by Gin Phillips
“Want to play in the rain?” she asked.
“Not particularly,” he said slowly, confused.
“Come on,” she said, and stepped off the porch into the downpour. She was soaked before he could answer.
“Are you serious?” he asked, standing in one easy movement. “You can’t even see where you’re stepping. You’ll slice your feet to pieces.”
Blinking water out of her eyes, she smiled. He did not. He reached for her, leaning off the porch, and she backed away.
“Come on,” she said again, a giddiness, a need to move, running through her. “Let’s find out what the view’s like from the site.”
He was not catching her mood at all. “We’d kill ourselves getting up there. Come back up here and dry off.”
“The answers are all up there,” she said, turning away from him and starting to run. She ran through the dirt yard, now mud, splashing through small streams and large puddles. The rain was coming down in curtains, heavy as the thick cotton of her mother’s old-timey costumes, falling down on her shoulders and head. Wet and cool. It was not completely unpleasant with the still-warm air. Her hair grew heavy and slapped against her cheeks, and she was glad she had on shorts, because wet denim would have slowed her. She did not have on shoes, though, and she could feel the rocks cut into her feet, just as Silas had warned her they would. Still she ran, and rain bathed her face.
She crossed the creek, hopping, trying to avoid the sharpest stones, and then she could hear Silas behind her.
“Ren! Stop, goddamn it! Ren!” He called her, and she kept running, on the balls of her feet now, minimizing the amount of skin that touched the ground.
She was at the elk trail, where there was nothing but stone and gravel and cholla. She knew that if she misstepped onto the cholla, the pain in the soft undersides of her feet would be unimaginable. She began the climb up. She could feel the cuts in her feet more intensely, but there was an ecstasy to this. The water was running off her like it was running off the ground. She would not absorb it—she cast it off. She could not see more than a few feet in front of her, and she was wrapped up in the soft, heavy sound of the rain.
She missed a step, didn’t see the dark crevice open in the ground. Her toes caught, and she turned her ankle. She cried out but didn’t stop. Her thighs hurt, and the bottoms of her feet were slick and sensitized.
“Ren!”
Too fast. She was going too fast, and the gravel was slick, and when her foot didn’t find a grip, she slid off to the side, out of control. She tried to steady herself, but her hands only scrabbled against the rocks, breaking one nail off below the quick. Her left foot wedged against one large flat rock and stopped her skidding, and she stood, starting upward again. She was inches from the ledge, maybe thirty feet from the ground.
“Ren!”
He called and called, her name ringing off the rock, and then he stopped calling. It was the silence that finally slowed her. She heard her own panting breath and nothing else, and she felt the forward motion drain from her muscles. She stopped. A stab of pain shot up her leg from her right foot. She had made it only to the first shelf of the elk trail, looking over the rocky bottom of the arroyo, but still endless zigs and zags from the plateau of the top.
The euphoria started to evaporate. When she turned around, she saw Silas walking back down the hill, facing away from her. She kept her eyes on him, catching her breath and waiting for him to turn toward her.
“Wait,” she called, after she’d watched him take ten or fifteen steps.
He kept walking.
“Silas,” she said, not quite yelling, just wanting him to come to her.
He stopped and turned.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, and she could hear the anger in his voice.
If he would come closer, she could answer him, she thought. But he wasn’t moving. So she picked her way down the trail, trying not to limp, ignoring the pain in her feet. He let her come.
When she was close enough to see the water dripping into his eyes, he spoke again. “I don’t know why I’m still here. If you want to fall off the mountain, go ahead. I’ll be back at the bunkhouse.”
He turned and started back down the hill, and she stumbled after him. It wasn’t only anger in his voice, she realized. She had frightened him. Frightened him so that his jaw was clenched. Frightened him so badly that he would hardly look at her.
“I had to get out,” she said.
He kept walking.
“It’s all up there, Silas. I know it is.” She hoped he didn’t notice that she was putting all her weight on her left leg. “I couldn’t just sit there. Can’t you feel how close we are?”
“You’re trying to tell me you ran up a mountain barefoot because you’re excited?” He stopped and shook his head. “This wasn’t excitement. This was something else.”
Her breathing was slowing, and her head was clearing. He had his tennis shoes on, which she knew must be ruined. She felt a pang of regret for his shoes. He must’ve stopped to grab them, she realized, which would explain why he hadn’t caught her sooner. She had seen him run, and he was much faster than she was. At least he was standing still now, listening to her.
“I just wanted to get out in the rain,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He wiped the rain from his eyes. He reached for her arm, looping his fingers around her wrist lightly. She had felt his fingertips biting into her hips, smiled against his fingers as he rubbed her cheek raw with his stubble, but now he seemed afraid to touch her.
He pulled her toward him slightly, looking down. “Let me see your feet,” he said.
She felt a sudden internal pressure against her ribs, and she thought it might be strong enough to crack bone.
She had been sitting on the bed, putting on her sandals, during the last fight she had with Daniel. It was like him to start a fight while she was sitting down, using his height over her. But she hadn’t blamed him, really, knowing he was trying to use whatever he could to even the balance between them.
He wanted something from her, she knew he did, and she was annoyed with him for wanting. He was blond, with long limbs and a wide chest with perfect lines of muscle. For the two years she was with him, she was always thrilled when Daniel undid the first button, then the second, then the third, on his shirt. He was not too handsome—she did not like too handsome—but his torso was flawless.
He loved her, she knew he did.
She sat on the bed, trying to work a prong into a hole, the sandal strap unyielding, and he said, “Will we just do this forever?”
And she thought, Crap. I want a cappuccino even though it has too much sugar but I could get it with skim milk and if we do this now I won’t have time to get coffee before my meeting and I thought we just had this conversation last week and I do still love his shirt unbuttoned like that.
“Do what?” she said. Even two years after the discovery of the bowls, they were still running tests on the hundreds of sherds found around the Crow Creek site. The lab had singled out three particular sherds that they thought she should look at just in case they came from the same artist. She knew she shouldn’t get her hopes up.
He had some sun on his face from their long run earlier that afternoon. “Did you even hear what I said?”
She immediately knew he was not asking if she had heard his question. He had been talking before the question, taking long strides across the hotel room as he rolled his sleeves up his forearms. She needed only to grab hold of what he had said.
He did not like her pause. “You didn’t.”
“I did, too,” she said, thinking. “You were saying how you could get hardwood floors.”
“I said since you like hardwood floors, if we turn the upstairs bedroom into your office, I could take out the carpets and put down hardwoods for you. I could do a lot to that
room.”
“Right,” she said.
“Some men like mysterious, complicated women,” he said. “I don’t. You won’t tell me anything. You don’t even hear me sometimes. How can we get married if you’re not even here?”
He had not given her a ring yet. The only one who ever had given her a ring, John, had talked much less than Daniel. She wanted to say, Daniel, of course you like mysterious complicated women, you ass. If that’s what I am. You obviously like whatever I am, because you’re still here, aren’t you?
But he wasn’t an ass. He was kind. Kinder than she was.
“I want to be married to you,” she said. And she did. As long as he didn’t talk about it too much. But he was kind. And thoughtful and perfectly smart, and she would surely be foolish not to be in love with him.
“I’m always the one who brings it up,” he said.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “But you’re not giving it to me.”
She respected him for that answer. John would never have said that. He was the first one she let herself stay with, and he was the one she had hurt the most. He had large hands that were always warm. With him, she knew she was giving him nothing, only complaints, and yet he never would acknowledge that he was being shortchanged. Argue more with me, she would say. You agree to everything. Aren’t you ever mad at me?
“Sure,” John would say, agreeably.
She believed he had not been mad at her. He loved her. And it drove her crazy, the obligation and the boredom and the guilt of it.
She had been twenty-one when she met John, and she should never have taken that ring. She figured that out only later.
“I love you,” she said to Daniel that day, and she meant it. “I want you. I want to spend my life with you.”
She was considering, as she waited for his reaction, that the artist might have made some of the plainer brownware they’d found, but there was no way to confirm it. The brownware had no paint, no brushstrokes to compare. But she was interested in the question itself of whether this artist worked solely on the artistic pieces or also on undecorated functional pieces.
Daniel finished buttoning his white shirt and covered up his beautiful chest while his green-blue eyes watched her, and she could see the need in them. If he grabbed his things and stormed out and told her he never wanted to see her again, she would still have time to get her cup of coffee. But if he stayed and kept talking, she would have to make do with a Diet Coke from a vending machine.
“That’s not what I want,” he said, and sank down next to her on the mattress. “I mean, it is, but only partly. But sometimes I feel like I should leave just so I could see if you’d come after me.”
She wrapped her arms around him. The fact that all the bowls were parrots made her believe that the artist herself had chosen the design. It was possible she had been told to paint the parrots, but Ren didn’t think so. She believed there was a personal connection, at least a preference. And she liked the idea of the woman bent over her clay, considering all the ways to fill the blank space, feeling a flash of satisfaction when she hit on the right image.
Daniel didn’t leave, of course. She always did the leaving. It was another month before she knelt beside his chair and said she thought she was being unfair to him. She had learned that a man liked it better if she was below him when she said it was the end of things. She liked to sit close, kneeling, not touching, because she had found that touching could make it worse for him. He would jerk away from her hand on his knee or arm. She would position herself on the carpet, off to the side, so he could stand and leave whenever he liked. If he did not stand and leave, if he wanted to convince her, she would stand and let the veil fall away so he could see how she had already left the room, already left him, and that this conversation was only a courtesy. And then he would leave and he would hate her at least for a while.
The day she ended things with Daniel, he asked why she’d stayed with him.
“Because I loved you,” she said.
He didn’t comment on the past tense. “No, you didn’t,” he said.
Daniel hated her permanently. At least she assumed that he did. He never called again, never e-mailed, never responded when she left a message saying she still had some of his clothes and his bike helmet. She was always stunned by the depth of what he seemed to feel, of what all of them seemed to feel.
The rain had slackened. She looked at Silas’s mouth and his breakable wrists. He was standing close to the edge, and she had a clear image of him windmilling his arms, teetering, then disappearing off the ledge. If he slipped, it would be too fast for her to do anything but grab for empty air. He would hit the stones in the arroyo below, spines of cactus in his arms and cheeks and fingers, and she would be too far away to do anything but call for him.
This was what Daniel had wanted from her: fear. But she couldn’t have summoned that, even if she had wanted to. She never feared the absence he would leave behind.
“I’m going to have to head back to Valle de las Sombras for a while,” she said, as if this were a normal conversation not taking place in the middle of a downpour. She tugged him closer to her, farther away from the ledge. “Next Monday or Tuesday, I’m thinking. For a couple of weeks.”
He tapped his left shoe against the ground, knocking off a clump of mud. He looked only at his shoes. He didn’t pull away from her, but she could feel the tension in his arm. Maybe it was only anger on his face, after all. Maybe his attachments flared fast and bright and faded quickly. That girl Hannah Hightower or his anthropologist wife. Maybe he’d looked at them with the same softness on his face. Maybe he’d told them all the thoughts in his head without them even asking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“That was insane,” he said, his voice as hard as she’d ever heard it. “You could have killed yourself.”
She tightened her hold on his arm. “I know. I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry.”
“You can say you will not do it again.”
She took a long time to answer, making sure she meant it. “I won’t.”
He pulled his arm away from her grip, gently. He rubbed his palm over his chin, and water misted off his beard. “So,” he said, “you want some company when you go home?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do.”
“Tell me when something’s different,” Ren said to him. “Tell me what’s different than it was with the others.”
“Everything that’s different?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Than with all the dozens of women before you?”
“Screw you,” she said, and brushed the back of her hand against his jaw.
“Nobody’s ever liked me not to shave before,” he said. It struck him as the safest answer. Her own reserve had tempered his need for full disclosure. He did not want to scare her off. Or bore her. He would make her laugh and keep her reaching for him at night, and the rest could come later. “I mean, the stubble thing.”
“I like it,” she said.
“I know.”
He was sore from the day, from holding his neck too long at one angle.
“I need a new body,” he said.
“I like the one you have.”
“But it hurts me.” He looked back at her, pulling one elbow behind his head. “What if I could have a body that was totally painless, but it was, um, pear-shaped? Wouldn’t you rather me be pear-shaped and not be in pain?”
“No,” she said, running her palm over his hip bones, the flat of his belly, hard thigh muscles.
He fidgeted again, making the mattress squeak.
“My shoulders hurt,” he said. “And my knees and my neck and the place where my left leg connects to my hip.”
“Okay, you can have a new body,” s
he said. “A fat, pear-shaped one. Fine.”
“Thank you.”
Ren came within inches of stepping on a little brown grass snake on her way to Santina Canyon. It had blended perfectly with the sand, and only when it moved did she jump back.
The snake slid past her foot as silently as a ribbon falling through the air, making quick looping curves through the sand. It was perfectly harmless. Silas had tried to get her to take his gun with her—he said hiking alone without it was dangerous—but she didn’t want to carry it. Still, she should have been more observant. She had been too lost in, well, not even thought. Lost in non-thought, in blankness. It could be comforting.
You could walk right past Santina Canyon and never know you’d passed it. Silas had shown her the way during her first week at the site—a path that seemed to dead-end into a rock wall actually dead-ended into the hidden entrance to the canyon. Someone—probably a long-dead someone—had carved footholds and handholds into the twenty-foot sheer wall, and the first chamber of the canyon appeared huge and solid around a corner just a few steps from the top.
Ren had hiked this canyon a handful of times, most of those with Silas. Going up the wall was satisfying and fairly quick, although going down would take more concentration. She slung her pack over her shoulder and reached for the first hold, moving steadily until she got to the top and needed to push off with her arms and reach with her left foot to cross over to another rock formation. A gap between the two rocks showed the gravelly ground below, and it was impossible not to dislodge a few pebbles that clattered to the ground in slow motion. It was a gap just large enough for a body to fit through, and Ren always tried to keep her eyes focused on her handholds.
Once the climbing was done, the base of the canyon opened in front of her, with a network of narrow pathways. The paths branched off and inevitably came back together into wide, round areas with towering walls, natural amphitheaters, little Roman Colosseums carved out of rocks. It was an alien world, harsh and sharp, but the colors of it were soft. Rose and tans and golds and yellows and pale pink—the colors of rose gardens, not rocks. It was lovely and claustrophobic, and only the bright blue sky above kept it from overwhelming her. But she liked to wander through the maze of it all—about two miles before it emptied into an unexpected meadow—and feel the quietness of the stones.