The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel

by Nevada Barr

  With an effort she raised one eyelid. The other eyelid remained shut, nailed in place by the daggers in her skull or the surface her face was mashed against. Through the slit between her eyelids she could see her left hand, the wedding band Zach had given her glinting dull gold, sparking with a glare so intense it threatened to slam her retina three inches into her brain.

  The movie that played every morning when she awoke began unreeling.

  The paper bag D’Agostino’s had packed her groceries in was limp, wet with drizzle that had been falling since noon, drizzle so stagnant with the heat of July it lost the ability to form real drops. Her hair was damp, braid trailing down her back, heavy as a hangman’s rope. The Levi’s that had fit when she’d put them on that morning stretched and drooped in the steam till they threatened to fall from her hip bones. Her pants legs trailed on the sidewalk. She was waiting to cross Ninth Avenue at Forty-first; one long block to Tenth and she was almost home.

  “Pigeon!” came a shout. Across the avenue, Zach waved both arms over his head, making his six-foot-two scarecrow physique look even taller and narrower. The drizzle and the heat plastered his dark baby-fine hair to his neck and cheeks; his glasses were askew and his clothes loose and ill-fitting. Anna thought he was the most beautiful man in Manhattan. Seven years of marriage had done nothing to dull the thrill she felt when she saw him.

  Fire on the soles of her feet banished the dream movie. She must have passed out with her feet in the sun. Sand, sun: outside. Was she a tourist attraction on a dung-infested beach? Turning from the glint of her wedding band, she tried to push herself up on her elbows. Sharp and grinding pain knifed through her left shoulder. The arm did not move. Her head threatened to explode, dimming the vision in her right eye. She fell to her side. The arm was broken or dislocated or badly sprained. Her head was broken or dislocated or badly hungover. Nausea, sudden and violent, spewed the contents of her stomach out. Dizziness, so bad she dug her fingers into the dirt to keep from being pitched off the surface of the earth, spun her.

  Finally, vomiting stopped. Dizziness abated. Anna stared at the mess splattered over her bare breasts, the end of her braid trailing in the muck.

  “I’m naked,” she whispered.

  In front of her was a short stretch of sand, then a wall. Afraid to move, she rolled her eyes: wall and sand and sand and wall. She was nowhere. A beach in a box. She was naked in the bottom of a rock-lined hole and couldn’t remember how she got there. Poison flowed through her veins, making her eyes blurry and her thoughts sluggish, but she couldn’t remember getting drunk. She couldn’t remember anything. Either this wasn’t a hangover or it was the last hangover, the drunk that put her down like a sick animal. Or pushed her back over the edge into crazy. Crazy, she remembered. Crazy was an empty purgatory ten thousand masses couldn’t free her from.

  Panic slammed into her viscera, vision tunneled, skin prickled.

  Squeezing her eyes shut she murmured, “Shh, shh, shh, you’re okay. Naked in a box is better than dead in a box.” The butchered line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead brought her back to Zach. He was playing Rosencrantz in an Off-Broadway production she stage-managed. Now she and Guildenstern awaited him in purgatory. Tears of fear seeped from the corners of her eyes. A sane person would know why she was naked and broken, getting stranger and stranger in a strange land.

  “No,” she whispered. “You’re not crazy anymore. This is real. Shh, shh, shh.”

  Easing to a sitting position, she cradled her left arm across her stomach. Her shoulder was deformed. A rounded lump pushed out in a knob the size of her fist, skin pulled so tight it was shiny. Images of Sigourney Weaver, an alien bursting from her sternum, shot through her mind, making the dislocated shoulder surreal, terrifying.

  Closing her eyes against this impossible existence, Anna began the catechism her sister teased her with. Molly was a psychiatrist; she knew crazy when it scratched at her door.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” Molly asked.

  That was an easy one. No fingers; Anna was alone with her own ten.

  “What is today’s date?” Molly demanded.

  “July 1995,” Anna whispered. “I don’t know what day.”

  “Who is the president of the United States?”

  “William Jefferson Clinton,” Anna murmured, proud of herself for remembering the Jefferson part. Molly would give her points for that.

  “You’ll do,” Molly said with a wry smile and faded from Anna’s internal landscape.

  “Don’t go,” Anna cried, but it was too late, her sister was gone.

  Slowing her breathing and relaxing her muscles one by one the way Molly had taught her, Anna felt the panic back off. It wasn’t gone, but it was bearable. “This is not purgatory,” she assured herself. “They don’t let Protestants in.”

  Encouraged, she opened her eyes again. No longer blind with fear and pain, she saw smooth stone curving up from the cushion of sand where she sat. Streaks of rose and buff and gold whirled upward nearly thirty feet as if sandstone had been twisted, pulled like taffy. The shape was as perfect as an earthenware bottle thrown by a master potter, the upper part flowing gracefully into a narrow throat that curved into a slanting tunnel. At the end of the tunnel an eye of blue was punched out of the sky. A single lozenge of sunshine, scarcely more than a yard across and a foot wide, reached the sand; the source of the sun on her bare feet. Spinning in the petrified tornado, her thoughts were as wild as wind-blown debris.

  A solution hole; she was in a solution hole.

  That thought was carved out of the chaos between her ears with difficulty. Around Lake Powell were hundreds of solution holes. She’d seen them from the boat. Jenny, her boss, said they were deposits in the sandstone made of softer stuff, and over the millennia they eroded away, leaving smooth, irregular holes. Jenny boasted Glen Canyon Recreation Area was home to one of the largest of these formations in the world.

  Anna was not in the largest, not by a long shot. The bottom of the hole couldn’t be more than six or eight yards in diameter. How had a woman who’d never been closer than a boat ride to a solution hole ended up naked in the bottom of one? Had she suffered a psychotic break in the desert sun, thrown off her clothes, and fallen in? Had she gotten drunk and stumbled naked into a pit? Each thought came hard and slow, coated with a residue thicker than booze. Gingerly she touched her head where it hurt the worst. Behind her right ear was a lump radiating heat. The skin was broken; she could feel dried blood in her hair.

  If she was sane, if she’d “do,” as Molly said, she hadn’t suffered a psychotic break. She sniffed her hand, cupped it to smell her breath, sniffed her hair. She stank, but she didn’t stink of wine. As crazy as she’d been the last months, she’d never blacked out without benefit of a couple of bottles, yet now she remembered nothing.

  Had someone pushed her in? The tumbling fall could account for the knot on her head and her shoulder being out of its socket. Why would anyone steal her clothes and drop her in a pit?

  Rape.

  “God, God, God,” she moaned and spread her legs, pushing her feet back into the searing sunlight. No semen smeared on her thighs, no bruising.

  She didn’t feel raped. A person would feel raped.

  “Not raped,” she whispered. “Naked in a hole and not raped.” Pushing into the sand with her heels, she backed into the curving wall of her bizarre prison. No exits, no steps cut into the rock face, no rope, no ladder. No way out.

  Slapping the stone with the palm of the hand on her uninjured arm, she screamed, “Help! Help me! Somebody help me, God damn it!” Words careened off the wall, echoed feebly, then were gone. She pounded and screamed until it seemed all sound was taken from her, poured out, pooling around her, not a single decibel making it up the sheer walls and out to …

  To where?

  Balling her hand into a fist, she struck the stone hard.

  “Stop it!” Molly ordered.

  Anna stopped, letting her
bruised hand rest palm up on her thigh in an unconscious attitude of supplication.

  “Breathe,” Molly said from somewhere behind her eyes.

  Anna breathed.

  Pulling her knees to her chest, she wrapped her good arm around her shins and, rock protecting her back, fought to push through the dense fog clogging her mind.

  THREE

  Stretches of Anna’s mind were blank, black and clean as if wiped with an eraser. The blow to the head, or whatever mind-altering substance she’d consumed, had stolen time from her. For a while she crept across this featureless plane; then, at last, the dim dawning of a memory.

  That morning—this morning, a morning, some morning—she’d gotten up early. Before seven, she remembered. Already the day was hot. Summer heat in New York came from milky skies, pouring moist and heavy over the city, flowing down from the buildings and up from the subways until it suffocated. Desert heat came from hard blue sky and weighed nothing. Like a weak acid solution, cleansing and caustic.

  Anna remembered that—remembered thinking that on that morning. This morning. Some morning. She reached deeper into her mind and the images scattered, leaves before a thunderstorm, skidding across her brainpan.

  Breathe in: one, two, three. Hold, two, three. Out on a five count. Just breathing, not chasing the memories. Air in, air out.

  Tentative, but real, an image drifted back: her, sitting on a rock, looking down at Dangling Rope Marina.

  Battleship gray and uniform, the marina was laid out like a kid’s game of hopscotch painted on flat, fake, teal green water, a single runway, wider near the shore end where the snack bar and ranger station were, narrowing as the dock thrust into the lake. Blunt rectangular arms stretched to each side, one for boat fuel, one for garbage Dumpsters the size of semis, one for the sewage pumps where houseboats could dump. In between were mooring slots. All gray and square and dull in hot light from a dead blue sky.

  “Lake Powell is a hundred and eighty-six miles long and has almost two thousand miles of coastline,” she whispered without opening her eyes. That she’d learned during orientation.

  Dangling Rope was a third of the way uplake, between Wahweap, which was near Glen Canyon Dam, and Hite Marina to the northeast. Uplake, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area butted into Canyonlands National Park; downlake, into the Grand Canyon. That she’d learned after stepping off a bus in Missouri—or maybe Alabama—and buying a map.

  Grand Canyon, Canyonlands—photographs of them were prettier than those of Glen Canyon. Glen Canyon was a warped, half-drowned land. Chameleonlike colors shifted with every change of light. The unnatural lake was not gentle with sand-and-shell beaches and cattails in the shallows, but fever green in a dead world. An inland sea in hell or on Mars under the merciless blue of a hard rock sky. It suited Anna.

  Unreal, or surreal, stark and freakish, the landscape could hold no memories. The past was burned to dust by the sun and blown away on winds that were seldom still.

  Could hold no memories.

  “I hate irony,” Anna mumbled. She prodded the image gently, hoping it would metastasize and tell her where she was, how she ended up here, and why her brain no longer functioned properly.

  Another image slunk from the shadows at the edges of her mind. A big yellow sun. Eyes lost behind sunglasses, rays spiky, Mr. Sun was smiling down on a powerboat towing a water skier. It was her daypack, bought at Wahweap’s gift shop. She remembered opening it, taking out the water bottle the park gave her, uncapping and drinking.

  God, but that was a great memory.

  My lieu days, Anna thought as the ghost water slid down the throat of her past self.

  “It’s Tuesday, July 11, 1995, and Bill is still president,” she said aloud to her sister.

  Molly did not reply. Maybe it was no longer July 11. How long had she been unconscious? Hours? A day? Days? Not days. At orientation they were told nobody could live in the desert for days—plural—without water.

  Thirsty, she opened her eyes. No cheery sun in Ray-Bans greeted her. The pack, along with her clothes, had not journeyed with her into this place. No bottle filled with water that, like the rain that often didn’t reach the ground in the desert, never seemed to reach her thirst but evaporated in her esophagus.

  Did desert peoples cry? she wondered. Or had dehydration reached their Anasazi tear ducts? She no longer cried, and she missed it. Tears were warm and kept her company. When tears were gone, what remained was emptiness the size of a basketball, yet paradoxically as heavy and solid as a chunk of concrete. Inflating her lungs around it was a chore. Swallowing food past it was more work than it was worth. Carrying it from place to place exhausted her.

  Out West, where there were wide-open spaces, big skies, where deer and antelope did their thing, she thought breathing might be easier. Out West there was supposed to be more air in the air.

  Out West.

  Out here.

  Outdoors.

  Not long ago “outdoors” meant the streets and avenues of Manhattan. “Wilderness” was Central Park after sunset. Robert Rowell, a costume designer she’d been fond of, summed it up nicely. Slamming the window of his ninth-floor apartment, he’d announced, “I love the outdoors! Let’s leave it out.”

  Then Zach left and Anna wanted out: of the city, her skin, her life. Three drinks with a stage manager working at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts and she’d applied for the first seasonal park job she found.

  She’d gotten it.

  There was nothing left for her to do but to practice breathing all the air in the wide-open spaces.

  Except she was in a hole smaller than the average New York apartment. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered and shifted her weight on the sand. A harsh grate of agony shot out from her shoulder to ricochet around her skull.

  “Sorry I blasphemed,” she managed. Given her situation it was best to stay on the right side of all gods whether they existed or not.

  When the worst passed she realized she could keep her eyes open. Pain seemed to be clearing her mind, not enough to produce anything like total recall, but enough that she could open her eyes without the stone tornado spinning her into a vomiting session.

  Having her eyes open was not reassuring. From the unsightly alien lump on her shoulder, she could see her arm hanging like dead meat. The tips of her fingers were white, and her hand was numb. The skin was pale and old-looking with papery fine wrinkles. Pain, spread over every square inch, was the only sign of life in the appendage.

  In the movies the hero would grasp the hand, give the arm a yank, and, presto, good as new. Tentatively, with the hand of her living arm, she tugged on the cool white fingers. Pain threatened to make her throw up again. She quit, laid her head back against the warm rock. Bone was squashing a blood vessel. That was why her arm and hand were dying. How long before the tissue was so damaged there was no reclaiming it? Gangrene, blood poisoning, necrosis, a litany of ailments of which she was all but ignorant. The classics had been wasting her time. If she’d stage-managed for General Hospital or M*A*S*H she’d know these things.

  No sense worrying about the arm. Thirst would probably kill her first.

  Breathe in two three.

  Hold two three.

  FOUR

  Jenny, Jenny Gorman, called the Fecal Queen because she cleaned human waste from the beaches, Anna’s boss, Jenny, said there was a trail out of Dangling Rope to the plateau—or mesa or butte or whatever the flat places above the ditch places were called. Anna remembered that.

  She remembered shading her eyes and staring up at the sand-colored rock. Never had she seen so much dirt in one place: tan dirt, red dirt, pink dirt, yellow dirt, black dirt. Dirt and rocks. Carved stone heaved up, smooth as polished granite in some places, shattered into avalanches in others, broken rocks flowing down from higher ground, rocks liquid as lava and lumpy as dough. A psychedelic Mt. Rushmore morphing into the Pyramids of Giza, giving way to the craters of the moon, and all of it glazed with whit
e-hot sunlight.

  At the skyline, crinkled trees or shrubs showed black rather than green, not exactly poster plants for Mother Nature. One of the few signs of life Anna had seen at Glen Canyon was the fish. Every day, around the dock, the big bums gobbled scraps boaters tossed at them. They were about as glamorous as rats begging for picnic leavings in Central Park. Bum fish, houseboats loaded with party animals, and a little pink rattlesnake were the sum total of her wildlife experience. This wasn’t Bambi and Thumper’s kind of neighborhood.

  Hand shading her eyes, she’d searched for Jenny’s path. To the right of a rubble of rock flowing down a side canyon was a sheer cliff veiled in a skein of black lace—desert varnish, Anna had been told. Even the black gave off a hot shine.

  A hat.

  Anna remembered Jenny told her to wear a hat. She’d offered to lend her one that looked as if the Yankees had used it for third base for a couple of seasons. Nobody wore hats. Anna hadn’t seen a hat in years. The first one she put on that wasn’t purely to keep her ears from freezing was the flat-brimmed ranger’s hat. Like everybody else, she resembled a hairless, malnourished Smokey Bear when she wore it.

  These memories trickled through the toxic sludge in her brain. Like dreams they drifted with color and emotion. Like dreams, they ran together without logic. Rehashing a hike up a pile of rocks wasn’t getting her any closer to what mattered. With her good hand, she rubbed the grit from her eyes and tried to fast-forward to the stone pit, the naked, the befogged. Wispy trails of the cliff, the past, the path threatened to dissipate. Anna let go of the effort.

  Breathing in: one, two, three.

  Hold, two, three.

  Exhale on a five count.

  Wisps coalesced into memory.

  Hatless, Anna was squinting. If she tilted her head to the side she could almost make out a line paler and more contiguous than the rest. It didn’t look like a path so much as a scratch on a rock. She could get most of the way up to it via the apron of broken stone. At the top of the pile was the wee scratch that might be Jenny’s path, might zigzag up a crack to the ridge. It didn’t look far. Anna had walked the length and breadth of Manhattan more times than she could count, hundreds of miles clocked on concrete. The climb looked to be less than a mile. Five crosstown blocks. Piece of cake.