Elise carried a canvas tote, collecting twigs and branches first, then sticks and bark, finally logs. The ground was soft with fallen leaves, a muffling cushion of yellow and orange and red. She built the pyramid in stages, Lance now sitting on the thick end of his too-fresh juniper, cup of foul cooler box water in one hand, glowing joint in the other. Elise lit a paper grocery sack at the bottom of her tidy pile, then headed out one final time for a last load of dense logs, the ones that would be a pulsing silver ruin by morning, when it was time to start all over again.
Behind her the fire had taken hold, a crackling, pleasing beacon in the moonless night. She was not afraid of the woods; she was proud to think she could survive in the wild. Last night Lance had locked the car doors, securing them inside while the rain and then hail pelted the hood and windshield; it had been amusing, when they were drunk: What did he expect would try to get them? “Opposable thumb,” Elise had tried to teach him. “We’re the only thing out here with opposable thumbs.” Now Elise felt a tiny flare of embarrassment spark in her. It was embarrassment for him, Lance, who was so far out of his element, so inept at mere basics such as these: wood-gathering, tent-pitching, any outdoor skills, any entertainment that didn’t involve electronics or drugs or sex, and embarrassment for herself, who had only just learned this about him. He had spent the day smoking weed, twitching and slapping his head to discourage the season’s last blackflies, alarmed by the lazy clicking crickets whose mating season it seemed to be, snacking on recognizable snacks, wandering like a dowser with his open cell phone, seeking reception. Later, napping back in the car, radio set at a murmuring volume to override the noise of flowing water and jeering magpies.
“I grew up in L.A.,” he explained, shrugging: What could he say? If only he’d been awed by the splendor. If only he’d perceived his lapse as a personal flaw, one he wished fervently to correct. Penitential, he would have been bearable. And, last resort, if only he cared enough about Elise’s opinion of him to at least pretend these things, lacking them in fact.
She’d not found quite enough logs, sap-sticky canvas bag over her shoulder, flashlight in hand. It had grown finally truly dark; she refused to consult her watch, poke its lighted stem. Time, while camping, depended on rhythms other than those dictated by civilized devices. Was there a way to send Lance back to Phoenix, where she’d found him, without having to leave herself? The car was his; he’d grimaced and clenched over every rock and rut on the dirt road in. His oil pan, his precious oil pan.
At the corral, Elise detoured into the woods, there where the ancient fallen trees lay. Set next to the blaze, they would fizz and sputter, moss and dampness evaporating, and later would put out a rosy radiant heat, mesmerizing. Ants might emerge, rushing from the center. How would Lance react to that? She might move her sleeping bag outside, beside the fire and under the riotous profusion of stars, leave Lance in an anesthetized slumber inside the tent. She wondered, Would he worry that he could not lock that flapping door?
And then she heard a low animal hum. Her light fell from her hand, and she caught in its weak beam movement in the brush. Wildlife encounter information abandoned her. Play dead? Run? Make eye contact? Scream? Stand (this unlikeliest of all) with arms upraised and roar? Like any stunned being, Elise froze. The animal stepped from the brush, its eyes the first thing visible, glowing gold with reflected light, demonic. Coyote, she guessed, by its size and the cunning low-to-the-ground slide. But why would a coyote approach a person? Protecting its den, she reasoned. Rabid, she panicked.
She knelt for the flashlight, prepared to use it as a truncheon on the creature’s crazed/maternal/rabid skull. But now the coyote crept closer, not predatory but groveling; not a coyote but a dog, its ears lowered not in menace but in supplication, fear, appeal. Another hapless domesticated beast, like Lance, loose in the woods, lost in the wild.
This one, however, she felt she could pity rather than scorn. Save rather than abandon.
“What the fuck?” Lance said mildly, when she brought the dog back to the fire. The woods, he was discovering, were full of surprises. For its part, the dog slid behind Elise, as skeptical of the man as the man was of it.
“I found her. She found me. I think we should let her sleep in the car. I’m afraid she’ll run off.” The dog was somebody’s pet. Her coat was glossy and she followed commands, sitting when told, chewing delicately at the beef jerky Elise handed her, one piece at a time, her teeth sharp and white, her tongue two splotchy colors. Behind her ears, the thick tufted fur was slightly damp. Only the gash on her underside spoke of mishap, a newly scabbed twelve-inch cut, as if somebody had attempted to fillet her. As if she’d escaped that.
Lance said, “And we want her to not run off why?”
“Otherwise she’ll die.” Like you, Elise was tempted to say. She’s as unprepared as you are, for this.
“Not in my car,” he said.
Elise was thirty-one years old; for the last several months, she’d stopped taking birth control pills, ready to push her entanglement with Lance further. It had always been she who moved them to the next step, from work acquaintances to lovers, from occasional dates to daily monogamy, from separate dwellings to the shared town house (hers). Otherwise, it seemed he would be content to remain in stasis, adhere to a routine, plan no further than a day in advance, perhaps a week if there were a band in town he wanted to hear. He still worked for the temp agency; he had favorite weekly TV shows; his long-term dealer was his cousin, safe as houses, close as kin. He was, in general, sedentary, unadventurous, incurious, steady—maybe that was how Elise had sold him to herself, once upon a time.
How was it, she wondered as they bickered that night, as the thick-pelted dog laid her chin on Elise’s thigh and blinked beneath Elise’s distracted scratching of her head, that she so clearly foresaw that this animal’s unlikely manifestation—tamed wild thing emerging from the black forest, stepping then into the middle of Elise’s limping relationship—would be that relationship’s coup de grâce?
And still the voice spoke the words. Still the chime chimed. The headlights would have been lit, safety day-runners, had they not both shattered on impact, so that only the inside dome shone. Far above, on the highway that had once-upon-a-time been a rail bed, carved at great mortal risk into the mountainside by men greedy and heedless for gold, a winding two-lane ledge that hugged the geologic formation, a station wagon crept past. At the wheel a man clutched fiercely, his gaze fixated on the centerline. His wife slept oblivious beside him. In the back, his little girl glanced through the window, up at the stars, then down over the fathomless drop. For a second she caught a glimpse of a faintly lighted box, a woman inside. “Snow White,” she said aloud.
“Shhh,” her father warned. “Your mother is asleep.”
WINTER
CHAPTER 2
THEY HAD AN ONGOING HABIT of standoffs concerning phone calls. One would outwait the other, time and again, proving that she, mother or daughter, needed the other, daughter or mother, less. Cell phone technicalities meant that they couldn’t call without consequence, without the effort being recorded, the need noted later by the smug recipient, winner, whether a message was left or not. The loser caught caring. Proud, stubborn, superficially tough, secretly tender: these were the traits shared by mother and daughter. They’d rather throw a punch than shed a tear, burn bridges than mend fences, always an eye for an eye; after only a month at boarding school, Cattie had been put on three kinds of probation (knee sock violation; absence of footnotes; and going off grounds after curfew).
They were in one of those phone standoffs when Misty Mueller’s car flew off the road. For days afterward—for days beforehand, truth be known—Cattie Mueller assumed they’d been playing their cellular version of Chicken, two people declining to dial the other.
If she’d called her mother, the phone would have chirped like a muted bird on the forest floor, insulated there between the fallen and the falling leaves.
It was late autum
n in the Rockies, and not long after the accident, snow reached the road and river. Hunters—poachers, trespassers—had made an anonymous tip at the Rico Conoco; the alerted stoned teenage counter help had waited until she was no longer high before notifying the sheriff, who had brought along his rock-climbing neighbor in order to verify the car and body, a wrecker with the county had then cleared the scene, and only then, finally, had a long chain of phone calls begun. Sheriff to the state of Texas and to the State Farm Insurance office, State Farm Insurance agent Dick Little who actually knew Misty Mueller, and had had occasion to catch sight of her daughter. Dick Little prided himself on a personal approach to insurance, as if Houston were still (was it ever?) a small town. Misty lived in the neighborhood; she’d come to his Montrose office a few times on the January Sunday morning when the annual city marathon took place, when Dick threw his party, watching from the office deck, serving mimosas, and cheering the runners. He and Misty had been drinking orange juice minus the champagne; sometimes she attended the same AA meetings he did, one or the other of them providing rides. Dick had mistaken her for a lesbian.
It was Dick Little who first began to search for Misty’s daughter, Cattie, and he was successful only because he’d been wily enough to guess that her cell number would be only a digit different from her mother’s, which had been logged on a form she’d updated just six months ago. Cattie here, said a flat gruff voice just like Misty’s. Gimme what you got, mothafucka.
“Whoa,” said Dick Little; he didn’t know any teenagers.
The lawyers were slower to react. The will had been filed a decade earlier; her address had changed since then, as had her job, her phone numbers, the vehicle she drove. Her daughter had grown out of adorable toddlerhood into troublesome adolescence and been sent to Vermont, to a boarding school, and that information had been garnered only because the woman who picked up the phone at Houston’s Lamar High remembered having faxed multiple transcripts and immunization records east on behalf of Catherine (Cattie) Mueller. It was as if that private school thought the child might be feral and her home state negligent.
Still, by the time Cattie learned of her mother’s death, it had been weeks since they’d spoken. It seemed unthinkable that a standoff could end this way, one of them having finally gotten the indubitable last word, and now being told, in the head of school’s office by no fewer than three adults, that Cattie had, in effect, won. Cattie sat without speaking, staring at her uniformed thighs, a plaid that vibrated if she let her eyes go loose in focus. All disciplinary action taken against her at this school had involved her refusal to speak—to provide justification or explanation for persistent rule breaking (uniform knee socks: lost; laptop computer: neglected; nighttime curfew: ignored). Each adult had a style of handling youth; none of them was effective with this girl, not the head of school’s tart British professionalism, not the school therapist’s hip liberal understanding, not the band director’s goofy know-nothing nerdiness. They’d been aware of her isolation, not the ordinary shy newness of a recent enrollee eager for friends but the more entrenched solitude of the loner who didn’t care if people liked her. In her unwavering stare one saw the adult looking out. By and large, people declined to challenge her.
She nodded in answer to all of their questions and assertions. She understood they were there for her. She agreed that it was tragic. She heard them say that she was stunned, that they were stunned—who wouldn’t be stunned? Other students had lost parents. The school was not unfamiliar with this dilemma. There was precedence, contingency plans, a series of next steps. She understood everything they had so far said. She did indeed wish to be left, for a moment, alone.
As a group, this trio of adults decided the girl must be in shock. This was what they told themselves when they finally left her by herself (simply vacated the head of school’s office, prepared to wait out her shock in the waiting room with the receptionist and college counselor, the plate of organic, gluten-free, non-transfat cookies someone had brought). Alone, Cattie had reached for her cell phone and gone to her saved voice messages. With shaking hands she extended the stay of one of them, her mother’s fatigued call from some night last summer, when they’d been back in Houston. Cattie hadn’t come home on time—not because she was doing any of the things her mother assumed, but because she was carrying out an experiment. One needed friends to do what her mother feared she’d be doing, and Cattie didn’t have friends, really. It seemed like so much work, having friends. From the moment she’d weighed the costs and benefits, Cattie had not consciously sought out the companionship of others. Young, she’d had a neighbor friend, a boy whose sidekick qualities had been second nature to her. There he’d been, for as long as she could recall, and friends they’d inevitably become. Since then, it seemed that friendship required foresight and effort and connivance. To Cattie, it seemed not only like work but vaguely false. People accused her of being selfish; maybe not needing others was what they meant.
Her mother both wanted her to make friends and feared what would happen if she did, where she would go with those friends when night fell. But Cattie’s worst behavior—shoplifting, smoking cigarettes, skipping class—occurred during the daylight hours, and always alone. She felt, sometimes, too old to be the age of her peers. Why did they take pleasure in the ridiculous acts they performed together? She studied them at school, at the mall, on the streets near her house, which was located in the neighborhood where teenagers ran wild, there among the tattoo parlors and gay bars, the condom emporium and the comic-book shop, the neighborhood of the creative anachronisms, the addicts, the artists, the homeless, and the giddy tourist wannabes who were Cattie’s age. She agreed with her mother: teenagers were irritating. And maybe Cattie was too lazy to be a proper one. Why attract attention, suspicion, penalty?
At night, when her mother worried, she was out committing the most harmless of activities: walking. Dangerous, it might have seemed, except that nobody bothered Cattie on her walks. At her side, her dog, that unpredictable deterrent. She navigated away from her own neighborhood to the mild one to its south, the one that held Rice University in its damp heart of trees and pulsing frogs, its ochre-colored streetlights, under which she wandered with fascination over the buckling sidewalks, glancing in windows, letting sweat drip down her back, murmuring occasionally to her pet. She would never walk to school or to the grocery store, never with a specific destination or errand, but she had an endless energy for walking after dark. She thought. She liked the quality of thinking that aimless walking brought on, of being invisible, the sensation of her inside and outside merged and therefore untroubled. She was often out testing her theory of invisibility, the dog panting reliably alongside.
The cell had vibrated in her pocket on one of those late-night walks. She had been at the Mecom Fountain, into which somebody had poured laundry soap. This happened with regularity, a grand bubbling disaster, slick suds spilling into the traffic roundabout, causing cars to slide. “No,” she told the dog as it stepped forward to take a drink. “Dummy,” she admonished. As soon as the message had been left, she listened. She might not pick up when her mother phoned, but she paid attention. She retrieved the message, and covered her exposed ear against the noise of cars, of people leaning out their windows to point and laugh at the festive bubbles. She listened then. She listened now.
“I hate that greeting,” her mother said. She always started her messages that way, she couldn’t help it. Gimme what you got, muthafucka. Her mother had been annoyed that evening, and worried, furiously fearful, that Friday-night feeling, but in the middle of this message there’d been a strange pause, a hiccup, an intake of breath, as if, while talking, her mother had seen something that startled her out of her single-minded task of reprimanding her daughter. Misty was suddenly hearing her own words. Cattie knew enough about Misty’s own adolescence to recognize the shift, the way the woman took ironic note of the fact that she was talking to herself as she addressed her daughter, the bemused consciousness
that entered her voice, its doubleness, and its uselessness. She badly did not want Cattie to lead the life she’d led. Even as Cattie once argued against this logic—“I have to learn by making my own mistakes!” she’d heard herself self-righteously wail—she’d known only an idiot would believe that. Along with taking long walks, Cattie read a lot of books. They’d taught her a fair amount about mistakes. She thought of herself, often, as a character in a book, in the third person, wandering a world that could be described as if from above, or beyond. Narrated. Seeing herself in a scene, rather than feeling caught up in that same scene, was a sensation she had lived with for a long time. It was one of the ways invisibility worked, after all. Did others feel that way, she wondered, or was it the explanation of her freakishness?
Her mother shared that freakishness, Cattie thought. They knew each other well. They could have traded places. Their voices and their penmanship and their dress size were the same. When Cattie had gone for braces, Misty did so, too.
Cattie had saved a more recent message from her mother, but she erased it now without replaying it. An act of loyalty, there in the head of school’s office in Vermont. “Why did you call me in the middle of the night?” she’d asked her mother, the morning after missing the call. Her phone had been right beside her head, right beside her bed, but she’d slept through.
“I didn’t call you,” her mother said.
“Yes, you did. You left a message.”
On the other end, silence. To spare her, Cattie had invented the reason: a pocket or purse call, made inadvertently, the phone dropped or bumped and then, all on its own, dialing out to the world. Not tears and laughter and slurred affection, but simple noise—the television, no doubt!
But her mother of course would know otherwise. And so had begun their standoff. Her mother had been drunk. The message was proof. They both knew, they were both not saying. Not saying was maybe more communication than saying, Cattie considered. And erasing it now was an act of love larger than saving it. Cattie then listened once again to that more coherent mother, the one who, last June on a Friday night, had been waiting at home for Cattie to come safely back.
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