It seems so obvious now.
Jen thinks Carly was supposed to believe Jen.
They ride up a dirt road, past a schoolhouse. There are horses tied under an awning in the shade and a few cars and trucks parked out front. Bikes lean on the fence. Some parents are just delivering their kids for the morning. Other kids are just delivering themselves.
A group of five girls runs in a circle around them as they pass.
“Hi, Virginia,” they all say, almost all at once. Only the littlest one misses the rhythm.
“Who’re your friends, Virginia?” a girl in a bright yellow shirt asks.
“They’re visitors. Say hi to them.”
“Hi, visitors,” the girls say, a little less simultaneously.
It feels good to Carly to be called a visitor and not an interloper.
“Bye, visitors,” the little one says.
They ride on up the road. Past a herd of cattle with no fences to keep them in. Past a fenced yard with five cars in various stages of dismantlement. Past a little white wooden house with a porch swing. With a woman on the porch swing. Who waves as they go by.
Carly waves back, but she can’t shake the feeling that the greeting was for everyone else. Jen is still riding next to Virginia, leaving Carly to feel like everyone fits into this landscape except her.
The trail begins to climb, and then Carly can see that it winds around to the top of the mesa. The sun is higher and stronger now, and sweat begins to creep down her collar, run down her back.
She nudges the bay forward, but he’s in no hurry. He makes up maybe one length of the ten they’re trailing, then falls back again when she stops nagging.
A solid decision forms in her head. She’s leaving tonight. If Jen is going to be pigheaded, Carly can’t afford to be weak. If Jen does what Jen thinks is right, Carly has to do what Carly thinks is right.
She’ll take off after dark and not look back this time. And when she gets to Trinidad, she’ll be able to see the ocean. Ralph said it was right on the coast. So there will always be water, and all she’ll ever have to do to see water is just look. She won’t be hot anymore, like she has been all her life. She won’t spend every day baking. Feeling herself sweat. And for the rest of her life, she won’t go anywhere dusty and dry and hot and empty. She’ll always be where it’s tree-lined and coastal and cool.
It’s a perfect, perfectly welcome plan. There’s really just one problem with it.
She only has about twelve hours to convince Jen to change her mind.
“You can ride over to the edge,” Virginia says, when they’re up on top of the mesa. “It’s quite a view. You can see almost as far as the Interstate 40. Well. More than halfway there, anyway.”
Jen nudges her horse forward. Carly holds back.
“Isn’t it dangerous to take them right up to the edge?”
“A horse has enough sense not to step off a cliff. They’re not stupid. They want to live, too.”
Carly pretends the view is just as good from where she sits. She looks all around, trying to see something familiar. She sees a road that looks like a real road. Paved. It heads south, or maybe southwest, in a straight line, disappearing to a point at the horizon.
“What’s that road?” she asks Virginia. “I thought there were no paved roads around here. Where does that go?”
“That’s this road,” she says. “The one we rode up on. The one with the school. If you take it the other way from the road Delores lives on, it’s a dirt road for about a mile. Then it turns into pavement. Goes all the way down to the I-40. Dumps you down between Winslow and Flagstaff.”
She remembers Alvin convincing her that Trinidad was too far away. He said you’d have to take the Interstate 40 all the way into California. Now Carly knows which road to take to meet up with the highway that will take her home.
She squeezes her boot heels against the bay gelding’s side. He takes a few dozen lazy steps, and then she’s right beside Jen. Right at the edge of the bluff.
They look off into the distance together.
Carly knows she’s looking down on Delores’s house, but she can’t figure out which one it is. Everything is too small, too unfamiliar from this distance and angle. The few tiny homes are scattered so far apart that they look to Carly like pins on a map. The sun has gone behind a pebbly, perfectly mottled blanket of clouds. She can see a mountain in the distance with traces of snow on its peak.
“Those clouds look just like popcorn,” Jen says.
It’s the first she’s spoken to Carly since Carly admitted the truth of what she does and does not believe.
“I really am leaving tonight,” Carly says. “No bluff. This time it’s real.”
“I know it.”
“Come with me.”
Jen only shakes her head. She doesn’t cry. Carly waits for her to cry. But apparently Jen found the bottom of her bottomless well.
“Then I’ll go on ahead and find Teddy. I’ll find out what’s what.”
Jen says nothing for a time. Carly’s horse shifts his weight under her, rubbing his face on the inside of his knee. Like scratching an itch.
Jen says, “I already know what’s what.”
“I’ll come back for you. As soon as I’ve got things squared away.”
“If you don’t die.”
“I’m not going to die, Jen.”
“I sure hope not. But you can’t say for a fact.”
“No. I guess I can’t. But, anyway…I’m going.”
“I know it,” Jen says.
There’s a calmness in her words. No less pain but no more agitation. It’s all accepted, apparently, as just the way it’s going to be. Apparently it’s just that easy. If you’re Jen.
They stare out at the view for a while longer. The gathering clouds form a nice break from the normally relentless sun.
“I just don’t get how you can look at all this and not think it’s beautiful out here,” Jen says.
Carly tries to look at the vista with new eyes. She really tries. It may be the only way to stop this split that’s about to happen. If Carly could suddenly fall in love with the Arizona desert…Love it enough to stay…
“I don’t see it.”
“I know you don’t,” Jen says. “And I just don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing out here.”
“See, that’s the problem with you, Carly. You think if it wasn’t made by a person, then it’s not anything at all. You just want malls and cars and cell phones. You look at a sky like this and think it’s nothing.”
Jen reins the paint horse around, as if she’d been born on his back, and rides back to Virginia. Carly sits her horse a minute longer, wondering how long there’s been a problem with her in Jen’s eyes. She always thought they fit each other fine. Funny how wrong a person can be. And how little time it takes to pull the covers off someone’s biggest mistake.
They lie in bed that night for maybe an hour. Carly is fully dressed. She even has her boots on. She tells herself she’s just waiting to be sure Delores is asleep. But she doesn’t share that thinking with Jen. Because she’s not even sure she believes it herself.
She rehearses the sentence maybe twenty times in her head. Opens her mouth twice, only to hear nothing but silence come out.
Finally she pushes harder. Forces the issue.
“I’m going now.”
“Be careful.”
“I wish you’d change your mind, Jen.”
“I wish you’d change yours.”
Carly climbs out of bed. Reaches for her backpack. The realness of everything settles in on her hard and fast. She almost wavers. But she thinks about Teddy and a place with an ocean. A cool place, with a nice big house. And him. He’ll help her understand how this whole horrible misunderstanding could have happened. He’ll lead her to a truth she can live with. She couldn’t stay here anyway. Never could have. But now, especially, she can’t stay here and not know. She has to know.
She threads her arm
s through the straps of the pack. Hoists it onto her back. It feels familiar, but not in a good way.
“I’ll come back for you.”
She doesn’t cry. She feels too scraped out to cry.
“And we’ll be right back to where we are now. You won’t stay and I won’t go.”
“No, I’ll fix it. I’ll find out what really happened. It’ll be OK. You’ll see. I think you just had a dream that night.”
“I don’t think so. It felt real.”
“Dreams do sometimes.”
“I feel like I might never see you again. Like you’ll go out there and get yourself killed.”
“No, I won’t. Look. Say I left while you were sleeping. That you don’t know where I went.”
Jen snorts. “Right. Like they won’t know where you went.”
That makes Carly feel the need to get going. Get a head start on Alvin. Be so far away by morning that he won’t be able to imagine she could have made so many miles. Then he’ll be looking in all the wrong places. Too close to here.
“I’ll see you soon,” Carly says.
But it sounds a little bit like whistling past the graveyard. She doesn’t say it like she fully believes it. Or like she expects Jen to.
The moon is still more than three-quarters full. And Carly’s eyes have adjusted to the light. It’s enough light to allow her to walk normally down the dirt road, due south, until it turns into pavement. Which it does, sooner than she expected.
It feels weird to walk on asphalt. Like she’d already forgotten such modern inventions existed.
Carly is nursing an unpleasant feeling in her gut. Like that weird unsettled feeling you get right before the nausea of a stomach flu hits. Oh, God, don’t let me be sick, she thinks. Just what I couldn’t afford to dump on top of all this.
Her jeans pockets are heavy with quarters. Eleven dollars in quarters. It jingles and weighs her down as she quickens her step, ready to make time, now that she can see where she’s going well enough. Now that the road is smooth.
For a while she actually runs. Jogs down the road. Her blisters are nearly healed, her boots feel fine. She’s in the best shape of her life. The road is a gentle downhill slope, which gives her a sense of power. Like when you’re walking on one of those moving walkways at the airport. It makes you feel like you’re a better walker than you really are. Like you can do anything.
Before she wears down from the running, she hears a motor behind her.
Her stomach goes cold. She spins around, expecting to see Alvin coming after her. But it’s a different truck. A good twenty years older. It’s a flatbed, with wooden slat railings on the sides of the bed.
She stands, frozen like a deer, lit up by its headlights.
Suddenly, and without even thinking, she sticks her thumb out. The truck passes her, then rumbles to a stop.
Carly runs to catch up.
Sure, she said no hitchhiking. But that was when Jen was along. It was her responsibility to make sure nothing bad happened to Jen. But now it’s just her. And she doesn’t worry so much about herself. Or maybe she doesn’t even still care.
A middle-aged native woman leans out the passenger window. Points to the bed of the truck. Carly runs around to the back, steps on the trailer hitch, and pulls herself up. Drops onto the flat wooden bed.
She crawls up nearer the cab as the truck rolls on again. Takes off her backpack. Flops on her back and uses the pack for a pillow. That funny feeling in her gut is still there, but she tries to focus off it. For the first time since arriving on Wakapi land, she looks straight up into the night sky. It’s alive with stars. Billions of stars, bright and clear. Even the strong moonlight can’t wash them out completely.
She thinks of Jen saying the sky is better here than anywhere else. But she convinces herself that the sky will be at least as good in Trinidad. Better.
Within minutes, she’s asleep.
The native woman is shaking her by the shoulder. She sits up suddenly. The truck is standing still. The moon is down. It’s dark. Truly dark. Just a thin path illuminated by the headlights of the old truck.
“We turn here,” the woman says. “You going to the 40?”
“Yeah,” she grunts, still shaking off sleep.
“That way.”
Carly thanks the woman for the ride and climbs down. The truck turns right onto a dirt road. Carly watches it until it’s gone.
Then she looks up.
Now that the moon is down, the stars are surreal. They surround her like a dome, and she feels as though she can see into the depth of that field. Like the stars are really in three dimensions. She can even see an eroded-looking band of mass that could be the edge of the Milky Way.
Somewhere in the distance, a dozen or more coyotes strike up a chorus. Yipping and howling. It sends a shiver up her spine. Makes little hairs stand up at the nape of her neck. That’s when she knows she’s never been so alone in the world, or so aware of her aloneness.
That sickening feeling slices through her gut again, leaving her thighs trembling, as if she can’t hold herself up. She falls to her knees in the dirt, wondering if she’s about to be sick. But when she turns her gaze fully to it, she finds it’s not sickness at all. It’s fear. She’s been terrified ever since leaving on her own. But she couldn’t let it stop her. So she couldn’t let herself admit it.
She thought she knew what it felt like to be on her own. But back then, she had Jen. But it’s as if she didn’t even know it. She thought that was alone, just her and Jen. But it wasn’t.
This is.
It’s about four miles later, as best she can gauge miles, and Carly is more or less sleeping on her feet. Walking and sleeping at the same time.
Suddenly, the world lights up in red, and Carly jumps fully awake, heart pounding. About fifty feet down the road in front of her, red lights flash. Cop cars, she thinks. What else could it be?
She has no doubt it’s her they’re after.
Then rhythmic bells start clanging. Ding ding ding ding ding. And the red lights move down in an arc, toward the road. First she thinks she might be dreaming with her eyes open. Then the lights drop into context and make sense. They’re railroad gates. That’s all. A railroad track intersects this road. And the train is coming. She can see it, off in the distance. She can hear one long whistle from its engine. Carly starts to run. Right in the direction of the clanging gates.
The train is coming. And it’s headed west.
It’s like a wind at her back. She’s getting help. She’s out on the road, making a beeline home to Teddy, and something in the universe is helping her get there. Paving a smooth road. First a truck picks her up and takes her practically to a railroad track. Then a train comes by headed west.
She sees the light on the engine of the train clearly now, off in the distance. She runs faster. Then she trips on something in the dark and goes flying. Lands on her belly and the heels of her hands. It knocks the wind out of her, as well as the burst of sudden confidence. But she struggles to her feet. The heels of her hands are stinging and wet, probably with blood. She leans on her knees, bloodying her jeans, until she can breathe again. Then she takes off trotting.
By the time she ducks under the clanging, flashing gate, the train has almost passed. She sees one final box car go by, but the door is just a crack open, barely enough to get a hand in. She knows there’s such a thing as jumping a train. But she has no idea what you grab on to. How you grip the thing.
The caboose lumbers by. In the flashes of red, Carly thinks she sees a ladder on the back of it. She runs after the back of the train and leaps on pure faith. If she’s wrong about what she thinks she sees, or if she misses, she’s in for another hard fall. She braces for it. Her bleeding hands grab on to something metal. A metal rung. Thank God the tops of her hands are dry. So her fingers can take a good hold. Her feet swing around for purchase. Then they land on a rung as well.
She slides one arm through the ladder and wraps her arms tightly, so she
can’t lose her grip. A moment at a time, her heartbeat calms, and her breathing returns to almost normal. She’s headed west, watching the dark shapes of whittled rocks and giant cactus flash by, dark silhouettes. Now all she has to do is hold on tight. And resist the urge to fall asleep.
She thinks about Jen. Is she sleeping soundly or lying awake worrying? What will Delores say in the morning when it’s clear Carly is gone?
A startling thought descends. Maybe Delores and Alvin will turn Jen over to child protective services. After all, Jen had nobody except an older sister, and then even Carly ran out on her.
But Jen will say it wasn’t like that.
But maybe no one will believe her.
Carly almost lets go, thinking she can make her way back down the tracks in the direction of the Wakapi. Then she realizes they’ve passed a dozen of those little roads. Just like the one Carly came down.
It’s too late to find her way back now.
PART FOUR
Seems So Long Ago
NEW MEXICO
Christmas Day
“Christmas is supposed to be a day you wake up early in your warm house and run downstairs in your pj’s to see what’s under the tree with your name on it, damn it.”
“Hmm,” Jen said. “Well. We don’t get that. So let’s go see what we get.”
They’d just woken up shivering in a tent at a KOA campground. Who knew it could get so cold in New Mexico? Carly thought. She’d expected it to be hot. Hotter than Tulare even. But they’d been climbing in elevation.
She’d wanted to ask if their new home was in the mountains. But then she would’ve had to talk to her mom. Or, God forbid, Wade.
“You ready?” she asked Jen.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
They stepped out into the freezing absolute silence.
Wade and their mom were sleeping in the bed of Wade’s truck, which was parked behind their mom’s car with a big rented trailer attached. No one moved in or near the cars. No one moved anywhere. Not many people were camping here. Most were home with their families for the holiday. Those who were here were apparently still asleep.
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