by Sonja Yoerg
“Does he flirt with you?”
“No.”
“Then why do I care about it?”
By the time she realized there was a reason for Valerie to care, she was too ashamed to tell, and too worried she might lose her best friend.
Liz hadn’t planned to keep secrets from Valerie and she hadn’t planned to lie to the police. The story about the beer came out of her mouth unbidden. She might have been subconsciously covering herself, so everyone would believe she was the tragic widow, instead of the cheating woman who’d shocked her husband and let him run out the door angry. Let him kill himself. Of course she was relieved she wouldn’t have to get into it with everyone, to explain how Gabriel had ignored her, and how it made her feel. To explain Mike. How could she do that anyway? Her understanding of her marriage, her choices, her goals—everything—had collapsed. She didn’t have anyone she could trust to help her figure it out—her go-to resource had always been herself—so she had buried the truth and let everyone think what they would.
And the lie, as it happened, worked out better for Gabriel. When she confessed to the affair, and used the past tense, she removed Mike from inside their marriage, where he never should have been. She hadn’t meant to put him there, but he was there nevertheless. And because Mike was now out, he had to stay out, and she would stay out of his marriage as well. That couldn’t transpire if the police—and perhaps Mike’s wife and Valerie and the Pembertons—all knew about her affair. He would be everywhere in Gabriel’s life, in the memories people carried of him. Gabriel hadn’t deserved that.
After she called Gabriel’s parents, she returned to the chair she never sat in. The reality of her situation began to sink in. Gabriel was gone, and this part of her life was over. The longer she sat, the more she realized the lie was irrelevant. She hadn’t gotten away with a thing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She woke at dawn to silence. Her head ached, and her mouth felt lined with parchment. The confines of the tent threatened to smother her—she couldn’t face Dante in there—so she grabbed her jacket and pants and crept outside.
The cold air was sharp in her nose. She walked up a small rise and faced east. The landscape stood immobile. She could not detect the slightest sign anything had happened during the night. The mountains remained stolid and mute above the lake, a sheet of midnight blue glass. The stunted trees held their resolute needles.
She returned to the camp, unpacked the cookware and stove, and set the water to boil. Dante squirmed out of the tent and regarded her as she spooned coffee mix into the cups.
“You been up long?”
“A few minutes.”
She filled the cups with water, stirred, and handed Dante his. “What are we going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you’d be going back.”
He stared out at the lake. His cheekbones were red where they’d caught yesterday’s sun. The short beard he’d grown since Red’s Meadow—which she had thought sexy—now made him appear to be transforming into someone she might not know. Her throat closed and the skin on her palms tightened. She sipped her coffee to stop from crying. She didn’t want him to go. She wanted him to want her. He didn’t need to forgive her (her transgression wasn’t his to forgive), or understand. Wanting her was enough. It had to be.
“No, Liz, I’m not going back. I promised I would do this hike with you, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Because he, at least, knew the meaning of a promise.
They ate their breakfast without speaking. Liz carried the dishes to the lake, scooped water into the bowls and mugs, rubbed them clean with her fingers and walked away from the edge to toss out the water. She wiped the dishes dry, stacked them on the ground and stuffed her hands into her pockets to warm them. The tips of the peaks on the western shore, a pair of isosceles triangles, burned orange. The lake surface captured them, every detail of shadowed and sunlit stone painted upon the water, the far shore an uncertain demarcation.
She watched until her fingers regained feeling, then gathered the dishes and climbed to the campsite. Dante was bent over his pack, his back to her.
“How far are we going today?” he said without looking up.
“Le Conte Canyon would be great. So, thirteen miles?” She began storing the dishes and cookware in her pack.
“Okay.” He clicked the straps shut. “I’m almost ready, so maybe I’ll see you at the pass, or later.”
Her hands stilled. She should’ve expected he might not want to walk with her this morning, but the break in their routine unsettled her. He didn’t seem angry, though, and probably only wanted time to himself. Her mind was so foggy she doubted she could manage a conversation anyway. “Sounds good,” she said.
She heard feet on gravel and lifted her head to see the McCartneys crossing the gulley between their camps. Liz wondered if they’d heard her screaming last night and felt her cheeks flush. The couple smiled and waved as they approached.
Paul said, “Good morning. We wanted to make sure you didn’t get blown away.”
“No, we’re still here,” Dante said, his tone tinged with regret.
Paul and Linda exchanged concerned looks. Liz changed the subject. “Thanks again for the stakes. I’m not sure the tent would’ve held up without them.” She scanned the piles of gear in front of her and peered inside her empty pack. “I didn’t give you guys a fuel canister last night, did I?”
“No,” Linda said. “You said you’d conserve, which was nice of you.”
“That’s what I thought. But I was so tired, I thought maybe I forgot.” She began rummaging through Dante’s pack.
“Is something wrong?” Linda asked.
“Yeah. Our extra fuel has spontaneously combusted, too.”
They all looked at one another.
“What the hell is going on?” Paul asked.
Linda said, “Someone could have gone through our packs at Muir Ranch. Everyone has dinner at the same time, and our cabin was next to yours. Nothing’s locked.”
Dante shook his head. “Stealing a camera, or a nice knife, I could see. But fuel? Even at the ranch they were only charging eight dollars a can.”
Linda said, “Eight bucks is eight bucks. Some people depend on other hikers’ leftover food instead of resupplying. They end up with a free vacation if they steal fuel.”
“I guess,” Liz said, although she doubted the theory.
Paul said, “If we hike into Le Conte Canyon tonight—and that’s our plan—we’ll be low enough to make a fire.”
Dante said, “Another primitive skill to add to my resume.”
“That’s the thing about primitive skills,” Liz said. “You never know when you might need them.”
The McCartneys returned to their camp. Dante swung his pack onto his back and adjusted his cap. “See you later.”
“Have a nice walk.”
He nodded as if this was exactly what he had in mind. “You, too.”
She watched him go. He cut diagonally across the hill to meet the trail at the shore and turned south. After a few hundred yards he followed the trail away from the water, and began ascending a ledge at the base of Mount Darwin. Dante was tiny now, an ant moving slowly and steadily, significant in its being and in its purpose, and insignificant otherwise. If she took her eyes off him, she might not find him again.
He reached the top of the ledge and stopped. He might have turned to admire the view, or to see where she was, but it was impossible to tell. In a moment she would lose sight of him in any case, so she made her final preparations and set off. She had become chilled and walked rapidly, relieved to be on her way.
She left Evolution Lake behind and passed a series of lakes, each the same deep blue. Wanda Lake was the largest, lying in a basin a mile below Muir Pass and nearly divided in two by a peninsula. The trail came within an arm’s
length of the shore. As she skirted it, the surface danced, bejeweled by the early-morning sun.
She stopped to rest midway along the final climb to the pass and looked down upon Wanda Lake, a pool of indigo ink. In this treeless expanse was only ink, stone and sky. The granite basin held the pool within its rugged curves. Beyond the lake, the western slopes of the jagged peaks plummeted into an unseen valley where she guessed another measure of ink had spilled.
The vista reminded her of her first weekend in Santa Fe, when her mother had taken her to lunch at Coyote Café, and to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. She’d been dragged through countless museums during her twelve years—some a dozen times or more—and had never been inspired. Museums and galleries and studios were her mother’s world. Claire was an authority, so Liz felt her mother automatically experienced more in the face of art than she herself ever would. Depending on her mood, Claire might offer commentary but she was usually lost in private reflection or engrossed in sketching in the notebook she always had with her. Liz was relieved when an audio guide was available to assuage her boredom, although she did admire line drawings, especially preliminary sketches, and the museum buildings themselves.
At the O’Keeffe museum she had left her mother’s side and proceeded, as if called, to a canvas in the far corner the size of a large window. She stood a step away and peered through an ivory hole into an impossibly blue sky, where a faint moon hung. Her gaze slid to the bottom corner of the painting and a second ivory hole revealing again an ellipse of sky. She realized the ivory was bone and had the sensation of lifting out of her shoes. Her eyes were drawn through the hole in the bone. She felt if she were to lean forward, she would feel the bone’s dry smoothness on her forehead. She was in the painting, and the moon was more real than she.
Liz returned to the museum most days after school. Each visit she would choose another painting, or let it choose her. Her hands dipped inside the cool velvet tunnel of a calla lily, and she lay at the foot of the round red hills and stroked their sides, which were sanded like the tongue of a cat. With her fingers she explored the openings in a coyote skull—weaving in and out of the nostrils and eyes—a skull she was certain had never belonged to a living animal, but had always been bare and exposed. In a painting entitled Above the Clouds I she stepped from one white puff to the next, the sky below as deep as the ocean.
She said nothing to her mother.
After several months, she could summon the paintings in her mind, and she returned to the museum only for new exhibitions. She kept a stack of postcards of her favorites in a drawer next to her bed, and entered an image before going to sleep, exploring and touching all the surfaces and their simple, beautiful meaning.
When she packed for UCLA, the postcards remained in her bedside table. They were emblematic of the odd, isolated childhood she trusted she could now leave behind. In any case, they lived inside her should she need them. And she managed without the skulls and mesas and morning glories until the night Gabriel died and she found herself sitting in the chair she never sat in, searching for O’Keeffes on her laptop. They got her through that first night.
Now she stared at the peaks surrounding her. It was utterly quiet, as quiet as her childhood bedroom before she fell asleep. These mountains were a far cry from Georgia O’Keeffe’s mesas and canyons, and yet the feeling they evoked in her was the same. The simplicity of the scene, combined with the enormity of its scale, evoked a sensual reverence in her. And curiosity. If she dipped the tip of her finger in the ink, could she write upon the sky?
This was why she had come. Not to think, or learn, or seek absolution. She had come to enter into a world of pure perception, to explore this canvas of gray and blue. It was a place beyond reckoning, beyond sin. If she could exist there, she could bear the weight of existence completely inside herself. This, she believed, was necessary for love. She feared the answer would be no, but, at the moment, the question was still alive.
During her marriage to Gabriel, she’d lost hold of the strength she’d taken for granted as a child, when she had calmly reached into her toolbox, aiming to take the world apart and discover how it worked. Courage lay within easy reach of a child who knew nothing of how easily understanding can unravel, leaving a set of rules that apply to nothing, and an empty heart.
Last night she’d delivered a truth to Dante, blown out of her by a windstorm. Today the trail was in front of her, and behind. Dante was there, following the same line, keeping his word. The high country, so simple, so beautiful, was indifferent to them both.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dante was waiting for her at Muir Hut, a stone shelter built by the Sierra Club in 1930. He smiled for the first time that day.
“Welcome to Muir Pass. I finally beat you to the top of something.”
She lowered her pack, pulled off her hat and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. “Lack of oxygen seems to suit you.”
“I slept more than you did.”
“Your conscience is clearer.”
He took a step toward her. “I have things I’m sorry about. Everyone does.”
She wondered what he meant. Probably something innocuous. “Thanks, but let’s not have a sinning contest.”
He put a hand on her arm, and looked as if he had something to say, but changed his mind.
“What?”
He picked his water bottle off the ground. “Here. Drink. You lost a gallon in tears last night.” She accepted the bottle. “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He reached into his shirt pocket. “Look what was sitting in front of the hut.”
A red tent stake.
They took a break from the long descent from the pass to eat lunch. Dante retrieved the tortillas, cream cheese and smoked salmon from his pack. Liz filtered two liters of water, and took a seat next to him on the grass.
“Someone’s messing with us, Dante.”
“Who would do that?”
“The Roots come to mind.”
“You think they’re behind everything. Rodell was injured, remember. They aren’t even hiking anymore.”
“So it seems.”
“Why would they fake an injury?”
“I have no clue. It doesn’t even work as a dare. ‘I dare you to fake a wrenched knee so we can get those two to hump your stuff downhill’?”
“You’re right. That makes no sense.”
“Unless they were after Brensen.”
“Why would they be after Brensen? You sound like a conspiracy terrorist.”
“Theorist.”
“What?”
“Conspiracy theorist. Not terrorist.”
“Who cares, Liz!”
He was exasperated with her. She couldn’t blame him, not after last night. She had half expected to be relieved having unburdened herself of a secret she’d held for years, but she wasn’t. She felt tenuous. And she couldn’t get the Roots out of her mind. “I’m just thinking aloud. Did you see Brensen at Evolution Lake?”
He shook his head.
“Me neither.” She took a bite of tortilla. “I kind of miss his bitching.”
Late that afternoon at Le Conte Canyon, they chose the largest of three campsites arrayed between the trail and the stream, the Middle Fork of the Kings River. The site was closer to the trail than she would have preferred, but they’d logged thirteen miles since Evolution Lake and it would do. A newly built rangers’ station was visible a hundred yards away, nestled among the pines on the other side of the narrow stream.
She erected the tent, crawled inside and fell asleep instantly. She awoke to low evening light. Tempted as she was to put her head down again and sleep until morning, hunger drove her outside. Dante wasn’t around, but he had set up the kitchen. She opened a bear can and grabbed a handful of trail mix. Other than the night at Muir Ranch, she hadn’t been full since they’d left Yosemite Valley ten days earlier. She’d gotten used to being
somewhat hungry much of the time. But every once in a while, like now, if it wasn’t for the obligation of rationing, she’d have eaten her way through the contents of both bear cans. And then crawled into the tent for another nap. Eight hours a day of hard exercise had turned her into a lean animal—a large cat that walked across its expansive territory and, after feeding, slept for days. At least that was her fantasy.
She scouted the area for dry wood to burn. On her way back to camp with a small armload of kindling, she spied Dante with two men on the bridge spanning the creek south of the camping area. He shook hands with them and left. When he noticed Liz, he raised a fuel can in the air.
“You can return that wood to its native habitat. This is almost full.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“On the map I noticed there’s another trail not far from here, coming out of Bishop. I figured there’d be people doing short trips, so I asked everyone who came by and scored on the third group.”
“They just gave it to you?”
“They only had one night left, so I traded our nearly empty canister. I offered them five dollars, but they wouldn’t take it.”
She smiled. “I never thought of salesmanship as a wilderness skill before.”
“Wherever people are, there’s a deal to be made.”
She admired his ease with people and his trust in the practice of give and take. He assembled transactions the way she assembled objects. His skill was more delicate than hers, as no deal was ever made without emotion: loyalty to a product, or a person; love for an idea; jealousy in not getting everything; and pride. Pride was always at the table. Dante respected all these feelings when he made a sale, and recognized them in himself. It made him an invincible negotiator. She had no clue how he made it seem effortless.
They needed to conserve fuel on behalf of Paul and Linda, and had collected the wood, so they built a fire anyway. She demonstrated how to arrange the kindling upon the ashes within the stone circle and handed him the lighter. “Torch it.” Once the kindling caught, they angled larger pieces of wood against it.