by Anne Valente
Rhiannon glances over. Now you’re wrangling Dad in?
He never visited, did he?
You’ve known Dad for thirty-two years. Dad never hit you. Dad never left a huge bruise on your arm. And that guy, you’ve known him for what, three hours? Is he coming up to our room?
Jesus Christ. I’ll just have a drink with him at the bar. Nothing else.
Well, I’m fucking tired. I’m going to bed as soon as we get back.
There are two keys. You can watch The Tonight Show while I have one more drink. Or else the news, to make sure we get the hell out of here in the morning.
Rhiannon looks at her. Just make sure there are people around. I’ll be right upstairs if you need me.
Okay, Mom, Billie says and a silence blankets the car. She wishes she could grab the words back from the air. Their mother. Billie realizes they’ve barely talked about her. How she at last slipped away inside a hospital room. How beyond the library fire Billie’s never felt the urge again to destroy herself except on the day of their mother’s funeral. Only an hour up the road from Decatur to Champaign. What might as well have been the distance between continents. Billie standing in the prison yard, her hands gripping the chain-link fence so hard that the metal cut her skin. She glances at Rhiannon in the dark of the car. Wants to ask how she’s doing. But there is no space, no time, the motel approaching beyond the Mustang’s windshield. Rhiannon hands Billie a key and leaves for their room. Billie hesitates a moment before stepping into the motel bar, a sadder affair than the one at the bowling alley. The bartender behind the counter an older man with a beer belly, his head a half-bald sheen. Billie orders a well whiskey and waits at a high-top table, the local news blaring on a small television behind the bar that smoke is still heavy above town.
And then Nick is there in the bar’s doorframe. Billie nods toward the counter and he buys himself a whiskey. He approaches and sits beside her at the table, his playfulness gone, replaced by something like vulnerability. He grins and looks down into his glass.
I’ve never done this before, he says.
What? Met up with someone after work?
Not someone I didn’t know.
You know I like beer and cheese fries.
You know what I mean.
The bar’s television is the only sound billowing through the bar. Billie touches Nick’s arm. She can’t stop herself from the luxury of human contact, can’t conjure the caution she should’ve had in Colorado Springs though somehow here with no music and no ambiance at all there’s still something safe, a man’s warmth moving through the thin barrier of his skin. And something else moving through hers: want. What she hasn’t felt in years.
So what’s bringing you two out to Utah?
Funeral, Billie says.
Nick doesn’t flinch. Sorry to hear that.
Our mother passed away three months ago. It’s more of a symbolic ceremony.
Where are you driving from?
Illinois.
Long drive. I’m sorry about your mother.
The television’s crackle fills Billie’s head and she imagines Rhiannon curled up on the hard mattress of the motel bed, late-night television flickering through the room. Billie doesn’t want to talk about her mother. For one night, she doesn’t want to think about coordinates or dig sites or the objects their mother left behind. She wants to drain her whiskey. She wants to focus on the sensation of someone else’s skin. She wants to remember what it was to feel wanted.
We can get out of here, she says. Words she’s never said in her life but Nick doesn’t shy away. She tightens her grip on his arm and leads him from the bar to the dimly lit hallway. Rhiannon upstairs in their room. Rhiannon watching local news and talk-show television and only steps away if Billie is wrong, if Nick isn’t what she thinks. She leads him out the back door to the motel’s pool where the lights have been killed, opening hours long over. The hum of chlorine filters. The soft lapping of water in the night’s wind, the smell of smoke. Billie hoists herself over the pool’s locked gate and Nick follows, the fence’s wrought iron clanging against his sneakers in the dark.
Billie pulls off her shirt and lets the dappled light of the streetlamps beyond the patio reach her arms. Muscle. The ridges of scars. Nick watches her and Billie wants to pull her shirt back on but doesn’t move. He could turn away. Go home. Call her ugly. Call her worse. He reaches down instead and unfastens the zipper of his jeans.
Billie moves toward the rippling water of the darkened pool. If she could, she would extend this moment forever, stay here inside this night, never go to Utah. She slides out of her own jeans, her sneakers. Steps into the water, sun-warmed by so many June days beneath a drought-choked sky. She sinks beneath the surface and lets the water coat the grooves of her arms, the second pool she’s entered in three days as if she were a child again, as if she could slip into the water and be reborn.
Through the dim noiselessness of the pool Billie feels hands on the bare skin of her stomach. What she imagines it was like to float in her mother’s womb. Pressure wells in her chest, her mother nowhere on this earth. In her place, hands encircling Billie’s waist. She breaches the pool’s surface and the shocking cool of the night air meets her face and Nick’s arms circle closer around her, his chin resting against her shoulder’s scars. Don’t, she wants to whisper. But he pulls her closer, runs his hands across the scars’ lunar fields. His mouth finds her left arm, a puckered line, and trails toward her neck. Scars he’d be senseless not to feel. Scars he shelters against his tongue.
Billie closes her eyes and his hands skirt up her stomach to her chest. The weight of his palms feather-light. Unbearable. A weight she’s kept at bay to keep herself safe. She lets her hands find his hands and wants to peel them from her skin as much as she wants to grab them and press them harder to her chest.
She turns around and faces him. Streetlight floods her arms and her mouth is against his mouth. His tongue as weightless as his hands. Her legs wrap around his body and her hands press against his face. Beads of water. The hum of the filter. The soft splashing of waves in the dark. She pushes against him, his back to the wall of the pool and then he is inside her and her body is a torrent of want.
Desire: a spark she hasn’t let herself feel. Not books. Not the memory of violence. Something else worth burning. Nick pulls his mouth away from her neck and meets her eyes, his face so close to her face. A face she knows she won’t see again. A face she brands into her brain.
WHEN BILLIE AT last slips back into the motel room, the lights are out but the television glows blue against the walls. Her hair still wet, her T-shirt and jeans pulled on, underwear balled in her front left pocket. Rhiannon sits up in bed, the local news murmuring on low.
Did he show up?
We had one drink downstairs. We went out to the pool.
Did you have sex with him?
Billie sits on the edge of the bed. Jesus, Rhee.
Whatever happened, I hope it was better than Colorado.
Billie pulls off her sneakers and pushes herself back against the headboard beside her sister. Yes, I had sex with him, she says. Yes, it was better than Colorado.
Billie expects Rhiannon to drill her about safety. About condoms and strange men. But Rhiannon only smiles and Billie can’t remember the last time they talked about sex, if it was in college or in high school.
Well, I’m glad for you.
Glad? Billie shoves a pillow at her.
It’s been a long time. And probably a while since it was any good for you.
Billie leans into the pillows and tries to remember what it was like with Tim, if there was ever a time when it was good. You can’t even imagine, she says.
It’s not like Beth and I were having tons of sex at the end.
You haven’t slept with anyone since?
No. I haven’t had any interest. Or met anyone interesting.
Do you want to?
The television’s blue light pulses against Rhiannon’s face.
I don’t know, she finally says. I thought I could move on. I thought we were done, that she wasn’t right for me. But now I’m not sure about anything.
What does that mean?
Her sister hesitates. I called Beth earlier today. From the gas station in Albuquerque where we stopped. I called her from the bathroom.
And?
She said she misses me. I told her I was sorry I left and she said nothing. She said she had to go and she hung up.
Billie watches a weatherman on-screen sweep his hands across a map of southern Colorado. Maybe you just caught her off guard.
Rhiannon sighs. The bottom line is that no, I don’t think about having sex with anyone else. I’m glad at least one of us had a good night.
I guess I did. It was nice. It was distracting.
Rhiannon nods toward the television. They’re calling for clearer skies tomorrow.
Billie glances at the grid of the five-day forecast. Tomorrow is the day they’ll finally cross into Utah. A day that all at once feels like a heavy weight.
I had fun bowling, Rhiannon says softly.
You better have. You swept both fucking games.
Rhiannon looks at her. Someone recognized me today. A clerk at the gas station. He knew my name. That I was a driver. He said he watched my races on ESPN.
Does that surprise you? You were good. Of course people know who you were.
It’s the first time a boy has ever asked me for an autograph. And no one’s remembered who I am for nearly six years.
Billie leans back against the headboard. How did it feel?
I don’t know. Weird. I don’t know what else to say about it.
How about proud?
Take a shower, Rhiannon says. Your hair’s getting the pillows wet.
Billie pulls off her shirt, her jeans. What time are we leaving tomorrow?
As soon as we get up, so long as the highway is open.
Billie grabs her sleep T-shirt and boxers and slips into the bathroom. She turns on the shower and steps in and lets steam fill the small room. She wants to stay weightless. Unanchored. She runs her hand across her left arm, the bruise nearly gone, the dappled scars still holding the ghost of Nick’s mouth.
HERNANDEZ, MARK. “DARK-SKY PRESERVE.” INITIATIVES IN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION. ED. OLIVIA YU. TALLAHASSEE: FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 99–102. PRINT.
CALL NUMBER: GE196 .P24 2016
DARK-SKY PRESERVE
Given increased light pollution in urban areas, dark-sky preserves are designated areas, often around observatories or natural landmarks, where artificial light is restricted. They allow visitors the opportunity to view skies as our ancestors once viewed them, without inhibition of modern light and city noise.
The first permanent dark-sky preserve was established in 1999 in Ontario at the Torrance Barrens. Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah was recognized in 2007 as the world’s first International Dark Sky Park. In 2015, nearby Canyonlands National Park was designated as a dark-sky preserve.
37.3498° N, 108.5767° W:
Cortez, CO
Rhiannon sits at a small table in the window of the Mountain Ridge Inn’s lobby below an overhead television. She cradles a Styrofoam cup of weak tea, her continental breakfast of white toast and one ripe banana already gone. A dreamless sleep. No Beth. Beyond the window, the sun strains through a thick sheen of haze. Wildfires still burn in the San Juan National Forest, firefighters and military Black Hawks still battling the blaze. But winds have shifted east and north, the western edge of the state clear. Highway opened back up at five a.m., the hotel clerk told Rhiannon when she came downstairs, Billie still sleeping. You should be good to go.
From the lobby’s window, Rhiannon watches a family of four pack up their SUV. North Carolina plates. She wonders if they planned to drive or if the news has made them take the road. Two small children. A girl Rhiannon assumes is nearing kindergarten and a toddler with bright brown curls. Rhiannon wonders if this is what she and Billie looked like on their few family road trips when they were small, their parents packing up the car and checking the route and placing Billie in a car seat and Rhiannon beside her watching out the window. Rhiannon remembers one trip to the Ozarks in southern Missouri and another to Disney World, her father driving them all night while their mother slept in the passenger seat. Their mother. Billie asked if she wanted to talk. Rhiannon wonders if it’s Billie who wanted to talk. The national newscast billows across the breakfast bar from the overhead television and Rhiannon looks up at the headline scrolling beneath two anchormen. GLOBAL WARMING TO BLAME FOR PLANE DISASTERS? Men in suits. Their banter betraying their answer to the question: global warming just a theory. Erratic weather traceable back to the nineteenth century. Pilot error. A series of unfortunate coincidences. Rhiannon glances at two women drinking coffee and one man eating a stack of waffles by himself, none of them paying attention at all to the newscast.
Rhiannon pulls her cell phone from her pocket. 8:24 a.m. An hour ahead in the Midwest.
Rhee? Her father picks up on the second ring. Where you girls at?
Southern Colorado.
You haven’t gotten very far since you last called.
We took a detour down to New Mexico.
Your mother sending you on a wild-goose chase?
You could say that. How’s everything in Chicago?
Not much changed since Monday. Still rain. You girls where that wildfire is?
Did it make national news?
A brief spot. Nothing big, but I noticed it since I knew where you two were.
We’re in a town called Cortez. Stopped last night because the highway was closed. It reopened this morning. We’re heading into Utah as soon as Billie wakes up.
How’s she doing?
Fine, Rhiannon says. Good, actually. We’re stopping in Moab today and plan to head to the quarry tomorrow.
I’ll be out that way this week myself. Not quite to Utah. But I’ll be in Dacono.
A track Rhiannon knows well. Dacono north of Denver. The Colorado National Speedway. She should have guessed her father would be on the road, June right in the middle of racing season. Her father on the raceway sometimes nine months out of the year, what Rhiannon assumed in part led to their parents’ divorce.
Is Dacono your only race route this week?
With a brief stop in Kansas City on the way, he says. Bryson’s racing well.
Rhiannon’s followed Bryson Townes’s races, knows he placed in Talladega’s top ten just before Memorial Day weekend. She knows the name of every contender her father could have mentioned.
Bryson looks like he’ll be good, she says.
He’s great. But no one’s as good as you.
The way he lets her know he still misses her on the team never sounds like a guilt trip. But this morning the road stretches open and a boy has recognized her in a gas station and Rhiannon feels a heat in her throat creeping down the line of her chest.
Will you be heading through St. Louis on the way?
Does that matter?
We found something. Rhiannon hesitates. We found Mom’s wedding ring in St. Louis. The one you were looking for.
What, she buried it in one of those boxes? In Forest Park? I thought you couldn’t find what you were looking for there.
We couldn’t. Billie called Tim’s brother and had him find it.
Tim’s brother? What in hell are you talking about, Rhee?
Billie called him. He lives there. He went and found it for us.
Shit, you could’ve just called me. I’ll be driving straight through there.
Her father falls silent and Rhiannon wonders if she should’ve told him about the ring at all.
We’re picking it up in St. Louis on the way home next week, she says. I’ll be sure to keep it safe for you.
No need. Your mother clearly wanted you girls to have it instead of me.
Maybe. It’s hard to tell out here what she wanted.
&
nbsp; You two stay safe, is all he says.
We will. You be safe too on the road.
Love you girls.
Before Rhiannon can wish Billie on the line to hear their father say it, he hangs up and the sound of the breakfast room’s television fills the space his voice has left.
BY THE TIME Billie comes down to the lobby, her hair a tangled mess and her hips hugging the same dirt-scuffed jeans she’s worn every day of their trip, the breakfast bar’s open hours are nearly over.
Someone slept late, Rhiannon says.
Billie combs a hand through her hair. Is there at least coffee left?
Coffee and probably waffle batter, if you want to make one.
As if we had waffles in Decatur. Of course I’m making one.
Billie gets up and Rhiannon watches her fill a small Dixie cup with cream-colored batter and pour it into the iron griddle. She grabs a plastic packet of syrup and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee and makes her way back to the table, no one else left in the lobby except one man watching fly fishing on the overhead television, the morning news replaced by midweek programming.
How far to Moab from here? Billie asks.
I just checked the route this morning. No more than two hours.
Billie glances out the window. Are the roads clear?
Sky’s better this morning. Still not great, but the winds have shifted off east. The front desk told me Highway 491 reopened this morning.
Billie sips her coffee and grimaces. God, Rhee, this shit is terrible.
How’s the waffle?
It’s a waffle. Full of sugar and carbs. Delicious.
Two hours means we’ll have most of the afternoon in Moab.
Which means we should plan for a hike, given Mom’s drawing.
A line of dinosaur tracks, Rhiannon says. Some kind of trail, just like Kansas.
Just like Cañon City. Probably just like the quarry, too. I bet Mom will make us hike five miles just to get to the spot she picked out for her funeral.
Rhiannon falls silent as Billie carves through her waffle with a plastic fork.