by Anne Valente
Billie looks at her. And you think that has something to do with the planes.
Not directly. But I’m sure she connected her research to what’s been happening. She didn’t want us to fly out to Utah. That’s clear. But maybe she wanted us to understand not just her career but something else.
Billie takes a sip of her milkshake. Like what? Some connection between the Jurassic climate and this bonkers weather now?
I don’t know. But the weather’s changing so drastically. Those planes aren’t a coincidence. We’ve never had a summer like this. Constant rain since March. And this drought out here. And fuck, Billie, all those planes. Airports have actually closed.
Some are opening back up. That’s what Lucy said.
So, what, you’re not scared? Are you worried at all about the news?
Billie rolls her eyes. I was in prison. It’s not like we ever thought about vacationing from there. So, no. I haven’t given plane travel much thought.
This isn’t about vacations, Billie. Seven plane crashes in four months. Rain in Illinois. That storm in Missouri. This haze and fog. Rhiannon gestures out the window. Have you ever seen a sky like that?
Billie glances toward the mountains where thick smog jackets the peaks. I haven’t seen any sky beyond Illinois in years. I don’t know what’s normal.
Well, that’s not normal, Rhiannon says as a hard gust of wind throws itself against the window and rattles the panes. We should get back on the road. Where’s the next coordinate?
I left the GPS in the car.
What’s the drawing?
Billie pulls the journal from her bag and a roll of toilet paper falls out before she stuffs it back into her daypack.
What was that? Rhiannon asks.
Billie looks up. What was what?
Are you carrying toilet paper with you?
Billie looks down at her bag, her face unreadable. My period might come on this trip. I wanted to be prepared.
Did you take that from the motel?
From the campsite.
Billie, I have tampons. And we can just stop at a convenience store.
For the first time since Rhiannon picked her up, Billie looks embarrassed.
They took our tampons sometimes, she says. I forgot we could just buy them out here.
Rhiannon feels ridiculous. The things her sister never talked about for six whole years and the things she’s processing that Rhiannon can’t fathom. Not the openness of mountains. Not a highway’s freedom. A tampon. Something so fucking simple.
We can get whatever you need, Rhiannon says. Just tell me and we’ll stop.
Billie nods and opens the journal to the next page. From across the table, Rhiannon sees what looks like some kind of scrawled horseshoe, a small sliver drawn above it in the shape of a crescent.
What do you think that is? Rhiannon says.
I have no idea. It’s definitely not an animal.
That crescent looks like a moon. But the rest of it?
Maybe a break from fossils and hiking. I wouldn’t mind that.
Another pulse of wind shakes the panes and Rhiannon signals the server for the check.
RHIANNON CONTINUES WEST along Highway 50 and lets the stereo hum. She’s heard enough news for now and the playlist lights upon Fleetwood Mac, her namesake. Billie fiddles with the GPS in the passenger seat until the device beeps.
Where are we headed?
Billie sits up. Turn around.
Rhiannon looks at her. What?
I said turn around. This coordinate’s routing us south.
Rhiannon flips on the hazard lights, the shoulder’s rumble strip shaking the Mustang as she pulls over. A white SUV behind them honks.
How far south?
Billie taps the route into the digital map on Rhiannon’s phone.
Carlsbad, she says. At the southeastern corner of New Mexico, almost to Texas. This is showing an eight-hour drive.
Rhiannon wants to scream. Are you fucking kidding me?
It’s not a far backtrack. It looks like we take Highway 69 south from here, a few miles back near Texas Creek.
A few miles back. Then hundreds of miles south.
Eight hours south, Billie says. We have time. We’ll still make it to Utah.
Yeah, by the middle of next week. Jesus, Billie. I thought she’d at least create a route that makes sense.
Billie studies the digital map and makes adjustments. It’s thirteen hours between the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry and Carlsbad. We could do that in a day’s drive.
Assuming we’re going straight there. There’s probably some other stop along the way.
Even if there is, it’s only Tuesday. We can still be there by Friday and drive straight through on Sunday, all the way home. Just over a week on the road.
Rhiannon eyes the jagged peaks beyond the steering wheel, the Mustang ready to drive straight through the Rockies. What she did so many times with her father, mountain passes through Colorado between speedways. How he always let her rest in the passenger seat between races, her brain catching on whatever passed beyond the window. The shapes of clouds. Sunflowers in Kansas. Wildflowers along the highways in Colorado. The same curiosity her mother had. What hasn’t lit Rhiannon up in years. Everything in her life: A to B. Utility. Nothing more than getting things done.
Tonight in Carlsbad, she hears herself say. Maybe one night somewhere on the way back up tomorrow, Cleveland-Lloyd by Thursday. But, Billie, this is far more driving than I ever imagined. I’m going to need to change the oil soon.
I can drive if you want, Billie says.
No, you can’t. You don’t even have a license.
Billie smiles and Rhiannon bursts out laughing.
You think that’s funny? Billie says and Rhiannon watches her begin to laugh too.
I’m sorry, Billie. I know it’s not funny. But all of this is just so fucking unreal.
Billie is still laughing. What the fuck is in Carlsbad?
Probably some other dig site. I don’t know. I’ve never been there.
Rhiannon shuts off the hazards and makes a U-turn and there is a shift that takes her by surprise. She feels no frustration. This detour not the disappointment she expected. What floods her body instead is pooled relief to drive away from Colorado and feel her hands on the steering wheel for an eight-hour stretch, the Small Quarry behind them. What a household name meant for her mother. What it almost meant for her.
JAMESON, CARRIE. “CARLSBAD CAVERNS NATIONAL PARK.” AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL: A GUIDE TO NATIONAL PARKS. CHICAGO: RAND MCNALLY, 2008. 14–19. PRINT.
CALL NUMBER: GB561 .G70 2008
CARLSBAD CAVERNS NATIONAL PARK
Located within the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is the fifth-largest cave in North America. The main cavern, made of limestone, is nearly 4,000 feet long and 255 feet high. The cave contains gypsum, a formation marked by limestone’s reaction with sulfuric acid, as well as speleothem formations including popcorn, draperies, and soda straws.
Approximately 250 million years ago, what is now Carlsbad Caverns was the coastline of an inland sea, its marine life forming the Capitan Reef. The Caverns are currently occupied by very few organisms except seven species of bats, including the most common species, Mexican free-tailed bats. Once populating the cave by the millions, the bats’ numbers have diminished in recent years due to suspected damage from DDT pesticides.
32.1753° N, 104.4439° W:
Carlsbad, NM
New Mexico is a lunar landscape, the setting sun pressed against Billie’s west-facing window as the Mustang guns south across the desert on Highway 285. Rhiannon’s playlist fills the car. Bob Dylan. The Guess Who. Jefferson Airplane. Every song an anthem of their childhood, their mother’s records merged in marriage with their father’s LPs. The Moody Blues. Electric Light Orchestra. Michael Jackson, Billie’s own namesake. She watches out the window as the landscape flattens from mountains to low ridges to dusted plains. Raptors
wheel in the sky above them. A Cooper’s hawk. An American kestrel. Billie recognizes their wingspans, smaller than a red-tailed hawk.
Billie wondered from her prison bunk and still wonders way out here where Alabama flew when she cut her loose. If she found a mate and built a nest. If Billie was right in letting her go, what Bud once told her some falconers did to let their birds live free in the wild. If Alabama was still out there somewhere in Illinois or if she migrated south or died years ago, struck by a car or hit by lightning or caught in the spiked whorls of a barbed-wire fence. Billie’s arm smarting as they travel south. A plum-size bruise. The feel of Jesse’s hands sliding down her pants. The toilet paper in her bag. How stupid. Billie forgetting what she could just buy. And still lodged in her brain the muscle memory of Alabama taking flight from the encased glove of her left arm, the weight of a red-tailed hawk all feather if not for the grip of talons. Hawks already less a part of her life by the time she moved to Jacksonville, Tim so frustrated with falconry’s strict routines and live-rat purchases that he forced Billie to keep Alabama outside in a poorly constructed weathering yard, barely regulated, and not in the mew he insisted Billie keep in the laundry room where the humidity was far too high for a hawk.
Billie remembers holding Alabama for the first time. Only six months old, raised at a breeding facility in central Illinois where Bud acquired her for Billie’s keep. Alabama so much lighter than Billie anticipated, all feathers and soft peeping. She earned her permit and completed Bud’s yearlong apprenticeship and passed her exam and built an indoor mew. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources visiting her two-bedroom in Urbana, checking enclosures for humane treatment. Billie wiring the outdoor weathering pen herself, airtight mesh and pipes, unlike the careless pen she made in Jacksonville. The only one Tim let her build, his salary funding their rented home, a weathering yard full of chicken-wire holes big enough for cats to claw through. What Tim made her keep quiet because he didn’t want to spend more. Alabama’s first indoor mew in Urbana had been pristine: inspected, state approved. An opening for sunlight. A suitable perch. Jesses and anklets. Enough space for her full wingspan. A small pan for water and bathing. A freezer for food. Everything Billie set up in the second bedroom of her rented house as if preparing for the birth of a child.
And Alabama herself: the hawk Billie named not after a band but for a state she’d never seen. She’d driven across Arkansas and Mississippi and Georgia once on a family road trip on their way to Disney World but had missed Alabama where she imagined the stars falling in curtains of light, the same magic as a hawk she could send to the sky. Not to hunt. What she knew the intended purpose of falconry was. Just a hawk she could feel leaving her arm, its weight taking to the Illinois blue.
You want to stop for dinner somewhere? Rhiannon says.
Billie shakes her head. I think I’m good.
I think Roswell’s the next big town. If you’re tired we can stop there for the night.
I’m good if you are, Billie says. And anyway, it’s June. Longest days of the year. The sun won’t fully set for another few hours. We can make it to Carlsbad before then.
Rhiannon nods. I’ll just need to stop for gas.
Billie wants to laugh that they’re stopping in Roswell, a place she’s never seen but has read about more times than she can count. Books on planets: the 523s of the Dewey decimal system. Alien life. Are we alone? They reach the outskirts of Roswell where buildings begin to populate the horizon. The Mustang passes the city limit sign and a huge wooden UFO where a minivan is parked, a family of three posing for a picture.
Looks like we’re in for a treat, Rhiannon says.
Highway 285 takes them straight through the center of town, a highway turned business district that Billie expects to roll out again into vast plains of nothing once they pass the city’s limits on the other side. Rhiannon slows the car, every gas station and grocery store decorated in outer space. Wooden cutouts of green aliens flanking each driveway. Arms waving customers inside. Flying saucers soaped into the windows of McDonald’s play palaces. Meteors painted on a Wendy’s atrium.
This place is no joke. Rhiannon points at a sign along the road. Want to stop at the UFO Museum?
I’ll pass.
Billie, I’m joking.
I’m fine with just a gas stop. Gas and a bathroom. Maybe a soda.
Rhiannon finds a Chevron station, the cheapest gas listed. Her phone beeps in the center console as she pulls in, back in range. Billie looks down: a voice-mail message.
I’ll fill up the tank, Rhiannon says. You can take a bathroom break first.
Rhiannon hands her a five-dollar bill and Billie opens the passenger door and feels her legs stretch against the pavement. Nearly five hours in the car since Colorado. She makes her way toward the gas station’s food mart when Rhiannon calls her back.
Billie turns around and Rhiannon is holding her phone to her ear.
It’s for you, Rhiannon says. If you want to take the call.
Billie, it’s Oscar, the message crackles when she places the receiver against her ear. His voice piercing. It could be Tim’s voice if Billie closes her eyes. She reminds herself that she told Oscar to call, that she asked for this kind of message. He reports what he found in Forest Park: a small plastic box wedged beneath the T. rex statue’s tail.
Rhiannon stands at the fuel pump beside her as Billie calls back before she can lose her nerve. The phone buzzes in her ear, the same drone of the Correctional Center’s only public phone. A line down the hallway from her bunk, one allotted call per week. Billie waiting always for someone to pick up on the other end of a line, Rhiannon or her mother or sometimes Bud. Never her father. Never Tim. Never his voice. Never again. Bud the only man she communicated with for six years beyond the prison’s guards, a voice that reminded her of Alabama: that she’d been someone before Tim.
Thanks for calling back, Oscar says when he picks up on the fourth ring. You were right. There was a plastic box right under the statue.
Billie steels herself. Did you open it?
I didn’t see what was inside. I didn’t know if you’d want me to look.
Rhiannon shifts beside her and Billie knows she wants to hear what Oscar found.
Do you have the box with you?
Right here.
Open it, Billie says.
She hears the muffled sound of Oscar fidgeting with the plastic box. She envisions his home, imagines a partner though she knows nothing of his life. There’s a drawing, he says. It’s a T. rex, and some kind of coordinate.
The drawing matches the first page in the journal. What Billie’s expected, though she’s still surprised to hear it.
Dig further, she says. What’s beneath it?
The fuel pump snaps and Rhiannon pulls the wand from the tank. Cars rush past the station along the business district, a whir of heat and dust.
It looks like some kind of ring, Oscar says.
What kind of ring? Billie asks and Rhiannon stops moving beside her.
It’s a blue stone. I’m not sure what kind.
But Billie already knows what kind as soon as he says it’s a ring. Aquamarine. The birthstone for March, the month their mother married their father in a late Illinois snowstorm. The month she died. Their parents’ wedding a ceremony and reception at Pere Marquette Lodge across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Just outside Godfrey, Illinois, where nearly everyone in their mother’s family still lived, their father’s family traveling downstate from Pekin. Their parents anticipating crocuses for the ceremony. A foot of snow arriving instead. The Lodge nearly shutting down but both sides of the family traveling regardless for a Pabst keg and a fried chicken buffet and a ring that’s been missing from her mother’s hand since their parents divorced when Billie was a sophomore in high school. Billie hasn’t seen her father in years but the last time she did, he still wore his ring, a small point of ice blue set in a thick band of gold.
You want me to mail it to you somewhere? Osc
ar says.
No, Billie says. We won’t be anywhere out here for more than one night.
Then what should I do with it?
Keep it. Just for now. We’ll be making our way back through the Midwest early next week. Is it okay if we swing by?
Oscar is silent for a moment. Only if you think that’s okay with you.
Billie holds her breath before she speaks and wonders what Oscar’s been told. That she’s fragile. Unstable and crazy. Still an ex-felon, Tim scot-free in Jacksonville.
Just give me your address, she says. I’ll call you early next week to let you know when we’ll be heading through St. Louis.
I’ll keep it safe until then. If I’m at work, I can take a quick break to meet you.
Billie wants to ask where he works but stops herself. This glimpse of her former life. She shouldn’t know, shouldn’t want to know. She only says thanks instead. When she hangs up the phone, Rhiannon is still standing at the fuel pump watching her.
A ring, Rhiannon says. Mom’s fucking wedding ring.
Right underneath the T. rex tail.
Billie.
It’s fine. We didn’t know what it was we were looking for. Don’t worry. He’ll hang on to it until we get there.
Do you know how long I spent looking for that ring?
Billie looks up and Rhiannon is trembling, her hands drawn and knuckled.
Before her funeral, Rhiannon says. Dad wanted it and I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Why? They were divorced. And who gives a fuck what Dad wanted?
I do, Rhiannon says. I fucking care. God, Billie. Get over yourself. It’s been six years. I don’t know why Dad didn’t call and didn’t visit you but he’s still our father. He’s the only parent you have left.
And that makes him a hero? Billie shouts, anger climbing her throat.
Keep your voice down, Rhiannon hisses. People are looking.
Who gives a fuck if people are looking?
Look, you have a right to your feelings. But Dad does too.
He has a right to judge me? He has a right to not even show up once?
No, Billie. He doesn’t. I don’t have any fucking idea why he never came. But he’s not a bad man. He doesn’t hate you. And he has the right to see that ring one last time.