The Desert Sky Before Us

by Anne Valente

You’re numb, Rhee. You’ve been sleepwalking since she died.

  Like you would know. You weren’t there.

  I wasn’t where?

  You weren’t there with me to lower her down.

  The words surprise her, the wide span of their mother’s desert spread out all around them, words she didn’t know were lodged in her throat. That Billie wasn’t there. Their father and her aunt and Beth quiet beside her and Billie nowhere, Billie another half, Billie a twinned life growing up and out of their childhood home, Billie sharing not just T-shirts and combat boots and small rakes planting seeds in their mother’s backyard garden but an entire foundation no one else on Earth could understand, the sole person on this devastated planet who knew their mother in the only way a sister could.

  What do you want me to say? Billie whispers.

  I don’t want you to say anything.

  Do you want me to say I’m sorry?

  I don’t need you to say anything at all. I just wish you could have been there.

  As if I could feel any worse that I wasn’t.

  I’m not blaming you. I’m just telling you what I wanted. I wanted you there.

  Billie clasps her hands together, her elbows bent against her knees.

  I can’t believe I fucked up my life so badly that I couldn’t be there at all.

  Rhiannon focuses on the valley all around them. Sleepwalking. She wonders if it’s true. If she’s been doing nothing but basic functioning, just eating and barely sleeping. Since their mother died but so long before. Since Billie nearly killed herself just to live on her own terms.

  When did you feel alive? Rhiannon whispers.

  What kind of question is that?

  You said you felt dead inside. With Tim. When have you ever felt most alive?

  Do you know what a hawk feels like on your arm?

  Rhiannon keeps her eyes on the valley, the scarlet slope of striated rock.

  I was alive. With Alabama. Feeling her take off from my arm. I was so fucking alive.

  Rhiannon is silent, Billie breathing beside her.

  What about you? she hears Billie ask.

  Rhiannon closes her eyes and lets her brain catch on the first thing that comes. One memory, maybe two. Her brain releases a flood. Opening the hood of a car for the first time inside their garage on Grove Street, her father letting her fasten and secure the prop rod. Following her mother around the backyard flowerbeds, a green plastic watering can in her small hands. Driving to high school in an old Honda Accord, Billie in the passenger seat, Billie still a freshman and Rhiannon a senior, the one year they shared the building’s walls. Kissing a girl for the first time, the ocean heat of Atlantic City beyond the hotel room’s window. Beth dropping her off outside her house, their first date. Chinese hotpot. Two cups of green tea. A May thunderstorm blowing in when Beth dropped her off afterward and leaned across the driver’s seat before Rhiannon got out, lightning flashing beyond the car’s windows. The damp-soft of Beth’s mouth against hers. Beth calling the next morning. Beth calling every morning after. And the raceway. Talladega. Pocono. Indianapolis. Daytona Beach. The same thrill as the Mustang gunning them across Missouri and across Kansas straight into Colorado and New Mexico and now the layered rock of Utah where their mother stood and said here.

  Right now, Rhiannon whispers. This trip. The chance to get back out on the road. It makes me want to disappear, Billie. She gestures toward the far-off mesas, the desert’s bright sun spilling down over all of them. This land. This place Mom knew so well. That we have to bury her here. Again. All of it makes me want to die. But I feel alive. I feel so fucking alive for the first time in years.

  Billie says nothing and Rhiannon wonders what it is that her sister feels. That she’s out here, straight from prison to the desert’s split-open sky visible for miles beyond the windshield of a car. Shared bathrooms, shared showers, shared cafeteria tables, stolen toilet paper. And out here, nothing. This hiking trail. The possibility of not seeing another human being for hours. The highway, so many mile markers of a radio’s white noise.

  I’m glad you’re here, Rhiannon says. That we’re out here together.

  Rhiannon waits for Billie to say this valley and the small space of their trailer make her glad to be here. But Billie just stands and continues along the trail their mother once walked.

  THEY HIKE IN silence. Billie speaks only to point out loose rocks to avoid. They return to the quarry past noon, Marcus and Angela standing outside the cluster of trailers making lunch. Billie slips inside their trailer and Rhiannon approaches the picnic table populated with pickle jars, deli cuts, sliced bread.

  Angela looks up. Good hike? I almost thought you two skipped town if not for your car still parked by the visitor center.

  We had the chance to get out before it gets too hot, Rhiannon says. You have some great views up there along the ridgeline.

  Your mother climbed all over this country, Angela says. Did you take the left-swinging trail? That view up there was one of your mother’s favorites.

  Rhiannon imagines her mother’s hiking shoes gripping the ridgeline. What she must have done for years while Rhiannon was on the interstate. Marcus motions her over and opens a plastic cooler filled with aluminum cans of Sprite and Coke. Rhiannon never drinks soda, never drinks beer, realizes how much of both she’s had in the past week. She pulls a Coke from the cooler and pops the tab and looks at Marcus, desperate to talk about anything but her mother.

  Decent morning?

  Marcus nods. I got a bit of work done in my trailer after my run.

  Is most of your family still back in Reno?

  My mother and father. I have a sister living out in San Francisco. The Palo Alto area. Silicon Valley. Marcus hesitates, a barely perceptible pause. And I have a partner. A boyfriend back at the University of Utah.

  Did you meet him there?

  He’s a doctoral candidate in atmospheric sciences. We met through some overlap of research two years ago since I’m studying paleontological climate. His name is Jason.

  Do you see him much over the summer?

  Sometimes on weekends. He’s come out here a few times to visit.

  I’m guessing Salt Lake City isn’t an easy place to meet people.

  It’s less conservative than you’d think, at least in terms of the dating scene. I was surprised by that when I moved there. I expected only white people and fundamentalists.

  Rhiannon hesitates, unsure how much her mother might have told Marcus about her own relationship with Beth. If it ever came up. If it even mattered at all to mention.

  Champaign’s the same way, she finally says. You’d think it would be a red dot in a blue state, but I guess being a college town helps. It wasn’t hard to meet Beth there.

  Marcus looks up from the bag of chips he’s opened on the picnic table. Is Beth your girlfriend?

  Was. Rhiannon looks away. I don’t really know what we are now.

  How long were you together?

  Over four years. We broke up a few months ago.

  Marcus looks like he wants to ask more but Angela calls him over to help pull containers of potato salad and coleslaw from her trailer’s small fridge, far too much food for the four of them to eat. Rhiannon stands beneath the Utah sun alone. She thinks again of first meeting Beth. An art opening at the University of Illinois she’d gone to with her mother after returning to Champaign off her final racing circuit. A Friday night, where some of her mother’s colleagues would be, where she hoped Rhiannon would buck up and have a drink. Rhiannon was standing by herself in front of a red canvas with a plastic glass of white wine when a woman came up and talked a good five minutes about the piece before mentioning she’d painted it herself, a screen-print artist who’d branched out to oils and mattes just for this show. The woman’s eyes a cutting blue, the shade of her hair a dirty blond. Her frame wiry and brittle, a type Rhiannon never went for: too delicate but for the pull of Beth’s low voice. How it hinted at something tough.

  Re
ady for a sandwich? Angela says, carrying a jar of mustard to the picnic table. Nothing fancy, but I promise dinner will be better.

  Rhiannon feels a faint buzzing in her brain. I just need to make a quick phone call. Is there service out here?

  You have Verizon? Marcus says. It’s the only service that consistently works.

  Rhiannon shakes her head and Marcus pulls his own phone from his pocket.

  Here. I learned last summer that I need the right service, if I want any chance at all of keeping up a long-distance relationship.

  Rhiannon grips his fingers briefly as he passes the phone to her hands.

  BEHIND THEIR TRAILER, Billie still inside hiding out, Rhiannon takes Marcus’s phone and dials Beth’s number, one she knows by heart. She doesn’t expect her to pick up, the number unfamiliar, but she hears Beth’s voice after the second ring.

  Beth, it’s me, Rhiannon says. We’re here. We’re out in Utah.

  You made it to the quarry?

  We’re at the quarry. The funeral’s this afternoon.

  Are you okay?

  Rhiannon closes her eyes. I’m fine.

  And Billie?

  I don’t know. She’s had her ups and downs. We both have.

  I’m sorry. I know it’s a rough time for everyone.

  Rhiannon leans into the shade of the trailer, its metal siding cool against her back. She wonders what Beth means. Everyone. If she’s incriminating herself, if their breakup has been just as hard on her.

  How are you? How’s everything in Champaign?

  Nothing’s changed since you last called. How about there?

  We’ve had a few detours. We got stuck in Colorado for a night, then we camped in Moab last night. But we’re on schedule. We should be back to Champaign by Saturday at the latest.

  Are you wanting to meet up when you get back?

  I don’t know. Are you?

  Beth sighs. I don’t know. Rhee, I really don’t know what you want from me.

  Rhiannon eyes the valley beyond the trailers. The vast span of land. So much daylight. A visibility she hasn’t seen for months in Illinois, a bright-flooded light that illuminates every corner of her brain.

  I don’t want anything from you, she says. I wanted more from myself.

  What? Rhiannon hears Beth sigh. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

  The irritation in Beth’s voice breaks across the line and Rhiannon knows all at once that she’s fucked with Beth for months since they broke up and for years before that. Never telling her what it was she was feeling or what she needed. When were you most alive? Billie pleading. If it’s right now, Rhiannon has nothing else to lose.

  I was a driver, she says. I was a race car driver.

  Rhee, I know.

  No, you don’t. Listen to me. I was a driver. I was such a good fucking driver. I could have been a household name.

  The words out there, the words Lucy used at the Small Quarry to describe her mother and Rhiannon can’t believe they’re coming out of her mouth right now. The valley below a gleaming landscape of marbled pink and purpling sun, a valley scoured beneath a white-hot sky that has bleached everything clean. Rhiannon feels the heat of the trailer’s paneling against her back through her shirt and doesn’t know why she’s spit this out across the line except only that she must.

  Rhiannon, I know. You think I don’t? I know how good you were.

  What do you mean you know?

  Come on. I looked you up right after I met you. Doesn’t everyone? You mentioned what you did but you never talked about how many races you won. I never thought you wanted to talk about it. You never brought it up.

  Right after we met? The gallery opening?

  Beth sighs. I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.

  Rhiannon slides against the trailer wall and sinks into the dirt. A shared pot of green tea. Steamed windows. Their first date, only days beyond the gallery opening and Beth’s tongue pushing hard against her mouth and even then she knew everything Rhiannon barely brought up and rarely mentioned since. She knew when Rhiannon hauled a small carload of clothes into her apartment and she knew when they huddled on the couch beside each other, every night, every episode of The Daily Show and Six Feet Under and Top Chef, every single night across four years inside Beth’s cramped apartment until Rhiannon moved out.

  Why didn’t you ever bring it up? That you knew I was good?

  Jesus. How is this my fault? Why does it matter what I thought at all? Why wasn’t it you who said something?

  I didn’t think you needed to know.

  I didn’t need to know? We lived together for four years and I didn’t need to know that you could have made history?

  You could’ve asked.

  No, you could’ve said something if it meant that much to you. You never did. I thought you would and you never did and is it any wonder that you moved out?

  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

  It means you’re a fucking wall, Rhee. You never talked about it. Just like you never talk about your mother. Not when she first got sick and not now.

  What the fuck was there to say? Beth, she’s gone.

  Yeah, she’s gone. And how do you feel about that?

  Fuck you.

  The words leave Rhiannon’s mouth before she can take them back and she feels her eyes smarting, her fists trembling.

  Fine, Beth says. Fine. You know what? I walked on eggshells for years never knowing what I could bring up and what I couldn’t. What you’d actually answer or what you’d keep to yourself because you could. Now I know. That you’re incapable. That there are people surrounding you who love you and you refuse to let them in.

  Maybe so, is all Rhiannon can think to say. She doesn’t want to think at all about who surrounds her, what it feels like to be loved. If Beth loves her. If Billie loves her. If her mother loved her, what Rhiannon logically knew but never stopped to feel what that meant beyond a word.

  Jesus, Rhee. Beth sighs. What the fuck does that say about us?

  That we were strangers, Rhiannon says, words she doesn’t want to say but there they are. That we were strangers for four fucking years.

  Beth is silent for a moment. I guess we were.

  Beth breathes into the receiver and Rhiannon feels her anger drain away and in its place there is only sadness, a wave that overwhelms her.

  Beth, she hears herself say.

  Don’t, Rhee. Just don’t.

  Beth, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I fucked everything up.

  Beth sighs. You didn’t. I know what you’re going through right now is impossible. I just don’t know why the past five years were so fucking hard for you too.

  I wish I could tell you.

  You still can. Rhiannon. You can still tell me anything.

  Rhiannon watches the valley until her eyes burn, the bright of the desert blinking back in a film of blue. What Beth’s voice sounds like: hope. That Rhiannon hasn’t dug a hole so irreparably deep and unfillable. That there might be something waiting for her back in Champaign beyond her job, beyond Billie wanting to leave.

  I wish you could’ve known me in a different time of my life, Rhiannon whispers. I wish you could’ve known me when I was so much prouder of myself.

  I’m proud of you.

  You don’t have to say that.

  I am, Rhee. I’m so fucking proud of you. Regardless of how good you were.

  Rhiannon closes her eyes. The words find their place.

  I wish you were here, she whispers.

  I wish it too. I wish so badly I could be there for you.

  Rhiannon opens her eyes and there is only the valley. Let’s talk when I get back.

  Okay, Beth says. Let’s talk.

  WHEN RHIANNON EMERGES from behind the trailer and steps back into the sun, the midday heat warms her skin and flushes her face. Her stomach empty, a five-mile hike since a small breakfast of coffee and a single granola bar and her head fogged with what she wishes she hadn’t said. Fuck
you. She moves to the picnic bench where Angela and Marcus are waiting and her brain doesn’t process at first who waits before her at the table. A familiar figure. Angela and Marcus sitting on opposite sides of the picnic table, a third person standing beside them.

  Her father.

  Here. Standing in the rock-cragged dust of Utah.

  Rhiannon stops short.

  How did you—she hears herself speak right as she hears the trailer door open behind her. She turns and Billie is standing on the front steps of the trailer, her body immobile, her gaze firm on their father.

  Girls, he says.

  His eyes on Billie. He takes a step toward her.

  For a moment, Rhiannon expects Billie to be relieved. She hasn’t seen their father for six years and now he’s here, on this day. But before Rhiannon can move, Billie’s hand is reaching back to the counter just inside the trailer door. A set of keys. Rhiannon steps toward her just seconds too late and Billie is running up the dirt path toward the visitor center, toward the parking lot, toward the Mustang.

  SHAH, ERICA. THE PHYSICS OF AUTOMECHANICS. LONDON: MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS, 2005. 229–233. PRINT.

  CALL NUMBER: QC124 .H32 2005

  CAR ENGINES

  To convert gasoline to energy and motion, automobiles require internal combustion engines, which place high-energy fuel in a cylinder with heat. The more cylinders a car contains, the stronger and faster its engine will be. Multiple cylinders create greater horsepower, or the amount of power an engine can produce against the load it bears.

  NASCAR stock cars are capable of 850 horsepower, two to three times higher than the average civilian car engine. NASCAR maintains strict guidelines for engine design, and all stock cars must contain carbureted V-8 engines with iron blocks. Engine servicing is required in pit stops due to extreme stress on engines from constant acceleration around turns. The temperature of NASCAR engines can reach 2,000 degrees and pressures of 1,500 psi. For this reason, engine valves are made of titanium to resist heat, and engine blocks are made of cast-graphite iron.

  39.3228º N, 110.6895º W:

  Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, UT

  Billie’s hands cortisol-curl around the Mustang’s sun-warmed steering wheel: the same as Rhiannon’s hands. What she dreamed from the polyester sheets of her prison bed, her sister’s fingers locked around the wheel, always Rhiannon she imagined and never herself guiding anything anywhere. Now there is nothing but an open road she knows she shouldn’t be on without a license and with a criminal record. But it feels like something. It feels like every kind of rebellion.