The Desert Sky Before Us

by Anne Valente

  Why didn’t you tell me you were looking for it? Or that Dad wanted it?

  I didn’t think it mattered. I couldn’t find it anyway.

  Billie glances toward the food mart, the five-dollar bill still wedged in her hand. Mom hid it in Forest Park well before her funeral, she says. Or had someone else do it for her. It obviously didn’t matter to her if Dad wanted it or not.

  She probably didn’t even know he wanted it.

  That lake by the Science Center is where Dad proposed. You said so after you talked to him. That’s clearly why she left it there.

  I know, Rhiannon says. But she drew a T. rex. Not the ring.

  Yeah, just to help us find the box.

  Maybe not. Maybe her career was always more important to her. At least in hindsight. More important than a marriage ever was. Maybe she wanted us to know that.

  Billie sees in Rhiannon’s face a trace of regret, her hands curled as if still gripping the steering wheel. Hey, Billie says. We have no idea what she wanted us to know.

  Rhiannon squints toward the rush of cars whistling past on the highway. I feel like this whole trip is Mom’s way of shoving all this in my face, she says. Everything she discovered throughout her career. All these places she saw, all these roads I once traveled and haven’t been on in years. Even marriage. Leaving us this ring. That she could leave it behind just like I left Beth.

  I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it at all.

  What else could it be?

  Maybe this isn’t about you. Maybe this isn’t about either of us.

  How not? She built this entire scavenger hunt for the two of us.

  Billie looks south down the highway where they’re heading. She has no idea what their mother is trying to tell them. She thinks of visiting hours, her mother’s weak palms pressing the journal into her hands. Her eyes already tiring and growing weak but her face still bright. Not a face of punishment, retribution. Never the face of hoping her daughters would discover only regret on the road.

  RHIANNON DRIVES SOUTH across New Mexico with no music, her gaze fixed on the road. She doesn’t open the bag of M&Ms Billie grabbed for her inside the Chevron station. She only drums her thumbs against the top of the steering wheel as Billie watches the sun sink deeper into the desert, light banded over fields of creosote and mesquite. Billie leans her head against the window, Oscar’s voice still banging around in her brain.

  Did you ever want to get married? she asks.

  I know you were gone awhile, but Beth and I wouldn’t even have been able to get married in Illinois until this year.

  Then traveling to another state for a marriage license. Did you ever consider it?

  Not once. We never talked about it at all.

  Did you want to talk about it?

  I think she might have wanted to. But I’m not really the marrying kind.

  Billie laughs. The marrying kind?

  I’m serious, Billie. Do I look like someone ready for marriage?

  You could be.

  Rhiannon sighs. I think you need some permanence to make that kind of decision. I’ve never really felt permanent.

  Across nearly five years of dating her? You never felt permanent?

  Maybe for a while. But who can really feel permanent selling textbooks?

  I’m sure a lot of people can. Maybe you conflated Beth with a job you never wanted. Maybe you’d have felt differently about her if you were still racing.

  Rhiannon keeps her eyes straight ahead. Your circumstances were completely different, but did you ever feel permanent living in Jacksonville? Like it would last?

  Tim talked about marriage sometimes. In hindsight, I think I always knew it wasn’t right. I don’t know if it was him calling me a cunt or him shoving me against a wall that made it clear he wasn’t the one for me.

  Billie means it as a joke but Rhiannon looks at her, the first time she’s looked away from the road since they left Roswell.

  How? Rhiannon says. How did you first know it wasn’t right?

  Billie thinks of Alabama’s makeshift weathering pen in the backyard. Tim’s long hours on campus. The expectation of a clean house, cooked meals. What she can’t believe she abided across those years, among everything else.

  There was always something hollow in my stomach, Billie says. An intuition. I tried sometimes to push it away. That was the only permanent thing I felt in Jacksonville.

  I think I felt that, Rhiannon says. A hollow. As soon as I left the racetrack.

  You could’ve kept racing. No one stopped you.

  I know. Knowing that is the worst thing.

  Billie watches the road and lets herself ask what she’s been wanting to ask since they left Cañon City. What did stop you?

  I really don’t know. It wasn’t Beth. And marriage or not is beside the point. We never talked about my past. She never asked. At first I thought she wasn’t interested but I never brought it up. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  You think?

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  Billie sits up. You’re good at a lot of things, Rhee. Talking about how you’re feeling isn’t one of them.

  I’m talking now.

  Yeah, to me. Not to Beth.

  Rhiannon sighs. Sometimes I think she never really even knew who I was.

  What stopped you from talking to her about this for so long? You were together for over four years.

  Rhiannon hesitates. I think I was ashamed. That I chose something safe. That I didn’t just get back in the car and try again. That I was a fucking coward. That I felt the entire time we were together that she was far more passionate about everything than me. All these exhibitions. All these coffee table books everywhere in our apartment about art. I used to be so much more interesting.

  What made her interesting to you?

  She’s a printmaker. She was excited about it. It was sometimes so hard to walk into her studio knowing my helmet was gathering dust in Mom’s garage.

  The sun slips low against the western horizon, the fields around them ablaze.

  You could forgive yourself, Billie says softly. That’s a good place to start again.

  You could too, Rhiannon says and Billie runs her hand up her left arm and the rippled scars and the lake bed of her bruise. What she hears Rhiannon saying: more doing. That Beth did things. That Rhiannon wished she had too. Billie closes her eyes and tries to root down into the same intuition that told her years ago Tim wasn’t right. Wonders if it can tell her out here in the nowhere of New Mexico what she should do now with her life. The one saving grace of prison. Just being. She opens her eyes and feels them sting and tells herself it is only the piercing light of the desert sky.

  DUSK SETTLES AROUND them as the Mustang pulls into the entrance for Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where the coordinates have led them. Not a dig site. Billie should have known. Carlsbad known for its caverns, New Mexico’s only national park. Despite their late arrival beyond regular hours, they join a line of cars filtering in. The road curves through plateaus dotted with sagebrush and limestone that Billie knows hide miles of caves beneath the surface. What she read about in one of the prison library’s donated books on national parks. The caverns a once-inland sea, so much like Smoky Hill River. Another ancient bed of marine fossils, the reason Billie imagines her mother has sent them here.

  Does this road ever end? Rhiannon says as the road’s mile markers lengthen through the darkening hills.

  Billie checks the mapped coordinate. We’re getting close.

  It’s well past visiting hours. Surely we’re too late for a hike.

  I don’t think so. Billie watches the trail of red taillights ahead of them. All these cars are here for a reason.

  Whatever it is, we can still camp for the night and come back early in the morning if we need to hike out somewhere. Can we camp here?

  Billie isn’t sure, no posted signs, no cell service since they left Roswell. But the landscape is desolate beyond the park, a vast flat
land of desert rolling out beneath a sky that will soon heavy itself with stars. A sky that won’t care if they pitch a tent. The caravan of cars slows as a large building appears on the plateau, what Billie assumes is the park’s visitor center and cavern entrance. Even in the dark Billie can see the vastness of the valley below, a wide horizon of red rock and desert sage and intermittent pinpoints of lighted homes. She glances down at the GPS in her hands, their route still inching toward its exact coordinate. Rhiannon follows the line of cars and parks in the building’s lot, the Mustang’s windshield overlooking the dim valley. Billie pushes open the passenger door, the air windless, surprisingly cool. Illinois another country from here. Constant rain, impossible from the dryness of the New Mexico desert.

  Where are we supposed to go? Rhiannon says.

  Billie slides the GPS into her pocket, its position a near match though it still hasn’t beeped their mother’s exact coordinates. She nods toward families leaving their cars and funneling onto the sidewalks past the closed visitor center.

  We’re not quite there, she says. I’ll keep the GPS on me to let us know when we’ve reached the exact mark, but I’m guessing we should just follow those people.

  They fall into step behind a family with two small girls. Billie watches them toddle and tries to remember if their own parents ever took them to national parks. She recalls only Illinois state parks. River bluffs. Thick oak trees. Maples turning crimson. Their father carrying her on his shoulders through the woods, nearly impossible to remember, her father so close, her small fists gripping his sweatshirt. She and Rhiannon pass a ranger who waves them along, the sidewalk transitioning into a black-topped path that leads off into the plateaus.

  This path must lead to the cave’s entrance, Rhiannon says.

  What could we possibly see there at night?

  We’re obviously not hiking. Look at all these kids.

  The path stretches off into the hilled landscape until the flow of people backs up at a staircase leading off a precipice and down toward something Billie can’t see.

  This must be it, Rhiannon says.

  Must be what? What the fuck are we here for?

  When Billie reaches the top of the staircase, she sees the cave’s entrance at the bottom of the stairs. A yawning dark where swiftlets circle up from the cave’s mouth in dusk’s fading light. People all around them, families and teenagers and couples on vacation. People descending the stairs and filtering into rows of limestone seats, a natural amphitheater in the shape of a horseshoe that surrounds the mouth of the cave.

  A horseshoe: their mother’s drawing.

  The crescent curved into the notebook’s corner the same as the half-moon rising beyond the cave’s entrance.

  No hike, no fossil. Only an outdoor amphitheater and the coming night.

  Arriving right on time, the moon already high, just as their mother intended.

  BILLIE SHOULD HAVE known. The Carlsbad bat flight. It appeared in so many of her earth science books, one of America’s natural wonders. The GB560s in the call number system, the library’s section on caves. Carlsbad one of the only places in the country where Mexican free-tailed bats flew out by the thousands each night and gathered food until the sun rose and they returned, roosting here through summer before returning to Mexico in winter. Only other two locations where they lived: Bracken Cave in San Antonio. The Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. Both of which Billie has only seen in the glossed pages of a library’s books.

  Rhiannon sits beside her at the edge of one of the amphitheater’s stone rows, far enough to the periphery that neither of them can see the mouth of the cave. Billie has let the GPS guide them exactly, the device at last beeping when they reached the row’s edge. Do you see anything? Rhiannon asked when they sat down, but Billie saw nothing. Scanned the stone beneath her shoes, the edges of the rows around them. No trace of a hidden plastic box. Tufts of sagebrush and juniper bushes obscure their view of the cave’s mouth though a ranger standing at the front of the amphitheater promises ten thousand bats will be visible from every seat. The ranger is a young woman providing facts to the crowd about the free-tailed bats’ diet and hunting habits. Facts Billie stops herself from calling out over the din of children, everything she recalls from so many hours reading books to pass the time at the library. Echolocation. Mother bats finding their young among thousands by call alone after hunting beetles and wasps, as many as two hundred pups per square foot stuck to the cavern’s ceiling. Rhiannon shifts beside her on the stone bench, the roughness of her jeans rubbing against Billie’s bare leg.

  I’m getting hungry, Rhiannon says.

  Billie watches the deep indigo of the sky above the cavern. The sun’s long gone, she says. The bats should be circling out any minute.

  Circling?

  That’s what they do. The cave’s entrance is small and steep. They need to circle out together to get enough lift to leave.

  Tell me more, nerd. Why don’t you go shove that ranger out of the way?

  The ranger tells the crowd to stay quiet. Says the bats will circle from the cave behind her. She tells the audience to let her know by rotating their hands in a circular motion and that the bats will fly over the amphitheater and out over the valley to eat two hundred tons of moths and bees in one night.

  I wish I could do that, Rhiannon mumbles.

  Come on, Rhee. We’ll be out of here soon.

  I don’t know why we’re here in the first place. A thousand-mile detour, and for what? There aren’t even any dinosaur bones here.

  She clearly timed these stops just right for us to arrive here at dusk. She wanted us here for a reason.

  Any idea what that reason is? And are we even sure there’s a plastic box hidden somewhere here? Look at all these people, Billie. How the fuck are we going to find it?

  Billie doesn’t want to think of the effort it will take among so many people. Despite the GPS beeping this row exactly, Billie scans the ground again and sees nothing as the audience near the cave’s entrance begins to rotate their hands and circle their arms in the air. The crowd falls silent and the ranger moves away from the entrance where bats begin to emerge.

  The crowd is so quiet that Billie hears the desert air shift with the movement of wings. The bats corkscrew and rotate out of the cave, an airless tornado, wings slicked in the half-moon’s light. Billie watches children clutched in their parents’ arms, brought to this isolated place just to see. Despite the weather, the planes. A toddler eyes the bats from her father’s lap, the grip of her small hands clenching the bunched fabric of his knees. Billie’s own father so fucking far away. An Illinois forest. Billie settled on his shoulders as he identified oak leaves. Sugar maples. Eastern bluebirds. Turkey vultures. Monarch butterfly chrysalides. He made sure she knew every secret the woods kept. Those same Illinois woods doused in rain and Billie wonders what autumn will even look like this year, a permanent flood. The bats pulse from the cave in cyclones and Billie wonders if they’ll even be here in fifty years, in twenty, the weather changing and their habitat shifting and the wind across the desert rising. The half-moon glares down, hooking light on the intermittent gleam of webbed wings and Billie feels her throat catch. Rhiannon touches her leg. Billie can’t bring herself to look at her sister.

  The ranger said this could last for two hours, Rhiannon whispers. I’m ready to go whenever you are.

  Billie nods. Families begin to filter from the amphitheater. Billie wants to stay but gives her sister this. A sister who’s picked her up from prison and taken off work and driven her halfway across the country. Billie follows Rhiannon toward the central staircase. She traps the sound of the bats’ wings in her brain, the soft silence of membranes and webbing. Her father’s shoulders, autumn leaves rainbowing his feet as they walked through the damp woods. Alabama taking flight from her forearm. As she walks she hears the scrape of plastic, her shoes kicking weight at the edge of their row. A recognizable shape. They might have seen it if there’d been fewer people when the
y first sat down in their row. Billie looks down. A mottled-gray box. Nestled beneath the lip of a stone seat, only feet from where they sat.

  The same kind of box as the Smoky Hill River, the Small Quarry.

  Beyond bats, what their mother intended them to find.

  BILLIE SITS IN the passenger seat, the engine off as cars stream from the parking lot behind them. Headlights fill the Mustang’s interior. Rhiannon holds the small box in her hands. She unfastens the latch, the sound of popped plastic. Billie hears the rustle of paper, what she knows is the coordinate and drawing. The stone amphitheater, a crescent moon. A match for the sketch inside the journal. She hears Rhiannon digging inside the box then the sound of something soft, almost inaudible.

  I think this one might be for you, Rhiannon says.

  Billie looks over and the box is lying discarded in Rhiannon’s lap. The paper nudged aside. In Rhiannon’s hands: the feather of a red-tailed hawk.

  A wing feather. Burnt color, marked by telltale tiger-striped barbs. White wisps funneled to the tip of a beta-keratin quill. The same down of Alabama’s coat, a weight Billie can feel still beating against her palms.

  Hawks winter here, Billie says dumbly. In New Mexico. They winter here.

  Come on, Billie. Mom didn’t send us here to see where birds winter.

  Then why did she? Billie looks out at the dark ocean of the valley, the lighted pinpoints of distant homes. And God, why bats? Bats aren’t even birds.

  Maybe she knew you’d know something about any kind of animal with wings.

  There were feathered dinosaurs in the Jurassic. Maybe she did research here.

  Jesus, Billie. We both know what this means. This feather’s clear as fucking day. It’s for you. It’s about you. This stop isn’t about Mom at all.

  What, to remind me that I used to do something? Billie looks at her sister. Just like you? She didn’t have to send us way the fuck down here to remind me that I’m not like you or her or Dad. Why the fuck are we out here?