by Anne Valente
39.3228º N, 110.6895º W:
Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT
The trailer’s shower is small, so cramped Rhiannon can barely move, but a separate bedroom allows her for once to leave Billie behind to sleep. No tiptoeing around a motel room. No quick pull of a tent zipper to minimize noise. After she finishes showering, she makes coffee in the two-cup drip in the trailer’s kitchen and steps outside as the sun breaks across a line of distant mesas.
You’re up early, a voice calls and Rhiannon looks away from the valley to a picnic table where Marcus sits between his trailer and theirs in basketball shorts and a dry-fit T-shirt, nothing like his work khakis and beige hat the day before.
I could say the same for you, Rhiannon says. Coffee? I made enough for two.
Marcus shakes his head. I already had some, but thanks.
How long have you been up?
I always get my jogs in early. I like watching the sun come up over the valley.
Rhiannon sits across from him at the picnic table. How long have you been coming out here?
This is my third summer at the quarry.
So you worked with my mother for two summers.
She was here, in and out, for the past two summers, yes.
Did you work closely with her?
I mostly work with Dr. Wallace. But I did work with your mother a bit.
Did you know her well?
I didn’t know anything you don’t know.
Rhiannon sips her coffee. It doesn’t feel that way.
Dr. Wallace told me about the journal. The coordinates you’re following. Maybe it’s not my place, but I think your mom has built an adventure for the two of you.
An adventure, Rhiannon repeats. She watches the horizon line of the mesas. I still don’t know why she spent so much time here if she found an intact skeleton in Colorado. There aren’t any here. There are barely any stegosauruses at all. Some adventure. An adventure based on everything she never told us about her career.
Marcus shifts on the picnic bench. I wouldn’t look at it that way.
Then how would you look at it?
I’d look at it as parents not talking to their kids about their careers. I’d look at it as her making this trip as fun for you as possible, given the circumstances.
Rhiannon sighs. Billie said the funeral is today.
I don’t really know anything about it. Dr. Wallace planned everything based on your mom’s recommendations. I just know it’s later this afternoon. Three o’clock.
Will you be there?
Marcus nods. I’m sorry again for your loss.
Rhiannon sets her mug on the picnic table, notices the humid ring of heat it makes in the wood. What brought you out here? she asks. From the University of Utah. Are you studying these five theories too of what happened here?
Sort of. I’m studying allosauruses, and Jurassic predators more generally. And also paleontological ecology.
You mean climate.
It’s one of the best places to study it. There are fossilized bones here, but there are also plants. The theories Dr. Wallace studies are what happened to these dinosaurs, but for me, they’re also figuring out what kind of climate might have existed across sixty-five million years. And what caused this mass grave of bones.
So you must have had some overlap with my mother. It sounds like she was studying climate too to see how stegosaurus plates responded to environmental change.
A little. Your mother was interested in similar aspects of the Jurassic climate here.
Rhiannon looks at him. Have you been watching the news?
You mean the plane crashes.
Yes. But all these weather events too. Tornadoes. Unexpected monsoons. We drove through that wildfire in Colorado.
We don’t have televisions out here, but I heard about that on the radio. Marcus leans into his elbows on the picnic table. I’ve been paying more attention than I want to, despite the remoteness out here.
Rhiannon nods. Me too.
Marcus waves a hand toward the valley. This quarry opened in the mid-1960s. The University of Utah championed a team of excavators to figure out what happened here, wrangling in a few other universities. The University of Illinois was one of the other colleges. I’m sure that’s how your mother got involved, if she found a stegosaurus skeleton in Colorado and the remains of four other stegosauruses were found here. Marcus pauses. I’m sure the weather was very different in the 1960s, before she first came here.
My mother was clearly paying attention, too. She said the wind and turbulence grew more violent out here the longer she traveled to this place.
I’m lucky I’ve been able to just drive down from Salt Lake City the past couple of years, Marcus says. My range of study is an entire Jurassic period. It’s hard to imagine what might have happened to the weather across millions of years, compared to how quickly our climate has changed in just the past fifty.
It is hard to imagine, Rhiannon echoes. And I don’t just mean the weather millions of years ago. It’s hard to imagine that any of this is happening. That we haven’t seen the sun in Illinois since winter. What’s it been like in Salt Lake City recently?
Drought. There and in Nevada, where I’m originally from.
I know Nevada’s speedway well, Rhiannon says before she can think. Vegas?
Reno. Your mom told me you raced.
I’m surprised she told you that.
She mentioned you had another job. Something with books?
Did she tell you Billie was in prison?
She was proud of both of you. I know that much.
Rhiannon wraps her hands around her coffee mug. Are you working today?
Marcus shakes his head. The visitor center is closed all day for you two.
What are you studying right now?
Marcus looks at her. Do you really want to know? It’s kind of boring.
It’s not boring to me.
I’ve specialized in Jurassic predators, which is what I’ve looked at every summer I’ve been here. This summer, since I’m nearing the end of my doctoral work, I’m focusing in on a subspecialty of paleobotany. Specifically, I’ve been looking at thallophyta this summer. Very simple, algaelike plant fossils.
Thallophyta. And what are you finding?
Not much. At least, not much yet. Through something so small, I hope to help Dr. Wallace better determine what kind of climate existed here during the Jurassic period.
She told us it could have changed dramatically across sixty-five million years.
Which makes it even more difficult to determine. That there could have been more than one major climate during that time. I’m just trying to figure it out based on the age and condition of the plant fossils in the sedimentary layers.
Rhiannon takes another sip of her coffee, the cup nearly drained.
I told you this was boring.
Not at all. But I should see if Billie’s up. We have a hell of a day ahead of us.
Marcus stands and says nothing, not that he’ll be here if they need anything, but Rhiannon knows it’s on the edge of his tongue. This young man who’s spent two concentrated years of his life studying a single ancient plant, far more attention than any newscaster or commentator has paid to the environment’s rapid change. Who knew Rhiannon was a driver, even now, so many years after she set down her racing helmet. Who across the past two summers could have learned this only from her mother.
INSIDE THE TRAILER Billie is already dressed, her hair slicked wet, the narrow double bed made. She wears what Rhiannon knows is the best outfit she’s packed, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that isn’t a hiking tank top. She sits on a bench beside the kitchen counter, the coffee maker still holding one more cup of weak Folgers she hasn’t poured. Her head is in her hands. She looks up when Rhiannon steps inside the trailer.
I don’t know if I can do this, Billie says.
Rhiannon sits down on the bench across from her. I know.
I know they’re fake ashes. I know it�
�s just sediment and rock.
Did Angela tell you that last night?
Billie nods. I know it’s just a symbolic ceremony. But I’m not ready. I thought I was. I thought it was going to be so much easier than this.
Rhiannon leans back against the trailer’s walls. Tries to feel if she’s ready despite a funeral she’s already seen. March drizzle. Heels sinking into the damp earth, the only pair of dress shoes she owned. Her father standing beside her, his lower lip a thin stoic line. The featherweight of Beth’s hand, so close but not touching hers. Her aunt’s hand on her shoulder, an anchor tethering her to the ground so she wouldn’t float away. The warble of the officiant’s voice. And the cherrywood of her mother’s casket: the one burned image she hoped to leave behind.
It’s at three o’clock, is all Rhiannon can say. We have the whole morning.
Billie looks at her. How did you do it?
How did I do what?
How did you say goodbye to her? How the fuck did you say goodbye?
Rhiannon is silent. The solidity of wood. Watching it disappear one last time covered in silt. She’d thought of her mother alone in the ground for weeks. They’d abandoned her to a cemetery by herself beneath nothing but moonlight, to an earth that in the end would take all of them. Rhiannon’s fingers grip the trailer’s fold-down bench.
That’s what this is for, Billie says. For me to say goodbye. For us to say goodbye together. We drove out here and I can’t even do what I promised her I would.
It’s an unkeepable promise. How can any of us keep that kind of promise?
Billie says nothing. Rhiannon hears the coffee maker buzzing on the counter.
I didn’t, Rhiannon finally says. I didn’t say goodbye. I was there and I saw her go. That’s not the same as letting anyone go.
I wish I’d been there.
I know. But we’re here. We kept a promise. We did what she wanted us to do.
I don’t want to spread fake ashes across the fucking desert.
Then what do you want to do?
Billie looks up. Do I have to do anything?
We have all morning. We can do everything she wanted us to do but still make this day ours.
I want to get lost for a little while. I’d rather see what she saw firsthand out here. By ourselves. No one else telling us what she did and what she studied. Just us. I want to know myself what it was that she loved.
Rhiannon stands. Come on.
Where do you want to go?
Put on your shorts. You won’t need those clothes until later.
Rhiannon opens the bedroom door and pulls out Billie’s suitcase, the sun already high beyond the thin curtains of the trailer’s bedroom. The morning theirs. No coordinates. No drawings, no journal. Nothing but the fossil beds their mother once dug, the dust-caked trails she once took.
ONCE BILLIE PULLS on hiking shorts and they sneak behind the visitor center toward the quarry’s circuits of trails, the valley widens before them and the sky hazes with full sun and clouds of dust.
Where do you want to go? Rhiannon asks.
Anywhere. Let’s just walk. I don’t want to have a plan at all.
Rhiannon chooses a trail up the ridge of the quarry’s elevated mesa. She knows it won’t matter which path they take, their mother’s footprint everywhere. She imagines their mother’s first trip here, surely upon invitation in the 1970s after Marcus said the University of Utah’s excavators began organizing multi-institutional teams. Surely after she discovered the full skeleton in the Small Quarry in 1992, her reputation preceding her, after she knew the red-rocked terrain of the West as intimately as she knew the alliums and poppies of their Urbana backyard.
Angela asked me about birds, Billie says. Last night. She asked me about falconry.
Marcus said something to me this morning about racing.
Did he say anything about prison? If Mom told them about us, I’m sure they know where I’ve been.
I’m sure they know. I’m sure it doesn’t matter. Billie, there’s nothing for you to be ashamed about.
I’m not ashamed of prison. Billie stops walking. But I felt awful when Angela asked me about the birds.
Rhiannon doesn’t have to ask why. The same hollow she felt when Marcus asked about selling textbooks, a question she evaded.
You can do whatever you want now.
Billie laughs. It’s going to be hard for me to get a job when we return.
I mean you can get another hawk. You can always start training again.
And you can always race again.
I’m too old, Billie. You’re never too old to train a bird.
You just think you’re old. Jesus, Rhee. You’re only thirty-five.
That’s ancient in athletics. Quarterbacks retire at thirty-five. Gymnasts retire in their twenties. Baseball players retire at forty if they’re lucky.
You’re not a baseball player. You’re not a gymnast or a quarterback.
Rhiannon keeps walking and hears Billie fall into step behind her. She knows some NASCAR drivers have retired at forty, sometimes forty-five or fifty, but it’s meaningless information. It would take her years to get back into training, to relearn the track, to retrain her muscles.
Our house has an enormous yard, Rhiannon says. Plenty of room for a hawk’s weathering yard, better than that shit cage Tim built in Jacksonville.
You remember Alabama’s cage?
I remember she had better living quarters when she lived with just you in Champaign. What was that guy’s name? The one you trained with?
Bud. His name was Bud.
You could contact him again. I bet he still lives in Urbana.
What makes you think I’m staying in Urbana?
Rhiannon turns around, Billie’s words hanging in the air. What Rhiannon realizes she’s assumed: that they’ll live together, that Billie will need her.
Where the hell are you planning on going?
I don’t know. But nothing’s tying either of us to Illinois anymore.
You’re on probation as soon as you get back. This trip is an exception. You have to be there for your therapy sessions. You have to be there one week from now.
But you know that’s only for a year. Not forever. I’ll do what I need to do, but I’m not required to stay in Illinois past a mandatory series of sessions. I can even move out of state after forty-five days of supervision as long as I have therapy sessions set up for the year. And I can move anywhere in the state as soon as I want. So can you.
Rhiannon stops and looks out over the valley, the sun high above them. The dumb sound of Billie’s words: nothing tying them to Illinois. What she hasn’t thought until Billie says it. Rhiannon’s job the only thing. The one stupid factor in a world of possibilities roping her to Champaign-Urbana, the same town she’s known all her life beyond a blip of years traveling interstates to racetracks. Urbana bereft. Only a house, one that could be sold. No property of her own. No Beth, a cord she’s cut, a relationship with nothing but a muddled future. A dead-end job: her only tether to home.
Rhiannon doesn’t look at Billie. The wind pushes around them and scatters Rhiannon’s hair across her face and she knows all at once that she’s envisioned a life in Urbana with her sister beyond this trip. A life in their childhood home. Past the requirements of foraging through boxes, donating clothes, keeping what’s theirs to keep. A life populated by something more than solitude, more than the empty rooms of a home holding the ghosts of her mother’s voice and her father’s voice and Billie’s voice. A sisterhood beyond six years in a state prison. Something to beat back the soft devastation of losing Beth and her mother in the span of three months, to combat the nothing of a job, to ignore the dust gathering on a helmet in the garage.
There’s nothing there for us, Billie says.
Beth’s there, Rhiannon says. Beth is still there.
But you’re not even with her anymore. Are you? Is that what you want?
Fuck, Billie. Rhiannon closes her eyes. I don’t know.
/>
Well, you better figure it out. Billie sweeps her hands across the valley before them. Look where we are. We’re saying goodbye. We’re saying goodbye to our mother in a place where she siphoned every last drop from the one short life she had. So you need to figure it the fuck out. We both do. I’ve already wasted six years of my life. And before that, four years with a complete shitbag who made me feel dead inside. I feel like I haven’t lived. I feel like I haven’t lived at all.
Rhiannon feels her breath leave her. The mesas on the other side of the valley shimmer in the early morning heat. This place her mother’s church. Household name. Her mother’s version of a racetrack’s asphalt, a cockpit’s compression. Nothing kept Rhiannon from pulling her helmet back on and getting back on the raceway. She’d siphoned nothing. Her mother squeezed everything from this landscape and Billie hadn’t lived because she couldn’t, not because she’d given up.
Do you really feel that way? is all Rhiannon can say. Do you really feel like you haven’t lived at all?
I’ve been in prison, Rhee. That’s not living. Neither is living with someone who tells you you’re nothing. I don’t have any more time to waste.
Rhiannon keeps walking. She can think of nothing else to do. She hears Billie calling her name behind her. The wind rising. The wind pushing grained dust and grit into Rhiannon’s eyes and she keeps moving, her hiking shoes gripping the trail’s ascending slope, her lungs scrambling to pull in air.
Jesus, Rhee, slow the fuck down.
Rhiannon reaches a landing on the trail. Her lungs screaming. Altitude. The pace of a hike. The effort of choking back a morning before another funeral, before releasing her mother to the earth again and again. She sits on a rocked ledge, the sun beating down against the back of her neck, the damp sweat of her skin.
Billie sits beside her. Be honest. Just be honest, Rhee. That’s all I’m trying to do.
Be honest about what?
About what you want. About your job. About racing. About why you left Beth.
I don’t know. I don’t know what you want from me. I’m here, Billie. I’m here with you because Mom wanted us to be here.