Light-years beyond. No one had ever told Angie such a thing before. She only knew she didn’t belong, and that it was somehow her fault. She held the wheel tight, her breath still unsteady.
“Do you need a ride?” Angie asked. She picked up the box from Eddie’s off the front seat and threw it in the back.
“Sure,” Jess said. “I was just out walking. I’m not really going anywhere.” She slid in next to Angie on the bench seat and clicked on her seat belt. “Where you headed?”
Angie shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about her father or the shop. She didn’t want to be that careful girl right now. She recalled the urge she’d had to gun it down Main as Papa watched.
She wanted to go fast for once.
She stepped hard on the accelerator, and Jess laughed, letting out a whoop as the wind through the open window whipped her long curls. Dust plumed behind the bumper. Angie’s palms sweated, and once she almost swerved off the road, but she laughed, too. At the lake pullout, she bumped into the makeshift parking area and slammed the brakes. They both jerked forward as the engine stalled.
Jess laughed. “Congratulations. I think you might be the world’s worst driver,” she said, and Angie smelled a hint of rubber and sweet shampoo mixed with gas fumes.
They sat in silence, staring out the windshield. Besides the shop, Arroyo Lake was one of the other places Angie felt okay, bigger than her public self. Behind the tufts of creosote and shrub oaks, Angie could see the water flash. It was so quiet she could hear the nasal ka-kah call of a quail, a rustling in the thin brush under the mesquites and junipers. On the horizon, the cement-plant smokestacks smoldered at the tips.
Her papa had taught Angie to swim at this lake when she was a girl, long before these days of bras and embarrassing toiletries, when she could float in his arms without him gently pushing her away. Good, bien, mira, mira like this, he’d say as she kicked and sputtered. He bobbed and frog-kicked below the dock, assuring her, and she jumped out into his waiting arms again and again. He taught her to dive from the dock, too, kneeling first with her arms tight like an arrow over her head, until she grew stronger and braver. Then she would run to the end of the dock and spring out, flying, flying, until she torpedoed into the brown water, larger than she’d ever been.
Jess ran her finger on the side window, made an X mark. “The middle of nowhere. I live in nowhere.” She propped her feet on the dash. Her tennis shoes were the purple of plums, the canvas thin at the toes. The laces were too long, knotted three times, and it looked as if she’d shoved her feet in without untying them, breaking down the heel. She had drawn black diagonal lines along the white rubber trim. Like tick marks. Or jail bars.
Angie made a noise in her throat, something between a sigh and a whimper.
Jess said, “You don’t have to talk. I don’t mind.” She scratched at her neck. “In my opinion, not talking isn’t the worst thing in the world. A lot of people I know ought to shut up more often.” She chewed hard on the rubber band. “My dad, he’s got this whole other family now. Like ours wasn’t good enough, so he went out and got himself a new one. Like we were old shoes. Like my stupid Chucks.” She tugged at the shoelaces. “Last thing he ever bought me.” She spit her rubber band into her palm, put it on her wrist.
Jess’s chin quivered, and her eyes blurred with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
It’s okay, Angie wanted to say, but it came out as a soft sigh.
Jess fell over onto Angie’s shoulder, limp as a drop cloth. Her plastic sunglasses dug into Angie’s bicep.
“I haven’t been sleeping. I get up and wander around in the dark.” Jess sniffled and sighed. “I feel like I want to go somewhere, but I don’t know where. Somewhere far away.” She took two hard breaths and fell asleep.
As the sun liquefied and seeped into the horizon, Angie rubbed a slow circle on Jess’s forearm. She knew her father would be waiting for her, starting to worry, but she didn’t want to move. The round glass rose in her throat, and she pressed her thumb on the butterfly indent of her neck. She could feel something there, tender as a swollen gland.
For a few weeks, they were inseparable. After school, Angie drove them around town in the Impala. Though it was cold, they rode with the windows down, drinking gas-station sodas from cups the size of oil cans. Jess would pop in cassette tapes of music Angie had never heard on the radio—R.E.M., the Velvet Underground, X, a Patti Smith mix she called Plush Patti. She talked about Phoenix, the desert city down the hill, a place that in Angie’s imagination was as large and dangerous as a samurai sword, lawless and glinting with cars and malls and desert parties, radio stations and rock concerts and movie theaters with first-run films, worldly-wise girls and boys who had the inside scoop on the world. But Jess made it seem much more normal. She talked more about her childhood than anything: riding the roller coaster at Legend City or the carousel and paddleboats at Encanto Park, pedaling bicycles up and down the graveled paths along the canals. She talked about watching British sitcoms and Saturday Night Live late into the night on weekends with her parents, all three of them together. Now the two of them.
“You’re a good listener,” Jess told Angie. “A good friend,” and Angie nodded in agreement that Jess was too, a friend, a good, good friend.
Weekends, Jess often spent the night at Angie’s. Angie stayed at Jess’s only once, tucked in a sleeping bag next to Jess’s twin bed. Jess’s mother, Maud, ordered them pizza for dinner and then disappeared into the bedroom before the sun had set. Jess explained that her mother had to get up at four thirty to get to the post office, so she went to bed early. Angie had nodded. Her father had to get up early, too, so she understood. But at Angie’s house, Papa cooked dinner for them after he cleaned his hands, washing them over and over with orange-pumice soap though he still wound up with grease in the cracks. He fixed them quesadillas or breakfast for dinner, their favorite, stacks of pancakes and huevos, all served on yellow melamine plates. Papa stayed up late with the girls on weekend nights when he didn’t have to open the shop in the morning. They played gin rummy, pinochle, or Texas hold ’em, or watched TV until the sun peeped through the curtains.
They slept in Angie’s double bed, which sagged in the center. When Jess’s knee grazed Angie’s, Angie almost fell off the side. Sometimes, when Angie knew Jess was deep asleep, snoring a little, she would dare to touch her. Trail her fingers down her cheek, along her bare thigh. She’d slide her pinkie under the rubber band at Jess’s wrist, feel the pulse against her knuckles. The glass inside her swelled. She imagined them hopping in the Impala and driving off down the hill to Phoenix, or to California, or to some town in Colorado. Angie would open an auto shop, and Jess would go to college and work in a record store. They could make do. Angie worried sometimes that her father knew her secret, what she was imagining for herself and her friend. A few times he caught her staring at Jess. He tilted his head, a frown between his brows, and she blushed and looked away.
Late one night, something woke Angie. She jumped out of bed, disoriented. Jess wasn’t in the bed, or in the room. Angie stumbled into the hallway. A light was on in the living room.
Jess was curled up asleep on the couch, a magazine dangling from her fingers, the lamp on low on the side table. Angie plucked the magazine from Jess and started to cover her with an afghan. As she did, she kicked over a tumbler of water Jess must have put on the floor next to the sofa.
Angie got a towel from the kitchen and knelt to sponge up the water. Her arm bumped Jess’s bare knee. She sat on her heels as her stomach twinged, as heat spread everywhere. She reached out and touched that knee deliberately, cupped it in the heart of her palm, holding her breath and watching Jess’s face. She moved her hand up Jess’s thigh and under the blanket, her fingers as directed as a trail of ants. She kneeled closer, lifted her other hand toward the curve of Jess’s shoulder. She wanted all of her under her hands. She thought her body would crack open from the pleasure
of this sensation, from the bright discovery of this feeling in herself.
Jess opened her eyes. Beneath the lamp, they seemed dilated, space-black. She blinked at Angie. “What are you doing?”
“Angela,” Papa said.
Angie yanked her hands away and scrambled to her feet. Her father stood in the darkness of the hallway. He leaned on the wall, his face unreadable in the shadows.
Even if she had the words, she couldn’t have spoken them.
Jess sat up, yawning. “I couldn’t fall asleep, but I guess I did. What’s going on?”
Papa stepped into the room, and Angie saw his face then, except it looked nothing like his own. It looked locked up tight. Lights out, no one home. A stranger who wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Go back to bed,” he said. “Vas. Ahora.”
Angie started to shake. The glass moved onto her tongue. She coughed and then spit onto the brown carpet, next to the damp spot under the towel.
Angie ran to her room, locked the door, grabbed her coat, and climbed out the window. She ran to the Impala, and when she turned on the headlights, she saw her father in the doorway, Jess standing next to him. She gunned it down the drive and into town. She drove up and down Main and through the District in a trance, not glancing at the closed-up shop windows, her eyes on the yellow and white lines of the road. She didn’t know where to go. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t know where, and she had no money anyway. She wondered how far those pavement lines stretched, where they would take her if she followed them past the outskirts of town—south to Phoenix, north to Flagstaff and to the reservations. And then to where?
Finally she drove across the bridge to Arroyo Lake, parking in the dark pullout with the engine running, huddling for warmth in her coat. She didn’t sleep, the images of her father’s face, of Jess’s knee, fluttering behind her eyes. At dawn, stiff with cold, she got out of the car and climbed to the solace of the lake.
The lake was gone.
Angie stood on the dock in the hazy dawn, blinking down at a fissure in the bottom, a jagged gash the length and width of a body. The muddy surface glistened with bloated sucker fish and soggy weeds, pockmarked with once-buried things—what looked like a broken fishing pole, a beer can, a tarp or maybe a deflated raft, the heaving back of a boulder. Around the lip, the mud was cracking, the water already soaked into the thirsty earth.
She squatted on her heels, her toes over the end of the dock, and wrapped her arms around her knees, fighting a shiver. She knew about sinkholes; in Earth Science, they’d learned about deep-down aquifers and the porous, fragile rock of the Verde Valley, but she also had grown up hearing stories about kids falling into them during hikes and bike rides, the legends of childhood. Devil’s Kitchen in Sedona was hundreds of feet down, and everyone knew there was more than one banana-seat bike down there. Bones rotted, metal rusted. The earth could eat you. Now it had eaten the lake.
The sun crept higher, the sky no longer gray but not yet blue. A non-color, something like the inside of a tin can. Crouched close, she could see more things in the lake mud. Cigarette butts, gum tinfoil, a condom wrapper—condoms, something she hadn’t ever needed. She swatted the gnats around her face, and her nostrils flared at the rotting smells. The images of Papa and Jess flicked and fluttered. She wanted to scream into all that ragged space. She couldn’t remember the last time she had screamed, had let fly until her throat burned. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Her thighs cramped, so she stood up, grimacing, shaking out her muscles. Her right foot was numb, and she stamped it, hopping on it. As she did, perhaps because of the dimness and the lack of sleep, she lost her balance. She whirled her arms, trying to throw her weight backward, but it was too late.
The scream trapped inside came out now as Angie fell into the empty lake.
She landed on her side with a hard thump, the mud certainly not as yielding as the old lake water. She tumbled and skidded down the slope toward the gaping hole until the mud slowed her. She stopped a few feet from the sinkhole, in a seated position, as her rear end and legs sank down into the mud.
She swam her arms in the air, trying to wade forward, but the sucking mud held her legs fast. “Fuck,” she said, “Fuck,” her voice piercing the hushed morning. She began to cry a little, hiccupping, grit in her nostrils and mouth. A little girl stuck in the mud. A stupid skinny little girl. No wonder Jess didn’t—no wonder.
The mud was rough with sand and rocks. She pawed at it, scooping up a lump, and chucked it with all her strength at the sinkhole. It landed several feet shy of it, which made her so furious she punched the mud with both fists, the rocks scraping her knuckles. She got another good handful, but instead of throwing it, she rubbed it into her mouth. She shoved in another mouthful, lungs burning, before retching it up.
A siren wailed somewhere in the distance. Then someone called her name.
She craned her neck. Her father stood at the top of the lake, his white hair wild. At the sight of him, despite everything, the first thing she felt was a spurt of relief.
“Angela Juarez,” Papa called. “Jesuchristo. Get the hell up out of there.”
She shook her head.
“What do you mean, no? Ahora. Venga.”
“Stuck,” she whispered.
“Mi’ja. Please. Come up out of there. Let’s talk about this.”
She shook her head again.
“Maybe I misunderstood—”
“You saw,” she said, louder now. “You saw.”
“Talk to me. You can tell me, verdad? You can tell me anything.”
She thought about how he had seemed like a stranger in the hallway, and she started to say, “I can’t,” when the lake let out a ripping groan. A mammoth wedge of mud alongside her fell away, exposing a slash of blackness. She stared at the menacing hole in the earth, and the reality of where she was struck her hard. She screamed again. Hot adrenaline rushed into her limbs, and she tried to lunge upward. Her arms were sucked into the unforgiving mud until she was stuck up to her chest.
Papa yelled, “Don’t move. Dios. Mierda. Don’t move. Hold real still.”
She held as still as she could, breathing in shallow spurts. Sweat poured down her face, dripped on her lips. She thought she heard a splash.
Papa was sliding down the lake on his backside and hands, crablike, inch by inch. He said, “No, no. Angela. Ya voy. Ya voy.”
She was up to her neck. Her feet dangled beneath her, pulled by the dark gravity below. Mud pushed up around her ears and chin, and her mouth, until she was only eyes, eyes taking in her father. Papa, white-haired and wide-eyed, nostrils flared, plastered with mud. Papa, digging down and grabbing her shirt. Papa, his mouth moving fast—Por favor, he seemed to be saying, por favor—and pulling and pulling, all muscles and veins and tendons, making her think, again, about how much weight he could carry.
He got a hand, then two hands, under her arms, and he pulled her to him. Breathing hard, she pressed her face against his chest, let the thud of his heart echo into her. The glass rose higher. This time it shook loose. She let it roll on her tongue and then spit it into the air. “Love,” she said, but it was unintelligible, more like a grunt, against his body. Her voice was froggy, the deep croak of a stranger. It burned, that new voice, and she touched her throat.
“Ay. More than you know,” Papa said. He locked his arms around her.
Though it wasn’t possible, Angie swore she saw the glass take shape before them, a tiny fragile orb, bright as water. She would see this image again at moments throughout her life, from what felt like a million years from that day, when she lay in bed with Rose, the cats curled on the comforter, Hazel asleep in the room next door, the dust motes floating in the sunlight in the window. She would see it the first time with Rose, in Rose’s parents’ motel, the rain flooding the parking lot as Beto Navarro stood guard in the Impala—the first time a girl had returned her touch. She would see it when Rose ran off the first time, spooked by the dawning awaren
ess that what they were doing in secret was real, it wasn’t going away. She would see it when Rose turned up on her doorstep, bouncing Hazel on her hip. She would see it when they visited her father’s grave tucked in the little cemetery in town, when she rearranged rocks into a heart shape over where she thought his heart might be. She would see it every morning as she woke in his house, as she opened his shop in the town she never left, the lines of the road taking her right here, a place both new and old.
She saw it again now as she stared down at the newspaper and looked at that girl’s face again, still seventeen years old, a bright xylophone chime of a memory. Her first secret love. The girl who’d opened Angie’s heart and pushed her in the direction of her true self, even if she’d never known it. The girl whose friendship Angie then severed, unable to see past her own shame and confusion, retreating again into silence. The girl who didn’t come home one rainy winter night, and about whom Angie never stopped wondering: What if I’d been a better friend? What if I’d told her? What if she’d said yes? What if I’d seen her that night? What if she showed up on my doorstep? The girl whose disappearance seemed to soak into the porous rocks of the town, a mystery lurking beneath the surface, becoming as much a legend as those of bones and bikes in sinkholes.
Angie pressed the newspaper to her chest, breathing hard. No, these were real bones, the real bones of a real person—not a myth, not a story. And she remembered that day in the mud, how she’d held tight to her father as he pulled her to safety. How she watched as the glass drifted silent between them and then floated out of the muck, rising above their heads, up and up, beyond them.
Unearthed
February–May 1991
In the first weeks they called her the new girl, and then Phoenix Girl. Not everyone, mainly those who roamed the halls in packs, boys with their hair gelled into spikes wearing polo shirts and smirks, girls with cocked eyebrows and wads of pink gum. At first they said it to each other, nudges and whispers she overheard (that’s her, the new girl), but then they said it to her: “Hey, it’s the Phoenix Girl. What’s up, Phoenix Girl?”
Sycamore Page 6