptoed around the fact at Christmas or Mother’s Day, the way they assumed.
“She passed.”
Sariah handled it more elegantly than most. “Oh, hon. I’m sorry.”
“When I was a kid,” Aiden said, granting the clemency of time. “When did you start painting?”
“Years ago. My grandpa used to, back in Idaho. Pieces of wood. Old tin. Nothing fancy. He’d paint the farm or the cows. I watche
d him, I guess. I never had much time when we were in the Governor’s Mansion, but I’m picking it up again now.”
“So, you’re not from Utah?”
She laughed. “No. I’ve been here fifty-plus years, but that still makes me an out-of-stater to some people. I’m a convert too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I was born in Challis, Idaho. It’s not much of a place. You won’t have heard of it. We moved to Utah when I was thirteen. Can you help me?”
She gestured to the sand bags, pulling a few buckets out from under her workbench. When Aiden lifted, she cut the corner off with a utility knife, collecting the fine grains in the bucket.
“My name’s Shelly, really. That’s my birth name at least. Sariah’s the name I took at baptism.”
“I’d never heard it before.”
“In the Book of Mormon, Sariah was the Prophet Lehi’s wife. She traveled with him from the Holy Land, across the ocean to America. That was a bit like me coming to Utah.”
“Did you convert when you met the governor?”
“No, a little before. I saw a lot of things back home growing up I didn’t want to see. Drugs. Alcohol. It was that kind of town. Nothing to do, nothing to live for. My dad had his demons, Heavenly Father bless him. When I met LDS people, I thought their life was so clean. So simple. I knew I wanted a family, and that was so central to the Church. I opened my heart, and He spoke to me. I really believe that.”
They’d filled one bucket with sand, fine and white like a tropical beach. Sariah deftly swapped in another.
“I started going to services. My parents didn’t like it. They weren’t religious, really, but they knew they didn’t like Mormons. But I persisted. Eventually the bishop of the ward assigned me a missionary. He was a godly man, but it was hard. Being honest with God. Owning my sin. Giving myself to Him. Some days I wanted to cry and shout. But then I met Orson, and we married. We had Brayden. It was a gift.”
Aiden wasn’t sure what to think. Usually statements of faith unnerved him. How could someone believe that? And more than that, what did they want? There was always an agenda. But Sariah spoke plainly. Matter-of-factly, like she was talking about her first job or where she’d gone to college.
The second bucket was near full. “I think that’s enough,” she said. She straightened up and showed Aiden how to put the sack down so the rest of the sand wouldn’t drain out the hole.
“Thank you for the help.”
“No problem,” Aiden said. It’d been interesting, in a way. For a moment she held his gaze, and he saw her eyes were the same blue as Hunter’s, set around with fine, warm wrinkles. For a moment, he thought she was about to say something else to him, something important, but instead she turned abruptly and started brushing the stray sand from the floor.
“I’m sure Orson’s off the phone,” she said, and Aiden got the feeling something had changed in her, and he was being dismissed. He took his leave and went back to the house. As he walked across the yard, he saw the clouds from the west had settled in a gray blanket overhead, the bright blue of the morning a forgotten memory. He found himself replaying his conversation with Sariah in his head. There was something strange about her; there was something strange about all of them. She professed simplicity, happiness, but there was also a tautness to her. He remembered that tense little exchange between the daughters at breakfast. Sariah was an outsider too, in her way, though she’d embraced everything strange and apart about this place. He looked up at the lowering clouds. They seemed closer here, like you were grazing the sky. The whole place felt under pressure.
Sure enough, the governor was off the phone. It must have been quite the spiritual intervention because his desk was strewn with Bibles and prayer books.
“Thank you,” Orson said, showing Aiden back into the office. He followed Aiden’s gaze to the desk. “Brother Welch needed some guidance.”
“Sounds like a full-time job.”
“I’m retired actually. A bishop serves the ward four or five years. But you never really give it up.”
Aiden took his chair again. “Was it unexpected?”
“Oh, no. I suppose there’s a difference between expectation and reality. Bob Welch was a great guy. Eight kids. Eighty-seven years old. God rest him.”
“You must get to know people very well.”
“You do. A ward is a family, maybe literally back in pioneer days. People relied on each other to live. Latter-day Saints see the priesthood as a sacred duty we all share. You guide people to the Word, of course, and you tend their spiritual needs, but you’ve got to help their earthly life as well. They might need advice. They might need counseling. They might need a loan even. The priesthood is all of those things.”
“So, you’re all priests?”
“We don’t have professional priests. All Mormon men are called to the priesthood, if they’re worthy.”
If they’re worthy, Aiden thought, remembering Hunter’s hot panic on the mountain, the tremulous pleading in his eyes.
“If they find out, my life is over.”
“Anyway,” Orson said. “Enough theology. I think we were talking policy.”
Aiden smiled and reached for his notes. “Right.”
Outside the sky was black over the mountains, dark as Golgotha. The first snowflakes danced on the wind.
Chapter Eight
IT SNOWED all night, and in the morning, Aiden awoke to find the desert frozen, ice covering the red rock of the canyon. It was otherworldly, like an image sent back from Mars. Powdery snow caught in the branches of the trees above the cliffs, brushing the evergreens with white, remaking the forest as a still, icy imitation of what it had been before. He opened the window with a creak and peered out, watching his breath mist in the morning. The snow was perfect and shining, like crushed glass. Here there’d be no salt or traffic or tramping feet to grind it into dirty mush. It was silent.
He looked out until his nose started to freeze. Pulling on an extra sweatshirt against the chill, he sat at Hunter Jensen’s little childhood desk and typed up his notes from yesterday’s sessions with the governor. He hadn’t seen Hunter again after their argument on the mountain. He’d been absent at dinner, down in the town with his brothers before they drove back home with their wives and kids. That would leave only the five of them in the house, six if you counted Stephanie’s boring husband, which no one seemed to. Aiden wondered how Hunter would keep avoiding him. Then again it was a big house, no matter how many people were in it. That image of him on the mountain, backlit by the winter sun, kept coming to his mind. The flesh of Aiden’s shoulder prickled at the memory of Hunter’s angry body pushing past him. If you’re staying, stay away from me.
Someone knocked on the door. For a second Aiden imagined it was Hunter, like his thoughts had manifested him into being.
“Aiden?” he heard Kayleigh call.
Of course it wasn’t Hunter. Twenty-four hours ago, Aiden had been convinced Hunter was about to push him off the mountain. He wouldn’t be sneaking in here for… well. Whatever he’d be sneaking in here for. Aiden told himself he was curious about him for curiosity’s sake, but that was probably a lie. The knowledge that Mormon Thor was under the same roof was a distraction to say the least.
“Hi,” he called. Kayleigh came in with a steaming mug, and for a wondrous second, Aiden imagined it was coffee. How much easier this would all be with coffee. Then he smelled it.
“Mom made Ovaltine for you.”
“Oh,” Aiden said.
She read his disappointment. “Sorry.”
“Ovaltine is great,” Aiden lied. She put it down in front of him. It looked a bit like chocolate protein shake. “What is it?”
“It’s made of malt. I don’t know what that is.”
“No caffeine’s a tough rule.”
“Actually, the Word of Wisdom doesn’t say anything about caffeine. Some people just take it that way. I’ve had Coke before.”
Aiden realized she m
eant the beverage, not the drug. Rebel without a cause. “No coffee’s a hard sell for me,” he confessed. He wouldn’t have been a very receptive customer of her missionary work, but then again there were other obstacles to that too. He sipped the Ovaltine and decided it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t coffee.
Kayleigh hovered. “I was wondering… I know my mom put you in an awkward position….”
“Send them to me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“Thank you!”
Aiden waved it off. She was a nice kid, and he felt sorry for her. In her own way, she was battling LDS expectations as much as Hunter was. If the Jensens could support Kayleigh’s choices, then they ought to be able to come to terms with who Hunter was, but Aiden already sensed it was more complicated than that. As she left, Kayleigh told him breakfast was ready. By the time he changed and made his way up to the kitchen, everyone was focused on Brayden and Dallin’s imminent departure. Children and bags were being loaded, the latter more easily than the former, and the dog was running around barking. There were tantrums, expeditions to the bathroom, and peanut butter sandwiches in freezer bags—a whole host of things that made Aiden glad he wasn’t likely to accidentally reproduce anytime soon. After his cursory goodbyes, Aiden slipped into the kitchen and was surprised to find Hunter sitting at the table.
“Hey,” Aiden said, taken aback.
Hunter glanced sideways at him, chewing his toast. He didn’t say anything.
“Not saying goodbye?” Aiden attempted.
Hunter swallowed his mouthful and put down his crust. “Just about to.” He got up and walked out to join the others.
Aiden watched him go. Good morning to you too. He helped himself to cereal. The snow had covered the deck, leaving the furniture as indistinct lumps under the blanket of white. It felt almost unusual to eat something without praying for nutrition or moisture or the blessed day ahead. Then again the prayers for moisture seemed to have worked. He heard the goodbyes being concluded outside and the sound of starting vehicles. Soon the remaining family were drifting back.
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